Tag Archives: increase

Should Thames Water go bust, rather than increase its bills by two-fifths?

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Why does the LABOUR Party want to put families – children – into poverty?

Child poverty: both the Tories and Labour want to put families with three or more children into poverty, so what could possibly make you think voting for them is a good idea?

It seems some of you are still clinging to the belief that the Labour Party is the answer to the Tory insanity that has been running the United Kingdom into the ground since 2010.

Let’s put everybody straight about that – starting with Labour’s clearly-expressed intention to put families with at least three children into poverty and keep them there.

Here’s the Resolution Foundation:

As Gavin Kelly posted on ‘X’: “A decade ago 1 in 3 children in large families (3+ children) were in poverty. Now it’s more than 4 in 10, heading to more than 1 in 2 (51%) by 2028-29.

“Completely policy-driven. Fixable.”

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Tom Pollard posted – also on ‘X’, “The two-child limit will condemn an increasing number of children to grow up in poverty – permanently scarring them, reducing their life chances & costing us all in the long term.”

Here’s Jonathan Bradshaw, Professor Emeritus of Social Policy at the University of York:

He’s saying that the economic benefits of lifting the two-child limit far outweigh the annual cost to the public purse – words echoed by Dr Katy Jones, Associate Professor in Employment at Manchester Metropolitan University:

The benefits of lifting children out of poverty would be huge, but obviously the Conservatives won’t do it because it’s their policy and they want to make you poor.

And Labour won’t do it either because Keir Starmer clearly wants you to be poor too.

He and his party would rather give huge bungs to fat bankers, as we can see from Shadow Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds’s squirming response when challenged on both subjects by Kay Burley on Sky News:

Labour is now the party of the bankers, not the workers. And if Starmer is happy to screw over families with more than two children, he’ll merrily do worse to you.

So you simply cannot vote tribally – for the party you think represents you (none of them do; they’re all about enriching their MPs and nothing else) – at the next general election.

Instead – and I cannot stress this strongly enough – if you want your vote to mean anything, you have to actually find out what the candidates in your constituency are planning to do, if they are lucky enough to be elected.

That is what party manifestos are for. Independent candidates also have policy documents and they will all be online for you to find and read.

You need to find and read these policy documents, and then you need to make a dispassionate choice, based on what you have read.

Which of the candidates offers the most policies that fit what you need? And, by that, I mean: who will improve your own life the most?

Do not consider how other people will vote, either in your constituency or the other 649 around the UK. That is not your concern.

It is not for you to worry about which party will get enough votes to actually enact its policies. This will lead you down the usual garden path to voting in a government that won’t do anything at all for the good of the country, like the one we’ve had since 2010.

BE SELFISH. Bizarrely, it might be the only way to get the kind of government that all of us need.


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​Tory minister quit as he ‘couldn’t afford mortgage hike’. How does he think WE feel?

George Freeman MP: has it not occurred to him that, if he can’t make ends meet because of high mortgage interest rates, people on lower pay might be in an even worse situation?

Can anything demonstrate how out-of-touch the Tories in government are, as well as this?

A senior Tory MP has admitted resigning from Government because he couldn’t afford a hike in his mortgage payments on his £118,000 salary.

George Freeman quit as Science Minister in November saying “the time has come for me to focus on my health, family wellbeing and life beyond the frontbench”. But writing on his blog just days ago he complained that his monthly mortgage repayments had more than doubled.

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Millions of people have been hit with higher mortgage costs after the economic carnage caused by Liz Truss’s mini-Budget sent interest rates soaring. Around 1.6 million homeowners are due to come off fixed-rate deals this year and face considerable hikes in their monthly repayments.

From what form of insanity are Tories like Freeman suffering?

They know their policies – intentionally or not – pushed interest rates through the roof, and that included interest on mortgages.

So they knew that people were going to be paying more – including, if they had mortgages, them.

If they can’t shoulder the extra burden on a ministerial salary of more than £100,000, how do they expect people on average pay of around £30,000 to cope?

Now that Freeman has felt the pinch, though, one might hope that he would have used his position to lobby for more to be done to help mortgage-holders cope.

Alas, no. Freeman has simply cleared off to the back benches – and possibly to a second, third, fourth (or whatever) job, which he maytake because he can. The rest of us don’t have the same options.

We have to conclude that MPs like Freeman just don’t care – and we need to remember that when the next election comes around.

Source: ​Tory MP quit as minister as he ‘couldn’t afford mortgage hike on £118,000 salary’ – Mirror Online


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NHS waiting lists increase by 400,000 after Rishi Sunak’s pledge to bring them down

Waiting for treatment: in fact, this image of people waiting in a corridor for treatment was taken in 2017 at a hospital Accident & Emergency department, but it serves to represent those waiting for scheduled treatment too, doesn’t it?

