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The Woodcraft Folk are supporting young protesters. As their leaflet for demos says, "the actions young people are taking here are worthwhile, exciting and starting to work."
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David Prosser looks at the evidence showing that consumer confidence is very low.
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Richard Exell
Barclay’s Capital forecasts that Sterling will strengthen against all the major world currencies in 2011. The bank predicts that Japan will return to deflation, worries about sovereign debt in the Euro zone are not going to go away in the near future and that the USA will follow a weak dollar strategy. They also like the cut of David Cameron’s jib – they think that currency and stock markets will be impressed by the deficit reduction plans. As a result the pound should rise by about 25 cents against the dollar compared with its current position and about 7 or 8 per cent against the Euro.
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With the news of more redundancies at Highland, West Berkshire, Waltham Forest and Gloucestershire councils the GMB's running total of local government passes seventy thousand.
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Sensible thoughts from Sunny
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Will Davies briliantly puts tuition fees/university funding in a wider economic context
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Scarlet Harris
When reading the Standard on the tube home yesterday, I was taken aback when I stumbled across a full page advertorial recruiting for Playboy Bunnies.
As hundreds of thousands of public sector employees face redundancy in the next year and students across the country wonder how they’re going to finance their university education or pay off their student debts, I imagine the recruitment pages of papers like the Standard will be increasingly well read.
According to the Standard – this was a paid for advertorial, written by a Standard journalist and presented as an article – this represents a career opportunity for a female graduate “looking to add another string to their bow”. It’s lucky that I’m already in gainful employment. I would struggle to get a foot on the career ladder these days if employers are looking for Playboy Bunny experience in addition to a university degree.
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UNISON has set aside £10 million for nationalo campaigning against the cuts and £10 million extra for the union’s industrial action fund.
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A new report from UCU says 49 of England's 130 higher education institutions have a high risk of being seriously damaged by the government's proposed higher education funding changes. This could mean mergers or, in some cases, closure; four universities – Bishop Grosseteste University College Lincoln, Edge Hill University, Newman University College and Norwich University College of the Arts – are at 'very high' risk.
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Nigel Stanley
The Daily Mail is well known as a womens’ newspaper. Only it and the Daily Express have more women readers than men (- and one suspects the latter has more to do with the fact that its male readers are dying quicker than its female readers.)
Yet they happily parrot a deeply anti-woman line from the Tax Payers’ Alliance when they report that workers in the private sector are “working harder” than those in the public sector.
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Richard Exell
This morning BAE Systems, the defence, security and aerospace company, announced that it has started consultations with unions about 1,400 job losses in Lancashire, Greater Manchester, Moray, Ayrshire, Hampshire, Rutland and Somerset. The company said that the decision was made after “a detailed review of the implications of the UK Government’s Strategic Defence and Security Review.”
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Paul Sellers
Are we really all in it together? As we count down the shopping days until Christmas new figures from ONS show that mean average salaries only increased by 0.2% during the last year, but this national average hides a wide range of real outcomes.
Some people have been hit particularly badly. For example, average salaries for employees in the agricultural sector actually fell by 8.5%. This makes the Government’s plans to abolish the Agricultural Wages Board for England and Wales look absolutely nonsensical, unless their secret plan is to increase rural poverty.
In sharp contrast though, average pay in the banking sector rose by 11.3%, with increases heavily skewed towards those at the top of the industry. Banking bonuses are back with a bang, rising by a cool 43.8% – jeroboams all round!
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Richard Exell
The UK’s negative trade balance widened in October, with total imports £3.9 billion higher than total imports that month. Concentrating on trade in goods, the balance was -£8.5 billion, the highest ever recorded. This was disappointing, as the goods deficit had been expected to be about £500 million lower than this. The deficit for goods excluding oil and other erratic items was -£8.2 billion, another record.
Regular readers may point out that this seems to contradict the picture of healthy manufacturing exports evident in recent data.
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Richard Exell
The 2009 figures for Regional Gross Value Added (the nearest thing to a GDP figure for each region) published today by the Office for National Statistics give us a picture of the impact of the recession around the country. Comparing the 2009 figure for each region with the 2008 level, we can see that the recession has made every part of the UK worse off. But some regions were hit worse than others, ranging from a 3.2 per cent decline in GVA in the East of England to 0.9 per cent in Scotland:
There is a bit of a tendency for the regions that were most successful at the start of the recession to have suffered most, but its not a simple relationship.