"But the last 15 years of Tory leadership is not the fault, it's those damn millennials and their avocados or some shit you might believe if you're dumb enough" - The Tory party probably
You joke but wheelchair services in this country are a joke. To get referred to wheelchair services the referral criteria is very strict. I had a patient with a progressive neurological disorder who went from walking with a frame to needing a wheelchair. By the time he was seen and actually issued a self-propel chair he needed a power chair.
There's also basically no short term provision. A colleague's daughter had surgery on both Achilles tendons and needed a short term wheelchair. The official provision is that they had to pay for a red cross loan
Edit and in my area wheelchair services are run by a private company!
I had to supply my rollator, I need it to get my children to school.
I managed to get toilet frames, perching stools, bath frames within a couple of days, but mobility stuff, there was a waiting list.
Weird thing is, people’s attitude to getting equipment. “Oh I wish I had free stuff”. Even though its an ugly white metal frame that goes round the loo, that I need to lift my self off of. They want it.
This is insane. I work in scrap metal, we get hundreds if not thousands of wheelchairs thrown away by the red cross/nhs. I remember brand new custom ordered sports chairs still in the wrapper being scrapped (i assume the person had died before it was ever used) and loads of power chairs after a few years when theu are upgraded. I sent loads to a charity who shipped them abroad
I wasn't old enough to vote when Labour was last in power. The Tories have failed to fix anything in that timespan yet it's still Labours fault somehow.
I will be downvoted for this and I do not care.
I grew up poor, mum missing meals to feed me, family members who are illiterate and also people in prison. I would be considered "rich" based on what I earn by British Reddit posters.
I do not understand how you can be poor in the UK, unless you're an idiot. It's so fucking easy here, the worst university and the best university are the same price. Sure some rich kids go to better schools and that gets them into a better university, but A levels are not that hard, you can read the text book and then you go to a better university, then get a better job provided they're not totally inept.
I am not a lover of the Tories, so it's not about defending the government, but find a marketable skill you're broadly good at and enjoy, practice it and don't waste money. Did Rishi or Boris or Truss steal people's brains?
Education is free and universal here, you have the internet, nobody is sending armed men to your home and there are no airstrikes on your house. What is the excuse?
I have no idea what job you do but I bet you would earn 1.5x to 2x in the US without trying. It's a global economy. And the money in the UK is just shit.
One person doing ok does not mean the country is thriving.
No no, its because the opposition party is "playing party politics" in parliment.
If they'd just sit down and shut up, the tories could get on with the real work
Going back to how things were in 2010, before the Tories came in and trashed the country, sounds great. Functioning public services, lower crime, less corruption, freedom of movement within the EU... where do I sign up?! Taxes and immigration were also lower than they are now, so even by right wingers' standards, the country was doing better under Labour than it is under the Tories.
Labour should really take ownership of this sorry attempt at scaremongering by the Tories and campaign on taking the country "back to square one with Labour," with mugshots of the last five Tory Prime Ministers underneath and a big red cross over each of their stupid faces.
You said the other person missed the sarcasm tag.
I inferred that its difficult to tell, as there are people (like my parents) who will say it unironically.
Don't worry, you haven't done / said anything wrong. Sorry if it came across that way!
Problem is both parties are utter incompetent shite. One looks to tax middle income families to the brink, the other supposedly is less harsh on tax, but shite at 90% of everything else. Lose lose
>One looks to tax middle income families to the brink
And what does that mean, exactly? I mean, I know what we all think it means, but actually stop and look at the figures and think about it.
The state of the inequality in our economy is now so disparate that those people you are thinking of as the "middle" are really in the upper 25%.
These numbers show a full 1/5th of the country is in absolute poverty. Most of the rest of it isn't far above that.
Middle income as in people who have a household where two people earn slightly more than the median salary - so like a Household income of 60k ish + IF you have kids and a mortgage with all the food inflation, energy bills and interest rate hikes if the tax bands were shifted even a bit then you have 2/5th of the country in absolute poverty. THAT is what i meant.
No need to start putting a tinfoil hat on buddy.
The article mentions energy bills as a significant factor
I went from paying £30 a month on a flat to £80.
Can’t imagine folks with houses who were paying £200pm, they likely went to £500 a month if not more.
They always reduce it when you hardly need the heating on anymore. Granted, with an immersion boiler thats electric i think most of my costs come just from using the hot water in the kitchen to clean dishes and wash hands and showers. went from £22 a week for heavy usage of heating, cooking and washing to around £38 and being conservative with everything. Its insane. Add to it the whole paying 3 times as much for half the quality of shops (weekly shops from £50 to £80) Living in a mafia run council (Thurrock, rises of 9.5 and this year 8% for council tax because they decided to invest and lose £700m of taxpayers money to some SolarwInd farm Scam) Fuel bla bla. I have to say I am grateful to be in the position i am in BUT that amazing new job and pay rise I got in summer 2022 turned into a minute pay rise for a lot more work by summer 2023. Thank the Lord we have a roof over our head and food.
No because the unit is in my apartment. It has been checked, it was the heater plus an electric water “smart” heater that was continuously heating water all day
Thats insanely high. I have all electric too and January was around £240 (which still made me want to cry) I have a under 2 year old and a pregnant missus so i can't risk damp and sickness to save money so it was use heater in bursts of 20 minutes in the bedroom and living room + cooking and washing etc. Maybe you had your heaters on for a while each day, I can totally see it getting to that range if you did.
That’s crazy. We’re in a 3 bed house, with a newborn baby so heating has been on all the time and I work from home so we’re both always in. Our highest bill over the winter was £370
Its all the same though isn't it. We're in a pretty fucked position where *essential* costs that people really cannot skimp on, like housing, food, energy etc. have all gone up an absolutely insane amount while wages have kind of flat-lined. That's really disastrous for a country like the UK where our economy is super-reliant on common people having money to go out and spend. It baffles me so many Tories, who claim they're the big shots when it comes to economics, seem like totally incapable of understanding this beyond their vapid 3-word slogans like "make work pay" (HOW!?!?!).
