He was name-checked by Jeremy Hunt in his Budget statement on Wednesday, and Martin Lewis went on to provide an instant response to it after the Chancellor sat down.
Here it is:
For me – and for Mr Lewis, it seems – the interesting aspect was one that Hunt didn’t mention in his speech. MoneySavingExpert.com discusses it as follows:
The maximum annual tax-free amount you can save into a pension once you’ve taken money out of it will rise from £4,000 to £10,000 from 6 April. Meanwhile, the amount you can save into your pension tax-free each year is also set to rise, as is the amount you can save into pensions over a lifetime.
You can find out more about that in the MoneySavingExpert article.
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Someone was having a laugh – but it was well-targeted.
At the top of March 15’s BBC Newsnight programme, somebody mixed Jeremy Hunt’s Budget speech with the song ‘Sorted for E’s and Wizz’ by Pulp.
The relevance was Hunt’s motif of four ‘pillars’ of the economy – each represented by the letter ‘E’.
But the clip ended with the immortal line, “In the middle of the night it feels all right but then tomorrow morning… ooh, then you come down” – which is almost certainly how we all felt after subjecting Hunt’s speech to a bit of analysis.
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John Glen, Tory Chief Secretary to the Treasury, got badly mauled when he tried to dissemble about the Budget in an interview with Victoria Derbyshire on the BBC’s Newsnight.
He couldn’t explain why it was a “Budget for growth” when medium-term growth forecasts have been downgraded.
And on the effects of Brexit, challenged to admit that it has made the UK poorer, he could not provide an alternative explanation for what has happened since the country left the European Union.
He crumbled under scrutiny.
Watch this car crash interview and understand why Tory leadership has taken the UK nowhere.
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Jeremy Hunt: is his smile just another example of ‘Duper’s Delight’ – the grin politicians wear when they know they’re lying to us, as exemplified so often by Boris Johnson?
Living standards in the UK are still facing their biggest fall since records began in the 1950s – after Jeremy Hunt’s supposedly upbeat Budget.
Amid lower growth predictions than in November when we were facing recession, the Office for Budget Responsibility has said damage caused by rising energy prices and the Covid-19 pandemic could take years to reverse.
House prices will fall an estimated ten per cent by 2025, as rising bills and taxes take a toll on people’s incomes. That is expected to trigger a 20 per cent slump in property transactions, said the OBR.
The tax burden is predicted to hit a post-war high of almost 38 per cent of GDP by 2027/28. And households’ disposable income will fall six per cent over two years.
That is below the seven per cent forecast in November, but represents the largest plunge since records began in 1956-57.
This is no different from the prediction made by the Institute for Fiscal Studies boss Paul Johnson after the then-designated Spring Statement of exactly a year ago. Check out the video for the proof:
So there you have it.
The best that can be said about Hunt’s Budget is that even if it does help the economy, it will help only the very rich.
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Jeremy Hunt: this image is from his financial statement last autumn but the suit is the same, apparently.
This is just to provide a little depth to the Budget coverage yesterday:
£9 billion in tax cuts to corporations, £6 billion cuts to fuel duty & at least £2 billion tax cuts for pensions of highest earners & yet nothing from Hunt for teachers, lecturers, nurses, junior doctors & health workers & civil servants striking against low pay today. Appalling
Does that give you a clearer picture? There will probably be more of this over the next few days, weeks and months.
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I’ve tried to distil the main points in Jeremy Hunt’s Budget statement, and it’s still 40 minutes long!
Nevertheless, if you’re looking for anything in particular, you should be able to find it more quickly than by watching the whole thing.
I was live-tweeting on Twitter at the time and those messages may provide extra information to explain what he meant:
UK will not enter a technical recession this year, says #JeremyHunt. Wow. So how much extra money will the UK's poorest have in their pockets, then? #Budget2023
#JeremyHunt talks about government work to halve inflation – but we know that the government is not doing any such work at all. Inflation will fall as the causes of the price increases become more than a year old and stop being registered. #Budget2023
#JeremyHunt announces funding for #swimmingpool – £63m – capitulating to protest after his prime minister had the National Grid changed, just to heat his own private pool. #Budget2023
Here's some waffle about debt falling. Chancellors have been predicting such falls since 2010, and debt has more than doubled in that time. So take it with a pinch of salt! #Budget2023
Interesting that #JeremyHunt will bring forward measures against promoters of #taxavoidance schemes. I'll want to see what those measures are and how much he expects them to bring into the Treasury. #Budget2023
#JeremyHunt predicts economic growth in every year from 2024 onwards. This is a common claim in Budget statements that also never comes to pass. #Budget2023
Employment: people with disability or long-term sickness should be able to work from home, says #JeremyHunt. Work Capability Assessment to be abolished and benefit entitlement unlinked from work. So ppl will be able to work without losing benefit support. Really? #Budget2023
People forced to leave work because of musculo-skeletal or mental health conditions will receive support. Why not just increase pay to stop stress and improve safety to prevent physical problems? #Budget2023
People on UC looking for work or on low earnings will face stronger sanctions on people failing to meet work search requirements or take up a reasonable job offer. Define reasonable, though. What pay and conditions are acceptable? #Budget2023
#JeremyHunt talks about the most significant improvements – in many areas – in a decade. So he's blaming previous governments of which he was a member for failing to improve incrementally over the years. #Budget2023
The elephant in the room is pay for the people who are going to do the actual work, and the conditions under which they do that work. I hear nothing in #JeremyHunt's speech to address that issue. People who are well-paid provide better work. #Budget2023
And let's remember that we're not really looking at incentives. People won't be given a choice, in many cases – they will be forced to do as they're told. #Budget2023
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Uncannily accurate: The Conservative government’s genuine policy towards PIP claimants may as well have been as it appears in this cartoon from 2017. But what will replace the assessment system it satirises?
