Category Archives: Employment

Would the UK have a labour shortage if the Tories hadn’t killed so many of us?

Too few workers: but with low wages, reduced access to healthcare and rising stress-related mental illness, why would anybody want a job in the UK?

It would be funny if it were not so tragic.

The Conservative government is not happy because there is a labour shortage in the UK.

The last figures This Writer has seen suggest that businesses need an extra million workers.

It would be easy to blame Brexit for the shortfall, and there is certainly an argument that sending migrant workers back to their own countries has been a bad idea.

But there’s also the fact – fact, mark you – that the Conservative governments of 2010 onwards have been killing off working-age people at an astonishing rate. This is not a reference to Covid, but to actual, premeditated Tory policy.

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The ever-excellent Prem Sikka made this point in a House of Lords debate on the subject:

He had previously posted this on ‘X’:

The article to which he links provides all the information you need:

People in secure and well paid jobs are more likely to have a longer life expectancy and take less time off work due to sickness. This can swell the size of the work force, but the government has pushed real wage cuts with claims that wage increases for workers are inflationary though that logic is suspended for executives and bankers. The average real wage has remained mostly unchanged since 2007.

The annual UK median wage is around £29,669.  The Joseph Rowntree Foundation estimates that a single person needs to earn £29,500 a year to reach a minimum acceptable standard of living. A couple with two children need to earn £50,000 between them. This means that nearly half the working population does not reach the minimum standard of living though low incomes can be supplemented by means-tested social security systems. 17.8m adults have income of less than £12,570. Indeed, due to low pay more people in work are claiming social security benefits than those out of work.

The result is that some 14.4 million people live in poverty. Millions of people are deprived of good food, housing, education, clothing, skills and healthcare. Deprived people cannot work long hours or fulfil their potential. More workers report sick and have mental and physical health problems. More than 800,000 patients were admitted to hospital with malnutrition and nutritional deficiencies last year. Some 16m people have disabilities which may affect their participation in labour markets. The government is considering withdrawing benefits from the old, sick and disabled and force them to work, but it is hard to see how that will deal with systemic problems.

Rather than improving healthcare, the government has reduced access to healthcare. People struggle to get access to NHS dentists and family doctors. Some 6.39 million individuals in England alone are waiting for 7.6m hospital appointments. That is one-in-nine persons. Around 2.8 million people, roughly equivalent to the populations of Bournemouth, Cardiff, Coventry, Edinburgh Stoke-on-Trent and Middlesbrough, combined, are suffering from chronic health conditions and are unable to work. More than 500,000 under-35s in the prime of their life are out of work due to long-term illness.

A 2023 study reported in the 5 years to 2022 nearly 1.5 million people in England died whilst waiting for a NHS hospital appointment – that is nearly 300,000 a year.  A 2022 study reported that between 2012 and 2019, government imposed austerity caused 335,000 excess deaths in England and Scotland i.e. nearly 48,000 a year. One-third of these deaths were among people under 65. Another study estimated that between 2011 and 2020, 1.2m people in England died prematurely from a combination of poverty, austerity and Covid. The Government’s obsession with austerity, wage cuts and defunct economic theories has turned the state into a killing machine, and is a major cause of labour shortages.

The article is well worth reading as it covers other reasons for the labour shortage – all of which are down to government policy, inactivity or incompetence.

This Site has been warning that government policy kills since it was founded in 2011 – but at successive elections, the Tories have been voted back in.

So the logical conclusion is that the people of the UK are happy to be deprived of the healthcare to which we all contribute via our taxes, happy to be starved of food, housing and education, and happy to be driven into mental illness by the stress that all this causes.

Are we?

Or have we all been misled, time and again, by politicians with undeclared interests in keeping us down, along with their client media?

With a general election coming up soon, isn’t it time we gave up listening to the public relations people and started to check for ourselves what we are really being offered?

The people of Rochdale could use their by-election as an example for the rest of us.


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Here’s why you think you’re getting richer when in fact you’re getting poorer

Relative values: older people think the young are richer than them because they’re paid in pounds rather than pennies – but inflation means those pounds don’t pay for as much as the pennies did and, in real terms, younger people are paid less than their senior counterparts were at the same age.

Here’s why you think you’re getting richer when in fact you’re getting poorer – as laid out in simple terms by Gary Stevenson.

He has released a video clip explaining why older generations are mistaken in claiming younger people “never had it so good”, to quote Harold Macmillan.

