I’m very lucky. I earn more than the average wage. And yet as a single parent I’ve been struggling in this cost of living crisis.
But it’s not about me, it’s about all of us. Every single person form the “middle class” and downwards. We’ve all been having a hard time – surviving not thriving.
Even the Chancellor Jeremy Hunt himself said that some of his well-heeled constituents were finding life hard too; Apparently £100,000 is “not huge salary in our area if you have a mortgage to pay”.
Wow. Just wow. If I earned £100,000 I could pay off my substantial mortgage in just five years! I should be so lucky!
And this raises two key issues;
The Tories Caused This and are Complaining About it
The “lady from Godalming” who spoke with Jeremy Hunt about eligibility for the Government’s childcare offer, couldn’t receive it because one of her household was on £100,000. Who’s on that wage? Her? Her husband? That means they need childcare because they both work and so there’s a requirement for it.
We don’t have the details of this situation but if a household is bringing in £100,000+ and they’re struggling to afford childcare then something is seriously amiss.
On the one hand, they really may well be struggling. Why is that? Have they overstretched themselves on their mortgage? For anyone on £100,000 exactly, the basic take home pay after tax and NI is £5,713.11 – what on earth are their household bills that they struggle with one of them bringing home nearly £6,000 per month after tax?
On the other hand, they may be out to get everything that they can. They’re already more than three times richer than the average worker but preserving wealth is their primary goal, and taking advantage of every opportunity to stay wealthy is what the rich do.
As I said, we just don’t have the full story. I wish we did. But what are the chances that this family are not Conservative voters? They bring in nearly £6,000 from one breadwinner alone, so it’s highly likely that they’re Tories themselves.
And isn’t that ironic? The current situation the country finds itself in is the responsibility of the Conservatives.
They started austerity. Under the guise of bringing down the national debt, of being fiscally conservative, the Tories have imposed cuts on everything from the Police, the Fire Service, Ambulances, the NHS, libraries, social care; you name it, we’re not allowed to have it because the Tories don’t want us to have it. Sorry, I mean they don’t think we can afford it.
We can afford it! We all pay our taxes, our NI, our council tax. Where are the services we pay for? Surely not everything is so much more expensive that we can’t have it anymore?
Or is there something more sinister at play here?
Are they deliberately breaking things so that they can be sold off cheaply? To their mates? To their already rich voters and donors? When we have one less police station in nearby Fleet, but the land was sold to a developer to build retirement homes – where did that cash go? Who stands to make the most out of this?
But I digress – The Tories started on this trajectory 14 years ago. They rewarded the richest and screwed the poorest. And now some of their own may be starting to feel the pinch.
Saying “Out of Touch” is Just Too Mild
In the story about Hunt’s constituent apparently Labour said how “out of touch” the Tories are.
That term cropped up again yesterday when Rishi Sunak said that he wants to make it harder for people to be signed off work, not in the BBC news story itself, but in comments I’ve seen on Twitter.
Just like Jeremy Hunt is “out of touch” with the average-wage earning majority of Brits who don’t or can’t live in Surrey, so Sunak is “out of touch” with those who really are unable to work.
Hunt and Sunak are both millionaires. And yet they are in positions of power and privilege, making the decisions that affect the vast majority of us who are NOT millionaires.
Hunt sold an online education business and spent some of that money on seven luxury flats in an exclusive Southampton waterfront development. Despite probably having a “first home” and, as many MPs do, a “second home”, he also has these seven properties, that apparently cost £3,560,000 – and most of us are on £30,000! He rents out these seven flats AND he can sell them at any time.
Sunak earns £140,000 as Prime Minister, has expenses, also a “first home” and “second home” plus probably other properties too. He earned £276,000 in dividends alone in the last tax year we have figures for, and would have only paid a paltry 20% capital gains tax on that. The same Guardian story shows that he earned over £17,000 in interest just on his savings!
So whilst many were slogging their guts out, Sunak earned ten times more than they did by doing nothing. Money sat in his accounts earning interest, and his stocks and shares, which should be in a blind trust, also sat ticking over, generating dividend income.
Hunt and Sunak alone do not know what it’s like to be a single parent in a three-bed semi, struggling to make ends meet, and unable to have the finer things in life because we can’t even afford the basics.
And yet all we ever say is that they’re “out of touch”.
They are that, but it’s also much more than that. Better would be to say that they are “completely out of touch with reality”. Lacking a grip on reality is another way of saying it. Lacking empathy is another.
I could be much harsher, but I’ll leave that to your imaginations – Hunt and Sunak haven’t got a clue what it’s like to be average or poor and what’s more – they don’t care!
The Safety Net
A friend on Twitter said that James O’Brien was talking about Sunak’s “safety net”. If he were ever to fall, he has his own safety net and it’s much bigger than what the rest of us have to deal with. And yet Sunak and the Tories are hell bent on reducing and in some cases removing that safety net for the rest of us.
Why is that?
I posit that, alongside the notion of merely being “out of touch”, there’s more to this than comes out their mouths. These people are selfish. And they are greedy. They don’t care about anyone but themselves. And yet the irony is that they have rich friends, and they want them to be rich too, so they rig the system so that those with similarly selfish and greedy traits can benefit too.
They’re robbing the British public. Robbing us of everything that we hold dear – our NHS, our Police, Fire Service, libraries, social housing, social care, clean water, clean air, the trust in our institutions – everything damaged and sometimes destroyed for their own personal gains.
And yet someone with mental health issues or physical disabilities is being threatened with the proposal that their safety net could be much reduced. Millionaires making decisions about the poorest in society. Yet all behind the utterances of there being a “spiralling welfare bill”.
I read one story last night on Twitter of a couple where one of them “burned out” and was finding it increasingly hard to work. It was a sad and genuine tale of the struggles that some people have, especially in their quest to get better and their challenges to find the right healthcare options. Their GP and “the system” let them down and that’s the fault of the Government that has been in power for the last 14 years.
That could have been me. That could have been you.
I work incredibly hard and I have, at times, felt the burnout. I’ve recovered quickly, as my genes are from two resilient hard-working bloodlines, but one day that may not happen. I’ve recently had a second, or is it third, bout of COVID. And then I got a virus on top of that. It’s taken me about two months to recover and I’m still not there yet. And I have scraped together maybe enough to survive for one month, and then I’d me at the mercy of the world.
I’m surviving not thriving.
We should ALL be thriving. Not just the already incredibly rich, who have more wealth than they know what to do with, but every single one of us.
To paraphrase a quote from Morgan Housel’s book “The Psychology of Money” in which there’s a point where he talks about the “golden age” in post-war USA;
“The country was richer when the poor were less poor”
And THAT is what we should aspire to, the next Government too.
Begone with these millionaires, I want a single parent in a 3-bed semi making decisions about the state of the nation.