Tag Archives: wages

Tory line on why they won’t negotiate with junior doctors is gibberish

Steve Barclay: watch him stutter through his nonsense argument against negotiating a better pay deal for junior doctors.

Listen to the nonsense that issues from former Health Sec Steve Barclay’s lips when he’s challenged on why his government won’t negotiate with striking junior doctors, while they’re on strike.

I don’t actually agree with Peter Stefanovic about Susanna Reid; she could have been much more incisive.

The issue is that the government says it will not negotiate on pay with junior doctors while they are involved in strike action. It will only talk if they call their strikes off.

But if they call their strikes off, then the government won’t have any reason to negotiate on pay with junior doctors. So it won’t; it will merely continue to impose punitive real-terms pay cuts.

“There was a catch, and it was Catch-22.”

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As a member of the public, you need to be aware of this Tory government tactic, and of how unfair it is.

Doctors’ pay has been eroded by more than one-third – by Tory governments – in the years since they took over responsibility for the health service in 2010. By comparison, Tory MPs’ salaries have remained at the same level, in real terms, as they were in 2010.

The only way the Tories would have a tenable argument against increasing junior doctors’ pay by the 35 per cent needed to return it to parity with 2010 would be if their own pay had also tumbled. It hasn’t, so they don’t.

Do you remember the Tory mantra from the general election of 2010? It was “We’re all in it together.”

Could there be a stronger argument than this that they were lying?


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Tories announce ‘biggest cut in net migration’ and we’re punching holes in their plan

Rishi Sunak and his priorities: who would have thought that stopping the boats would contradict his plan to reduce inflation?

The following is misleading.

If you’re announcing a plan to cut net migration into the UK, then it hasn’t happened yet. The following tweet is therefore misleading.

There’s no way of telling whether these measures will actually bring inward migration down.

Also, there’s the issue of unforeseen consequences.

First, here’s another misleading message from Rishi Sunak. See my response to understand why it’s wrong:

Again, to remind you: The treaty with Rwanda that James Cleverly was sent to sign has nothing to do with stopping criminal gangs from transporting refugees (or whoever) across the English Channel.

It is merely an attempt to bypass the Supreme Court’s ruling that Rwanda is not a safe place to send them once they have arrived in the UK.

Now, about those unforeseen consequences…

When Sunak says he will “end abuse via the Health and Care Visa, he means he will prevent care workers moving to the UK for employment from bringing their families. This will also apply to overseas students.

This will turn away expertise that the UK needs.

Tory voices like that of Brendan Clarke-Smith are already whispering that foreign workers will still come, because the UK is “a fantastic country”:

Is it?

It seems unlikely that highly-qualified people, who could earn a better living anywhere else in the world, would willingly give up their kith and kin to work in a country that will not appreciate their efforts and that – certainly in the case of health and care – treats its own people so badly.

No worries, though! Immigration Minister Robert Jenrick reckons workers from the UK will fill the gaps:

He said UK businesses would no longer have the option of hiring cheap labour from overseas, meaning they would have to “invest in the domestic workforce”.

Why should they?

Big businesses are more likely to preserve their profits by moving out of the UK altogether and hiring all that cheap foreign labour abroad, where it’s still cheap.

And small or medium-sized enterprises are not likely to be able to afford the kind of investment Jenrick is suggesting.

He went on to appear on Sky News, supporting the remaining point in the five-point plan – ensuring that people sponsoring dependents, who do come with them to the UK, can support them financially:

So the overall implication of this plan is that it is an attempt to nudge businesses into paying higher salaries to people working in the UK.

This appears to be an attempt to steal a policy from Reform UK, whose leader Richard Tice had already spoken in favour of higher wages and investment in people:

Opinion polls have suggested that right-wing voters are, themselves, migrating – from the Tories to Reform UK. This anti-immigration policy may be an attempt to woo them back.

But – perhaps crucially – this is a policy turnaround for the Tories, who have previously argued that increased pay for working people is inflationary:

TL;DR: this supposedly anti-immigration policy seems to be intended more as a way of stemming the flow of voters to Reform UK. Its stated aim of increasing pay contradicts Tory policy on inflation and is more likely to move businesses out of the UK than bring investment in.

