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Lower-income families face 137-year wait for living standards to double, says UK thinktank

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/feb/10/lower-income-families-living-standards

The ‘huge income slowdown’ since 2005 has been driven by pay rises drying up, according to the Resolution Foundation. Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images

Two decades of weak pay growth have left poorer households stuck, Resolution Foundation says, fuelling political unease

It would take 137 years for lower-income families in the UK to see their living standards double at the current rate of growth, according to a thinktank.

A two-decade stagnation in disposable incomes has created a “mood of unease” across the country, the Resolution Foundation says, warning of the risk of “further political disruption” unless pay growth accelerates.

In the 40 years to 2005, the typical disposable income of working-age families in the poorest half of the population doubled, after growing by 1.8% a year on average once adjusted for inflation, according to the thinktank. In the final decade of that period, growth in disposable incomes rose by 4% a year and looked on course to double within 18 years.

Since 2005, however, there has been a significant slowdown. The rate of growth in disposable incomes – measured after taxes and housing costs – has increased by just 0.5% for lower-income families. The Resolution Foundation said: “If progress continues to crawl in the way it has since the mid-2000s, a further doubling would take over 130 years.”

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Article continues at https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/feb/10/lower-income-families-living-standards

Keir Starmer says that the Labour Party under his leadership is intensely relaxed about assaulting those least able to defend themselves - the very poorest and most vulnerable.
Keir Starmer says that the Labour Party under his leadership is intensely relaxed about assaulting those least able to defend themselves – the very poorest and most vulnerable.
Keir Starmer, Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves wear the uniform of the rich and powerful. They have all had clothes bought for them by multi-millionaire Labour donor Lord Alli. CORRECTION: It appears that Rachel Reeves clothing was provided by Juliet Rosenfeld.
Keir Starmer, Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves wear the uniform of the rich and powerful. They have all had clothes bought for them by multi-millionaire Labour donor Lord Alli. CORRECTION: It appears that Rachel Reeves clothing was provided by Juliet Rosenfeld.
Keir Starmer commits to play the caretaker role for Capitalism through the "hard times".
Keir Starmer commits to play the caretaker role for Capitalism through the “hard times”.

England’s most deprived areas to get worse by next election, report for No 10 finds

Continue ReadingLower-income families face 137-year wait for living standards to double, says UK thinktank

Why is the UK so rainy this year and how is the climate crisis making matters worse?

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/feb/09/why-is-the-uk-so-rainy-this-year-and-how-is-the-climate-crisis-making-matters-worse

Flood water covering Worcester racecourse on Monday. Astwood Bank in Worcester has recorded rain every day of the year so far. Photograph: Jacob King/PA

It has rained in parts of the country every day of the year so far and downpours are expected to continue this week

In a “miserable and relentlessly wet” start to the year, rain has fallen somewhere in the UK every single day for weeks on end.

With more than 100 flood warnings in force across the country and further downpours forecast this week, scientists say the atmospheric forces behind Britain’s endless drizzle are the same ones driving devastating floods across Spain and Portugal.

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Is the climate crisis making rainfall worse?

Scientists think fossil fuel pollution is making the jet stream more erratic, allowing extreme weather systems – from heavy rain to heat domes – to become stuck over the same areas for prolonged periods, amplifying their impacts. These so-called blocking systems are expected to become more frequent under medium- and worst-case emissions scenarios.

At the same time, global heating is intensifying rainfall. Warmer air can hold about 7% more moisture for every 1C rise in temperature, a shift that has contributed to increasingly wet UK winters arriving roughly two decades earlier than regional climate models had predicted. In January, however, Arctic air led to slightly cooler temperatures than usual, with high monthly rainfall totals more a result of persistence and duration than intensity.

Scientists project climate breakdown will bring wetter winters and drier summers to the UK. Neumann said: “One positive to come from the recent rainfall is the move to recovery status for UK water resources.” She added that England is now free from drought for the first time since May, with reservoirs and aquifers slowly restocking and recharging to healthy levels.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/feb/09/why-is-the-uk-so-rainy-this-year-and-how-is-the-climate-crisis-making-matters-worse

dizzy: The rich have destroyed the climate for profit despite fossil fuel industries knowing the consequences of their actions for 70 years or so. Donald Trump is further accelerating that destruction.

