Caron's Musings: Are we really all in this together?
Last week and this we’ve watched Labour and the Conservatives veer between delusion and illusion as they unveil their public spending policies and pledges at their respective conferences.
Nick Clegg spent much of the last few months of the last Westminster Parliamentary session trying to instigate a meaningful debate about how a future government would get the country on a more solid and sustainable financial footing.
He put forward a whole host of serious ideas including abolishing the Child Trust Fund, forgetting about a like for like replacement of Trident, and doing away with ID cards along with the intrusive, ineffective identity database.
What he got in return was a series of angry slanging matches between Brown and Cameron, spawning such classic phrases as “zero percent increase” from Brown and nothing of substance from Cameron.
Last week saw Gordon Brown deliver a speech to the Labour Party Conference which went on for so long about the need for change that he sounded more like a challenger, not an incumbent Prime Minister who had been in two of the top positions in Government for 12 years. His call for a rejuvenation of community post offices was laughable given that Labour have closed even more of them than the Tories. He rolled out pledge after pledge after pledge with no mention of how he was going to pay for them. What horrified me most was his idea that 16 and 17 year old mothers needing “support from the taxpayer” were to be put in supervised accommodation, blatant pandering to the myth that there are hordes of young girls out there getting pregnant in order to get a house.
This week we’ve seen the Tories tell us how men are going to have to work a year longer before they retire by 2016. My husband turns 65 then and has been carefully planning his retirement for a long time so you can imagine how that went down in this house. If you are reasonably affluent and your occupation is sedentary, this may not be so bad, though. However for the low paid in more physically demanding jobs, it is bound to cause real problems, especially when you consider that the poorest are also more vulnerable to ill health. The Tories also don’t seem to have properly considered the implications for women, either, as Lib Dem Pensions Spokesman Steve Webb has pointed out:
“Women have been a total afterthought to this announcement. It is simply impossible for the Tories to save £13bn a year by raising the state pension age for men alone.
George Osborne’s plans would require the pension age for women to increase each year until 2016. The Tories must come clean or risk leaving every woman in the country in a pensions limbo.”
Then we have their idea of a one year pay freeze for every public sector worker earning over £18,000. That is going to cause real misery for many households. If your income is £18,000, you are just a wee bit beyond the level at which you can get means tested tax credits. So, if you earn £18,000 you will be expected to fork out the full cost of childcare, prescriptions, school meals and the like. For your wages not to rise with the cost of living is therefore going to be an absolute catastrophe. Let’s not forget, as well, that £18000 is only around two thirds of average earnings.
In contrast, while the Liberal Democrats propose a freezing of the public sector pay bill, lower earning workers will be protected. They will also benefit from proposals to take anyone earning less than £10,000 out of tax completely and cut the tax bill of low and middle earners by £700.
I know that £700 might not sound much to the Tories. That’s only a few bottles of champagne in their world, where they mix with people who have enough ready cash to stump up £50,000 a year for dinner with David Cameron. In the real world, though, it would make a huge difference to ordinary households across the country. It’s nearly 4 months’ rent on a Council flat, or almost three quarters of the annual Council Tax on a Band B property in Edinburgh.
George Osborne might say that “we’re all in this together”, but he’s come up with a set of proposals which will cause even more hardship for the poorest and have little impact on high earning professionals. They say leopards don’t change their spots and nor do Tories. Their gut instinct is to protect the rich. However much they might try to pretend that they’ve changed, the evidence is that a Cameron led Government would hit the poorest hardest in exactly the same way the Conservatives did the last time they held office. Do we really want to go back to the 80s? Anyone?
And what of the SNP? What do they have to say on these things which are vitally important to millions of Scots? They’re spending their time threatening court action if Alex Salmond doesn’t get invited to debate Cameron, Brown and Clegg. How typical of them to be obsessed about their own interests above the issues which are important to everyone else. To be fair, however, I should note that they are now backing a pay freeze for top staff which will presumably mean that Alex Salmond will have all three of his salaries frozen.
So while Labour goes for the ostrich vote, sticking its head in the sand and pretending that a) it isn’t happening and b) it’s not their fault, the Tories revert to type. If you think that at some point in the next five years you might be old, sick, female, poor or unemployed, it’s probably best to give them a miss.
