These are the ways Cameron actually changed society - and what we can expect from Theresa May
'Britain has the lowest*social mobility*in the developed world,' David Cameron said in a speech five years after he became Prime Minister, which was about as encouraging as what May has said this week
“Listen to this: Britain has the lowest social mobility in the developed world. Here, the salary you earn is more linked to what your father got paid than in any other major country. I’m sorry, for us Conservatives, the party of aspiration, we cannot accept that.”*
Those are the words of David Cameron in 2015. He was right: the UK had – and has – appalling levels of social mobility and income inequality, some of the worst in the developed world. At the point at which Cameron explicitly chose to bring this sorry fact up, he’d already been in power for five years – and absolutely nothing had changed.
Actually, it’s not true to say that nothing had changed. Overall inequality remained basically stagnant, but some other important indicators of national hardship had seen significant developments.
*The number of children in absolute poverty was rising, having previously fallen year on year since the mid-nineties. It was 2010 – the year that Cameron took the helm – that marked the reversal of this trend; since then, 500,000 extra children have sunk into poverty, two thirds of whom have at least one parent in work.
People in the bottom 10 per cent of the UK population have on average a net income of £8,468 in 2016. The top 10 per cent have net incomes almost 10 times that (£79,042). Meanwhile, wealth is still spread unevenly across the UK, with the average wage in the North East of the country differing from the average wage in London by about £15,000 per annum.*
If you’re a child who grows up in one of those poverty-stricken households with a parent on a very low salary and few qualifications, your chances of bettering yourself through higher education haven’t gone up under “the party of aspiration” either.
But compare what Cameron said during his speech in 2015 with what Theresa May said this week, as she set out the little that is required of her prime ministerial manifesto. “It is apparent to anybody who is in touch with the real world that people do not feel our economy works [for everyone],” she said, citing the “ordinary members of the public” who “made real sacrifices after the financial crash in 2008”.
Never mind that she voted for the bedroom tax, against using public money to create guaranteed jobs for young people who had spent a long time unemployed, and against tax breaks for small firms taking on extra workers. Most depressingly, she even voted against curbing payday lenders (or loan sharks, as many of us in that “real world” she references call them).
May voted, in 2013, against creating 100,000 affordable homes that would begin to tackle the housing crisis and against banning unfair lettings fees levied by estate agents on tenants rather than landlords. She voted for schemes that would allow employees to sell their rights. She voted against curbing “rip off” rail fares and energy bills, and in favour of repealing the Human Rights Act. And despite grand remarks about our great British industries and how they mustn’t be allowed to collapse or fall into the hands of asset-stripping corporations from overseas, she voted against plans to save the steel industry this year.
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/...-a7133306.html
UK ‘sailing blindly’ into financial meltdown bigger than 2008, think tank warns
https://www.rt.com/uk/354452-financi...nk-regulation/
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