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Cost of Living Up 5% (or actually a lot more? )

Of course we’re a low wage economy, otherwise the government wouldn’t need to subsidise poverty pay thru universal credit. In particular housing benefit has trebled its budget in twenty five years.

Look at the countries that routinely top the happiness and quality of life surveys, they are high wage, high tax societies such as Denmark, Sweden Holland etc.
Denmark has the worlds least billionaires per head of population, but the most millionaires! I lived in Denmark in eighties it really is a great place to raise a family.
 
ks.234 said:
You said “we” have a high wage economy. All the evidence; the fact that it is acknowledged that a high wage economy is still an aspiration in this country, a decade of real terms pay cuts, increase reliance on food banks, increased levels of poverty, increasing inequality, my personal observations of people struggling and reading newspaper headlines, suggests we are not in a high wage economy.

Your experience might be different, you might see high wages in your household and in those around you, but there is no evidence that such an observation can be extrapolated to the wider economy. The fact of the matter is that there is a lot of hardship going on out there and that hardship is going to be increased further by higher prices and higher taxation.

That hardship which is felt by millions is a result of economic mismanagement.

If you think we live in some sort of high wage El Dorado, why do we have food banks?
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I'm talking about my own first hand experience of food manufacture. It's not an El Dorado, it's a factory. Some people in our place are min wage. £8.91 ph, to save you looking it up. However most skilled workers are on more. My direct first hand experience is that the UK is a higher wage economy than a lot of Europe. If you choose not to believe this because it doesn't fit your preconceived ideas, be my guest. I don't care what you choose to believe, if you want to ignore a fact that's up to you.

A high wage economy, or any sort of economy, does not describe everyone in it. Obviously. The UK has been described as having a service based economy. Not me, I manufacture food. Or a financial services economy, again not me. The same can be said of the unwaged. You can have the highest wage economy in the world, it's no good to you if you don't or can't work. Equally a high wage, high skill economy is no use to you if you don't have the relevant skills. If you are a box packer or a floor sweeper, and that's all that you will ever be, and I see a good few people like that every day, then automating these jobs and replacing 10 manual jobs with 10 machines and a robot minder cum programmer will make unskilled people lose out.

The people at food banks are, in their vast majority, not the people working 40 hours a week in the chicken factories with me. Sadly they are those unable to put in 40+ hours because of health, childcare, transport etc. They would not be helped by raising skill and wage levels in the workplace, because they are unwaged or partially waged. These people are why we have a welfare state. If Boris and his cronies have decided to kill the welfare state, don't imagine that we are going to address this by replacing manual work with fewer, more automated jobs.
 
stevec67 said:
The people at food banks are, in their vast majority, not the people working 40 hours a week in the chicken factories with me. Sadly they are those unable to put in 40+ hours because of health, childcare, transport etc.
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That's supported by the Trussell Trust report from 2017.

https://www.trusselltrust.org/oxford-university-report/

Key findings on drivers of food bank use

Almost all households had experienced a drop in income in the past three months, unsteady incomes, or an unexpected expense or rise in expenses in the past three months.
  • Benefit delays: Nearly 2 in 5 people were awaiting a benefit payment, with most of these waiting up to six weeks, though a fifth were waiting seven weeks or more. A third of delays were for Employment Support Allowance payments, with people assessed as capable of taking steps to move into work in the future particularly at risk of needing a food bank
  • Income shocks: 2 in 3 people had been hit by a recent ‘income shock’, with most experiencing sharp rises in housing costs or food expenses
  • Low income: The average income of households in the month before being referred to a food bank was reported at around £320, with 20% of households still needing to pay housing costs. This falls well below low income thresholds, before and after housing costs, and is a fraction of the national average. 16% had no income at all in the last month
 
Seeker_UK said:
I think I paid nearly £7 last time I went in the Garrick Arms, Charing Cross Rd. That's why I normally stick to the Chandos around the corner. Much cheaper.
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Yep Sam Smiths remains a bit of a bargain even in London. I've got in the habit of drinking in a huge Youngs gastropub they built near us a few years ago that no one seems to use mid week. It's stupidly expensive but at the mo I'll happily pay an extra couple of quid on a round to drink in a virtually empty pub!
 
paulfromcamden said:
Yep Sam Smiths remains a bit of a bargain even in London. I've got in the habit of drinking in a huge Youngs gastropub they built near us a few years ago that no one seems to use mid week. It's stupidly expensive but at the mo I'll happily pay an extra couple of quid on a round to drink in a virtually empty pub!
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I'm working in rural Wales. All the pubs are virtually empty! I nearly have panic attacks back home in suburban Leeds where there might be 4 people and as many as 2 dogs in the place.
 