While it is true that young people may start their working lives earning more money – in pounds and pence – than older people did, the simple fact of inflation means the pounds they are paid simply doesn’t go as far as the pennies their elders received.

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But the fact that – on paper – they are receiving more means employers can pay them less in real terms and claim they’re being over-generous – and get away with it because people look at the simple numbers rather than the real-terms value.

Here’s Gary:

The theory Gary puts forward is proved by the fact that, after World War II, a single earner was able to buy the mortgage on a house and pay the living costs of everybody living in it – no matter how big the family, and now everybody of working age has to be slaving away all the hours they can work, and still can’t make ends meet.

But the UK as a nation is not getting poorer – either in money terms or real terms.

This means the cash that would have gone to working people in the post-war era is now going somewhere else. Gary says it’s going to the rich and that makes perfect sense because rich people own the companies that employ working people and can therefore dictate how their firms’ profits are divided.

It is these rich people who are impoverishing the vast majority of us in the UK – and getting away with it by lying that we are actually getting richer, generation by generation, when in fact the action of inflation and the wage stagnation they inflict on us mean that we are actually getting poorer.

The answer is for government to tax the rich so that these pay policies make them no better-off, or to impose laws that demand a maximum ratio between the highest-paid and lowest-paid in any business.

Neither of the main political parties seem interested in this. We may speculate about the reasons for this – is big business holding politicians to ransom: “Keep our salaries high and wages low or there’ll be no cushy job waiting for you after you get voted out”? – but it won’t make any real difference. It is what it is.

We see that in Labour’s new ‘campaigning bible’, that is full of soundbites and empty of initiative.

From what This Writer has seen, it contains nothing that could possibly induce a member of the voting public to conclude that a Labour government will improve their standard of living.

The reason for that is simple: it doesn’t address the issues facing us – like the illusion of improvement that Gary has identified.


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Is the government refusing to hire doctors because of this?

Hospital ward: the staff are just blurs because they’re so overworked, they’re moving faster than the eye can see (or maybe it’s just a camera effect, I have to explain before some halfwit deliberately takes me literally and tries to pick a fight).

It’s alleged that the government is refusing to let the NHS hire medical experts in order to create a fake crisis.

This, apparently, will then allow the gaps to be filled with unqualified “Physician Associates”:

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Does anybody know more about this?

Let’s have some information and put it out to the voting public.


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Israel isn’t the only home of fake news – is it, Victoria Atkins?

Tory fake news: yes, they’re talking about child poverty.

Following up on the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s research showing the number of people in the UK who are destitute has doubled since 2018… it seems to have triggered Tory MP Victoria Atkins.

Check out this video clip:

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Economist Richard Murphy takes issue with the claim that 3.8 million more people being in work is any use in combating destitution:

To This Writer, it suggests that being in work is not the way out of poverty that the Tories keep parroting it is.

But they keep saying it. Isn’t it time someone debunked this falsehood?


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Labour betrays workers: Starmer drops pledge to ban zero-hours contracts

Smells like Tory in spirit: Keir Starmer’s decision not to put an end to zero-hours contracts puts him in line with the Conservatives on employment policy.

This is just to serve as a reminder that Labour under Keir Starmer cannot be trusted at all.

Here’s a summary of the new policy:

It came just four days after the party’s deputy leader, Angela Rayner, told the TUC conference that the party would impose a blanket ban on all zero-hours contracts:

The change has been met with a certain degree of scepticism, but the real sticking-point is as described sarcastically by Evolve Politics, below:

It’s all very well to say zero-hours contracts will only be permissible if workers are happy to take them – but that just encourages employers to coerce workers into those contracts, saying they won’t get the job if they don’t say they’re happy to take it on those terms.

Keir Starmer knows this as well as I do. He knows that by imposing this new policy, the so-called “Labour” Party is betraying the workers it claims to represent.


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Sick and disabled people are dying while trying to claim benefits; Tory press calls them ‘scroungers’ again

A cartoonist’s view of government sickness and disability assessments; ministers set the bar at an impossibly high level.

The Conservatives seem to have launched another attack on sickness and disability benefit claimants – labelling them as “scroungers” again, even though many are dying before they even receive state payments – due to the Kafka-esque assessment process.

Tory lickspittle Andrew Pierce has published a poison pen piece in the Daily Hate Mailaimed at whipping up division between claimants and the rest of the population.

It’s a classic Tory “divide and rule” tactic, that was deployed to devastating effect during the years of the Coalition government. It comes out whenever the government needs to distract people away from its own shortcomings.