Rishi Sunak has failed in another pledge to help the people of the UK.

Has he become too preoccupied with helping his business colleagues who are embroiled in the Post Office scandal and Israel’s genocide of Gaza?

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Here are the details of the latest mess:

Rishi Sunak has broken yet another pledge, after new data this morning revealed that NHS waiting lists have soared by 400,000, a year after the Prime Minister pledged to bring them down as one of his five pledges.

Data from NHS England shows 7.61 million treatments were waiting to be carried out at the end of November, involving 6.39 million patients. Although the latest numbers show this was around 100,000 less than the previous month, it is still higher than the 7.19 million waiting list in January last year, when Sunak made his pledge to voters to bring down NHS waiting lists.

The Royal College of Nursing said: “Data released today shows the NHS waiting list remains extraordinarily high, with 400,000 more waits since the prime minister pledged to cut the numbers waiting more than a year ago.

“He can’t pull the wool over people’s eyes by claiming it’s down to strike action. Patients, staff and the public deserve better.”

Source: NHS waiting lists increase by 400,000 after Rishi Sunak’s pledge to bring them down – Left Foot Forward: Leading the UK’s progressive debate


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Former Marine to stand against Johnny Mercer after failure to end veterans’ homelessness

Keyboard warrior: Johnny Mercer responded with anger to the revelation that an Armed Forces veteran will try to unseat him at the next general election after he failed to reduce veterans’ homelessness, instead presiding over a 14 per cent increase.

A former Royal Marine is to stand as Labour’s candidate against former Army officer and current Minister for Veterans Affairs, Johnny Mercer, at the next general election – as Mercer himself suggested.

Mercer swore to end veterans’ homelessness in 2023, saying, “Hold me to account.”

But he has failed dramatically, with veterans’ homelessness in fact increasing by 14 per cent.

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Here’s Carol Vorderman with some facts:

Will he apologise, asked Mr Thomas.

Apparently not.

Instead – well, here’s Vorders again:

To support herself, Vorders has tweeted some evidence:

If any part of the factual information above is wrong, This Writer would be interested to know.

But it all looks fairly clear to me.


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Rishi Sunak IGNORED ‘the science’ with his Covid-spreading ‘Eat Out to Die Out’

[This image is from ‘X’ (formerly Twitter) – apologies if it’s yours as I will have used it without permission.]

So much for “we’re listening to the science”.

Remember that – the Tory government slogan that they repeated like a mantra throughout the Covid-19 crisis?

Evidence to the Covid-19 inquiry suggests – strongly – that this was a lie; and one with mass-fatal consequences.

Remember Rishi Sunak’s ‘Eat Out to Help Out’ scheme?

Announced on July 8, 2020, it involved the government subsidising half the cost of food and non-alcoholic drinks ordered at participating cafes, pubs, and restaurants, where the food and drinks were consumed on the premises, up to £10 per person (per order).

The offer was available from August 3 – 31, from Monday to Wednesday each week. There were no limits on how many times an individual could use the discount.

It led to a significant increase in restaurant visits during August – and what else do you think happened?

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Research available in December of that year showed – well, here‘s what This Site said at the time:

Tory Chancellor Rishi Sunak made certain that thousands more people caught Covid-19 than would otherwise have done so, with his Eat Out to Help Out scheme.

Research by the University of Warwick has shown that the initiative is likely to blame for 17 per cent of infections – one in six outbreaks – between August and early September (when it was overtaken by outbreaks linked to schools that had reopened at Boris Johnson and Dominic Raab’s insistence, we may conclude).

People will have died from catching the virus after taking part in Sunak’s crackpot plan.

He didn’t even help hospitality businesses very much, either.

In March this year, we discovered that then-Health Secretary Matt Hancock knew about this:

Matt Hancock – Health Secretary at the time – knew about it and conspired with then-Cabinet Secretary Simon Case, and Sunak (who is now prime minister, remember) to hide it from us.

Look at his WhatsApp messages from the summer of 2020:

News outlets like The Independent are reporting that Hancock ridiculed the scheme, calling it “Eat Out to Help The Virus Get About”.

Clearly the scheme should have been halted as soon as the concerns became apparent to Hancock. Instead he made a bad joke about it.

Who knows how many people died because they weren’t told about the danger? And shouldn’t Hancock, Case and Sunak be punished for allowing those deaths to happen?

And now, finally, we know that the government’s scientific advisers had opposed the scheme all along but Sunak refused to listen.

The current Chief Scientific Adviser, Professor Dame Angela McLean, actually called him “Dr Death” in a WhatsApp exchange with Prof John Edmunds, from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) in September 2020.

