Labour draws up equality law revamp that will inflict ‘socialism’ on Britain

I seem to remember a few threads on here bemoaning the class bias at the BBC for example. In particular people making the point that "Diversity" efforts ignored the issues of class and therefore you had a cadre of elites (post upper middle class types) who were out of touch and couldn't connect with for example the reasons "ordinary" women might not want trans women in their toilets. But when there is an effort to adjust to this, that's bad to. Inequality is a very hard thing to fix. Especially when the categories (class, income, family income) are quite fluid. But when you are talking about representation in public bodies I think it's important to at least try. Or at least try to avoid discrimination. Just as women shouldn't be discriminated based on sex, maternity etc, so people shouldn't be excluded based on class or accent. That is something that stil happens in the UK.
Its amazing though that all the right wing papers who were asking "what about you g white working class boys, why are they being ignored" when someone else was talking about racism or sexism are now up in arms when the government is looking at improving opportunities for those same white working class boys (and presumably Black WC men and women too).Almost as though the outrage at those groups being ignored was performative all along.

I should add that the low wage low skill economy that we choose to operate requires a constant demand for the lowest cost unskilled workers with all the problems that causes on infrastructure and eventual social unrest.

I agree with your post but there is more around this
We have an historic problem that we are not as productive as workers in other countries.

This is true but not because we are lazy. We are less productive because we don't invest in training and productivity measures. For example a high productivity economy would invest in a digger to dig a hole. Here we would hire 5 blokes and shovel (on minimum wage or at least a lot less than the digger operator) and save the capital expenditure, which presumably would show in our profits or dividends making us seem more profitable. This of course ignores the fact that with a digger you can make holes a lot quicker than 5 blokes and a shovel. We are a low wage low skill economy and have constantly avoided upskilling our workforce (by teaching them to operate diggers) or buying actual diggers. The fault lies with our short termism management and short term returns on capital. Fuck knows how we'd change that, it seems baked in. At least in the anglo-saxon business world.

More people are getting a smaller slice (neoliberal policies) of a smaller pie (brexit). Lose twice unless very lucky.

I don't think it does. Your argument rests entirely on the fact that family two are paying much higher housing costs than family one. Take housing costs out of the equation and there is no reason at all why family one would be better off than family two.
If high housing costs mean family two are left with less than 60% of the median income after housing costs, they would be considered in poverty. If low housing costs mean family one have 60% or more after housing costs, they would not.

Get rid of the housing costs, and the general principle still stands, though.

Poverty in the UK is defined as having income of 60% below the median AFTER housing costs so already allows for the situations you describe.

@5128gap
If we target support to lift children out of poverty, which is a shocking 31% of UK children,

This is a bad measure though, as it’s defined relative to median incomes. If everyone gets richer but some get richer than others, the measure shows that as a bad thing.

Basically, it’s the measure you would choose if you wanted poverty never to be solved, because it makes it mathematically almost unsolvable.

The absolute poverty measure shows large declines over decades, though has flattened out in the recent decade. That’s what we should mostly focus on.

The underlying problem in addressing children in a household classified as living in poverty is that one is dealing with purely statistical measures. Take, for example, the two following families:

• Family one consists of two parents and two children living in the north-east of England in a council house. One parent works, and the household income is just low enough that they qualify as a household in poverty, but they have a very low rent for their housing, no childcare costs and, due to these and other circumstances, the family has a reasonable standard of living.
• Family two consists of a single parent with two children living in London in privately rented accommodation. The parent is a high earner on paper, but has significant travel costs, high rental costs, and high childcare costs, as well as a student loan to repay. The adult was effectively forced to locate to London due to this being the only place where work was available which utilised this individual's qualifications.

As a statistical measure, family one is in poverty, whilst family two is not, but, in reality, family one might have a far higher quality of life and more disposable income. Creating policies to redistribute wealth from family two to family one ought to be seen as problematic, and yet that is what is often advocated for by supposedly progressive politics. And I note that there are many families in similar circumstances to family one who are in genuine need, and many families in similar circumstances to family two who are in comfortable situations, but this is just more reason to think about what is wrong about our society, and try to find better solutions.

I dont mind everyone ignoring what i have posted but if you listen to economists, potential investors, etc, the issue isn't about tinkering with tax levels, or the bizarre notion that Reform would do it better. One of the biggest reasons we are currently up shit creek is the economic negative impact of Brexit.

I think the question is whether you would prefer a quarter of a ten-inch pie, or a third of a nine-inch pie.

Brexit is something which I would consider to be a consequence of ongoing economic and social problems, rather than a cause of them (although it will undoubtedly have its own consequences). Whilst being part of the European Union increased GDP, it's pretty clear that not everyone saw the benefits. If you worked in a large company which employed labour from overseas, or were a mobile professional, the EU might seem unquestionably beneficial; if you were competing for housing, or employment, or public services which might be straining as a result of large-scale EU immigration into your local area, you might not see it as quite so benign.

