Heroes: Struggling to Survive 

 

‘Why don’t you remember, I’m your pal 

Say buddy, can you spare a dime?’ 

 
We start this week by extending our best wishes to Princess Kate and her family, and wish her a full and speedy recovery. 

Secondly, and somewhat more disingenuously, we, along with Chancellor Hunt, sympathise with all those poor people struggling to make ends meet on £100k p.a.. 

In his post on X, Hunt wrote; ‘I spoke to a lady from Godalming about eligibility for the government’s childcare offer which is not available if one parent is earning over £100k. ‘That is an issue I would really like to sort out after the next election as I am aware that it is not [a] huge salary in our area if you have a mortgage to pay.’ 

There are two points here, firstly, after the next election the only thing Hunt will be sorting out is a new job! Secondly, the latest government data (published March 2024) reveals that the average UK weekly wage (including bonuses) across all industry sectors (in England and Wales) is £672 gross (that’s the equivalent to an annual pre-tax salary of around £34,900. Need I say more? 

Even in the relatively affluent Godalming and Ash constituency Hunt is contesting, estimates by the consultancy Electoral Calculus put the median at little more than half that: £56,606. 

To say his comments were unfortunate would be an understatement. As it came at the end of a week when official figures showed 300,000 more children were plunged into poverty in 2022-23. Almost 4 million people across the country experienced outright destitution – the inability to afford the basic essentials of life, such as food, clothing and energy, it is plain bloody stupid! 
 

‘What it does highlight is the damage Liz Truss caused mortgage holders in her 49-days of lunacy’

 
What it does highlight is the damage Liz Truss caused mortgage holders in her 49-days of lunacy. In addition, the absurd cost of childcare in the UK, which, according to the OECD is the highest in the rich world, relative to average incomes. 

The elections expert Prof Paula Surridge, the deputy director of the thinktank UK in a Changing Europe, summed up the situation very succinctly, ‘It just highlights the fact that if people are struggling, they’re struggling because of the actions of the government anyway.’ 

Turning to the real world, I found the following quote at www.medium.com, from a man called Charlie Scaglietti 

‘The fact is, poor people choose to be poor. …..They choose it from the moment they wake up to the moment they go to bed, every single day. For the vast majority of people, they choose to be poor. It’s as simple as that.’ 

Charlie is clearly a smug twat, full of his own self-made importance. 

The truth is, that today, poverty is a political choice made for us by successive Conservative governments.  

From George Osborne’s unnecessary austerity in 2010, Tory administrations priorities have forced a significant percentage of the population into poverty, including many children. The Child Poverty Action Group’s analysis of official data last week showed that a third of those between infancy and adulthood – 4.3 million children. Even by the government’s preferred measure, absolute poverty, the share of children in penury rose in 2022-23 by its highest rate for 30 years. 
 

‘today, poverty is a political choice made for us by successive Conservative governments’

 
The reason for this is simple; Tory austerity has prioritised spending cuts, as a result benefit levels have fallen by 8.8% in real terms since 2012. Whoever thought that cutting back on welfare produces less poverty must have studied under the same economics master as Liz Truss. There is money, but the poor simply aren’t a priority, instead ministers flaunt tax cuts worth £9 a week extra for the average worker, while about 3.7m people struggled to feed themselves last year. 

Ever since the birth of Thatcherism being poor has been a burden. Their economic model and politics, which saw welfare as part of the problem, rather than the solution, produced a transformative rise in poverty levels.  

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation finding are simple; 1997 hardship trended downwards under Labour, and upwards under the Tories. 
 

‘ministers flaunt tax cuts worth £9 a week extra for the average worker, while about 3.7m people struggled to feed themselves last year’

 
Conservative party politics paints benefit claimants as ‘scroungers‘ living at taxpayers’ expense. This, in turn fuels hatred with a proportion of the electorate failing to accept that others are genuinely struggling. The Tory welfare secretary’s jibe that many of those who are unemployed because of mental illness may be ‘convincing themselves‘ that they are sick to dodge work is an example of this victimisation. 

MPs on the work and pensions select committee noted last week that ‘while there is an objective that benefits should incentivise work, there is not an explicit objective as to how benefits will support claimants with daily living costs‘. The Tories clearly still see hardship as a way of forcing people into work irrespective of the demoralisation and despair it may cause. Politicians who force people into poverty are failing in their role as peoples representatives, and should be held accountable for their failure. 

To change this, a new government will need to building a new consensus around welfare if we are to reduce poverty’s harmful levels of inequality, increase national wellbeing and utilise unused labour resources. 

Labour, on the one hard are promising to embrace a new economic settlement, whilst, at the saying they will keep the Tories’ controversial two-child benefit cap – which has been an engine of destitution in Britain.  
 

‘Politicians who force people into poverty are failing in their role as peoples representatives, and should be held accountable for their failure’

 
All too often we hear people say: ‘How do people cope?’ The answer is simple; they can’t.  

Before finishing I thought this was a good opportunity to look at some of the findings of ‘Hope not Hate’s’ recently published ‘State of Hate‘ paper. 

Given the above, it is hardly surprising that, they identified a growing mood of pessimism in our society.  

