I was delighted when the Labour Party won the recent election and kicked the Tories out after 14 years of misery.

I am fairly certain that they have good intentions and that they are very competent, but it would appear that they are trying to go too fast.

The British media is awful in so many ways, one of which is the new phenomenon of criticising the government for not fixing everything in mere weeks. They know that their criticisms are ludicrous, but they don’t care because it sells newspapers, get clicks and more viewers, and ultimately negativity rules in political journalism.

Our government has stripped the winter fuel allowance from pensioners who do not receive one of the following allowances-

Pension Credit
Universal Credit
income-related Employment and Support Allowance (ESA)
income-based Jobseeker’s Allowance (JSA)
Income Support
Child Tax Credit
Working Tax Credit

This would be fine, but the above list means that many with very low incomes will suffer.

I have no problem with removing the allowance, it is a hand-out that does not fit in with how the rest of the tax system works, but the government has set the bar too low.

Taking it away from wealthy pensioners who use the allowance to pay for their Winter holiday ski pass is one thing, there are many of them, but it is just too harsh.

And then there is this nugget- ‘Changes to Employer NICs will come into effect from April 2025. The rate of Employer NICs will increase from 13.8% to 15%. Employers will start to pay Employer NICs on salaries from £5,000 (reduced from £9,100). The legal minimum wage for over-21s will rise from £11.44 to £12.21 per hour.’

For a government that needs to grow the economy to build from the ashes of the last government, this does seem to be a strange move which can only result in fewer job vacancies, less corporate ambition and of course lower growth.

It has the potential to create a recession and make everything worse, and this alone could be a decision where media criticism is hard to argue against. On top of this there will be new employee rights which many employers will decry as affecting their ability to grow, but I don’t buy that for one minute. We have lost the notion of a career for many young people who now have to battle for a low paid job with little chance of moving up the ranks and almost no chance of purchasing a house to live in. High rents, long hours, disrespect and not a lot of hope are what the younger generation are facing today.

The number of workers per pensioner in the UK has decreased over the past 50 years due to the ageing population and this will only increase the headwinds against economic growth. It is a list of problems that will take a long time to fix, many years…

I fear that in their desire to fix the major problems we have today, our government could end up making things worse to the point that we are once again governed by a bunch of right-wing zealots who have no real policies apart from hating brown and black people, and next time the zealots could be the very worst we have in our relatively small island.

Categories: Articles, Politics