Why do useless Tory MPs think they deserve so much more pay than life-saving docs?

Who would have thought that this cartoon could be re-used? Now, as when he was Health Secretary, Tory Chancellor Jeremy Hunt has doctors on the rack. He’s not going to pay them the 35% cost-of-living increase he owes them – but he and his colleagues have been happy to take a 42% rise for themselves.

Take a look at the clip below, in which Steve Brine MP, Tory chair of the Commons Health and Social Care Committee, says junior doctors do not deserve the 35 per cent pay increase that would be required to give them parity with their pay in 2010:

Now read this:

Conservative MPs have been worse than useless to the UK since 2010.

They have plunged the country into five times the debt it had in 2005, with nothing to show for it but a crashing economy and nose-diving public services, including a National Health Service that is constantly on the verge of collapse due to intrusive privatisation and over-demand due to the effects of all the Tories’ other policies.

Junior doctors, working within that crashing health service even as it crumbles around them, are far more valuable – for the obvious reason: They are genuine life savers.

But it is the Tory MPs who hold the purse strings.

They could have refused the recommended pay rises that have been offered to them since 2010 but they haven’t. They have taken the money. They have also taken huge wodges of cash in donations from businesspeople, along with the advice of those donors on what to do. You can form your own conclusion about the value of that advice to the majority of us.

And while taking all that filthy lucre – a higher proportional increase than the amount the junior doctors have lost over the same period of time – the Tories have told junior doctors that they do not deserve a pay rise equal to the increase in the cost of living.

No wonder medical professionals are quitting the NHS as fast as they can.

There is a word for MPs like Mr Brine. It begins with a ‘C’ – but it sure isn’t ‘Conservative’.


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Is this how Keir Starmer wants to stop you getting the wages you deserve?

Keir Starmer: he likes to give speeches in industrial settings, claiming to be on the side of workers. But is he actually betraying them by giving employers a way of keep wages low?

The Tories have found a new angle from which to attack Keir Starmer today, claiming he will allow around 100,000 migrants into the UK in return for restoration of a “returns” scheme that would send back those arriving in the UK by non-approved routes.

Here’s Greg Hands:

And here’s Robert Jenrick:

Presumably they’re all at it but I’ve only seen these.

The claim that Starmer is somehow betraying the UK by seeking to negotiate a solution to the channel boat question is undoubtedly good for the Tories. But it is completely daft.

The UK used to have a “returns” policy along the lines suggested by the stories in the Torygraph and Hate Mail but the Tories under Boris Johnson ditched it as part of their childish Brexit. It had worked very well in keeping down the number of people seeking asylum in the UK from abroad.

Not only that, but it has to be remembered that there would not be as many people coming here if the UK had not engaged in numerous adventures in foreign countries that displaced these people in the first place. Whether because of that or domestic issues, they come because they no longer feel safe in their home countries. The solution to that is negotiation with the governments of those countries to restore them to stability.

And it would put a stop to the “criminal gangs” who exploit the people trying to cross the channel into the UK, more effectively than anything the Tories are doing.

So Starmer’s ideas are not beyond reason, as these Tories are painting them.

They are unacceptable to UK employees, though – and here’s the reason.

The country’s labour market is currently stretched to its limit; there simply aren’t enough jobseekers to fill the vacancies available to them. This is partly due to Brexit and the departure of many foreign-born workers back to the European Union.

In such a situation, employees have a stronger hand when negotiating pay deals. If evidence that average pay has increased by 8.5 per cent in the year to summer 2023 is accurate, then someone has been taking advantage of this.

Employers don’t like it. It cuts into their profits (which have been enormous in some cases but they still want it all for themselves).

The Tories have suggested that they would push sick and disabled people to seek jobs, by making the Work Capability Assessment they must take to receive benefits more difficult. The aim is to force a million people onto the jobs market, even though they are actually too infirm to work.

Starmer’s suggested deal with the EU would bring in at least 100,000 people – initially. And they all have to make a living for themselves.

It seems to This Writer that Starmer wants to undercut UK workers’ wage demands by ensuring employers have access to cheap labour from abroad. This is how he is betraying the UK today.