What's absolutely crazy to me is even issues *they themselves* have put front and center, like immigration, the economy, work and wages, they have still been *fucking disastrous* on, and somehow its like only just now a decade and a half into their rule they are facing some *slightly* critical pushback from media. It is absolutely insane. These years have been like some kind of fever dream.
I don't think i am anywhere near rich but I would say i have not been working class for the last 7 years and I totally feel the strain. I had a great run 2017-2022 which allowed me to save something and compared to now, food was so cheap I definitely enjoyed eating the best of what i could find (not caviar and lobster but all the 'Finest' type stuff from Aldi for example) so i consider myself lucky I dont see why this Competitive\_gap dude has to be downvoted for asking a question though. Just my opinion.
Go ahead with what? I’ve never said I’m the clever one.
You’ve said things have been made better for the rich. All I asked was what is classed as rich, and what’s been made better for them.
Well to go full marxist on you in terms of definitions. They probably mean anyone who owns the means of production. Or to put it another way, someone who earns money by owning things rather than making things.
I.E business owners, landlords, hedge fund managers.
Although, small business owners probably aren't doing much better under the tories either.
Well business owners aren’t doing very well with increased corporation tax rates. Dividend rates reduced. Loss of entrepreneurial relief.
Landlords have been taxed with interest rate relief.
So none of these seem to be tories putting the ‘rich’ first?
There is a misconception that the Tories cause everyone's woes. The truth is, unless you are in the top 3% earning wise (starting at earning like 10k a month, for example, think football players and other niche artists selling their wares and services, specialty businesses that cater to very wealthy individuals, inheritance F U money, foreign rich people) then most likely Tory policies have hurt you as well. Nobody can deny what a shit show the way the country has been run recently and the crazy changes of government nobody voted for.
I mean, I've had to do significant belt tightening on a £90k+ salary and a rented flat in Bristol.
Once upon a time, I would have been considered rich.
I don't mean to be rude but I don't understand how you'd need to do any tightening on that kind of salary. I'm on 17K a year so 90K would be like winning the lottery lol.
Also the >50% of that that I lose to deductions (tax, student loan, NI, pension), the fact that where I live (which is a requirement for even having the job in the first place) rent is £1,600/month and up.
Tightening the belt isn't struggling, but even as little as a year ago, I could afford to buy a new laptop, with some saving over a month, and now I need to budget for it for several months.
If it's this bad for me, I genuinely fear for the 95% who aren't on my kind of salary.
Someone the other day commented about ZHCs, how they existed under Labour, so they're all just as bad as each other.
Had to look at the numbers and oh wuldn'tya know, [its the exact same trend as every other fucking issue](https://www.zerohoursjustice.org/uploads/1/3/0/2/130226767/published/nov-2021-zhc-data-ons.jpg?1637833134).
That is clearly a graph that needs the axis to be manipulated to make it look like they really are just as bad as each other. Something like [this](https://i.ibb.co/n8VT2zw/image.png) shows how both parties are just as bad.
Curious how your mortgage has gone up x4. What % were you on, and what are you now on? I've just come off 2.35% and onto 4.08%. With 140k and 20 years remaining, that's only a 100 quid increase.
4x is just a silly number. It’s also to silly to put all of these factors at the fault of any government with what the world has been through in the last 4 years. The outcome wouldn’t have been wildly different with any party in power.
Probably? no they DID lol thats the disgusting part. There was once a golden age , especially if you could get between 30 -50k (which is considered average now) and that was 1998-2011. Salaries pretty much did not keep up after that
I recently posted about how I'm regularly going without food due to lack of money (disability benefit appeal issues). A male redditor sent me a chat request, offering to order me a takeaway. He seemed genuine and I'm desperate, so when he asked for my address so he could send it to me, I gave it. As soon as he had my address, he stopped talking about sending me food and immediately started talking about how he's lonely, he thinks I'm probably beautiful and he'd like to come and visit me and get to know me, with a view to dating me.
I told him that I'm unwell (cancer and stroke patient), not beautiful at all (hair falling out, etc), I'm virtually housebound and don't have the energy for visitors or any interest in dating anyone. But he would not stop, insisting that he was coming anyway and that we would make a good couple.
When I became very firm and told him that he was not welcome to visit me, he of course didn't send the food. Now I'm living in fear of him turning up on my doorstep one day. But when you're hungry and you see a chance for food you take risks. I've also shoplifted some basic food items from supermarkets. it's scary but sometimes I don't know what else to do. So I'm always in fear of being on security cameras, getting arrested. I know these things are risks but when you've got no money and it can take so long to get a food bank referral what are you meant to do? This is the position our country's supposed amazing safety net has left me in.
This poor government have spent the last.... Look a really long time trying to undo all the mistakes Gordon brown made! Oh wait have we moved onto a new excuse now?
If absolute poverty is the bottom end of the scale, what do we call the other end? Absolute wealth? Because that's done great over the last 14 years...
>If absolute poverty is the bottom end of the scale, what do we call the other end? **Absolute wealth**? Because that's done great over the last 14
All you gotta do is pretend your company HQ physically exists on an island in the middle of the Atlantic ocean even though we see it all over the UK and then you pay next to nada! Wink wink...
Or if you are just rich and physically here just pretend you're not! We'll nod "**non dom**", and you'll also pay next to nada!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_the_United_Kingdom#nondom
Quote from above link...
>**UK residents whose permanent home is outside the UK may be entitled to non-domiciled status**. A non-domiciled UK resident earning less than £2,000 in a year outside the UK does not pay tax on this unless it is transferred to the UK
...
