Fortsätt till huvudinnehåll

Poverty, poverty, poverty

Today's news contains a report about the government's failure to prevent increasing child and pensioner poverty.

It is unfashionable to say this, but child poverty is to a large extent a consequence of the decline in the family. Single women with highly paid jobs may be able to function effectively as single mothers, but if the mother has no qualifications and can only do a menial task, or the child is not old enough to allow her to go out to work, then child poverty will be an inevitable consequence. And with the tax and benefit system the way it is, then it is quite likely that there will be no incentive to work, but rather to continue living on the bare subsistence provided by benefits. Tax credits were meant to address this but are evidently too complicated for people to get to grips with.

Pensioner poverty is a separate issue. The Chancellor's raid on the pension funds cannot have helped, but the main effects of that have yet to come. Most pensioners will have worked, if they worked, during the post-1945 period when they are likely to have paid 40% of their earnings in tax, and if they had a mortgage, a further substantial chunk will have gone out in interest payments. To that extent, their ability to save will have been badly hit, and it was inevitable that they would be hard-up when they retired.

The present generation of pensioners need assistance to deal with their problem but policy should be directed to the underlying cause to prevent this from recurring.

Kommentarer

Populära inlägg i den här bloggen

The dreadfulness of British governance

I wrote to my MP on two entirely separate issues recently. The first was to do with the replacement for the Inter City 125 train, which at £2.6 million per vehicle, is twice as expensive as it ought to be. The second concerned the benefits of a switch from business rate and Council Tax to a tax based on site values. In both cases, the replies were full of spurious, unsubstantiated assertions and completely flawed arguments. This is typical. You will not get an iota of sense from the government on any area of public policy at all - finance, economics, trade and employment, agriculture, housing, health, transport, energy. All junk. If you write to your MP you will invariably receive answers that are an insult to your intelligence, no matter what subject you are writing about. Of course they cannot understand statistics. They are innumerate. Whitehall is staffed with idiots with a high IQ. Look at their IT projects. And mind your purse, they will have that too.

How much more will the British tolerate?

The British are phlegmatic, tolerant and slow to rouse. Thus there was no great reaction after the terrorist attack in July 2005. The murder of Lee Rigby created a sense of outrage, but nothing more, since it appeared to be an isolated incident. Two serious incidents within a fortnight are another matter. Since the first major terrorist incident in 2001, authority has tried to persuade the public that Islam is a religion of peace, that these were isolated events, or the actions of deranged "lone wolves", having nothing to do with Islam, or to reassure that the chances of being killed in a terrorist attack were infinitesimally small. These assurances are are beginning to wear thin. They no longer convince. If government does not act effectively, people will take the law into their own hands. What, however, would effective action look like? What sort of effective action would not amount to rough justice for a lot of innocent people? Given the difficulties of keeping large n...

Battery trains fool’s gold

A piece by the railway news video Green Signals recently reported the fast charging trials for battery operated electric trains on the West Ealing to Greenford branch, in west London. In a comment under the video, I described the project as technological overkill, bearing in mind that before dieselisation in the 1960s it was worked by the tiny steam locomotives of the Great Western 1400 class, a 1932 design based on an 1870s design. The money that has been spent on the experiment would have paid for a small fleet of the old things. Elsewhere in the comments, I was critical of the 800 series trains. This produced a response from the makers of the video, as follows. “I may be grasping at straws here but I am guessing you don't like 8xx series trains all that much and rather wish we still had Kings, Castles and (for the branches) 14xx's. Fair? ” My reply was as follows... Yes you are grasping at straws. The model for long distance stock is the class 180, which is a 23 metre veh...