Seeker_UK said:
That's supported by the Trussell Trust report from 2017.

https://www.trusselltrust.org/oxford-university-report/

Key findings on drivers of food bank use

Almost all households had experienced a drop in income in the past three months, unsteady incomes, or an unexpected expense or rise in expenses in the past three months.
  • Benefit delays: Nearly 2 in 5 people were awaiting a benefit payment, with most of these waiting up to six weeks, though a fifth were waiting seven weeks or more. A third of delays were for Employment Support Allowance payments, with people assessed as capable of taking steps to move into work in the future particularly at risk of needing a food bank
  • Income shocks: 2 in 3 people had been hit by a recent ‘income shock’, with most experiencing sharp rises in housing costs or food expenses
  • Low income: The average income of households in the month before being referred to a food bank was reported at around £320, with 20% of households still needing to pay housing costs. This falls well below low income thresholds, before and after housing costs, and is a fraction of the national average. 16% had no income at all in the last month
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Add to this people with problems that nobody can fund. I know of a couple of damaged ex military types, they have problems with alcohol and white powders respectively. There's a hole in daddy's arm, where all the money goes. I know another 2 with online gambling problems, and another who's being fleeced by a renta bride who is coming over, sure, all he has to do is send a bit more money for her sick mother, the house repairs, etc. It's not like she has 3 sad deluded fools on the hook and funding half the village.
 
The folks using food banks are very much a mixed bag, sure enough there's those with addiction problems which is a mental illness often resulting in a physical illness, there's those with poor economical management skills, those who have 'lost' there jobs or been made redundant, those who due to low wages and increasing living costs that need a bit of help and those who through unfortunate circumstances have found themselves in poverty due to know fault of their own, I'd include all the children affected by their parents/carers actions or decisions in the latter category. This is all from first hand experience.

Our 'welfare' system does not work and has been the creator of modern social deprivation, elevating the amount of drug abuse, drug misuse , gambling, alcoholism, petty and more major crime.

The national minimum wage is both simultaneously an insult and joke IMHO.

And yes, the cost of living has definitely gone up and will continue to do so.
 
I thought this was an interesting quote from author/farmer James Rebanks (English Pastoral: Penguin):


James Rebanks
@herdyshepherd1
Dec 30, 2021

Cheapening food is an excellent way to concentrate wealth and power in fewer hands Why? Because we are more than ‘consumers’ - cheap food systems reduce most people to de-skilled low wage jobs in corporate food/logistics systems - and destroys many of the jobs they once had.

In ten years talking about this stuff I’ve never had a poor person tell me they want cheaper food - they want better jobs and opportunities and the things the rest of us want. I’ve had about a thousand right wing affluent people tell me cheap food is all for poor people’s sake

@SheilaDillon
· Dec 30, 2021
But "cheap food is necessary for poor people," says the interviewer. "You don't solve poverty by cheapening food, you do it by redistributing income" says @herdyshepherd1 Same point made powerfully on the prog by @carolynsteel Follow up questions? No. https://bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0bdcv2c…
 
paulfromcamden said:
Yep Sam Smiths remains a bit of a bargain even in London. I've got in the habit of drinking in a huge Youngs gastropub they built near us a few years ago that no one seems to use mid week. It's stupidly expensive but at the mo I'll happily pay an extra couple of quid on a round to drink in a virtually empty pub!
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I'd pay extra because Sam Smith's is swill. It used to be good 30-40 years ago, even my small local offy used to sell about 8 different bottled ales of theirs and if I got the train to York I'd hop over the road for a pint or two. Sadly the quality of the beer seems to track the management of the brewery, I've read some pretty awful stuff about them.
 
Enfield boy said:
I'd pay extra because Sam Smith's is swill. It used to be good 30-40 years ago, even my small local offy used to sell about 8 different bottled ales of theirs and if I got the train to York I'd hop over the road for a pint or two. Sadly the quality of the beer seems to track the management of the brewery, I've read some pretty awful stuff about them.
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Yes, the boss is an arse. Banned mobile phones in his pubs and is pretty draconian about enforcing it, including what happens to staff who don't. Not planning to set foot in a Sam Smiths pub again.
 
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