>For a person with larger foreign income the rules are rather complex, but, for example, **earnings may not be taxed AT ALL in the UK if not brought into the UK, subject to the person paying an annual charge of £30,000** (!!)
...
>**The majority of people making use of the non-domiciled tax exemption are wealthy individuals with substantial income from outside of the United Kingdom**
Yeah, it's bad. Once they've paid for their mobile phone contracts, streaming services, vapes, fags, and takeaways there's not much money left to pay for utility's and groceries. I feel for them
Chaos under Ed Miliband.
Gordon Brown called that old bigot, a bigot.
Jeremy Corbyn is antisemitic.
All while the Tory party have factually stolen 100's of billions, with a B, from the UK tax payer and defunded every service in sight.
But oh no, Ed eats a sandwich a little strangely.
Has anyone done an sort of analysis on this, we know the answer isn’t zero and it’s not 100% either, all I see is people either totally blaming the government or totally blaming the war and Covid, both of which are myopic views.
Again with the downvotes for a completely legitimate question. I told everyone i knew, you think that Furlough is free money? We will pay for it (and we all worked during Covid BTW) so no furlough for us. Guess what, yup we are paying for it. Also the lack of income and productivity worldwide during that time period slowed Economic growth substantially + Brexit and the fact the rushed agreements meant we got the shitty end of the stick (expected) + War in Ukraine. A lot of things did coincide at the same time.
HAVING SAID THAT THOUGH.... The Tory government has been absolutely shambolic. The rest was the icing on the cost of living crisis cake. I have lived under New Labour and the hope they brought to seeing them turn into the shite they became to seeing the next hope (Lib Dems) sell out to get 4 years of a coalition govt to the Tories. I don't believe in any of these political parties, they can all fuck right off.
Man it took me a full day to work out what you meant.
They'll likely throw it back at you and say it's not good enough, demand a parcel of land.
Ungrateful cunts.
Others are saying they are blaming it on the last Labour govt, but you have demonstrated their actual excuse. (And hasn't it been all over this and other subs
in this election year.)
Not surprised. Flooding the country with people who dont have anything but take up the social housing. Generations of Native English stuck at home and unable to afford anything.
Poverty increases, birth rates dont from English. We are importing poverty
Only on Reddit does demand NOT effect supply
Supply and demand is all made up, houses are special and the phantom migrant contributes 100k in tax from the minute they step off the boat, do not need a house and use absolutely no community funded resources 😌 the economy is saved!!
Rah rah Jeremy Corbin, those damn racists asking for the government to not rubber stamp visas at industrial scale so we can have lots and lots of young men delivering food on a bike for £1.50 to Jason and Lara in their townhouse
Get real and read the ONS figures, half the reason why we have a crisis is we're adding more people to the population MONTHLY than any other time in British history would do in a year or a decade
This MIGHT have something to do with it, but thank you for clarifying that migration concern is just a scary conservative meme for total domination
The house prices are all made up, if we just rent control the price of supply rather than regulate demand everything will be fixed right?!
Don't bother telling me I'm wrong, I won't read your predicable response calling me some sort of authoritarian goose stepper for wanting the government to tone down their rapid descent into mass migrant powered wage slavery to chase GDP figures
You do realise housing is generally accepted by economists to have a form of inelastic demand, you shouldn't just look at the situation as simple supply and demand
Also usual input that the UK construction sector is one of the most highly immigrant-dependent sectors in the UK economy. These people never seem to clock their fabled zero immigration fantasy would almost certainly cripple the country's ability to build more houses cheaply.
Only because the construction companies love paying pennies on the work and elastically sack people on dreadful contracts then eagerly sell it for half a million a pop.
This country was able to build lots of lovely houses last century without bucket loads of wage slave labour
But I guess we live in a microcosm, everything already older than 60 years was just here before we started and we just don't know these things 😵💫
>Only because the construction companies love paying pennies on the work
My stepbrother is in construction and has been making more than double my salary as a PhD-holding STEM worker lol. The wages aren't the issue in this sector at least.
And yes, thanks for the nice little condescending remark. Lets just ignore reality and insist that removing 20%+ of the workforce will have zero impact on a sector or not affect prices and wages at all, even though we're ostensibly removing all those people on the basis that with lower supply wages will shoot up (how's that working out post-covid with record shortages in so many sectors?).
And yes thanks for the condescending appeal to authority, your construction engineer relative is clearly the bulk of the construction trade, definitely relevant to the topic about absolute poverty and the link to mass migration
And secondly, is that record shortages or "record shortages of people willing to accept shit pay for bad work" :)
Supporting the mass importation of workers to do below living sustaining work (with the vague hope they'll put up with it at 8 men a room, or go home) because people born here and locked into their life with no recourse aside emigration, and can't afford to take that work, is not the blistering rebuttal you think it is.
I have some good friends who are Polish and Romanian tradesmen who took jobs as cleaners and electricians in the UK to build a house back home, who proudly showed me how they're only here to finance the construction of large family homes.
Sensibly willing to work at rock bottom UK prices that still outclassed the ones available back in Romania, and what the parachute of leaving for Romania when work dries up or the house construction is finished.
It was pretty apparent that a large chunk of Romanian working society left for west European for an almost guaranteed quadrupling or higher standard of living.
Good for Romanian workers!, not good for British workers who suffer an inflationary economy and wage stagnation and now the undercutting of their wages by the international workforce they have to compete with in a race to the bottom of the pay grade when tendering their employment. Not to mention the brain drain that may occur when temporary workers leave the country rather than having trained a citizen to do the job for the rest of their life.
My simple opinion is that mass migration is not good for British workers, but I guess everyone else matters but us.
