RACHEL REEVES’S decision to protect fat cat bankers has lost the public £15 billion — money that could have saved freezing pensioners and hundreds of thousands of children from going hungry, a damning new report found today.
Campaigners for a windfall tax on banking profits slammed the Chancellor after it emerged that Britain’s four biggest banks made a record £45.9bn in profits for 2024.
Positive Money found that the policy, called for by unions and left MPs, would have brought in an additional £14.7bn for the Exchequer this year after Lloyds Bank became the last of the so-called Big Four to announce its £6bn pre-tax profits for last year.
The group calculated that increasing the existing surcharge on bank profits from 3 to 35 per cent, in line with the government’s windfall tax on energy companies, could have raised this sum from Lloyds, HSBC, Barclays and NatWest alone.
This would be enough to cover the cost of scrapping the two-child benefit cap — fives times over.
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 says pensioners can freeze to death and poor children can starve and be condemned to failure and misery all their lives.
Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves at the Labour Party Conference at the ACC Liverpool, September 23, 2024
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One of Labour’s few redistributive policies attempting to tap the immense wealth of the filthy rich — a crackdown on the abuse of non-dom status to avoid tax — is to be softened, Chancellor Rachel Reeves says, because she has been “listening to the concerns” raised by the non-dom “community.”
She won’t listen to concerns over children trapped in poverty by the discriminatory two-child benefit cap.
Or over the impact of restricting winter fuel payments when energy prices are twice what they were a couple of years ago, even when those concerns convince her own party to vote against the policy at its conference, and prompt Labour’s biggest affiliate Unite to challenge the government in court.
Keir Starmer says pensioners can freeze to death and poor children can starve and be condemned to failure and misery all their lives.
Or even over the U-turn on compensating the Waspi women, despite leading Labour politicians having championed their cause for years.
Reeves’s selective approach to people’s concerns applies to the environment too, even as yet another severe storm closes schools and transport systems, and despite years of worsening floods and failing crops. Sod the science, says Reeves, growth trumps net zero.
Orcas comment on killer apes destroying the planet by continuing to burn fossil fuels.
Limiting action on the accelerating climate catastrophe to measures which don’t affect corporate profits is one reason the world continues to warm uncontrollably.
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Labour’s growth policies across the board simply turn government into a doormat for big business. Rather than publicly fund infrastructure projects in the public interest, Labour will scrap regulations to weaken rights to object to construction by the private sector.
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.
The same deference to the right of construction firms to do as they please applies to housing. But it is not over-regulation which stymies house-building in Britain but land-banking aimed at keeping prices high. Urban development in major cities like London and Manchester is blighted by developers’ lack of accountability to communities, as working-class neighbourhoods are driven out by construction of luxury flats designed to accumulate value, not house locals.
Keir Starmer confirms that his government is cnutier than Suella Braverman on killing the right to protest.
The question of the day is democracy versus capitalism. Defending our communities and rights as citizens means building resistance through any means we can: trades councils, People’s Assembly branches, even Morning Star supporters’ groups can be hubs to bring activists together. The future is looking ugly if we cannot unite to do that.
An extra 260,000 children are on the breadline since before the Covid pandemic. Photograph: Orlando Britain/Alamy
Exclusive: Study finds almost quarter of UK population living in poverty, reaching the highest level this century
More than one in three children and a quarter of adults are living in poverty in the UK as deprivation levels rise to the highest in the 21st century, according to a landmark report.
The study by the Social Metrics Commission (SMC), which uses measures recently adopted by the UK government, found the cost of living crisis had plunged 2 million more people into severe hardship since 2019.
In total, more than 16 million people are defined as living in poverty, or 24% of the UK population – the highest since comparable records began in 2000.
Children accounted for the biggest rise of any social group falling into poverty, the report found, with an extra 260,000 on the breadline since before the Covid pandemic, meaning a record 36%, or 5.2 million children, were in deprivation.
It is likely to reignite calls for Labour to scrap the two-child benefit cap as, of those 5.2 million children, more than half (55%) lived in families with three or more children. About one in four of the children in poverty lived in a single-child household, with the same proportion in a two-child family.
Keir Starmer says pensioners can freeze to death and poor children can starve and be condemned to failure and misery all their lives.Zionist Keir ‘Kid Starver’ Starmer. Image thanks to The Skwawkbox.
Jeremy Corbyn, MPs and politicians from the Green party, Plaid Cymru and others respond to the budget.