I should be pleased.
This Site has campaigned against the Work Capability Assessment for sickness and disability benefits, practically since I started publishing it at the end of 2011.
In my opinion, it has been misused, as a tool to force people who are too ill to work onto job-seeking benefits that carry sanctions if a claimant fails to carry out particular tasks – tasks which the long-term sick and disabled are often clearly incapable of doing.
In many cases, the results have been fatal. I know this because it took me two years to force the Department for Work and Pensions to release figures showing that 2,400 people died within a limited period (two weeks) after being found fit for work, between dates in 2011 and 2014.
That’s right – these people had been found fit to go to work by this hopelessly flawed tick-box assessment system, and then they had proven themselves to be nothing of the sort.
And the Tory government carried on as though nothing was wrong.
I also have personal experience of the system’s flaws. After my partner – Mrs Mike; remember her? – was wrongly put in the work-related activity group for Employment and Support Allowance, she appealed in the hope of being relocated to the support group.
Instead, whoever received her letter slapped a “Do Not Contact” tag on her file for no discernible reason and allowed her claim to end after 12 months, while she waited – in considerable confusion and distress – for a response that was never going to come.
Fortunately, I was around to kick up a stink and get the situation sorted out. But that just highlights the fact that many thousands of people don’t have that kind of help at hand.
And now, we’re told, the Work Capability Assessment is to be scrapped.
But we’re not being told what will replace it.
This Independent article has comments from a couple of organisations that have a stake in what happens:
Trades Union Congress general secretary Paul Novak [said:] “Scrapping the work capability assessment will be welcome if it means an end to assessments that cause anxiety instead of helping people achieve their aspirations,” he added, while urging greater investment in public services to get people off NHS waiting lists and reduce barriers to training.
James Taylor of the disability equality charity Scope said axing the assessment was “the minimum change needed to even begin improving a welfare system that regularly fails disabled people”, and stressed the need for “a more person-centred system” offering “specialist, tailored and flexible” support.
“Those that want to work should be supported. But for some, that’s not an option and disabled people shouldn’t be forced into unsuitable work,” he said. “There is a lot of work to do for the government to restore trust in our benefits system.”
Notice that they both mentioned ways of getting more people back into work; this is Chancellor Jeremy Hunt’s aim with the changes to the benefit system.
And that’s why I fear for the future of sickness and disability benefits in the UK.
I think the odious Hunt is planning another push to put sick people into jobs they can’t do. If I’m right, his plan will fail on many levels.
Jeremy Hunt: is he planning to pull the rug out from under disabled people, to fill the gaps in the labour market? If so, he’ll probably make matters worse.
Bad news? Or just the same old story?
Apparently Jeremy Hunt is planning to “reform” (we’ve heard that word before!) disability benefits in order to push people back to work.
According to The Independent, the economics editor of the Financial Times, Chris Giles, said there would probably be a “carrot and stick” approach, although it seems to be more “stick” than “carrot”:
“The charitable way of putting it is that people are better off in work rather than out of work and have better lives and maybe they need a push. That’s not how a lot of people will see it but that’s how the government will see it.”
It looks like the expected inflation-matching benefit increase isn’t going to happen for people on disability or sickness payments!
Either that, or Hunt will make receipt of the benefit conditional on seeking work of some kind – which is a partial contradiction in terms because PIP is supposed to support disabled people in their lives, whether they are in work or not.
The trouble is, people aren’t better-off in work because the policy for the last 13 years and more – across the board – has been to push wages down in order to maximise profits.
That’s why we’ve got so many billionaires at the moment – most of whom didn’t do anything meaningful to get that cash.
Secondly: work won’t give disabled people better lives; it is far more likely to make their condition worse – if employers even bother to take them on.
You don’t get a better life in a low-waged job that creates physical or mental stress that is harmful to your health – possibly because it doesn’t pay enough to cover the bills.
And experience shows that most employers won’t even hire a person with a disability – so that person is left struggling on a benefit that is even less likely to cover the bills, because it has been designed to be that way.
So trying to force disabled people into work isn’t even likely to succeed.
Finally, let’s be perfectly clear about this: more people are on disability benefits now because of the Tories’ cack-handed handling of the Covid crisis.
It’s also because they’ve created huge stresses with low-paid work; people are having nervous breakdowns and physical health problems because employers and the government have made it impossible to make ends meet.