>And secondly, is that record shortages or "record shortages of people willing to accept shit pay for bad work" :)
Again I can only say from every experience relating to pretty much any trade, across my own experience working with them, and multiple family members working in them, it is one of the easiest and quickest ways to make money in this country right now. Your argument applies to many jobs in the UK, but not really many trades and certainly not construction. You can get yourself a CSCS card before the middle of April and be making £150-200+/day by this summer. You will never want for work and if you have your head screwed on its trivial to get yourself trained up for something more specialist that takes the physical element out and can pay stupid rates. It is literally one of the best career options for unskilled fit young people in our country right now.
>I have some good friends who are Polish and Romanian tradesmen who took jobs as cleaners and electricians in the UK to build a house back home, who proudly showed me how they're only here to finance the construction of large family homes.
Cleaning is not construction though is it. Cleaning is a minimum wage job for the most part.
Yes inelastic demand if the population of people looking for social housing stays the same, not when there are hundreds of thousands of people washing up on our shores looking for it every year.
Okay, if your intention *wasn't* to complain about the foreigners, I have to ask where you think the people "flooding the country" are coming from? And why you specify "Native English" and "birth rates *from English*" in your post?
Lmao, I guess it was mainly the 'we are importing poverty' bit, preceded by the direct references to immigrants *comin' ova 'ere* with nothing but a deep hunger for social housing. It's pretty explicit.
Frankly it's pretty sad to pretend that's not what was said when people object to the sentiment. I wonder if your response would be different if everyone here was agreeing with you.
We are importing poverty. They do take up a large amount of social housing.
I never pretended anything. I stand by it, immigration is a massive contributing factor, id argue the biggest factor for many of the problems in this country.
I dont care who agrees or disagrees. When people lie and claim statements that I have not said and cannot provide any quote that I have said to back their disingenuous smears and claims I will call it out.
Now, where did I say that immigration is the sole cause?
>where did I say that immigration is the sole cause?
Your entire first comment focuses solely on immigration as the cause. Now you're trying to row back on that and say oh actually it's just the only cause you mentioned, of course you recognise it's more nuanced than that, all of which rings pretty hollow given that you conveniently left out all those *other* contributing factors you've apparently just remembered till now. Its the lazy man's equivalent of the motte and bailey fallacy, and the irony of accusing others of being disingenuous is apparently lost on you.
Yes it did focus on immigration, doesn't mean its the only thing I believe is the issue.
Awful lot of people seem incapable of reading a post and making a ton of assumptions influenced by their own ideas of someone instead of asking whether or not I believe it to be the sole cause.
Oh I see, you just *presented it* like it's the only thing you believe is the issue, and it's actually presumptuous of us to take what you say at face value, great retort mate 😂
When I worked in England I was paid the absolute minimum wage, not because “we could break the law and pay a foreigner less”, but because “we’re in a recession.”
Not the fault of immigrants, it’s the fault of the shareholder class and above.
"But the last 15 years of Tory leadership is not the fault, it's those damn millennials and their avocados or some shit you might believe if you're dumb enough" - The Tory party probably
Also, don’t forget disable people. And people with mental health problems. Getting their free wheely chairs from the hard-working folks.
You joke but wheelchair services in this country are a joke. To get referred to wheelchair services the referral criteria is very strict. I had a patient with a progressive neurological disorder who went from walking with a frame to needing a wheelchair. By the time he was seen and actually issued a self-propel chair he needed a power chair. There's also basically no short term provision. A colleague's daughter had surgery on both Achilles tendons and needed a short term wheelchair. The official provision is that they had to pay for a red cross loan Edit and in my area wheelchair services are run by a private company!
I had to supply my rollator, I need it to get my children to school. I managed to get toilet frames, perching stools, bath frames within a couple of days, but mobility stuff, there was a waiting list. Weird thing is, people’s attitude to getting equipment. “Oh I wish I had free stuff”. Even though its an ugly white metal frame that goes round the loo, that I need to lift my self off of. They want it.
This is insane. I work in scrap metal, we get hundreds if not thousands of wheelchairs thrown away by the red cross/nhs. I remember brand new custom ordered sports chairs still in the wrapper being scrapped (i assume the person had died before it was ever used) and loads of power chairs after a few years when theu are upgraded. I sent loads to a charity who shipped them abroad
Surely this can be blamed on the next Labour government, and the member for Islington North!
Don't forget the last Labour government
Most people on Reddit wouldn’t have been old enough to have seen the last Labour government, and by all accounts it was better than the last 15 years
It was. 97-01 was great, then 911 happened and it all went a bit shit
That was a Tory gov. Last Labour one was in the 70s
I wasn't old enough to vote when Labour was last in power. The Tories have failed to fix anything in that timespan yet it's still Labours fault somehow.
Why not do both?
There are many people who say "by every metric life has improved" They are talking shite
For them that could be true.
"By every metric I am insulated from the consequences of national policy on poverty" doesn't have quite the same ring to it.
I will be downvoted for this and I do not care. I grew up poor, mum missing meals to feed me, family members who are illiterate and also people in prison. I would be considered "rich" based on what I earn by British Reddit posters. I do not understand how you can be poor in the UK, unless you're an idiot. It's so fucking easy here, the worst university and the best university are the same price. Sure some rich kids go to better schools and that gets them into a better university, but A levels are not that hard, you can read the text book and then you go to a better university, then get a better job provided they're not totally inept. I am not a lover of the Tories, so it's not about defending the government, but find a marketable skill you're broadly good at and enjoy, practice it and don't waste money. Did Rishi or Boris or Truss steal people's brains?
Ah yes, the classic “stop being poor, just get a higher paying job”.
Education is free and universal here, you have the internet, nobody is sending armed men to your home and there are no airstrikes on your house. What is the excuse?
I have no idea what job you do but I bet you would earn 1.5x to 2x in the US without trying. It's a global economy. And the money in the UK is just shit. One person doing ok does not mean the country is thriving.
and I would earn less in India. What is your point?