So, for example, today you could be asking why the Conservatives ignored warnings that schools built with RAAC concrete were falling down – for 13 years – and only started doing something about it after collapses came to public attention. The Tory answer to that is: “Look at those skiving benefit scroungers!”

The reality isn’t remotely similar to Tory Boy Pierce’s claim.

The reality is that people claiming sickness and disability benefits often die before they receive a penny, because the system already works very hard to deprive them of it – as Labour MP Debbie Abrahams pointed out in a Westminster Hall debate earlier this week:

If a coroner writes a ‘Prevention of Future Death’ report, it means they believe a death could have been prevented but the circumstances in which the deceased had been placed – in this case, a benefit claim process that is so complicated and obstructive that it not only discourages claimants but depresses them and further harms their physical health – actually contributed to or caused their death.

Obviously, if we have a claim process that is actually harming or killing claimants, it should be impossible to suggest that they are lazy scroungers; a lazy scrounger would not put him- or herself through the trial of such a procedure because it would not be worth the hassle.

And the underlying reality is that prime minister Rishi Sunak and Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride want to make the Work Capability Assessment harsher, in order to force a million sick and disabled people back onto the jobs market.

They’re not doing this because those people are actually fit for work and shouldn’t be on benefits.

They’re doing it because more people looking for work means employers can pay less; if a job applicant wants more than employers are willing to pay – like an actual living wage – they can refuse the application on the grounds that they can always find someone else who will take the lower payment.

But you won’t see that fact in one of Tory Boy’s hate screeds.


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Starmer SCRAPS (not ‘waters down’) his pledge to strengthen workers’ rights

Keir Starmer: if he bothered to do some work instead of lounging around listening to right-wing donors, he’d known that protecting workers’ rights means employers’ productivity and profitability improves. His claim that watering down those rights is pro-business is ridiculously silly.

Keir Starmer has really done it this time; he has scrapped the Labour Party’s reason for existence.

In case it hasn’t occurred to you, the “Labour” in that party’s title means it was created to represent working people and people who have to seek work in order to make a living.

Not very long ago, Starmer pledged (he loves to pledge) stronger rights for workers if his party were to form a government.

Now that pledge is as much a part of history as all the others he has made:

Let’s be clear on this: Starmer has gone on the record many times, stating that his word is his bond and if he makes a pledge, he’ll stick by it (the following clip discusses renationalisations of privatised national utilities and the scrapping of university tuition fees, which are both Starmer pledges that have since been consigned to history):

Saul Staniforth points out that Starmer’s supporters have excuses for his decisions to withdraw all the pledges he made when he became leader of what was still, then, the Labour Party. But Saul also clarifies that the same conditions are not relevant to the pledge on workers’ rights:

It seems clear from shadow minister Stephen Morgan’s interview response below that the pledge on workers’ rights is now history:

Here’s the at-a-glance guide to what Starmer has done:

Alternatively, follow the link below for a more in-depth examination:

Amazingly, Angela Rayner is still claiming that the policy is intact and the only difference is that, now, the way it will be implemented is being laid out:

But nobody is taking that seriously, including leading figures within the party:

Ultimately, last week’s announcement means just one thing to most people:

And finally: here’s Damo with exactly the kind of earthy commentary we should expect from him:

The punchline is that Starmer’s claim that scrapping this policy is pro-business… is childish nonsense.

Firms whose employees have strong rights and support are more successful than those whose workers don’t – because their job security instils loyalty, pride in their work and a genuine desire for the entire business to prosper. They are healthier in body and mind, and more productive.

Firms that treat their employees as they will be able to continue treating them under Starmer’s new policy… well, they go under. And then the bosses blame the workers they mistreated.

Starmer would know that if he had bothered to do any research.

Sadly, it seems he doesn’t know the meaning of work.


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Is latest council loss REALLY a ‘bounce’ against Labour’s attack on workers’ rights?

Let’s answer the headline question straight away: This Writer doesn’t think so.

Keir Starmer’s announcement that he’s abandoning yet another pledge – this one to strengthen the rights of UK employees – probably came too late to influence the results of last week’s council elections.

It’s more likely to be part of a long-term shift towards Independent candidates that we saw enacted across the country at the local elections in May.

For clarity: the Ayresome ward in Middlesbrough has been won from Labour by an Independent candidate:

This Writer knows little about the winner apart from her name: Jackie Young. From what I can see, she is not a former Labour Party member, as so many of those who took seats from Keir Starmer’s party in May were.

