Sneaking Out

Who do we really care about?

Family, friends, vulnerable people, children...?

Let's start with the children. The most vulnerable children. Kids without parents, living as refugees just across the 'hard border' that separates England from France.

Last year Lord Alf Dubs negotiated an agreement with the UK Government that would allow a number - he had pitched for 3,000 but this was diluted in the final version -  of lone children from the Calais refugee camps to be allowed into the UK.

It was a huge battle for a very small victory.

And then yesterday The Minister for Immigration, Robert Goodwell (Conservative MP for Scarborough and Whitby) shuffled out a written statement declaring that just 150 kids will be allowed into mighty Britain. The statement is designed to baffle with waffle. It is hard to spot just the numbers, but read paragraphs four and five carefully and you'll see the maths. 'We've let in 200, and we are going to let in 150 more.'

Mr Goodwell happened to release his statement on the same day that Westminster voted for the Tories' Hard-Dream Brexit. This is not an accident. He knew that no-one would notice.

This is sneaky politics. In other words, it's business as usual at Westminster.

It uses a technique known as a 'Shock Event.' Professor Heather Cox Richardson has written a clear guide over on Facebook. Brexit is a Shock Event. We are hypnotised by Brexit, we talk about it all the time, and we divide along traditional fault lines over Brexit, with racism or at least anti-immigrant sentiments being the guideline. While we are staring into the darkness of Brexit, the government pushes forward with its real agenda, led by the Minister Against Immigration, Robert Goodwell.

The sneaky Tories have abandoned hundreds of orphan refugees to their fate. One NGO says that it cannot trace one third of the 179 children it was tracking, and Save the Children Fund has reported in its blog that more lone kids are going missing as they hear the rumours about changes in the UK laws. There are 5,100 child refugees and asylum seekers detained in France, according to the well-researched data at the Global Detention Project.


What is to be done? Lobbying, pressure, writing to MPs, donating to the tiny volunteer-led NGOs that are working with child refugees in France. 

But finally the people of Scotland will have to decide. Do we want to be bound to this Parliament of sneaks and rogues, for ever more?




Finally, a selection of organisations you might like to help:

Save the Children Fund
Dunkirk Legal Support Team
Help Refugees
Refugee Youth Service
Calais Migrant Solidarity
Global Detention Project
 
 
 
 
 

 


 

Working poorer

David Cameron will announce today, Monday, the bad news for everyone who did not vote Tory. He will announce what the FT calls "an assault on tax credits" as part of his plan to cut £12 billion out of part of the economy.  

The part of the economy from which he and Giddy Osborne will cut £12 billion is not the part that has a lot of money. It is not the bankers, or the well-heeled-and-toed voters of the Home Counties. It is £12 billion from the poor.

What does that mean for Scotland?

The focus will be on Working Tax Credits (WTC) and Child Tax Credits (CTC). These are payments made to people on low wages or no wages. The system is designed to taper so that families in work whose total income is £6,420 or less receive the full benefit, with a reduction of 41p in each additional £1 they earn above this level. In 2013-4 the Government paid out £29 billion in tax credits, according to the National Statistical Office. It is unlikely that they will take the full £12 billion from this one area (although only "unlikely", not "impossible") but even half of that would represent a 20% reduction in tax credit payments.

The statistics (here) are clear. In Scotland 351,900 families received Working Tax Credits or Child Tax Credits in 2013-14. In these families there were 526,300 children. In 2013-14 these families received on average £5,832 in tax credits. A quick review of the constituency data shows a map of poverty in Scotland, with Eastwood, Pollok, Rutherglen, Hamilton South amongst the places where the poorest people received the largest Working Tax Credits

Imagine that Mr Cameron sticks to a vow. Imagine that he cuts 20% off tax credits. Here is the maths:

In Pollok in 2013-4 there were 6,100 families including 8,800 children, who were receiving either WTC or CTC. This represented a total of £36.6m for the Pollok economy. Imagine that Mr Cameron sticks to this new vow and cuts, say, 20% from that total. He would be taking £7,327,320 out of the Pollok economy. More than £7m from an economy that is already on its knees.

Now translate that figure into income for small businesses, shopkeepers especially. They will cut staff. How many staff? Around 700 full-time jobs in Pollok (basing the calculation on National Minimum Wage and a 35 hour week).

So rather than, say, put a penny on income tax for the people of Surrey and Hertfordshire, Mr Cameron will impoverish the in-work poor and, as a consequence, chuck a lot of people out onto the street. 

Donchalove him?

A Poor Choice

In today’s FT Nick Pearce, director of the Institute for Public Policy Research, makes the parallel between the “most successful minority government in modern British history”, and this year’s election.