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Low pay at Border Force creates ‘breeding ground’ for corruption, watchdog says | Civil Service World

Border Force: presumably the staffers in this image were not on the take – but how many of their colleagues are – due to low pay?

This is interesting: not only is low pay bad for physical and mental health, but it also breeds corruption:

Aprobe into Border Force’s ability to identify and respond to corruption among its own staff has found work is hampered by “confused” civil service leadership structures, while poor pay and a lack of engagement are acting as a “breeding ground” for criminal behaviour.

Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration David Neal’s investigation into so-called “insider threat” focused on the risk that an “unscrupulous minority” of Border Force staff will abuse their access to data, property, and contraband to commit criminal acts.

The investigation was conducted between January and March and its findings were presented to home secretary Suella Braverman at the end of May, however Neal’s report was only published yesterday – and in redacted form.

So it seems that, deprived of a way to profit from their actual job, Border Force employees consider it acceptable to abuse the privileges of their work in order to make cash on the side.

And the corruption doesn’t end there: not only has publication of the report on this criminal activity been delayed for more than three months, but when it was finally published, some information was left out.

What’s the matter, Suella Braverman? Are the facts simply embarrassing for you – or damning about you?

Source: Low pay at Border Force creates ‘breeding ground’ for corruption, watchdog says


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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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These new inflation figures should be awkward for the Tories

Inflation has dropped to 6.8 per cent – but this is not an endorsement of Conservative government policy.

The Tories have spent months claiming that they cannot pay the money they deserve to public sector workers (including the junior doctors who were on strike over the weekend) because it would worse inflation – but today’s fall comes alongside an increase in average pay.

Looking at the small print, we see that none of this pay rise has gone to people who actually need it; instead it has further fattened the bloated bank accounts of high-paid company executives and other friends of the Conservative government.

But that doesn’t matter; wages have increased and inflation still came down. The Tory lie has been exposed as – in the language of Peter Stefanovic – bollocks:

The clip includes a few other interesting take-outs:

Workers in the UK are £11,000 a year worse-off.

2022 was the worst year for wage growth in almost half a century.

Average real wages in the UK will still be lower in 2026 than they were in 2008.

So it is impossible for public sector wages – or any other wages paid to employees – to have had anything to do with inflation figures.

In fact, according to the extremely non-socialist International Monetary Fund, the largest contributor to Europe’s inflation over the past two years was rising corporate profits cause by companies increasing their prices by more than the costs of imported energy. Look at your own energy bill over the past few years and compare the increases with the costs of energy and you will see the factual accuracy in this.

Increases in private sector wages may increase the price of goods – because companies would factor those rises into their prices.

There is evidence of this in the new figures: strip away the cuts in energy and food costs and core inflation is one per cent higher.

But that doesn’t happen in the public sector where, for example, healthcare is free at the point of use.

And the public sector labour force is only 17 per cent of the total workforce, meaning its pay increases have a lower effect than anything happening with the 83 per cent in the private sector.

Of course, prices are still increasing, meaning that people will blame that on increasing wages and demand another interest rate rise from the Bank of England to curb spending by the little people (you and me, as opposed to the big bosses who have actually received the pay boosts).

I struggle to grasp the point of such a move as it is more likely to cause a recession than stabilise the economy. The precipitous rise in interest rates set by the Bank has not affected inflation at all, and conventional wisdom suggests we will not see the result until 18 months after the first one was imposed. With inflation already coming down of its own accord – as was widely predicted by people like economist Richard Murphy – this could be disastrous.

So when the Tories come out with outrageous nonsense like this…

… I am glad to see responses that put it into the proper perspective, like this:

Sadly, the message is unlikely to get through to the general public, thanks to the biased priorities of our right-wing social media platforms. Look at the number of views the Tory propaganda has received, in comparison with those collected by Clare’s response.

Finally: at least someone out there can laugh about it. Read this:

Sadly for the story, even though the Royals are technically working in the public sector, they are right at the top of it, so their pay rise comes in as equivalent to those of the fatcat company execs.