My guess, then, is that she was offering policies that voters in Ayresome actually wanted, as opposed to the current Starmer Party we-do-what-we-want-because-you-have-to-vote-for-us nonsense. I’m willing to stand corrected if necessary, but experience suggests that’s how it is.

Remember what happened in May, when and expected Starmerite landslide turned into a trickle of extra seats for Labour while the Green Party and a large number of Independents who had been booted out of Starmer’s party (or had left of their own accord) cleaned up?

Here’s a reminder from Vox Political‘s article of May 5:

But the biggest kick in the teeth for the main parties – especially Labour – is the strong performance of councillors who have been expelled from that party for being too left-wing (other excuses are available).

Usually when a person leaves a political party – or is, as in these cases, removed – and stand as an independent, they sink without a trace. Look at the performance of the Labour quitters who formed Change UK while Jeremy Corbyn was in charge, and then lost their seats in the 2019 general election.

Instead, independent left-wing candidates are retaining their seats across England.

Here are a few examples:

This is in Portsmouth:

This is in Windsor:

To me, this indicates that people are starting to give up on political tribalism – they’re not all voting for candidates just because of the name of the party those people represent.

Instead, they are voting for the people they know will represent them.

We should bear in mind that these are council elections in wards with low electorates and low turnouts.

But council election results are regarded as forecasts for general elections.

The times are changing. The Parliamentary elites have tried to dictate the policies we can support and the people available to get our vote – and across the country, people are saying they’re not going to put up with it.

It’s the way we are. We’ll put up with a lot – but there come a point when someone will try to tell us what to do and we’ll say: “No.”

Keir Starmer won’t learn any lessons from this. My impression is that he’s too deeply into the pockets of right-wing donors to hear the pleas of those who actually vote election candidates onto councils and into Parliament.

Let us hope they make their message clear when the general election is finally called.


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One rule for them: shocking government double-standard over pay is revealed

Under a cloud: considering the number of MPs who work long hours on multiple secondary jobs, it’s a wonder any of them ever have time to set foot in this place at all.

Once again Rishi Sunak is undermined by the behaviour of his own MPs.

In the week he insisted that a below-inflation, six per cent pay rise for junior doctors (meaning it is a real-terms pay cut) is not negotiable, the obscenely inflated amounts his fellow Tories (and a couple of others) earn from secondary employment have been revealed.

And some MPs are saying they need the extra cash from these second jobs because they can’t make ends meet otherwise.

Their MP salaries put these people among the highest-paid in the UK and they still reckon they can’t live without having more. They cannot justify this while pushing down pay for public sector workers including the junior doctors.

Here’s Sunak, follow by commentary that puts him right in his place by the great Peter Stefanovic:

The pay imposition means that, depending on their experience, junior doctors will receive a raise of between £3,000 and £3,700 per year (rising to £32,300 and £43,900 respectively).

If that seems like a lot, bear in mind that these are highly-skilled jobs for which they spend many years in training.

MPs, on the other hand, are unskilled; you don’t need any training for the job – you just need to persuade people to elect you.

Then you receive £86,584 a year as your basic wage (this is the figure as of April 2023), rising to £167,391 (as far as I can tell) if you are prime minister Rishi Sunak.

This puts him in the top one per cent of earners – and all MPs in the top two per cent.

And still they want more.

Sky News has published an exhaustive list of MPs’ earnings from second jobs, and it is a catalogue of greed, with those who have held ministerial jobs among the top earners. Now why would that be…?

The article states:

MPs with second jobs have an average wage of £233 per hour, Sky News can reveal.

The typical rate for MPs is 17 times the national average – and over 22 higher than the minimum hourly wage.

Indeed. According to the pay deal Sunak is determined to impose, junior doctors will get just £14 per hour, which is only slightly better than the absolute minimum wage.

Ms Truss’s most lucrative work since leaving Number 10 has been a speech in Taiwan. She was paid at a rate of £20,000 per hour – nearly 1,500 times the UK average hourly wage – for her insights into global diplomacy.

Even higher than Ms Truss is Boris Johnson, who resigned as an MP last month. His hourly rate comes in at £21,822, but having left parliament, he is free to work without having to publicly record his earnings.

The leaderboard of the MPs with the 20 highest hourly rates in this parliament reveals a clear pattern: 18 have government experience, suggesting a ministerial background is valued by some employers.

Or it means employers have been paying them in order to influence their decision as ministers?

