Author: dizzy
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
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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.
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. 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. 
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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.
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