Here it is:

Prof Edmunds was recorded discussing the exchange at the Covid-19 Inquiry today (October 19, 2023):

According to the BBC,

Prof Edmunds told the inquiry he was unable recall if that had been a specific reference to the Eat Out to Help Out scheme, which had subsidised food in pubs, restaurants and other hospitality venues over the summer, while Covid cases had been low.

But in earlier testimony to the inquiry, he said he was “still angry” about the policy.

“It was one thing to take your foot off the brake – but to put your foot on the accelerator,” he told the inquiry.

Prof Edmunds told the inquiry 45,000 people had just died – and while the pub and restaurant sector needed support, the government could have just given them money.

“This was a scheme to encourage people to take an epidemiological risk,” he added.

To explain: he was saying Sunak was asking us to gamble on whether we would catch Covid-19 or not. And we now know that the scheme led to 17 per cent more of us being infected than would otherwise have contracted the disease.

This Writer is unaware of any statistics showing the number of people who died – but there would have been fatalities.

This means Rishi Sunak is directly responsible for the deaths of many people who might otherwise have been alive and contributing to UK society today, if not for him and his homicidally reckless fiasco.

As some have already commented: no wonder he is refusing to release his own WhatsApp messages from the time of the scheme.

The question now is: how can he be brought to justice?


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Housebuilders rise to top of FTSE100 now YOU have to pay for pollution they cause

Housebuilding: the Tories have been looking for something on which they can blame their failure to build enough new homes – and have found it in the form of legal protections for river life. So they are scrapping those protections and forcing you to pay for pollution prevention measures.

Exactly as This Site predicted only hours ago, evidence is showing that a Tory government decision to scrap “nutrient neutrality” rules that protect river life from harm caused by housing developments is creating huge profits for builders.

Meanwhile, the cost of cleaning up their mess is set to fall on the public purse.

Here’s the evidence about building firms:

And The Guardian is saying the following about how the bill for their pollution will now be paid:

Taxpayers will pick up the bill for pollution by housebuilders, government officials have admitted, as rules on chemical releases into waterways are scrapped.

The government has said it will double Natural England’s wetland funding to £280m in order to show it is trying to meet the requirements of its legally binding Environment Act.

This extra £140m will come from the public purse, the government confirmed. When asked by the Guardian whether this meant the taxpayer was now picking up the bill for pollution caused by developers, a government official responded “yes”, adding that while “the polluter pays principle is very important”, it was having too many adverse impacts on small- and medium-sized housebuilders.

So there you have it.

You paid for the privatised energy companies’ enormous profits. You paid for the privatised water firms to pollute our rivers. And now you are to pay for mitigation of the already-private builders’ attempts to kill off any remaining life in our waterways – if such mitigation ever happens.


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Why are the Tories trying to hide energy bill misery for those who use the least?

The hard fact for the poorest people: while headline energy costs are falling, the price for those who can least afford to pay is rising unaffordably.

Average energy bills will fall slightly in the three months from October – to £1,923 a year for the typical household, the regulator Ofgem has said

This is a drop of £151 on the current annual energy bill for a typical household, which is currently £2,074.

But there are complications!

The drop is in the price per unit of electricity and gas, and standing charges – that are charged daily regardless of energy use, are set to rise to recoup the costs associated with the wave of supplier failures, consumer defaults, and additional support to shore up energy companies’ finances.

This means people who use less energy – logically, poorer people – will end up paying more for it.

The Resolution Foundation has explained the situation in a press release here. I’ll pull out the important bits:

Any family with an energy consumption less than four-fifths of the average will see higher bills this winter than last, a situation that applies to around one-in-three (35 per cent) of households in England and close to half (47 per cent) of those in the lowest income decile.

For some, these extra costs will be substantial: 13 per cent of households (2.7 million families) face energy bills rising by more than £100 this winter, a figure that rises to one in four (24 per cent) for the poorest households.

The removal of the flat £400 Energy Bill Support scheme, which was paid out in monthly instalments over winter 2022 to all households, regardless of income or energy consumption, is in effect putting upward pressure on every household’s bill this winter.

Whether a household faces a lower bill this winter depends on whether the lower per-unit prices provide savings that outweigh the higher standing charges and removal of the £400 support.

The Resolution Foundation expects 7.2 million households will end up paying more, with 2.7 million spending more than £100 more on gas and electricity bills – including 24 per cent (almost a quarter) of those in the poorest 1/10 of families.

The Conservative government doesn’t care about this increased pressure on the poorest.