Here’s Sky‘s Sam Coates explaining it:

Let’s have a look at the list.

Top is Boris Johnson (Conservative) – now an ex-MP after one Partygate scandal too many. He worked 117 hours outside Parliament and earned £2.5 million. That’s £21,800 per hour.

Then:

Liz Truss (Conservative): 12 hours, £189,200, £15,700 per hour.

Alok Sharma (Conservative): four hours, £20,000, £5,000 per hour.

Theresa May (Conservative): 622 hours – that’s nearly 12 solid working weeks! £2.7 million, £4,400 per hour.

Fiona Bruce (not the broadcaster)(Conservative): 245 hours, £733,100, £2,900 per hour.

Sajid Javid (Conservative): 174 hours, £412,300, £2,300 per hour.

Julian Smith (Conservative): 67 hours, £147,800, £2,100 per hour.

Greg Clark (Conservative): 14 hours, £17,770, £1,200 per hour.

Ian Blackford (Scottish National Party): 31 hours, £38,120, £1,200 per hour.

Michael Gove (Conservative): three hours, £3,100, £1000 per hour.

The next 10 are all Conservatives, most notably including Sir Geoffrey Cox at 12 (2,560 hours, £2.4 million, £960 per hour). This means he worked nearly 49 weeks solidly for other employers than Parliament. Has he actually turned up to represent his constituents at all? Even if he has, how can he be expected to have done a good job, working full-time for other employers?

And Jacob Rees-Mogg is at 18 (123 hours, £92,910, £750 per hour).

Some MPs are saying they need multiple jobs because the current salary isn’t enough for them. One can only agree with Richard Burgon:

Nor does our democracy need Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey, who earns almost as much in a week as many of us do in a year, and wants employers to push your wages through the floor. Here’s Jon Trickett:

Yes it is. “Do as I say – take home rapidly-decreasing remuneration for the grinding hours of hard work that you do, while I spend increasingly less time in the job where I’m supposed to represent your best interests so I can moonlight for the big corps and earn 17 times as much as you.”

Put like that, do you think you’re getting value for money from your Tory MP?

I don’t.

Note this also:

Now consider this:

These are the kind of people we need in Parliament. But Keir Starmer is doing his best to purge Labour of its left wing in order to make it into his dream: a Substitute Tory Party (STP). The SNP is incapable of forming a government because it would never have enough MPs. And the Green Party is habitually ignored by voters who think they have to support Labour or the Tories because their choice is the only one they think can keep the other one out.

Without better representation, the situation described by Robert Peston below will worsen:

Finally: the information provided in this article is vital for anybody in the UK who has a vote. It tells you what you need to know in order to make an informed decision when you come to vote. But I can predict that only around 200 people will read it.

This is because Vox Political must depend on the social media platforms for articles to be seen, and they are run by corporations that depend on other corporations’ advertising revenue to make their own profits, and fear regulation by a right-wing government that wishes to suppress dissenting viewpoints. So of the 42,000+ people who supposedly like This Site’s page on Facebook, only around 300 will actually see the link to this article on their newsfeed.

This is how Sunak, Bailey and the other greedy fatcats keep you down:

By making sure you don’t know how to impose change.


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Don’t think your life will get better, just because Boris Johnson is going

Boris Johnson: he has left Parliament but he’s doing quite all right, thank you very much. Meanwhile it’s business as usual at Tory HQ and in Downing Street.

Here’s an excellent point, courtesy of Gary Stevenson:

It’s true – the Conservative Party is not an organisation of public servants; it’s a business.

It works for whoever pays it the best – and that isn’t the public, even if they are getting at least three times the average wage.

No – the Tory Party works for Mohamed Mansour, who has donated £5 million to Conservative coffers, along with other donors like him. Why do you think Tory donors, party members and friends got so many Covid-19-related business contracts when the usual scrutiny processes for awarding them were suspended because it was an “emergency”?

And Labour (under Keir Starmer) works for Gary Lubner, who’s donating $6 million to that party, along with donors like him.

When in government, both parties do a very good job for their real employers. That’s why the UK’s super-rich have expanded their wealth threefold since 2010.

This happens because both the Tories and Labour tell you that they’re working for you and will make your life better, and when election time comes around, whoever’s in office throws you a few scraps to make you think they mean it.

It’s time to wise up and realise you need to find someone else; you need to break the racket.

Because your money is running out of your hands and into their bank accounts faster than you think – and you probably don’t even know it yet.


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