The Independent article makes clear the correlation between the pandemic and benefit take-up:
A new report revealed that a huge wave of early retirement following the Covid pandemic was the biggest cause of labour shortages across the UK. [It said] that the workforce outlook for the UK was “bleak”, finding that economic inactivity has increased by 565,000 people since the start of the pandemic.
There was also a stark increase in long-term sickness since the start of the pandemic, with the Office for National Statistics (ONS) finding that 217,000 people not in work in the year to July reported long-Covid.
However, the report highlighted that most of the rise in sickness-related inactivity was among people already taking leave and those leaving jobs were more likely to be ending their careers early.
Giving up, in other words.
So, in typical Tory fashion, these idiots have created a problem for them to solve… with cruelty.
As Kate Bell, assistant general secretary of the TUC put it:
“The government usually reaches for benefit conditionality when they don’t have anything to say.”
“I think it might happen because they see it as easy and cheap.”
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Is this the latest Tory attack on people with long-term illnesses?
According to the Mirror, Chancellor Jeremy Hunt is planning to pressurise GPs into refusing to sign people off work with long-term illnesses, even if they are too physically ill to perform any work at all.
This would mean he is planning to starve them to death.
They would still have to try to claim Universal Credit, but would be unable to show that they deserved it because they could not provide medical evidence of inability to work. Therefore they would receive nothing.
Attempting to work would simply worsen their condition and may also drive them to an early death.
Of course, anybody who finds it odd that a former Health Secretary would want to send UK citizens to their deaths simply hasn’t been paying attention for the last 13 years.
You can read the Mirror piece by clicking on the link here:
Now this rotten to the core piece of crap Government wants to force the sick back to work. They would send kids up chimneys if we let them https://t.co/iJ08bZ8qrj
It has sparked alarm, with Dr Deepti Gurdasani, epidemiologist and senior lecturer at Queen Mary University, posting on Twitter: “Yeah, this’ll really help because long COVID and chronic illness responds so well to being forced to push through and work long hours regardless of how ill one feels…”
Let’s hope that the UK’s GPs still have a shred of decency about them and remember that they have a duty to do nothing to harm people who present as patients.
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Liz Truss: her lunatic economic ideas created an economic black hole. Jeremy Hunt’s attempts to fill it are likely to harm us all – including people who say they can’t be bothered with politics.
This is another story about how politics affects you, even if you don’t want anything to do with it.
Councils in England are warning that the cuts Jeremy Hunt is likely to force on them – in a desperate bid to fill the financial black hole that Liz Truss created with her daft neoliberal trickle-down economic plan – will mean the cancellation of everyday services.
They mean services they provide that help you do the things you need to, every day.
The BBC is reporting that a survey of county councils suggests bus services, home care for the elderly and climate change projects are most likely to face the axe.
Other services under threat are leisure centres and parking.
So you will be faced with the added expense of driving to work – and spending a lot of time in traffic jams because many more vehicles will be on the roads.
If you have elderly relatives who need care, then you’ll be the one providing it. While their pensions and possibly other benefits will help financially, your free time will be wiped out.
And obviously any project that actually helps reduce the threat of climate change is vital for our future existence. Who knows what could be cancelled that may otherwise change the world for the better?
You won’t have anywhere to go to relieve the pressure on you because all the leisure centres will be closed.
And you wouldn’t be able to drive there anyway because so would all the car parks.
All because Liz Truss couldn’t do her sums, because 12 years of Tory rule made the UK vulnerable to energy and food price inflation, and because the Tories had spent all that time cutting council funding to the bone, so there is nothing left to tackle emergencies.
Council funding from central government – which makes up the vast majority of the money councils use – has been halved by the Tories since 2010.
And there are more services facing cuts: road maintenance, home-to-school transport, and opening hours of libraries and recycling centres may all be cut. Charges may be introduced to use public toilets and may be increased in car parks. You may be forced to wait longer for your rubbish and recycling to be collected (which may create a problem with vermin).
Apparently the best idea the Tories have is to raise the cap on council tax increases so local authorities can charge already-impoverished residents even more money for the meagre services they continue to offer.
And the Tory government of Rishi Sunak seems to be in denial. A spokesman has said Westminster gave £3.7 billion to councils last year, to shore up services. But that was before inflation went through the roof. How much was actually needed to maintain them at their proper level?
You won’t hear an answer from Downing Street. The press office there is all about damage control, not factual accuracy.
And when I mention damage control, I mean controlling any damage to the reputation of the Tory government – not controlling damage to the fabric of UK society.
Damaging our society has been Tory policy since before they slithered back into government in 2010.
But we still have people who say they’re not interested in politics and they don’t think politics have anything to do with them.
Someone should create a checklist to demonstrate exactly how badly they already have been affected by this country’s political choices – and how much worse it will be in the future.
Have YOU donated to my crowdfunding appeal, raising funds to fight false libel claims by TV celebrities who should know better? These court cases cost a lot of money so every penny will help ensure that wealth doesn’t beat justice.
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