Here’s Tory mouthpiece Andrew Bowie (he’s an under-secretary for “Nuclear and Networks”, whatever that means), refusing to discuss the issue with the BBC’s Naga Munchetty and determinedly trying to force the subject back to the reduction in bills for the very richest people:

We may draw just one conclusion from this:

Conservative government energy policy is to make the poorest pay the most (as a proportion of their available funds). They are using energy bills to create poverty.


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Student loans: Bad news for English people starting university in the autumn

Graduates: how many of these people will ever fully pay back their student loans? How many new students, entering university in autumn 2023, will be even worse-off?

Anyone English who starts a university course in the autumn will pay more for their student loan, and over a longer period of time.

Here’s Martin Lewis, explaining it on ITV’s Good Morning Britain:

So for anybody who lives in England and has not gone to university yet (but will in the autumn or at any time afterwards), from the April after you leave university, you will not pay back the £243 per year that current ex-students do or will; you will pay back £450 per year.

The period of time over which you will make those payments will not be a maximum of 30 years, as it is now, but 40 years. This means you won’t pay a minimum of £7,290 but a minimum of £13,500.

Some might think that’s still a good deal on loans of more than £25,000.

And of course there is interest to be paid. Some ex-students known to This Writer have recently discovered that, after paying back their student loans for more than 20 years, they owe more now than when they started.

In terms of the public purse, where the state is currently paying 44p for every pound spent on education, from September – for new university students – it will pay just 19p for every pound spent on education.

Instead of paying 56p per pound, the individual will pay 81p per pound. Martin Lewis reckons this is a 50 per cent increase. I make it around 45 per cent.

Apparently more people are likely to clear the cost of the loan plus interest. I’d be fascinated to learn just how they’re likely to do that.

To me, it seems like a way of offloading debt from the state and onto individuals. Bear in mind that the level of student debt owed to the Student Loans Company currently stands at £205 billion.

That figure has doubled in the last six years, after the then-Tory/Liberal Democrat Coalition government increased tuition fees from £3,600 per year to £9,000. The decision was made in 2012 but the change happened in 2016.

We can all see what this is, I hope. The Tory government is saddling poorer students with a debt they will have to repay for their entire working lives, making them more vulnerable to exploitation by employers – wage slaves.

All this in the middle of a huge – and worsening, remember – cost of living crisis.

Meanwhile, privileged students whose parents have more cash to splash on them will be able to pay off their loans faster and go on to earn more.

The whole situation puts the lie to Tory claims that they are the party of opportunity, of equality, and facilitators of upward social mobility. Doesn’t it?


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Corporate profits proved to be driving inflation. Why are Tories attacking your wages?

Rishi Sunak: the sign behind him says his government’s priorities are “your priorities”. This would only be true if “you” referred to corporate bosses and shareholders, and there was only one priority listed: bloating profits by robbing customers with increased prices.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has published information that proves inflation in the UK and other European countries is being driven by the greed of corporations that have been pushing their profits up for no good reason.

Here’s the evidence:

(Some might say this applies only to countries in continental Europe but the question then is, why should it not apply to the UK too?)

So the answer to inflation is not to cut wages, and is not to increase interest rates; it is to force corporations to cut their bloated profit margins and pay for a rise in labour costs (increase wages).

This is the opposite of what Rishi Sunak and his corporate stooges in government have been saying since the crisis began. It seems clear that they have been lying to you all along.

And what’s he doing about it now?

His latest plan is to renege on all his promises about following the advice of pay review bodies:

“Workers need to recognise the economic context we are in.” Okay; well, this worker recognises that major corporations, many of which are probably donors to the Conservative Party and individual Tory MPs, have caused inflation by artificially increasing their prices. Now they’ve been caught doing it, they should cut their prices and increase wage to at least match the current inflation rate or be penalised for it.

This is what I expect my government to enforce.

(I don’t think it will happen for a single moment, but I do think that the longer Sunak refuses to do it, the more people will realise that he, his government and the corps funding them are all crooks and vampires, sucking out the lifeblood of the UK.)

Sunak is talking utter bollocks about it, of course:

People won’t accept that it’s right – or even acceptable – because we all now know it isn’t.

Here’s a doctor, responding to Sunak’s attack on the public sector workforce:

Would you like more proof of what’s going on?

Here’s Howard Beckett:

Sadly, there is no pressure from the Labour Party – the UK’s official Opposition to the government – to make Sunak and his bandits do the right thing. Labour is on their side and helping to rob us all.

Proof:

This Writer will be writing to all those in government or able to influence it, calling for a change of policy to demand responsibility from the corporations, and I urge you to do the same.

But this time I think we’re all going to have to get out of our armchairs and onto the streets – possibly with blazing old-style torches and pitchforks – to demand action “or else”.

You know what I mean: French-style.

Or would you rather just lie back like a weakling and let these fat cats carry on robbing you?


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