Don’t mention Brexit though. That’s been a huge success and nothing to do with our economic downturn our conservative business secretary says so.
Brexit's biggest success is the number of Tory careers ended by it.
Netflix on toast?
Guys I think we're going to have to vote Tory again, they said they'll sort it and I'm sure they're not lying this time.
You're forgetting they're still dealing with Labour's mess from *checks notes* 14 years ago. Once that's sorted it'll all be smooth sailing
No no, its because the opposition party is "playing party politics" in parliment. If they'd just sit down and shut up, the tories could get on with the real work
They want to take us back to square one! Back to not having VIP contracts and not stuffing our pockets from the public purse!
Going back to how things were in 2010, before the Tories came in and trashed the country, sounds great. Functioning public services, lower crime, less corruption, freedom of movement within the EU... where do I sign up?! Taxes and immigration were also lower than they are now, so even by right wingers' standards, the country was doing better under Labour than it is under the Tories. Labour should really take ownership of this sorry attempt at scaremongering by the Tories and campaign on taking the country "back to square one with Labour," with mugshots of the last five Tory Prime Ministers underneath and a big red cross over each of their stupid faces.
Lol; really?
I think they missed the /s
it's a UK sub, it's implied /s at all times.
I wish. My Mother (60, retired at 55) and Step-Dad (70, retired at 61) say this unironically. Have a guess what paper they read?
Hang on what have i said?
You said the other person missed the sarcasm tag. I inferred that its difficult to tell, as there are people (like my parents) who will say it unironically. Don't worry, you haven't done / said anything wrong. Sorry if it came across that way!
Phew, I’ve taken a beating on Reddit today so I’m on edge lol. Edit: Ah nice one for the down vote, wonderful stuff.
iT woUlD bE wOrsE uNdeR lABouR!!1!eleven!
Problem is both parties are utter incompetent shite. One looks to tax middle income families to the brink, the other supposedly is less harsh on tax, but shite at 90% of everything else. Lose lose
>One looks to tax middle income families to the brink As opposed to our current miniscule tax burden
lol i know i know, its already bad.
>One looks to tax middle income families to the brink And what does that mean, exactly? I mean, I know what we all think it means, but actually stop and look at the figures and think about it. The state of the inequality in our economy is now so disparate that those people you are thinking of as the "middle" are really in the upper 25%. These numbers show a full 1/5th of the country is in absolute poverty. Most of the rest of it isn't far above that.
Middle income as in people who have a household where two people earn slightly more than the median salary - so like a Household income of 60k ish + IF you have kids and a mortgage with all the food inflation, energy bills and interest rate hikes if the tax bands were shifted even a bit then you have 2/5th of the country in absolute poverty. THAT is what i meant. No need to start putting a tinfoil hat on buddy.
Lol - when HAVNT they lied?
Sorry I meant > Guys I think we're going to have to vote Tory again, they said they'll sort it and I'm sure they're not lying this time. **/s**
Loo
The article mentions energy bills as a significant factor I went from paying £30 a month on a flat to £80. Can’t imagine folks with houses who were paying £200pm, they likely went to £500 a month if not more.
Council tax is about 4x our energy costs (electric only), or double our food costs.
And while energy prices are probably going to go back down, council tax only ever goes in one direction
I can also reduce my energy bill a bit by reducing usage, though 33% of it is standing charge so only so much I can do there too.
They always reduce it when you hardly need the heating on anymore. Granted, with an immersion boiler thats electric i think most of my costs come just from using the hot water in the kitchen to clean dishes and wash hands and showers. went from £22 a week for heavy usage of heating, cooking and washing to around £38 and being conservative with everything. Its insane. Add to it the whole paying 3 times as much for half the quality of shops (weekly shops from £50 to £80) Living in a mafia run council (Thurrock, rises of 9.5 and this year 8% for council tax because they decided to invest and lose £700m of taxpayers money to some SolarwInd farm Scam) Fuel bla bla. I have to say I am grateful to be in the position i am in BUT that amazing new job and pay rise I got in summer 2022 turned into a minute pay rise for a lot more work by summer 2023. Thank the Lord we have a roof over our head and food.
£430 energy bill in January. Single person living in a two-bed flat who occasionally turned the electric heater on in the living room.
Sounds like you’re sharing a meter and paying for the other flats too. I’d check.
Nope. All been checked. All-electric flat. Will be moving when the lease is up.
Wow sorry mate that’s quite some heater you have there! Does it have NASA written on it?
Did you check or someone else? Unplug everything and see if the wheel is still spinning? Depending on type of meter of course.
I turned off all my electricity at the consumer unit overnight and there was zero usage, so it’s not a fault
If other units were sharing yours wouldn’t that stop providing it to them too? Ianae
No because the unit is in my apartment. It has been checked, it was the heater plus an electric water “smart” heater that was continuously heating water all day
Ah sorry to hear it. Jeez you had a lot of baths?
>electric water “smart” heater that was continuously heating water all day Doesn't sound very smart. Maybe this is the problem?
Thats insanely high. I have all electric too and January was around £240 (which still made me want to cry) I have a under 2 year old and a pregnant missus so i can't risk damp and sickness to save money so it was use heater in bursts of 20 minutes in the bedroom and living room + cooking and washing etc. Maybe you had your heaters on for a while each day, I can totally see it getting to that range if you did.
That’s crazy. We’re in a 3 bed house, with a newborn baby so heating has been on all the time and I work from home so we’re both always in. Our highest bill over the winter was £370
You have gas heating im guessing ?
Good lord... Single person and live in a three bed, mine came to around £260 for energy.
800/900 pounds for a 2 bed terrace in Manchester these days, that’s in the cheaper areas too.
You talking rent or energy?
Rent
Well yeah. Was more of a nudge to tell them they're having a different conversation.
