It has become an iron rule of recessions that it is the lower and middle-paid sections of the workforce that bear the heaviest burden of the fallout. Of course, with the economic cake shrinking by 7%, pain was inevitable after 2008. Living standards on average were bound to slide. This recession, however, was meant to…
Ed Miliband is hardly the first to attack ‘predator capitalism‘. It was Edward Heath in 2003, who, pointing to the money baron, Tiny Rowland, first coined the phrase, ‘the unacceptable face of capitalism’. In 2009, Lord Turner, chair of the Financial Services Authority described some of the activities of the City as ‘socially useless’. When…
Behind the high profile appointment of Frank Field to review Government poverty policy seems to be a hidden agenda – the redefinition of poverty in absolute rather than relative terms. Iain Duncan Smith, the Work and Pensions Secretary, has more than hinted that he would prefer the adoption of an absolute definition. The official numbers…
Rising personal debt, global imbalances, excessive bank leveraging and reckless financial risk-taking all played a key part in the current economic meltdown. But there is another factor that has been largely ignored – the role of wages which I explore in the first Touchstone Extra – Unfair to Middling: How Middle Income Britain’s Shrinking Wages…
In the ToUChstone pamphlet, Life in the Middle, I argued that the term ‘middle Britain’ has come to be commonly used by the political and media classes to describe a group that sits in the upper half of the income distribution. Indeed ‘middle Britain’ has increasingly become shorthand for the professional middle classes. Yet an…