Still, I don’t see anyone talking about the inflationary effect of this massive increase, so it adds to the evidence that public sector pay does not affect inflation and the Tories have been feeding us bullsh*t since the public sector strikes started, if not before.

Try to remember this amid the barrage of inadequate and misleading reporting by the BBC and the rest of the Tory media.


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Are you still being fooled that wages are causing inflation? Watch this

The Bank of England: why are you letting a gang of super-rich bankers tell you it’s the pittance you take home in pay that has caused inflation when that is so obviously a lie? What are you going to do about it?

It’s self-explanatory and if you believe the Tories, the right-wing media, the bankers and all the others who have been telling you that wage rises are pushing up inflation, you need to see it. Watch:

Now you should be angry that so many people have been lying to you.

There’s something you can do about it. The same thing you’ve always been able to do.


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The news in tweets: Monday, July 17, 2023

Ruling-class privilege: there’s no ‘class ceiling’ for grotesqueries like Rachel Reeves and Keir Starmer – they are laughing at you when they say they can’t do anything to help you. Remember: it is political choice that has dumped the UK in its current crisis.

Backlash against Starmer’s Substitute Tory Party grows as he insists he’ll do nothing for ordinary people

It’s a good question. Jeremy Corbyn promised to provide dentistry on the National Health Service but Keir Stürmer is promising to deny it to more people (although he hasn’t said it in as many words).

He’s also planning to inject much more privatisation into the NHS, probably to complete the transformation of the service into nothing more than a banner under which public money may be passed to private companies that perpetuate illness and refuse to provide cover where it is not profitable, making healthcare a postcode lottery:

More privatisation?

Read this:

There’s the problem with more privatisation in a nutshell. Once these private health bloodsuckers get a monopoly on the provision of care, they’ll push prices through the roof – knowing that you and I will have to pay for it, no matter what.

By supporting increased private involvement in healthcare, Starmer supports this plan to drain the public purse of its funds and effectively put you into debt to grotesquely rich corporate fatcats – forever.

He’s being nicknamed #SirKidStarver because he won’t end the two-child limit on child benefit and is therefore continuing to impose poverty on millions of children, nor will he provide free school meals for everybody who needs them.

Stürmer’s ‘Right-hand Liar’, Yvette Cooper, was pressed to justify the policy that will deliberately keep a quarter of a million children in poverty and 850,000 more in increased poverty, on the morning media round. Judge her failure by this clip:

Labour’s answer to criticism is apparently to say we should vote for the Substitute Tory Party because its members have ancestors who were working class:

It seems Stürmer and all his little stürmtroopers need a lesson on how a Labour Party governs a nation. Here’s one:

The consensus opinion is increasingly that Stürmer is lying:

Thankfully not everyone, even in the Parliamentary Labour Party, supports the wholesale betrayal of Labour Party values that Stürmer is preparing:

And outside the party, some of us are already agitating for direct action:

The article states that Stürmer is actively planning to fail the nation on many levels:

– Climate change
– Renewables
– Transport reform
– The economy
– Public sector pay
– The NHS
– Social care
– Education
– Law and order
– Housing
– Trade unions
– Reversing Tory policy
– Support for local government
– Electoral reform
– Europe
– Interest rates
– Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland
– Defence
– Inequality
– Taxing the rich

It calls for us to make Stürmer as uncomfortable as possible, for as long as possible, on all those issues until the pressure on him to reform becomes unsurmountable and he is forced to change.

How to do this?

– Inform yourself
– Join groups
– Talk to people
– Write to MPs, councillors and anyone else
– Phone in to the radio (you are likely to get on)
– Consider peaceful protest
– Join a union if it is appropriate for you
– Write a blog
– Comment here
– Tweet, Thread, use Mastodon, create a YouTube, TikTok or Instagram post.

But just don’t suffer in silence. Starmer has to know he is failing, already. Only then might he change, or be forced to. Things are far too serious to accept the dire policy options as those Starmer is now proposing. We all have to demand better.

And in the short term there is only one option: anyone who understands how bad the situation is at the moment must vote for anybody but Labour or the Conservatives. Who the other party to support may be will only be apparent locally.

The best places to start are at Somerton and Frome, Selby and Ainsty, and Uxbridge and South Ruislip on Thursday (July 20, 2023).