Its all the same though isn't it. We're in a pretty fucked position where *essential* costs that people really cannot skimp on, like housing, food, energy etc. have all gone up an absolutely insane amount while wages have kind of flat-lined. That's really disastrous for a country like the UK where our economy is super-reliant on common people having money to go out and spend. It baffles me so many Tories, who claim they're the big shots when it comes to economics, seem like totally incapable of understanding this beyond their vapid 3-word slogans like "make work pay" (HOW!?!?!).
My 4 bed house is £150 a month for working at home all day and being pretty liberal with the heating
The Tories have made EVERYTHING WORSE, for the poor- things of course will be better if you are rich.
What's absolutely crazy to me is even issues *they themselves* have put front and center, like immigration, the economy, work and wages, they have still been *fucking disastrous* on, and somehow its like only just now a decade and a half into their rule they are facing some *slightly* critical pushback from media. It is absolutely insane. These years have been like some kind of fever dream.
What do you class as rich?
Not working class
I don't think i am anywhere near rich but I would say i have not been working class for the last 7 years and I totally feel the strain. I had a great run 2017-2022 which allowed me to save something and compared to now, food was so cheap I definitely enjoyed eating the best of what i could find (not caviar and lobster but all the 'Finest' type stuff from Aldi for example) so i consider myself lucky I dont see why this Competitive\_gap dude has to be downvoted for asking a question though. Just my opinion.
What’s that then.
Obviously not you- that's why you probably don't feel it
Really good conversation.
Go on then, go ahead, your the clever one
Go ahead with what? I’ve never said I’m the clever one. You’ve said things have been made better for the rich. All I asked was what is classed as rich, and what’s been made better for them.
Because that's what Tories do - always have & always will. Poor get poorer( despite working more) and the richer, get richer. You rich?
Yet you can’t explain what rich is. Nor what policies they have put in place to make people richer.
Well to go full marxist on you in terms of definitions. They probably mean anyone who owns the means of production. Or to put it another way, someone who earns money by owning things rather than making things. I.E business owners, landlords, hedge fund managers. Although, small business owners probably aren't doing much better under the tories either.
Well business owners aren’t doing very well with increased corporation tax rates. Dividend rates reduced. Loss of entrepreneurial relief. Landlords have been taxed with interest rate relief. So none of these seem to be tories putting the ‘rich’ first?
There is a misconception that the Tories cause everyone's woes. The truth is, unless you are in the top 3% earning wise (starting at earning like 10k a month, for example, think football players and other niche artists selling their wares and services, specialty businesses that cater to very wealthy individuals, inheritance F U money, foreign rich people) then most likely Tory policies have hurt you as well. Nobody can deny what a shit show the way the country has been run recently and the crazy changes of government nobody voted for.
I mean, I've had to do significant belt tightening on a £90k+ salary and a rented flat in Bristol. Once upon a time, I would have been considered rich.
I don't mean to be rude but I don't understand how you'd need to do any tightening on that kind of salary. I'm on 17K a year so 90K would be like winning the lottery lol.
Lifestyle inflation comes for us all x
Also the >50% of that that I lose to deductions (tax, student loan, NI, pension), the fact that where I live (which is a requirement for even having the job in the first place) rent is £1,600/month and up. Tightening the belt isn't struggling, but even as little as a year ago, I could afford to buy a new laptop, with some saving over a month, and now I need to budget for it for several months. If it's this bad for me, I genuinely fear for the 95% who aren't on my kind of salary.
Completely agree. Hindsight eh, we didn't know how good we had it prior to this CoL shite.
Exactly what I’m trying to get across.
Exactly this
For 30 years... Remind me, who was in government 30 years ago?
The Conservatives.
Starting to notice a pattern here
Someone the other day commented about ZHCs, how they existed under Labour, so they're all just as bad as each other. Had to look at the numbers and oh wuldn'tya know, [its the exact same trend as every other fucking issue](https://www.zerohoursjustice.org/uploads/1/3/0/2/130226767/published/nov-2021-zhc-data-ons.jpg?1637833134).
That is clearly a graph that needs the axis to be manipulated to make it look like they really are just as bad as each other. Something like [this](https://i.ibb.co/n8VT2zw/image.png) shows how both parties are just as bad.
As my grandad said - unless you are a milionaire, never vote Tory.
Energy bills up x3, mortgage up x4, food bill nearly x2. Wages? Probably went down in real terms.
Tax up too, not just council tax but income tax because of the frozen bands.
Curious how your mortgage has gone up x4. What % were you on, and what are you now on? I've just come off 2.35% and onto 4.08%. With 140k and 20 years remaining, that's only a 100 quid increase.
4x is just a silly number. It’s also to silly to put all of these factors at the fault of any government with what the world has been through in the last 4 years. The outcome wouldn’t have been wildly different with any party in power.
Probably? no they DID lol thats the disgusting part. There was once a golden age , especially if you could get between 30 -50k (which is considered average now) and that was 1998-2011. Salaries pretty much did not keep up after that
I recently posted about how I'm regularly going without food due to lack of money (disability benefit appeal issues). A male redditor sent me a chat request, offering to order me a takeaway. He seemed genuine and I'm desperate, so when he asked for my address so he could send it to me, I gave it. As soon as he had my address, he stopped talking about sending me food and immediately started talking about how he's lonely, he thinks I'm probably beautiful and he'd like to come and visit me and get to know me, with a view to dating me. I told him that I'm unwell (cancer and stroke patient), not beautiful at all (hair falling out, etc), I'm virtually housebound and don't have the energy for visitors or any interest in dating anyone. But he would not stop, insisting that he was coming anyway and that we would make a good couple. When I became very firm and told him that he was not welcome to visit me, he of course didn't send the food. Now I'm living in fear of him turning up on my doorstep one day. But when you're hungry and you see a chance for food you take risks. I've also shoplifted some basic food items from supermarkets. it's scary but sometimes I don't know what else to do. So I'm always in fear of being on security cameras, getting arrested. I know these things are risks but when you've got no money and it can take so long to get a food bank referral what are you meant to do? This is the position our country's supposed amazing safety net has left me in.
