Paul Nowak

Today, Ed Miliband used a speech at the Resolution  Foundation to set out how Labour can tackle,

“The 21st century inequality, the fairness divide in our economy, [which] threatens to be about a division between the richest at the top who have been doing well, and the majority -lower and middle-income – who have been struggling to keep up: working harder for longer for less.”

Both his underpinning analysis and suggested policy responses are hard to fault. Growing wage inequality which saw wages for those at the top grow twice as fast as those in the middle; wages which for many struggled to keep pace with the rising cost of living and generated a demand for cheap credit; the need to reverse historic under-investment in skills and technology; the value of an active industrial strategy; and the need for a fairer tax and benefit system.

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Owen Tudor

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been helping the National Union of Journalists to campaign against the cuts being made to the BBC World Service – especially the foreign language services. And they are indeed gutting. Although no one has so far been so inept as to announce any cuts to the BBC Arabic Service in the middle of the biggest upheaval in a generation in the Middle East/North Africa region, the cuts that are being made are just as outrageous and short-sighted.

Trade unionists around the world are as shocked – if not more so – as I am about these cuts, and have recalled on camera and in text the part that BBC World Service language broadcasts have played in defending their human rights and providing them with that most precious of commodities for anyone living under a dictatorship: information.

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Richard Exell

Will there be another recession in 2011? Today’s revised estimates for GDP in the last quarter of 2010 make that a reasonable question to ask. They show output in volume terms down 0.6 per cent from the previous quarter (last month’s initial estimate was a 0.5 per cent fall). This means that the UK economy grew by just 1.5 per cent in 2010 – well below the ‘trend’ rate of 2 – 3 per cent and very disappointing for  a country just emerging from recession.

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Nicholas Jones

Whenever there are news reports of mergers, factory closures or perhaps redundancies, there is every likelihood the emphasis will be on the financial impact of what is being announced.  Trade union leaders might occasionally be asked for their reaction but in all probability the thrust of the coverage will reflect the prospects for the company concerned and its share price rather than the interest of the employees.

Readers, viewers and listeners might not realise the full extent of the shift which has taken place: business news rules supreme and dominates the way the fortunes of Britain’s major employers are reported by newspapers, television, radio and now the internet.

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Richard Exell

NHS trusts are denying operations to up to one in eight of all patients referred by GPs. Pulse magazine reports on the rise of “total referral management”, a variety of cost control measures, sometimes involving “referrence management centres”, some operated by private companies. Four in five primary care organisations now operate a referral gateway of some sort and a growing list of procedureshave to be authorised in this way.

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Richard Exell

Figures released today show that the long-term trend for sickness absence is for it to go down, not up. Not that you’ll read much of that in the papers, most of them are following the Prime Minister’s lead last week when he announced the government’s review of sickness absence:

We simply have to get to grips with the sicknote culture that means a short spell of sickness can far too easily become a gradual slide to a life of long-term benefit dependency.

What is the full picture?

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Richard Exell

Today’s Services Producer Price Index shows lower inflation than other recent indicators. The Index covers the price of services provided to businesses and the government, and the annual rate of increase in the fourth quarter of 2010 was 2.7 per cent. Admittedly, this is up from 2.5 per cent in the third quarter, but it is well below the 4 – 5 per cent ‘near term’ inflation forecast in the Bank of England’s  downbeat Inflation Report. It is also well above the 5.1 per cent level the Retail Price Index hit in January and the 4.0 per cent Consumer Price Index.  Hopefully, this will ease off a little of the pressure for interest rate hikes.

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Anjum Klair

The Coventry Telegraph reports on the cuts announced by Warwickshire County Council. As a result of £21million of cuts in its budget this year, rising to £60 million over three years, there will be a wide scale shutdown of services and job losses. It is expected that there will be about 1,800 job losses over the next three years.

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Anjum Klair

Nursery world reports that in a survey jointly carried out by 4Children, the Daycare Trust and Nursery World only 40 per cent of local authorities were able to commit themselves to keeping all of their children’s centres over the next financial year.

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Anjum Klair

Liverpool City Council has set out its budget proposals for 2011-12 on how it will make £91m of savings during the year. The proposals will be considered by the full council which meets to set the budget on Wednesday 2 March.

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