Asked to describe modern Britain, 43% of respondents choose the word ‘declining‘. The cost of living crisis still dominates people’s concerns, followed by the NHS and the economy more generally A majority of people still think immigration has been good for Britain, but at 55% this is lower than it was two years ago. Attitudes towards immigration are more nuanced than many politicians and commentators think  

Summing up how the political classes have failed the majority, only 6% strongly agreed with the statement that ‘the political system works well in the UK‘ and 79% think that ‘politicians don’t listen to people like me’  
 

‘only 6% strongly agreed with the statement that ‘the political system works well in the UK‘ and 79% think that ‘politicians don’t listen to people like me”

 
A third of Britons think that ‘in certain circumstances, violence can be necessary to defend something you strongly believe in’, whilst 48% of those intending to vote Conservative at the next election say they would prefer to ‘having a strong and decisive leader who has the authority to override or ignore parliament’ over ‘having a liberal democracy with regular elections and a multi-party system‘. 

This column has long written that these are precisely the conditions that can allow right-wing politicians to thrive. 

It would seem that the report agrees with my thoughts, as they wrote; ‘If anything, 2023 is the year it (the right) came of age.’  

What needs to be understood is that whilst, the Conservatives have long had a hard right, it has primarily been conservative and traditionalist.  

Britain has long had a radical right, whether that be in the form of UKIP, the Brexit Party or the forces that drove forward Brexit itself, but these were largely movements driven by the single issue of securing the country’s departure from the European Union.  

Today, Britain has a fully-fledged radical right movement, with one foot inside the Conservative Party and the other outside. An example, of the foot inside the Tory party came last May (2023), with the formation of the New Conservatives, a faction inside the party which, in its own words, stood for ‘the realignment of British politics‘. Led by MPs Danny Kruger and Miriam Cates, the faction has attracted the support of C. 30 other MPs, including Sir Iain Duncan Smith, Dame Priti Patel, Sir John Redwood and Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg. Their policies include calling for ‘legal’ immigration to be halved; substantial tax cuts; the abolition of the workers’ rights we have achieved whilst in the EU; preventing young people who fail their A-Levels from securing loans to enter higher education; banning ‘gender ideology in schools’; and giving all parents the right ‘to oversee the sex education their children receive’. 

In the week leading up to the formation of the New Conservatives, London hosted the National Conservatism Conference, an international gathering of politicians, academics and political commentators from across the radical right. Organised by the US based Edmund Burke Foundation, the event was the latest in a series of conferences around the world that have hosted high profile far-right politicians, including Viktor Orbán and Giorgia Meloni. Much of the rhetoric emanating from the stage was indistinguishable from the sort of conspiratorial and reactionary speeches found at traditional far-right meetings. Speakers warned about ‘transgenderism’, ‘wokeism’, ‘cancel culture’, ‘neo-marxism’, ‘globalists’ and the ‘end of our way of life. 

Among the speakers were the then-Home Secretary Suella Braverman, who told the conference that ‘people coming here illegally do possess values which are at odds with our country’ and that ‘the unexamined drive towards multiculturalism’ is a ‘recipe for communal disaster.’ Also speaking was the then-Immigration Minister Robert Jenrick, who argued that ‘those crossing tend to have completely different lifestyles and values to those in the UK’. 
 

‘the unexamined drive towards multiculturalism’ is a ‘recipe for communal disaster.’

 
There is an insidious expansion of this type of political message and policy. As this column has said before, as their message takes hold, less radical parties, such as the broader Conservative party embraces it, giving it both credibility and exposure in the mainstream. In effect it becomes part of the normal political discourse. 

Clearly, the Tories as they struggle for answers and policies to fight the election on will look to wokeism and immigration as a platform they can take forward. In turn, there are voters who will embrace this; many of the elderly will support anything in blue irrespective of the policies they put forward, and then there is the red wall, full of voters disenchanted with the mainstream. 

In my opinion, parties and politicians of the right will continue to flourish. 

The latest YouGov poll (21st March 2024) shows Labour unchanged on 44%, the Tories down 1 on 19%, and Reform up 1 on 15%. 

Even among the oldest Britons, who have been the Conservatives’ saviours in recent elections, only 32% say they intend to vote Tory, 26% intend to back Reform, while 23% say they will vote Labour. 
 

‘Labour will win the election but will continue to disappoint sections of the electorate, providing the oxygen right-wing politicians require’

 
Focussing on the red wall, 88% of those who voted Labour in 2019 say they would vote Labour again, while only 50% of those who voted Conservative say they would do so again.  

In addition, C.20% of 2019 Conservative voters in the Red Wall now say they would vote for Reform if a General Election were held tomorrow, while a further 15% would vote for Labour. 

Source:  https://redfieldandwiltonstrategies.com/latest-red-wall-voting-intention-30-31-january-2024/ 

This merits a conclusion, and my concluding thoughts are this. Labour will win the election but will continue to disappoint sections of the electorate, providing the oxygen right-wing politicians require. Whether they are Tories, Reform, or a new amalgamation of the two isn’t clear at present. 

But they aren’t going to go away! 
 

‘There’s a world outside your window 

And it’s a world of dread and fear 

Where the only water flowing 

Is the bitter sting of tears’ 

 

‘No editorial this week, as the column speaks for itself’ – and who could dispute it when it contains pearls like ‘The fact is, poor people choose to be poor’ and also some pretty damning stats about the state of our nation, or rather the predicament of a large number of its citizens.

Lyrically, we start with “Buddy Can You Spare a Dime” dedicated to Jezza and all those struggling on £100,000 a year. More appropriately we finish with Band Aid and “Feed the World”, in recognition of how far we have fallen. Enjoy!

 
@coldwarsteve
 

Philip Gilbert is a city-based corporate financier, and former investment banker.

 

Philip is a great believer in meritocracy, and in the belief that if you want something enough you can make it happen. These beliefs were formed in his formative years, of the late 1970s and 80s