Unintended consequences or not, Budget cuts for the very poorest will boost fuel poverty and undermine efforts to tackle climate change. Households in fuel poverty are already concentrated among exactly those families where the cuts will hit hardest. Worse, DWP Minister Steve Webb has not ruled out cuts in weekly Cold Weather payments this autumn. Media reports put Winter Fuel Allowance in the frame. Yet regressive Budgets sustain the high energy use of the most well off, widening the fuel divide between the poor and well-off.
The more unequal our society, the more remote are our CO2 reduction targets. Yet yesterday’s IFS report shows that the very poorest families with children lose more from the June Budget than any other group – facing a 5% cut in their total income. Yet the lowest third of households by income account for over 90% of those in fuel poverty in England. Read more »
Inequality profoundly matters in our efforts to tackle climate change and prevent runaway global warming. Risks to climate change policies are inherent in the coalition’s unfair and regressive cuts programme - like Winter Fuel Payments - squeezing the poor while effectively allowing the rich to continue to produce much higher levels of emissions. The Spirit Level warns that “Governments may be unable to make big enough cuts in carbon emissions without also reducing inequality.”
Today’s employment figures confirm the problems facing older unemployed people. In the first two years of the recession, it was clear that young people were being hit harder than any other group, and I argued that they should be the primary target for government support.
I still think that we have to pull all the stops out to stop creating another generation of young people facing greater poverty and worse employment prospects for the rest of their lives. But it’s becoming plain that there’s a group of older unemployed people who are finding it hard to get back into employment. Since the start of the year, when the labour market began to recover, over-50s have gained less than other groups. Read more »
Here are some videos of yesterday’s Cuts Briefing event, “Did the Budget pass the fairness test?”. We’ve got the opening presentations by Tim Horton of the Fabian Society, showing how the brunt of the losses are borne across the UK’s income groups, Professor Ruth Lister on the impact on women and families, and Richard Capie of the Chartered Institute of Housing on the likley implications for housing. Read more »
When we apply the fairness test, our starting point is, rightly, the overall distributional impact according to income level. But gender and family-friendliness are also important factors when deciding whether the Budget passed the fairness test.
The Conservative Manifesto promised to ‘make Britain the most family-friendly country in Europe’. In a recent speech, Nick Clegg declared that the government’s agenda for children and families stands ‘at the heart of our coalition’. [1] Yet in some ways it looks as if families with children have been singled out to bear the brunt of cutting the deficit and there is no attempt to assess overall how the Budget will or will not contribute to this family-friendly agenda. Read more »
What was the last government’s record on employment for people from disadvantaged groups? What, in particular, has happened during the recession?
An important article by Ruth Barrett inthe latest issue of Economic and Labour Market Review (the Office for National Statistics’ on-line magazine) looked at this issue. It measured what has happened to the employment rates of disabled people, lone parents, members of minority ethnic groups, people aged 50 and over, people with low qualifications and people who live in the most deprived local authority wards. Read more »
Next time you hear people talking about the social change that must be brought about, or some new reform agenda they are developing, ask them this: will it lead to a redistribution of power so that the gap between the powerful and the powerless is significantly reduced?
Anyone who claims that people should just be left alone as they are to interact with others sensibly and responsibly, and all would be for the best of all possible worlds, is either remarkably naïve or deviously misleading. If history has one consistent message for us, it is that genuine cooperation and mutual respect only flourish if none is so powerful as to be able to dominate others, and no one is so weak as to be at the arbitrary mercy of the rest.
So if we really want to release people’s potential to collaborate for the good of all, we have to target any concentration of power and press for a more balanced redistribution. Read more »
The decision of President Mutharika of Malawi to pardon Tiwonge Chimbalanga and Steven Monjeza, convicted of gross indecency after celebrating their engagement in December, is a welcome step forward. Hopefully, it was, as he claimed, because he believed it was the right thing to do. That would be better than the other possible explanation, which was that he caved in to pressure from outside Malawi.
Not that I’m against such pressure – the TUC supported the picket outside the Malawian High Commission today, and we were glad to see the British Government make its position clear before and after the pardon (although it would have been better to respect Tiwonge’s transgender status more by not referring to her as “Mr”). But it would be nice to believe that this decision was a turn in the direction of human rights and equality in a world where LGBT communities face oppression, hostility and worse – from Iran to Jamaica, as well as in Africa. Read more »
The No 10 Briefing on the flexible working and equal pay bill contains a brief reference to ‘looking to promote gender equality on the boards of listed companies’. The TUC has long been an advocate of greater diversity on boards, including, but going beyond the important issue of gender diversity.
At present, company directors are drawn from a very narrow range of backgrounds and we believe that the quality of discussion and decision-making on boards would benefit from a wider range of voices being heard in the boardroom. Read more »
One of the quiet success stories of this election has been the way some academics have contributed their expertise to the debates. My favourite has been the series of analyses of key policy battlegrounds published by the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics. CEP has now published the full set and if the subjects where I know something are anything to go by, they are fair, authoritative and expert. Read more »
According to Nobel prize-winning economist, and presenter of this year’s Demos Lecture, Amartya Sen, “the capabilities a person does actually have…depend on the nature of social arrangements, which can be crucial for individual freedoms. And there the state and society cannot escape responsibility”. Indeed, a state can be judged on the extent to which it empowers those less able to realise their own vision of a free, fulfilling life.
The economic crisis hit all sections of society, but people with disabilities were struck particularly hard – entering the recession on very unequal footing in terms of savings, income and employment. During the months that followed, disabled people were considered to be at greater risk of redundancy, more exposed to economic insecurity and vulnerable to increased discrimination from corner-cutting employers. Read more »
“We will have to keep on working at national level to ensure Governments commit to an ambitious climate change treaty that includes the principles of just transition & decent work”. This is the message from the ITUC’s representatives in Bonn as the UN ends the first of the 2010 round of negotiations on a global climate treaty.
The Copenhagen Accord, remember, was silent on labour and human rights. So we need to meet UK officials again, to ensure that our case for just transition is made afresh. And as climate change impacts increasingly affect life and livelihood in developing countries (see Oxfam’s report), so the ITUC will want to join forces with human rights campaigners to unify our demands. Read more »