And this is before we get to some of the absurdities about the situation; an example was paying child benefit to EU workers in the UK for children who were living in other countries. This one was waved away as trivial by the Labour party, though you might be able to see why financially-stretched families might consider it symptomatic of the problems created by EU membership.

So, back to the question of the pie; you actually get more pie if you have a third of a nine-inch pie, even though it's a smaller pie. It might thus be in the interests of individuals to shrink an economy if, by doing so, they gain more power within (and thus benefits from) the economy...

You did. It doesn't make any difference to the point I was making though.

I did not mention the “middle class”. I talked about the class of people who work and pay taxes.

Focusing support on the most deprived is a marathon not a sprint, with the results seen in the next generation. If we target support to lift children out of poverty, which is a shocking 31% of UK children, and as a result those children have better outcomes and prospects, our future society will be better overall.
You think its important that middle class people have children, because you think the children of the middle classes are the superior citizens of the future. However if deprived children had the opportunities of the more privileged, they could make the same level of contribution.

Hard agree. I think this government has taken the idea that we just need higher taxes and more spending, and tested it to destruction.

There are bigger issues around state capacity. Not just the NHS, it's that nothing works any more.

Local councils, driven to bankruptcy by statutory duties, are just stopping doing all the useful discretionary stuff they used to do, and even if they weren't short of money there's still a capacity issue.

That involves entire inspection regimes around things like environmental health. Try finding an EH inspector who's younger than 50. It's not just that the numbers are too low, it's that nobody has entered the profession for years and we're about a decade away at best from the entire EH system collapsing.

You could say similar things about other inspection systems like rogue landlords, or hygiene standards in slaughterhouses (this one being kept afloat by newly qualified vets from Ghana), or the failures behind that vape shop fire in Glasgow.

I don't have an easy solution - I think all these are long term issues, many of them downstream from bad policy decisions 15 or 20 years ago, which will take ages to fix. But we can notice that nothing works.

why not though? 😂 someone was saying they were deprived for living in a council house (rent was 600 as opposed to market value which is 1400) life long tenancy too.
Socially housed are living life on easy mode if anything

I can't help but link this to the news story over the weekend about GPs being told to remove 1 in 4 patient referrals to hospitals to control waiting lists.

I agree, its very concerning.

The thing about this story is that it isn't about GP referring patients inappropriately, its about too many people needing hospital treatment.

So if GPs are pressured to reduce the number of referrals while given a priority list of patients, it is very likely that lots of people will never get referred to fully state funded care. Maybe getting financial help to use the private sector?

One thing you learn from focus groups is that even the voters who are angriest about the state of the country often don't realise the scale of what they have to be angry about.

Take Commonwealth voting, which Reform have started to kick up a stink about. Most normie Brits simply don't believe that foreign citizens who do not also have UK citizenship have the right to vote here. It sounds absurd. Or maybe they think it's restricted to long term residents.

They don't know that someone who came here last week from Cameroon on a student visa can register to vote, and Labour is introducing legislation to automatically register him as a voter.

You can argue for or against that, but what we're getting from Labour and Lib Dem MPs is not even an argument for that, it's an argument that Ofcom should stop people talking about it on X.

This is not sustainable.

That revolution might be Reform. What the current political establishment and many people seem to fail to recognise is that when public institutions make your life measurably worse and don't do what they're supposed to do for you and your family (and it is clear they will NEVER do their job for you) then maybe you're willing to 'throw the baby out with the bathwater' so no one gets those benefits.

So, what is everyone's guess for what proportion the 'everyone else stuck in the middle' is going to be? I suspect on numbers alone that group of people could start a revolution if they get sufficiently pissed off.....

And alongside all this is the total failure to deal with corruption and the zero accountability managerial class.

There are people who are CONVICTED of fraud on a massive scale in public institutions who still get their pension. The taxpayers will never see that money returned.

Things aren't just shit because of cuts, they're shit because of corruption, which no-one is EVER held accountable for. Look at the Post Office Scandal, those sub postmasters were honest and had money stolen from them - many still have not had the full amount returned and some never will because they're now dead (sometimes because of the way they were treated).

I really think we're seeing a societal breakdown because of this.

As Knotty says Nothing seems to be working anymore. It’s like false advertising. We have institutions like the HSE but if you ever try to report something they say it’s not their jurisdiction. So a lot of things are in name only. Why not just shut all these pointless places down if they don’t do anything. That would save a few quid for the essentials?

People are noticing this. Because there's no accountability and public institutions costing millions don't do their jobs and are never held to account, it's not surprising a lot of people (more and more) just want them scrapped and the money saved and put elsewhere.

Another good example is the case on this board of a school failing to safeguard girls by providing their legally mandated single sex spaces. No-one responds properly to safeguarding concerns, it's shifted around and nothing is done, costing goodness only knows how much in staff time, there's no consequence to this deliberate incompetence and refusal to answer basic questions. There's no consequence to people not doing their jobs! What is the point of the plethora of institutions involved if they can't do something as basic as fix the issue of a young girl being forced to strip in front of a male - which is against the fucking law?!!

And none of the bodies contacted have done a single tiny thing other than produce word salad. The father has had to resort to legal action.