Osborne is now mooting an emergency budget within the next few weeks to lay the foundations for the £30bn fiscal consolidation (aka cuts) to be announced in the autumn spending review. It is made up of £12bn welfare cuts, £13bn reductions in departmental expenditure (aka cuts in public services), and £5bn in tax avoidance measures. […]
Posts under ‘Poverty/Low Pay’
If Osborne cuts £30bn as promised, he can’t achieve his deficit reduction targets
May 12th, 2015 by Michael Meacher.
1,000 richest Britons worth £547bn, 13m others now in poverty, half in work
May 1st, 2015 by Michael Meacher.Murdoch’s Sunday Times has just published its Rich List for 2015 which shows that the richest 1,000 persons based in Britain now have wealth valued at £547.1bn. That works out at an average level of wealth of nearly £550 millions per person, though there are wide variations between the threshold level of £100 millions at the […]
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Britain’s pay: from £28m 8 weeks into a job to £0 a week on zero hours contracts
Apr 19th, 2015 by Michael Meacher.Some of Ed Miliband’s most popular announcements have been his pledge to abolish non-dom status and to hunt down aggressive tax abusers , not only making them pay up what is owed, but also a fine of an equal amount on top. He would be even more popular if he found a formula to deal […]
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Tories make tenants and homeless pay for social housing give away as election bribe
Apr 15th, 2015 by Michael Meacher.The desperate search for shrinking votes has pushed Iain Duncan Smith into yet another spectacular own goal. His latest pet idea is to extend the Right to Buy to Britain’s 2.5m housing association tenants. However, whilst social homes are owned by Councils, this latest Tory brainwave means selling off housing association assets which are private property […]
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Another hit for low-paid workers revealed – one of Osborne’s £12bn hidden benefit cuts
Apr 2nd, 2015 by Michael Meacher.Following my post on the further £12bn welfare cuts promised by Osborne if the Tories win, I received an email from one of those persons who read it, Sue Tuke, with some devastating new revelations about how the proposed cuts to Universal Credit when self-employed claimants miss their monthly targets will likely be part of […]
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Poverty is the real difference between school attainment levels
Apr 1st, 2015 by Dave Watson.The Scottish Government’s Parentzone website has published data on the performance of school leavers. The Daily Record highlighted how these figures show a shocking class divide between the wealthiest and least well off areas of Scotland. This is Dave Watson’s opinion piece in the Daily Record that ran alongside the article. In it he argues that the difference […]
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£12bn more cuts will crucify poorest in society and are not necessary
Mar 31st, 2015 by Michael Meacher.So the Tories are able to tell us that Labour plans to cut the deficit (which they have never seen) will increase costs by precisely £3,028 per household, a figure now definitively rubbished by the Institute of Fiscal Studies and which the Tory party chairman has now admitted is mere “guesswork”. Yet they can’t tell […]
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Does the party of the welfare state talk tough because it doesn’t know where the centre ground is?
Mar 29th, 2015 by David Osland.Sometimes I suspect that not a syllable escapes the lips of Rachel Reeves unless it somehow encapsulates the pitch for the latest Channel Four eat the poor documentary while simultaneously disgusting a sizeable chunk of Labour activists. Most recently, her declamation that Labour is not the party of the welfare state and doesn’t represent those out […]
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Why we should say NO to welfare cuts in the next Parliament
Mar 22nd, 2015 by Michael Meacher.There is an auction taking place on the size of the welfare cuts to be imposed in the next 5 years. The Tories are arguing for £30bn cuts in the first 2 years to 2017-8 via no tax rises, £12bn in welfare cuts, £5bn in extra corporate tax evasion revenues, and bigger departmental cuts (up […]
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Why isn’t inequality a central issue in this election?
Feb 4th, 2015 by Michael Meacher.Inequality ought to figure much more sharply in this election than it has done so far. The reasons are obvious: the grotesque injustice in the widening gap between the top 1% (and more particularly the top 0.1% and most of all the top 0.01%) and the rest of us; the way that austerity has been […]
