Tubby Isaacs wrote: ↑Sat Jul 12, 2025 3:22 pm I see they’ve moved on to “abhorrent” in their analysis of Rayner’s performance.Deployment of "neoliberal" and "red Tory" can only be hours away.
Unite’s failure to act over bullying and victimisation allegations is ‘unacceptable’ and GMB members have ‘quite simply had enough’.
GMB Union members working in Unite the Union's National Bargaining and Disputes Support Unit (BDSU) have voted to strike over 'bullying and victimisation' from management.
A group of workers will now walk out for four days of strike action, from Tuesday 3 to Friday 6 December, after Unite failed to investigate and take action following complaints that some managers in the BDSU bullied staff and victimised those who spoke out.
The ballot, which opened on 8 November and closed today [Monday], resulted in 83% of the members who participated backing strike action.
Despite attempts by GMB to resolve this dispute, Unite has been unwilling to address the members’ concerns or take any meaningful action.
Jones cites Labour support for local community group Ambition Lawrence Weston – still thriving today – as well as a taxpayer-funded “gifted and talented” scheme, as crucial in helping to signpost him towards university, as the first in his family to go. He went on to qualify as a solicitor, and was an in-house lawyer for BT before being elected in 2017.
With projects like these in mind, he is now announcing that the Treasury will invest £500m over a decade, alongside private backers, in a new “social outcome partnership” to fund grassroots projects tackling child poverty.
He says he made it a personal mission since arriving in the Treasury last summer to dramatically expand this form of “social impact investment”.
Pioneered by Gordon Brown’s Treasury, it is an approach that involves private investors matching taxpayer funding for neighbourhood-level anti-poverty projects.
These backers earn a modest return, but only if the scheme meets specific targets – which might be, Jones says, getting a certain number of children into college, or university, or parents into secure jobs, for example. The fund is expected to be the largest such vehicle in the world. Jones hopes it will be worth £1bn in total.
“It’s really trying to just unlock those opportunities, like it did for me,” he said. “I’ve now had a great career and I get to do this job. And a lot of that stems from what the New Labour government did. So essentially this type of funding mechanism, this investment into tackling the root causes of poverty is something that’s very personal to me.”
The detailed proposal emerged from a social impact investment advisory group, set up by Jones last year. It was due to wind down this summer, but will now continue at his request, to draw up plans for a more general template for social impact projects, that could be applicable across Whitehall.
It is something of a cliche to argue that Britain is running out of money, living beyond its means, wandering through a fiscal fool’s paradise – but no less true for that. The trend of old-age payments will make it even worse (read The Economist). It was the great unspoken theme of the last election – well, unspoken except for every damned think tanker with a spreadsheet, who could in half a minute explain that Jeremy Hunt’s departing NICs cuts were unaffordable, and Rachel Reeves’ incoming promise not to raise the major taxes just as unrealistic. And things have gotten worse since then.
I was a bit surprised therefore, when mildly calling for some leftish think tank to do proper work on welfare reform, to come across quite so many reply-people questioning the premise. I leave it to experts at the Resolution Foundation and elsewhere to set out how there is a problem in welfare itself. But there are two other popular diversions I keep reading: that the problem is the fiscal rules, which just need to be changed (or abolished); and that we can always just tax the rich a bit more.
The fiscal rules are not perfect, and the government (over)reaction mid-year to events framed by those rules is pretty suboptimal. But they are also quite irrelevant. The government’s financial position is objectively bad. Just make a silly little model, with real growth, inflation, taxes as a share of the economy, spending similarly, and interest costs, and you can easily see how quickly things go from dicey to terrible. Here, I have had a rudimentary go.
The Weeping Angel wrote: ↑Tue Jul 15, 2025 9:41 pm Giles Wilkes on the reality of the fiscal situation.Yeah. that was interesting. The amount of tax paid by the top decile is higher than people think as a percentage of income. But, you know. Starmer doesn't tax the rich.
https://freethinkecon.wordpress.com/202 ... al-corner/
It is something of a cliche to argue that Britain is running out of money, living beyond its means, wandering through a fiscal fool’s paradise – but no less true for that. The trend of old-age payments will make it even worse (read The Economist). It was the great unspoken theme of the last election – well, unspoken except for every damned think tanker with a spreadsheet, who could in half a minute explain that Jeremy Hunt’s departing NICs cuts were unaffordable, and Rachel Reeves’ incoming promise not to raise the major taxes just as unrealistic. And things have gotten worse since then.
I was a bit surprised therefore, when mildly calling for some leftish think tank to do proper work on welfare reform, to come across quite so many reply-people questioning the premise. I leave it to experts at the Resolution Foundation and elsewhere to set out how there is a problem in welfare itself. But there are two other popular diversions I keep reading: that the problem is the fiscal rules, which just need to be changed (or abolished); and that we can always just tax the rich a bit more.
The fiscal rules are not perfect, and the government (over)reaction mid-year to events framed by those rules is pretty suboptimal. But they are also quite irrelevant. The government’s financial position is objectively bad. Just make a silly little model, with real growth, inflation, taxes as a share of the economy, spending similarly, and interest costs, and you can easily see how quickly things go from dicey to terrible. Here, I have had a rudimentary go.
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