Donald Trump urges you to be a Climate Science denier like him. He says that he makes millions and millions for destroying the planet, Burn, Baby, Burn and Flood, Baby, Flood.
Donald Trump urges you to be a Climate Science denier like him. He says that he makes millions and millions for destroying the planet, Burn, Baby, Burn and Flood, Baby, Flood.
Nigel Farage urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a climate science denier like him and his Deputy Richard Tice. He says that Reform UK has received £Millions and £Millions from the fossil fuel industry to promote climate denial and destroy the planet.
Nigel Farage urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a climate science denier like him and his Deputy Richard Tice. He says that Reform UK has received £Millions and £Millions from the fossil fuel industry to promote climate denial and destroy the planet.
Orcas discuss Donald Trump and the killer apes' concept of democracy. Front Orca warns that Trump is crashing his country's economy and that everything he does he does for the fantastically wealthy.
Orcas discuss Donald Trump and the killer apes’ concept of democracy. Front Orca warns that Trump is crashing his country’s economy and that everything he does he does for the fantastically wealthy.

Misery for many as rain falls for 40 days in some parts of UK

Continue ReadingWhy is the UK so rainy this year and how is the climate crisis making matters worse?

Peter Mandelson Sold Off Britain to the Super-Rich. He’s Not the Only One

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Here, as in the US, newspapers and broadcasters sit in the hands of billionaires and financiers. Around Westminster, politics and journalism have ceased to be adversaries and become parts of the same social world. Scrutiny softens into familiarity; policy dissolves into gossip; public life shrinks to the drama of personalities.

The media rarely treats any of this as disqualifying. On the contrary, it admires the fluency: the contacts, the cosmopolitan ease, the glide from Davos to Washington to Whitehall. It looks like sophistication. What it is is capture.

While this narrow caste circulates between cabinet, consultancy and corporate boards, the country it governs decays: stagnant wages, crumbling public services, foreign takeovers of strategic assets, an economy built on rent and speculation rather than production. Britain grows poorer even as its ruling class grows richer. The state works – efficiently, even brilliantly – for those at the top. For everyone else it pleads constraint.

Contempt for the governed has always been part of the package. Mandelson’s reported remark that working-class voters “have nowhere else to go” captures the emotional core of this regime: if your base is trapped, you are free to govern for someone else. This is what political scientist Peter Mair diagnosed as “ruling the void”: parties hollowed out, participation collapsing, democracy reduced to ritual while policy converges around the interests of capital. 

So when we read those emails – a minister apparently passing sensitive state information to a private financier – we should resist the temptation to ask, “How could he?”. If politics has been reduced to managing relationships with wealth, then wealth becomes the real constituency. Everything else is theatre.

A nation run this way can’t be sovereign. Its secrets leak upward. Its wealth flows outward. And its politics are for sale.

Keir Starmer discusses the UK Labour Party's tradion of excusing and protecting child rapists.
Keir Starmer discusses the UK Labour Party’s tradion of excusing and protecting child rapists.
Keir Starmer says that the Labour Party under his leadership is intensely relaxed about assaulting those least able to defend themselves - the very poorest and most vulnerable.
Keir Starmer says that the Labour Party under his leadership is intensely relaxed about assaulting those least able to defend themselves – the very poorest and most vulnerable.
Keir Starmer explains that he feels no shame or guilt benefitting personally from gifts from the rich and powerful while insisting on policies of severe austerity causing suffering and death.
Keir Starmer explains that he feels no shame or guilt benefitting personally from gifts from the rich and powerful while insisting on policies of severe austerity causing suffering and death.
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Andrew Feinstein slams Rory Stewart’s excuse for MP corruption

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The agency to decide how our world is organised

Finally, Feinstein finished with a rallying cry to voters and activists across the country:

And I think that’s what we need to do. We need to realise that one of the things that the sort of late era neoliberal capitalism does is it intentionally stifles our imaginations and our creativity to make us believe there is no alternative. As Margaret Thatcher famously and evilly said, to believe that this is the only way the world can be organised. And it’s not. We have the agency to decide how our world should be organised and we need to take that agency.

Referring to his upcoming book set for release in Autumn this year, he added:

And this book [Making a Killing] is an attempt to give people the information and to propose some of the ways in which we can take agency about something that is destroying our societies and our politics. And I’m always reminded when people feel very depressed and defeated, which of course I sometimes do too, I’m always reminded of what Nelson Mandela said when he was asked how he retained hope in an apartheid prison and in very dark and depressing days.

And he [Mandela] said, because anything is always impossible only until it’s done.

And I think we have the ability, we have the brains amongst us ordinary people to change the world profoundly and fundamentally. And I hope that this book will be a very small contribution towards that.

Rory Stewart and his neoliberal ilk can consider themselves ‘told’ after this brilliant takedown from a man who makes fighting corruption his day job.

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