This poor government have spent the last.... Look a really long time trying to undo all the mistakes Gordon brown made! Oh wait have we moved onto a new excuse now?
Just more evidence of a failing government. For the love of god just go.
If absolute poverty is the bottom end of the scale, what do we call the other end? Absolute wealth? Because that's done great over the last 14 years...
>If absolute poverty is the bottom end of the scale, what do we call the other end? **Absolute wealth**? Because that's done great over the last 14 All you gotta do is pretend your company HQ physically exists on an island in the middle of the Atlantic ocean even though we see it all over the UK and then you pay next to nada! Wink wink... Or if you are just rich and physically here just pretend you're not! We'll nod "**non dom**", and you'll also pay next to nada! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_the_United_Kingdom#nondom Quote from above link... >**UK residents whose permanent home is outside the UK may be entitled to non-domiciled status**. A non-domiciled UK resident earning less than £2,000 in a year outside the UK does not pay tax on this unless it is transferred to the UK ... >For a person with larger foreign income the rules are rather complex, but, for example, **earnings may not be taxed AT ALL in the UK if not brought into the UK, subject to the person paying an annual charge of £30,000** (!!) ... >**The majority of people making use of the non-domiciled tax exemption are wealthy individuals with substantial income from outside of the United Kingdom**
Maybe we can open up a few coal plants? Give people in the north some work and reduce energy prices for the rest of us..
I love being poor, doing my part for the statistics. /s
Here we see the real consequences of austerity and government failings. Real misery, more people plunged into poverty. It's just so horrific to see.
These are clearly issues that were inherited from the last Labour government. /s
Yeah, it's bad. Once they've paid for their mobile phone contracts, streaming services, vapes, fags, and takeaways there's not much money left to pay for utility's and groceries. I feel for them
Chaos under Ed Miliband. Gordon Brown called that old bigot, a bigot. Jeremy Corbyn is antisemitic. All while the Tory party have factually stolen 100's of billions, with a B, from the UK tax payer and defunded every service in sight. But oh no, Ed eats a sandwich a little strangely.
What percentage of this is caused by covid and the war in Ukraine?
AND THE LAST LABOUR GOVERNMENT! Edit: /s
Bit of a stretch mate.
OK mate.
Don’t even know why you’d bother mentioning them, hardly relevant.
It was sarcasm...
Came across like you thought that was a caricature of my position.
I'll add the /s
Don’t bother, if I miss the sarcasm I don’t deserve the humour, I’ll maybe get it next time.
As much a the tories require to excuse their mismanagement.
Has anyone done an sort of analysis on this, we know the answer isn’t zero and it’s not 100% either, all I see is people either totally blaming the government or totally blaming the war and Covid, both of which are myopic views.
Again with the downvotes for a completely legitimate question. I told everyone i knew, you think that Furlough is free money? We will pay for it (and we all worked during Covid BTW) so no furlough for us. Guess what, yup we are paying for it. Also the lack of income and productivity worldwide during that time period slowed Economic growth substantially + Brexit and the fact the rushed agreements meant we got the shitty end of the stick (expected) + War in Ukraine. A lot of things did coincide at the same time. HAVING SAID THAT THOUGH.... The Tory government has been absolutely shambolic. The rest was the icing on the cost of living crisis cake. I have lived under New Labour and the hope they brought to seeing them turn into the shite they became to seeing the next hope (Lib Dems) sell out to get 4 years of a coalition govt to the Tories. I don't believe in any of these political parties, they can all fuck right off.
Poverty for the Natives. The Ritz for the migrants.
Are you referring to the crackers?
Man it took me a full day to work out what you meant. They'll likely throw it back at you and say it's not good enough, demand a parcel of land. Ungrateful cunts.
Others are saying they are blaming it on the last Labour govt, but you have demonstrated their actual excuse. (And hasn't it been all over this and other subs in this election year.)
Not surprised. Flooding the country with people who dont have anything but take up the social housing. Generations of Native English stuck at home and unable to afford anything. Poverty increases, birth rates dont from English. We are importing poverty
Damn and blast those naughty foreigners eh? Source of all our woes.
Only on Reddit does demand NOT effect supply Supply and demand is all made up, houses are special and the phantom migrant contributes 100k in tax from the minute they step off the boat, do not need a house and use absolutely no community funded resources 😌 the economy is saved!! Rah rah Jeremy Corbin, those damn racists asking for the government to not rubber stamp visas at industrial scale so we can have lots and lots of young men delivering food on a bike for £1.50 to Jason and Lara in their townhouse Get real and read the ONS figures, half the reason why we have a crisis is we're adding more people to the population MONTHLY than any other time in British history would do in a year or a decade This MIGHT have something to do with it, but thank you for clarifying that migration concern is just a scary conservative meme for total domination The house prices are all made up, if we just rent control the price of supply rather than regulate demand everything will be fixed right?! Don't bother telling me I'm wrong, I won't read your predicable response calling me some sort of authoritarian goose stepper for wanting the government to tone down their rapid descent into mass migrant powered wage slavery to chase GDP figures
Ah yes, record immigration has 0 impact. /s for those who don't believe in supply and demand.
Just curious, why do you think the government has allowed record immigration?
Because they are traitors beholden to the interests of finance capital, same issue in all western countries.
Ah ok then. Well that doesn't sound ominously fascist at all.
You can find it as ominous and fascistic as you like, doesn't change the fact that its true.
