UK: A left-wing model?
Bush and Blair have both suffered for their misadventures in Iraq. New York and London have both benefitted from their status as global financial centers, and both are in many ways more similar to each other than either is to most other cities in its own country. The US and the UK: transatlantic partners, the West Atlantic and East Atlantic wings of the Anglo-Saxon neoliberal paradigm. Or, not so much:
If we take all taxes and benefits into account, Gordon Brown has clearly been a “Robin Hood” chancellor, especially during Labour’s second term. His measures have raised the incomes of the poorest 10th of households by around 11 per cent, while cutting those of the richest 10th by 4 per cent. The gains at the bottom are smaller and the losses at the top are bigger if you include council tax.
The Chancellor has been selective in his giveaways. He has favoured lower-income pensioners and families with children. ..the proportion of pensioners in poverty relative to average living standards, has fallen from 28 per cent to 17 per cent.
The Chancellor is now paying more than £15bn in tax credits to lower-paid workers and families with children. Not all this money is genuinely additional spending, but the amounts directed at households with children are almost two thirds higher in real terms than under the previous Conservative government. Largely as a result of this largesse, the proportion of children in poverty has fallen from 33 to 27 per cent since Brown took office.
In other words, rising inequality and falling real median wages are not some kind of necessary part of a 21st Century free-market economy. Brown can certainly be criticized, and criticized at length. But it’s also worth stopping to appreciate the degree to which a leftish government can make a real positive difference to average people’s lives.
No Responses to “UK: A left-wing model?”
MrBill • September 28th, 2006 at 3:46 am
Yes, if you believe that wealth redistribution or encouraging parents to have more children on their own is a good thing? Pensioners, of course, have lived, worked and saved their entire lives, supposedly, so I assume it is only right to give them more at the expense of younger workers who have not had the chance to build-up equity, buy homes and raise their own families with their wages.
