The Conservatives have announced in their election manifesto that that they will extend Right to Buy (RTB) to all housing association tenants in England. We will extend the Right to Buy to tenants in Housing Associations to enable people to buy a house of their own… We will fund the…Read more…
Conservatives’ “anti-green growth, anti-clean energy manifesto”
The trade body for the renewables industry says some 19,000 onshore wind jobs are at risk as a result of the Conservatives’ manifesto pledge to halt the spread of onshore wind farms. The onshore wind sector delivered £1.6 billion in investment in the UK last year. But Renewable UK says that…Read more…
Zero inflation and still reducing core inflation. To repeat: deflationary pressures are not just about fuel
For once CPI inflation was in line with market expectations, remaining at zero per cent for the second month in a row. But this unchanged reading simply followed because fuel prices were not as low in March as they were in February, falling by -13.7 per cent on the year rather than -16.6 per…Read more…
Labour: tackling climate change ‘an economic necessity’
Labour’s manifesto says tackling climate change is “an economic necessity … the most important thing we must do for our children, our grandchildren and future generations.” It plans for the green economy create a million additional green jobs through world leading investment in low carbon…Read more…
Attlee and Cameron may both have enjoyed no interest rate rise but there is one key difference: Attlee’s policies were successful
Yesterday the Bank of England left interest rates unchanged, generating a flurry of commentary on how rates have been unchanged for the whole parliament, and looking back to the Attlee government when rates were last unchanged over a parliament. For Ca…Read more…
Conservative rail fares pledge masks high costs of privatisation
The Conservative Party have pledged to freeze regulated rail fares for the next five years. What this announcement obscures is that even if capped at the level of inflation (what is meant by the term ‘freeze’), fares will still rise at wage-busting prices. At the same time our heavily…Read more…
Construction and production output suggest a slower start to 2015
Today’s production and construction figures continue to suggest a loss of momentum into 2015. While manufacturing was up 0.4 per cent on the month, this did not fully compensate for a fall of -0.6 per cent in January; the more stable three month on three month change shows growth of only 0.1 per…Read more…
David Cameron’s 3 day boost for trade union organising
David Cameron is launching a new election policy today, giving everyone working in a firm over 250 employees and all public sector workers, the right to three days’ extra paid leave every year to do voluntary work. He has described the pledge, which covers half the UK workforce as the “clearest…Read more…
Saving Our Safety Net Fact of the Week: local government cuts are hitting the poorest areas hardest
Back in 2010, the Spending Review announced that funding for local authorities, fire and police services would be cut by more than a quarter by April 2015. The same day, Eric Pickles wrote to local authority leaders, promising them Local finance reform…Read more…
Market competition is stifling vital innovation in our NHS
It is increasingly clear that any government coming into power after the next election will be faced with unprecedented challenges across the NHS. The legacy of five years of government-imposed austerity and top down restructuring is a growing financia…Read more…
How Greek austerity has stoked inequality
A new study, Greece: solidarity and adjustment in times of crisis, shows that the impact of the austerity and structural adjustment policies applied in Greece between 2008 and 2013, since 2010 through loan conditions imposed by the Troika (IMF-European Commission-ECB) have been overwhelmingly borne…Read more…
Surprise, surprise – we don’t spend so much when there’s a living standards crisis
Really, this is one of those “one chart says it all” stories: Here at the TUC we started worrying about the living standards crisis years ago – and there’s a long way to go before we can say it’s over. But the crisis isn’t just about wages, pensions and other…Read more…
Mansions debunked
The question of houses worth more than £2 million is currently in the news. To read some of the more florid press coverage you might think that we are all in danger of finding that our homes have accidently become mansions – this is simply nonsense of course. To get a quick shot of…Read more…
Labour market deregulation: When the facts change…
The famous remark, commonly attributed to Keynes, that “when the facts change, I change my mind…” could be about to face a stern test. The IMF is about to publish the findings of research by staff members that finds no evidence that labour market deregulation promotes growth. This…Read more…
Does pensions “freedom” offer the right choices?
Today (almost*) anyone over 55 can get their hands on their pension and take it as cash. It is all about “freedom” and “choice”, we are told. Those of us who are sceptical of the policy are therefore immediately labelled as opponents of freedom. We are the snooty…Read more…
Saving Our Safety Net Fact of the Week: Taxing disability benefits would hit hundreds of thousands of low-paid disabled workers
There’s something (horrible) for everyone in the list of possible benefit cuts leaked to the BBC last week. In this column I want to concentrate on the proposal that people would have to pay income tax on their disability benefits if their incomes including these benefits were over the minimum…Read more…
A cautionary tale: pension funds and the infrastructure bandwagon
Infrastructure finance has risen to the top of the international financial policy agenda. Within the new infrastructure finance agenda emerging in such forums, the $85 trillion that institutional investors, and in particular pension funds, are estimate…Read more…
Figures for 2014 change nothing: weak productivity is still caused by austerity
As many argued in the wake of the Budget, productivity outcomes remain a significant concern and major blot on the government’s economic record. Today ONS issued the first figures for 2014 as a whole, showing growth at only 0.5 per cent, up only marginally on 0.4 per cent in 2013 (left chart); they…Read more…
The curious case of yesterday’s living standards ‘good news’
Right from the off yesterday, ONS statistics triggered a celebration of rising living standards. Yet you were hard pushed to find exactly the reason for that celebration. In the newly-issued National Accounts, real household disposable income per head …Read more…
Zero hours: Time to put a stop to this exploitation
Very few people in the UK today would not know about zero hours contracts. The Prime Minister himself said that he wouldn’t want to work on one…
The post Zero hours: Time to put a stop to this exploitation appeared first on ToUChstone blog.Read more…