In 1910 Herbert Asquith, a Liberal, led a minority government with support from a progressive alliance of Irish nationalists and a nascent Labour Party.  The Liberals won 272 seats, the Conservatives 271, and it was thus the Irish Parliamentary Party, with 74 seats and Labour (42) who could balance the powers of the two main parties. There are lots of Scottish connections - Asquith was MP for East Fife, and Labour was led by George Nicoll Barnes, MP for Glasgow Blackfriars and Hutchesontown. Nick Pearce notes that this reforming government created the national insurance system that was the basis of the modern welfare state, passed constitutional reforms that established the power of elected MPs over the House of Lords, reformed trade union law and passed an Irish Home Rule Act.

“Some…will seize the crisis of the established party system as an opportunity for realignment…” concludes Nick Pearce.

And that will be a healthy outcome for England as well as for Scotland. Especially for the poor of both countries because they – of all people – are the ones who suffer most from “the established party system.”

That’s what Jamie Livingstone, head of Oxfam Scotland argues: with 820,000 people living in poverty in Scotland in 2012-13 he says that "…we have a major opportunity - with the leaders of the two largest parties at the Scottish Parliament sharing a single objective - to seriously challenge inequality in Scotland."

And Child Poverty Action Group in Scotland lays out what a new Government – one that did not have to toe the Party line – could do: adequate social security benefits, affordable childcare, free school meals – the list is simple and well argued.

We thought that the September 2014 Referendum was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Now we have a second chance to make a good choice; a poor choice.

For Richer, for Poorer. And a Tartan Trident.

If you take a bus down Ferry Road in Edinburgh you will move from wealth to poverty as you head west. Or you can just stand in Stewart's Melville (private) College's playing fields and chuck a stone west to Pilton. You will be throwing your stone from an area ranked as amongst the least deprived into an area that is the most deprived, according to the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation.

Edinburgh, deprived

This week two reports have talked about poverty.

What Do We Know about In-Work Poverty? [1] shows that most poor people (52%) in Scotland live in homes where at least one person has a job.  Worse, the proportion of poor children in homes with an adult in work has increased from 40% in 1999 to almost two thirds today.

What is going on? Doesn't a job give you an income? Well yes, and poverty is of course related to work (the rate of poverty amongst households where no-one is in paid work is of course higher.) But people in low-paid jobs - earning less than £7.40 an hour - have double the poverty risk of all workers. Low-paid women are especially vulnerable; mothers returning to work are more likely to end up in low-paid jobs, says the report, which highlights the almost 20% difference in wages paid to men versus women in the private sector.

Scotland comes off badly in the low-pay stakes compared to other countries: 19.5% of employees in Scotland were low-paid in 2011 compared to say 14% in New Zealand or 15% in Spain.

Low-wage work is a dead end - workers are less likely to be offered training, and more low-paid workers become unemployed than their better paid colleagues. So families are juggling low-pay, no-pay and benefits and it is, above all, the children who suffer.

Meanwhile, Oxfam has shown in Wealth: Having It All and Wanting More [2] - published this week in time for Davos - the link between wealth, business and tax. The richest 1% own 48% of global wealth - and the trend is upwards, for the rich. The pyramid is skewed so the richest fifth of the population own more than nine-tenths of the wealth, meaning that the rest of humanity, the 80%, scrabble over just 5.5% of global wealth.

Cleverly, Oxfam shows that the businesses that our wealthiest people invest in are the same businesses that spend the most on lobbying on budget issues, particularly lobbying to reduce taxation. Thus there is a vicious circle in which wealth is held by a very few, who ensure via their businesses that taxes…for those few rich…remain low. This explains why David Cameron and Giddy Gordon Osborne have been so reluctant to do the obvious thing - tax wealth, to reduce the poverty gap.

This is stupid economics. As the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) has shown [3], a child growing up in a poor household is likely to have a poor outcome - to become a poor adult - because of a range of issues including stress and poor health. CPAG has calculated the cost - to all of us - of allowing poverty to take hold. The cost of allowing 110,000 children in Scotland to be affected by in-work poverty could be £1.1 billion. 

£1.1 billion! We could almost afford to buy our own Tartan Trident for that…

1 What Do We Know about In-Work Poverty? A Summary of the Evidence (Social Research Series. Edinburgh: The Scottish Government, January 21, 2015. http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2015/01/3233/downloads)

2 Hardoon, Deborah. Wealth: Having It All and Wanting More. Cowley, UK: Oxfam International, January 19, 2015. http://www.oxfam.org/en/research/wealth-having-it-all-and-wanting-more.

3  Farthing, Rys. Local Authorities and Child Poverty: Balancing Threats and Opportunities. London: Child Poverty Action Group, July 2013. http://www.cpag.org.uk/content/cpag-publishes-cost-child-poverty-every-local-authority-and-constituency.