Labour’s first budget punishes the “working people” they claim to support. Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves promised to deliver real change to the electorate, after 14 years of Tory rule. This week, they have broken that promise. This budget is austerity by another name.
While we welcome the government’s decision to invest in school and hospital buildings, it is extremely disappointing that these investments have been undermined by a swathe of public sector cuts, cruel attacks on the worst off, and a dogmatic refusal to redistribute wealth and power. These are not “tough choices” for government ministers, but for ordinary people who are forced to choose between heating their home and putting food on the table.
Labour is raising defence expenditure to 2.5% of GDP while telling us there is no money to lift 250,000 children out of poverty. This is a lie. There is plenty of money – it’s just in the wrong hands. The richest 1% in the UK hold more wealth than 70% of Britons. By refusing to impose a wealth tax, this government has chosen to force vulnerable communities to pay the price for years of economic failure, instead of making the richest pay their fair share. Labour’s first budget shows us whose side they’re on.
Years of austerity and privatisation have decimated our public services and pushed millions into poverty, disproportionately impacting women, people of colour and disabled people. Making millions of children, working, retired and disabled people poorer damages our entire economy and stretches our public services. An austerity economy is a false economy.
We, along with nearly 100 progressive Independent and Green politicians across the country, are calling on the Labour government to:1) introduce wealth taxes; 2) abolish the two-child benefit cap and stop attacking welfare recipients; 3) reverse cuts to winter fuel; 4) restore the £2 bus cap; and 5) invest in a Green New Deal.
We refuse to believe that child poverty, mass hunger and homelessness are inevitable in the sixth largest economy in the world. A progressive movement is growing up and down the country, demanding a real alternative to this race to the bottom between Labour and the Tories, which has seen the new government perpetuate decades of austerity and rampant corporate greed.
The Tories’ collapse allowed Labour to come to power with the lowest vote share ever won by any single-party majority government. Labour haemorrhaging votes to progressive independents and Greens in their heartlands should be a lesson to this government: you are wrong to believe that progressive voters have nowhere else to go. Our movement is growing every day – and you ignore the demand for a real alternative at your peril.
Jeremy Corbyn MP Independent,Carla Denyer MPGreen partyco-leader, Adrian Ramsay MP Green party co-leader, Sian Berry MP Green party, Ben Lake MPPlaid Cymru,Ann Davies MP Plaid Cymru, Liz Saville Roberts MP Plaid Cymru, Llinos Medi MP Plaid Cymru,Zack Polanski Green party deputy leader and London assembly member , Leanne Mohamad Independent candidate for Ilford North, Jamie Driscoll Former North of Tyne mayor, Andrew Feinstein Former ANC MPand Independent candidate for Holborn and St Pancras, Leanne WoodFormer leader, Plaid Cymru, Beth Winter Former Labour MPfor Cynon Valley, Hilary SchanChair, We Deserve Betterand Independent councillor in Worthing, Anthony SlaughterWales Green partyleader
This blog has previously experienced copyright take down notices. I am republishing this letter in full on the basis that the original authors have and retain rights of copyright and that they have indicated that they wanted it published by submitting it to the Guardian newspaper.
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 says pensioners can freeze to death and poor children can starve and be condemned to failure and misery all their lives.
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So-called austerity is best understood as a massive transfer of wealth — from public to private, from the many to the few, as the fortunes of the super-rich ballooned while Britain endured the longest wage squeeze since the Napoleonic wars.
This is a grotesquely unequal country in which big banks and energy giants post the largest profits in their history, in which the richest 1 per cent own more than the poorer 70 per cent of the population put together, in which millions rely on foodbanks while the number of billionaires increased by a fifth during the Covid crisis alone.
When Reeves gives with one hand and takes away with the other — as PCS leader Fran Heathcote notes she does by offering a 1.7 per cent increase in departmental spending, while setting a 2 per cent savings target for those same departments — she cites pressure on the public finances that could be relieved easily through higher corporation tax, a financial transactions tax or a wealth tax. As Unite’s Sharon Graham notes, a 1 per cent tax on the richest 1 per cent would raise £25 billion, filling the so-called “black hole” in the budget at a stroke.
It is a choice to echo Tory hysteria over benefit fraud, when the amount lost to this is less than goes unclaimed in social security payments people are entitled to. Giving the Department for Work & Pensions power to remove money directly from bank accounts will likely increase non-take-up of benefits by people who need them but understandably fear their personal finances being exposed in this way.
And it’s a choice to hike the cost of a bus ticket by 50 per cent while maintaining a fuel duty freeze — when governments across Europe are making public transport cheaper because it is essential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