Nick Clegg spent much of the last few months of the last Westminster Parliamentary session trying to instigate a meaningful debate about how a future government would get the country on a more solid and sustainable financial footing.
He put forward a whole host of serious ideas including abolishing the Child Trust Fund, forgetting about a like for like replacement of Trident, and doing away with ID cards along with the intrusive, ineffective identity database.
What he got in return was a series of angry slanging matches between Brown and Cameron, spawning such classic phrases as “zero percent increase” from Brown and nothing of substance from Cameron.
Last week saw Gordon Brown deliver a speech to the Labour Party Conference which went on for so long about the need for change that he sounded more like a challenger, not an incumbent Prime Minister who had been in two of the top positions in Government for 12 years. His call for a rejuvenation of community post offices was laughable given that Labour have closed even more of them than the Tories. He rolled out pledge after pledge after pledge with no mention of how he was going to pay for them. What horrified me most was his idea that 16 and 17 year old mothers needing “support from the taxpayer” were to be put in supervised accommodation, blatant pandering to the myth that there are hordes of young girls out there getting pregnant in order to get a house.
This week we’ve seen the Tories tell us how men are going to have to work a year longer before they retire by 2016. My husband turns 65 then and has been carefully planning his retirement for a long time so you can imagine how that went down in this house. If you are reasonably affluent and your occupation is sedentary, this may not be so bad, though. However for the low paid in more physically demanding jobs, it is bound to cause real problems, especially when you consider that the poorest are also more vulnerable to ill health. The Tories also don’t seem to have properly considered the implications for women, either, as Lib Dem Pensions Spokesman Steve Webb has pointed out:
“Women have been a total afterthought to this announcement. It is simply impossible for the Tories to save £13bn a year by raising the state pension age for men alone.
George Osborne’s plans would require the pension age for women to increase each year until 2016. The Tories must come clean or risk leaving every woman in the country in a pensions limbo.”
Then we have their idea of a one year pay freeze for every public sector worker earning over £18,000. That is going to cause real misery for many households. If your income is £18,000, you are just a wee bit beyond the level at which you can get means tested tax credits. So, if you earn £18,000 you will be expected to fork out the full cost of childcare, prescriptions, school meals and the like. For your wages not to rise with the cost of living is therefore going to be an absolute catastrophe. Let’s not forget, as well, that £18000 is only around two thirds of average earnings.
In contrast, while the Liberal Democrats propose a freezing of the public sector pay bill, lower earning workers will be protected. They will also benefit from proposals to take anyone earning less than £10,000 out of tax completely and cut the tax bill of low and middle earners by £700.
I know that £700 might not sound much to the Tories. That’s only a few bottles of champagne in their world, where they mix with people who have enough ready cash to stump up £50,000 a year for dinner with David Cameron. In the real world, though, it would make a huge difference to ordinary households across the country. It’s nearly 4 months’ rent on a Council flat, or almost three quarters of the annual Council Tax on a Band B property in Edinburgh.
George Osborne might say that “we’re all in this together”, but he’s come up with a set of proposals which will cause even more hardship for the poorest and have little impact on high earning professionals. They say leopards don’t change their spots and nor do Tories. Their gut instinct is to protect the rich. However much they might try to pretend that they’ve changed, the evidence is that a Cameron led Government would hit the poorest hardest in exactly the same way the Conservatives did the last time they held office. Do we really want to go back to the 80s? Anyone?
And what of the SNP? What do they have to say on these things which are vitally important to millions of Scots? They’re spending their time threatening court action if Alex Salmond doesn’t get invited to debate Cameron, Brown and Clegg. How typical of them to be obsessed about their own interests above the issues which are important to everyone else. To be fair, however, I should note that they are now backing a pay freeze for top staff which will presumably mean that Alex Salmond will have all three of his salaries frozen.
So while Labour goes for the ostrich vote, sticking its head in the sand and pretending that a) it isn’t happening and b) it’s not their fault, the Tories revert to type. If you think that at some point in the next five years you might be old, sick, female, poor or unemployed, it’s probably best to give them a miss.
posted by Caron at
12:29
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