Where is the evidence that the Tories are ‘transforming’ the economy?

It seems that the only evidence of any such action by the Conservatives is a plan to close down what Rishi Sunak calls “rip-off” degrees that don’t guarantee a job to graduates.

It seems a strange demand – that degree courses guarantee a job to the people taking them. By that standard, shouldn’t they all be shut down and a multi-billion pound education industry destroyed overnight?

You see, the point of most degrees isn’t to fit people into a job; it is to teach people how to think. That way, they can work out how to get, for themselves, the job that best suits them. This policy reveals Tory ideology: they don’t want people who can think – they just want livestock who can be slotted into jobs that will make money for their friends and funders:

But it’s hard to tell, because it seems the Tories are doing their utmost to hide what they are doing – probably because the only people they are helping are themselves.

Example:

How about the way government departments under the Tories have been blacklisting media organisations that publish information that is critical of them? Here’s Defence Secretary Ben Wallace apologising for such treatment of Declassified UK:

What else do they not want us to know?

Perhaps the fact that yet another Tory MP has been arrested – for sexual impropriety and misconduct in public office?

Perhaps the fact that 2022 was the worst year for real wage growth in nearly half a century since the early 1970s, meaning their fairy story that increases in your wages are fuelling inflation is a lie?

Perhaps the fact that they spent more than one-and-a-half times as much money on duff Covid-related contracts through their illegal “VIP lane” as they have allocated to the building of new NHS hospitals?

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The Tories and the bankers are lying to you about inflation. Is this the reason?

It seems the Tories and the Bank of England are starving you of money with a lie – to cause problems for a possible future Labour government.

Take a look at this – and listen to the clip:

It’s true: driving down wages will do nothing to halt inflation because the only reason people want wage increases is so they can afford to pay prices that have already risen.

Wage rises don’t cause inflation – they are demanded because of inflation.

So what’s the real answer to the crisis – the one these rich Tories and super-rich bankers don’t want you to know?

Here’s Richard Murphy:

There’s your argument to put against twits like Victoria Atkins (above): for wages to be fuelling inflation, wage rises would have to have been above the rate of inflation – and they haven’t been.

In fact, wages have fallen so badly in real terms that teachers are said to have lost more than £65,000 in total since the Tories started cutting their pay.

That’s your answer in a nutshell.

But why aren’t the Tories and the bankers saying – and doing – this? Easy: they hate you.

So it’s perfectly fine for working people to have the pay rises they need, in order to make ends meet. Inflation will return to the normal level without any downward pressure on your pay.

So: greedy corporate bosses who are taking advantage of current circumstances to increase their prices beyond what is necessary are responsible for inflation.

They probably do; an election is approaching that the Tories do not expect to win. If they crash they economy and a Labour government has to deal with it, they’ll be able to criticise from the sidelines (especially if Labour honours its pledge to continue Tory economic policies until such time as the economy improves) and use Labour’s subsequent failure to sort out the mess to persuade voters to bring in another Tory government at the following general election.

So corporations are pushing up inflation so they can make a fat profit; they’ll still have that fat profit in the future when they use continuing higher revenues to pay higher wages, so their employees can still afford to buy the goods and services they need. The current inflationary cycle is a means for the already-rich to become even richer.

The claim that much of the pressure for wage rises is created by the Bank of England is supported by the fact that businesses will incorporate interest rate rises into their prices. Most, if not all of them, will have debts. Look at the privatised water firms: they have debts because they borrow to cover the costs of equipment and so on. This allows them to pay around 35 per cent of their turnover to shareholders – an enormous amount of profit.

But they must pay interest on the money they borrow and they add that amount into their prices so the customer pays more, not the shareholders.

The knock-on effect is to give us all another reason to demand pay rises.

So the Tory government and the Bank of England are deliberately engineering a recession that will probably harm the credibility of Labour, if Labour wins the next election.

To me, that seems a forlorn hope.

Mr Murphy has described a political struggle in which the Tories are using inflation now to attack a possible Labour government in the future.

The livelihoods of working people are merely collateral damage in that war. Nobody who can make a difference thinks you matter at all.