Poverty and inequality

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines Jubilee 1 - a year of emancipation and restoration provided by ancient Hebrew law to be kept every 50 years by the emancipation of Hebrew slaves, restoration of alienated lands to their former owners, and omission of all cultivation of the land. 2 - a religious song of black Americans usually referring to a time of future happiness. The Hebrew usage is said to be based on a custom by Babylonian kings of decreeing, irregularly in the Babylonian case, a general cancellation of debts. Thus the Jubilee Debt campaign demands the cancellation of debts for poor...

On 27 April Barclays Bank bosses will face protests from shareholders at their annual general meeting. They will question the bank’s decision to pay a £5.7 million extra to boss Bob Diamond last year in the guise of a “tax equalisation payment”, and the total £17.7 million paid out to him. Another two bosses, Jerry del Missier and Rich Ricci, are being paid £6.7 million and £6.5 million. The labour movement should not leave protest to well-heeled shareholders. We should be raising an outcry against such pay-outs, and demanding that the big banks, already dependent on public subsidies, be put...

Document for 21 April joint meeting of AWL industrial and trade-union fractions, amended in the light of 21 April discussion. Click here to download as pdf . I An analysis in January 2012 by a right-wing thinktank, the Institute for Fiscal Studies, showed that so far only 12% of the Government's planned cuts to welfare spending and only 12% of its planned cuts to spending on public services have been implemented. There is 88% still to come. The cuts so far have not reduced the government's Budget deficit, because they have depressed most incomes so much as to cut tax revenue even more than...

François Hollande, candidate of the Socialist Party in the French presidential election coming up on 22 April and 6 May, has called for 75% tax on incomes above a million euros. Supporters of incumbent president Nicolas Sarkozy have expressed outrage and muttered about “confiscation”, but polls show 61% of voters backing the policy and only 29% against. At present the highest marginal income-tax rate in France is 41% (on pay above 70,830 euros: similar to the 40% highest rate in Britain, on pay above £34,371, before the 50% band for pay above £150,000 was introduced in April 2010). In fact...

Quietly, without any of the stomping that accompanied Greece's “bail-out”, the European Central Bank has lent European banks more than a trillion euros at ultra-low interest rates, in two tranches, one in December and one in February. This is equivalent to an outright subsidy to the banks of maybe €120 billion over the coming three years. Banks borrowing cash cheaply from the ECB, at one per cent interest a year, can then use the same cash to buy Italian or Spanish government bonds at about 5% interest a year. So long as Italy and Spain don’t go bust, the banks make a net gain of 4% a year. 4%...

Bonus payouts in banking and finance totalled £14 billion in 2011. If such amounts were redirected to social spending, they would be way more than enough to reverse all the Government’s social cuts. Benefit cuts to 2015: £18 billion. Cuts in education and local services: £16 billion. This year the bonus total will be a bit smaller. It could hardly not be, even on the most shameless capitalist criteria, since banks did poorly in 2011. Prime minister David Cameron is bidding to “call a truce” and “call off banker-bashing”. The startling thing, though, is that the top bankers are still shameless...

Bonus payouts in banking and finance totalled £14 billion in 2011. Most of these bonuses go to a top few. The government-owned Royal Bank of Scotland paid out £1 billion in 2011, when it had made a thumping loss, and plans to pay out £0.5 billion this year. Having persuaded top RBS boss Simon Hester to waive his £1 million bonus, prime minister David Cameron now says he “will not micro-manage” the bonuses paid to other RBS chiefs this year, some of them much higher than Hester's million. He hopes the fuss will have died down by the time other banks announce their bonuses. If those amounts were...

Since the start of the Thatcher government, in 1979, the rich have been getting spectacularly richer in Britain (as in many other countries), and the gap between rich and poor has been increasing. The gap has continued to increase in the economic downturn since 2008. All the main political parties say that cuts in social spending and a squeeze on wages and benefits are necessary — even if they argue about the extent and the speed — because, as Ed Miliband puts it, “we are not going to have lots of money to spend”. In fact there is lots of money to spend. The question is, who has it, and what...

While workers face wage freezes or real-terms pay cuts, those who top the market food chain are enjoying ever-bigger payouts. Bosses of the FTSE 100 companies saw their pay rise by an average of 49% in the last financial year. According to a report from Income Data Services the bulk of the increase is down to a sharp rise in bonuses, which leapt from an average of £737,624 in 2010 to £906,044 this year. Workers’ real wages meanwhile dropped by 2.7%, according to the Daily Telegraph (13 July 2011). Free market capitalism is to blame; economist Nouriel Roubini said: “[it is] a deeper truth that...

The proportion of children living in poverty — defined as below 60 per cent of median income — will rise from 19.3 per cent in 2010-1 to over 24 per cent by 2020. According to new research by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, that is the certain result of changes in welfare benefits and cuts in real wages which are already underway. The Child Poverty Act 2010, which the Tories did not then oppose, sets a legally-binding target to cut the percentage of children in poverty below 10% by 2020. The Financial Times (11 October) reports Government officials shrugging this off with comments that...