We’re going to be joining the Left Foot Forward blog team from noon on Wednesday for their live coverage of Alistair Darling’s Pre-Budget Report.
Billed The Left Foot Forward Progressive PBR, it will include other guest commentators and reader discussion through chat on the site and via Twitter (address your tweets @leftfootfwd to get them noticed by the moderators).
Philip Pearson
A banner draped across the prow of the Greenpeace ship Arctic Sunrise, anchored here in Copenhagen harbour, says “Politicians talk, Leaders act”. This morning, as we enter the UN conference centre on the outskirts of the city, past the drums and chants of younger delegates, we pass beneath one of two inflatable archways erected by NGOs, one says Leaders this way and the other, Politicians.
Brendan Barber
There’s a very significant letter published in the FT today, signed by twelve leading professors of economics. They’re calling on the Chancellor, Alistair Darling, not to risk the recovery through premature spending cuts in this week’s Pre-Budget Report. I’ve copied it out below. The letter that shows that while politicians talk tough on public spending, our leading economists are deeply concerned about immediate spending cuts which could undermine recovery.
Those who think the recession is over and are calling for immediate deep public spending cuts are being dangerously complacent. With unemployment rising, and both consumer and business confidence on a knife edge, cutting back on spending now runs the risk of sending us into a second wave of recession.
Will Norman
Today the Young Foundation publishes a major new study looking at people’s needs in Britain. Sinking and swimming: understanding Britain’s unmet needs is based on new analysis of statistical data, case studies, surveys and hundreds of conversations with people across the country. It shows where the most acute needs are and how they inter-relate. It looks at why some people can cope with shocks and setbacks and others can’t. And it draws out the implications for policy, philanthropy and public action.
The study looked at the material needs that are still going unmet (jobs, homes, wealth etc.) and the emerging and increasingly significant psychosocial needs (happiness, self esteem, resilience etc.) experienced by many around the country. In addition to the groups who are particularly affected by pressing need and – in many cases – multiple need, we also focused on a relatively under-researched group, whose needs most people are generally unaware of. We decided to look at needs at night.
Alice Hood
The announcement yesterday that the operating arm of Tyne and Wear Metro is to be privatised was met with bitter disappointment by unions and community campaigners in the region and nationally.
Maeve McGoldrick
The Need NOT Greed coalition launched our campaign ask today calling for the government to increase the earnings disregard, the amount of money that can be earned before it is deducted from their benefits, from the current £5 to £50.
The launch received a lot of media attention including a BBC Radio 5 interview (iPlayer) with a person working cash-in-hand and not declaring it, followed by the TUC’s Nicola Smith. The Radio 5 journalist highlighted the problem with the benefits system, how the present inflexible rules were causing people to fiddle the system, leading them to take cash in hand jobs such as the qualified plumber who is struggling to survive financially on the £64.30 he receives per week from his Jobseekers’ Allowance.
Tom MacInnes
New Policy Institute produced its first Monitoring Poverty and Social Exclusion report for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation in 1998. Entitled “Labour’s Inheritance”, it was the first independent attempt to bring together indicators on low income, unemployment and low pay as well other aspects of social exclusion, such as low educational attainment and poor health. This year we published our twelfth annual report – the first to be written during an economic downturn.
And whilst the recession forms a large part of the discussion in the report, the key findings focus on what was happening before the recession began. What is clear is that problems of rising poverty, debt and unemployment did not begin with the sub prime crisis, and had certainly began before the economy started to shrink. In fact, 2004 looks like the turning point, where trends that were previously positive either stagnated or turned for the worse.
Nigel Stanley
Lord Myners has just told the Lords:
“I would estimate that at least 5,000 people working in the banking industry in the UK will receive, if nothing is done, remuneration in excess of GBP1 million this year.
I think the real responsibility here must lie with the shareholders. Accordingly I have written to the National Association of Pension Funds, the CBI and the TUC urging them to use their influence to persuade trustees to ask their fund mangers: ‘What are you doing to stop these quite unreasonable and unjustified levels of remuneration?’
The decisions about bonuses are going to be made over the next six to eight weeks and it is important our major institutions engage now with the companies and say that ‘we will not support grotesque payments and if you persist in paying them we will exercise our votes to remove from the board the people who authorised them’.”