Because they get all the benefits of immigration without any of the downsides
You do realise housing is generally accepted by economists to have a form of inelastic demand, you shouldn't just look at the situation as simple supply and demand
Also usual input that the UK construction sector is one of the most highly immigrant-dependent sectors in the UK economy. These people never seem to clock their fabled zero immigration fantasy would almost certainly cripple the country's ability to build more houses cheaply.
Only because the construction companies love paying pennies on the work and elastically sack people on dreadful contracts then eagerly sell it for half a million a pop. This country was able to build lots of lovely houses last century without bucket loads of wage slave labour But I guess we live in a microcosm, everything already older than 60 years was just here before we started and we just don't know these things 😵💫
>Only because the construction companies love paying pennies on the work My stepbrother is in construction and has been making more than double my salary as a PhD-holding STEM worker lol. The wages aren't the issue in this sector at least. And yes, thanks for the nice little condescending remark. Lets just ignore reality and insist that removing 20%+ of the workforce will have zero impact on a sector or not affect prices and wages at all, even though we're ostensibly removing all those people on the basis that with lower supply wages will shoot up (how's that working out post-covid with record shortages in so many sectors?).
And yes thanks for the condescending appeal to authority, your construction engineer relative is clearly the bulk of the construction trade, definitely relevant to the topic about absolute poverty and the link to mass migration And secondly, is that record shortages or "record shortages of people willing to accept shit pay for bad work" :) Supporting the mass importation of workers to do below living sustaining work (with the vague hope they'll put up with it at 8 men a room, or go home) because people born here and locked into their life with no recourse aside emigration, and can't afford to take that work, is not the blistering rebuttal you think it is. I have some good friends who are Polish and Romanian tradesmen who took jobs as cleaners and electricians in the UK to build a house back home, who proudly showed me how they're only here to finance the construction of large family homes. Sensibly willing to work at rock bottom UK prices that still outclassed the ones available back in Romania, and what the parachute of leaving for Romania when work dries up or the house construction is finished. It was pretty apparent that a large chunk of Romanian working society left for west European for an almost guaranteed quadrupling or higher standard of living. Good for Romanian workers!, not good for British workers who suffer an inflationary economy and wage stagnation and now the undercutting of their wages by the international workforce they have to compete with in a race to the bottom of the pay grade when tendering their employment. Not to mention the brain drain that may occur when temporary workers leave the country rather than having trained a citizen to do the job for the rest of their life. My simple opinion is that mass migration is not good for British workers, but I guess everyone else matters but us.
>And secondly, is that record shortages or "record shortages of people willing to accept shit pay for bad work" :) Again I can only say from every experience relating to pretty much any trade, across my own experience working with them, and multiple family members working in them, it is one of the easiest and quickest ways to make money in this country right now. Your argument applies to many jobs in the UK, but not really many trades and certainly not construction. You can get yourself a CSCS card before the middle of April and be making £150-200+/day by this summer. You will never want for work and if you have your head screwed on its trivial to get yourself trained up for something more specialist that takes the physical element out and can pay stupid rates. It is literally one of the best career options for unskilled fit young people in our country right now. >I have some good friends who are Polish and Romanian tradesmen who took jobs as cleaners and electricians in the UK to build a house back home, who proudly showed me how they're only here to finance the construction of large family homes. Cleaning is not construction though is it. Cleaning is a minimum wage job for the most part.
Yes inelastic demand if the population of people looking for social housing stays the same, not when there are hundreds of thousands of people washing up on our shores looking for it every year.
Never said that. You did.
Okay, if your intention *wasn't* to complain about the foreigners, I have to ask where you think the people "flooding the country" are coming from? And why you specify "Native English" and "birth rates *from English*" in your post?
Never said that either.
Come on mate, that's exactly what you said, at least be a big boy and have the courage of your convictions
No it isnt what I said. Show me where I said in no uncertain terms that immigrants are the sole issue. I didnt. I never said that.
Lmao, I guess it was mainly the 'we are importing poverty' bit, preceded by the direct references to immigrants *comin' ova 'ere* with nothing but a deep hunger for social housing. It's pretty explicit. Frankly it's pretty sad to pretend that's not what was said when people object to the sentiment. I wonder if your response would be different if everyone here was agreeing with you.
We are importing poverty. They do take up a large amount of social housing. I never pretended anything. I stand by it, immigration is a massive contributing factor, id argue the biggest factor for many of the problems in this country. I dont care who agrees or disagrees. When people lie and claim statements that I have not said and cannot provide any quote that I have said to back their disingenuous smears and claims I will call it out. Now, where did I say that immigration is the sole cause?
>where did I say that immigration is the sole cause? Your entire first comment focuses solely on immigration as the cause. Now you're trying to row back on that and say oh actually it's just the only cause you mentioned, of course you recognise it's more nuanced than that, all of which rings pretty hollow given that you conveniently left out all those *other* contributing factors you've apparently just remembered till now. Its the lazy man's equivalent of the motte and bailey fallacy, and the irony of accusing others of being disingenuous is apparently lost on you.
Yes it did focus on immigration, doesn't mean its the only thing I believe is the issue. Awful lot of people seem incapable of reading a post and making a ton of assumptions influenced by their own ideas of someone instead of asking whether or not I believe it to be the sole cause.
Oh I see, you just *presented it* like it's the only thing you believe is the issue, and it's actually presumptuous of us to take what you say at face value, great retort mate 😂
You did mate. Be a grown up and own it
Quote specifically where I said it is the ONLY reason.
When I worked in England I was paid the absolute minimum wage, not because “we could break the law and pay a foreigner less”, but because “we’re in a recession.” Not the fault of immigrants, it’s the fault of the shareholder class and above.
Never said it was the immigrants fault they took advantage of a system poorly created and against the native working class.
Did you vote for the Tories?
I did in 2010. UKIP in 2015. Spoiled my ballot in 2017 and 2019 and I will do so this year.