‘Real’ pay – adjusted for inflation – fell by a record 3% in the quarter to June as the cost of living crisis deepened.

Figures from the Office for National Statistics showed average total pay, including bonuses, grew by 5.1% between April and June while regular pay excluding bonuses grew by 4.7%.

However, when adjusted for inflation (which reached a 40-year high of 9.4% in June), total pay fell 2.5% and regular pay fell by 3%, the fastest decline since comparable records began in 2001.

Ben Harrison, director of the Work Foundation at Lancaster University, a think tank for improving work in the UK, said: “Ahead of next week’s energy price cap announcement, there is more bad news for workers as real wages fell by a record 3% on the year. With inflation at 9.4%, and the Bank of England predicting it will peak at 13% in early 2024, people across the UK are facing more tough decisions as their regular pay fails to keep pace with rising prices. The six million workers in severely insecure jobs will be hardest hit and are already running out of options. Many have already tried to find more hours work and cutback spending but continue to face great uncertainty.”

The average household’s annual grocery bill is now set to soar by £533 to £5,128, the equivalent to £10.25 every week.

(1) UK real pay falls by record 3%, as job vacancies also decline – business live (theguardian.com)

 As with Covid, corporate interests are taking priority over getting monkeypox vaccines to people.

Britain expects to run out of vaccines in the next couple of weeks, with no further deliveries planned until late September. The sole supplier of the only approved vaccine for monkeypox is a Danish pharmaceutical company called Bavarian Nordic. In a case of almost unbelievably unlucky timing, the company’s bulk production line has been closed for refurbishment. Even more, ironically, the company has millions of doses in the freezer, but getting them into vials and ready to go isn’t a small job. The company is looking for other factories to help with this. 

But even when it does happen, the overwhelming bulk of the doses have been bought by the US, with a trickle going to other high-income countries. Africa is so far the only continent to suffer more than a couple of deaths from monkeypox to date, yet it hasn’t received a single dose of vaccine so far.

The vaccine – known as Jynneos, Imvamune or Imvanex – was developed as a safe immunisation for smallpox, and was being kept on hold in case of a biological terrorist attack. It was funded, to the tune of $2bn, by the US government, but like most medicines, it was patented. Bavarian Nordic, which holds the patent, dictates who can make the vaccine, how many doses are made, who gets to buy them and at what price.

 Bavarian Nordic will make a huge windfall, producing and selling as much as the company can manage. Its shareholders have already seen the price of their stock triple.

With monkeypox, profits are once again being put ahead of protecting life | Nick Dearden | The Guardian

 The attainment gap between poorer pupils and their better-off classmates is just as large now as it was 20 years ago.

The study found that disadvantaged pupils start school behind their better-off peers, and those inequalities persist through their school years and beyond – eventually having an impact on earnings.

There is overwhelming evidence that the education system in England leaves too many young people behind, and despite decades of policy focus, there has been little if any shift in the gaps in educational attainment between children from different backgrounds.

The report said: “Despite decades of policy attention, there has been virtually no change in the ‘disadvantage gap’ in GCSE attainment over the past 20 years. While GCSE attainment has been increasing over time, 16-year-olds who are eligible for free school meals are still around 27 percentage points less likely to earn good GCSEs than less disadvantaged peers.”

At the start of their educational journey, just 57% of English pupils eligible for free school meals reached a good level of development at the end of reception in 2019, compared with 74% of their better-off peers, the report notes.

Fewer than half of disadvantaged children reached expected levels of attainment at the end of primary school, compared with nearly 70% of their better-off peers. Of those who do achieve the expected level, just 40% of disadvantaged pupils go on to receive good GCSEs in English and maths, compared with 60% of better-off students.

Perhaps the biggest failure of the education system, the report suggests, is that for those leaving school with poor GCSEs, there is a lack of a clear path and “second chances”, leaving millions disadvantaged throughout their lifetime.

The report finds the relationship between family background and attainment is not limited to the poorest, but educational performance improves as family income goes up. Just over 10% of young people in middle-earning families gained at least one A or A* grade at GCSE, compared to a third of pupils from the wealthiest tenth of families.

These inequalities lead to vast gaps in earning, the report says, pointing out that by the age of 40 the average UK employee with a degree earns twice as much as someone qualified to GCSE level or below.

Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, added: “Government policy is in a rut of meaningless targets, empty rhetoric and pitiful levels of funding”

No improvement in school attainment gap in England for 20 years, report says | Education | The Guardian

 More than 5 billion people would die of hunger following a full-scale nuclear war between the U.S. and Russia. Under this largest war scenario, more than 75% of the planet would be starving within two years.

 Even a localized India-Pakistan war would also reverberate worldwide, resulting in possibly two billion deaths from lack of food.

“The data tell us one thing: We must prevent a nuclear war from ever happening,” said Alan Robock, a Distinguished Professor of climate science in the Department of Environmental Sciences at Rutgers University and co-author of the study. “If nuclear weapons exist, they can be used, and the world has come close to nuclear war several times.” 

Nuclear war would cause a global famine and kill billions, study finds (phys.org)

 Aramco reaped a half-year income of $48.4 billion in profits between April and June this year, compared with $25.5 billion last year. The company enjoyed a similar surge in profits for the first three months. Half-year-earnings reached nearly $88 billion.

Aramco President Amin Nasser said the results reflected “an increasing demand for our products,” and predicted that the trend would continue. “In fact, we expect oil demand to continue to grow for the rest of the decade…”

Saudi oil firm Aramco profits skyrocket amid global instability | News | DW | 14.08.2022

Eight of the 14 areas of England are now classified as being in drought, with hosepipe bans being implemented across increasing areas of the country.

The Environment Agency recently called for water company bosses to be jailed for serious pollution, after finding the water firms’ performance on pollution had declined to the worst seen in years.

 The bosses of England’s water companies have been criticised for banking £58m in pay and benefits over the last five years. Since privatisation, shareholders have been paid £72bn in dividends. The cash came from big debts, with companies borrowing £56bn, and big bills, with prices rising 40%.

Stuart Singleton-White, head of campaigns at the Angling Trust, said: “The profits being made by water companies, who are in effect private monopolies, the dividend payments to shareholders, the inflated salaries and bonuses to the CEOs, and the debts that have been run up by these companies, mostly to support dividends and inflated salaries, rather than finance investment, is a clear sign this is a broken market.”

He pointed out that no new reservoirs have been built in England since water companies were privatised, and that years of underinvestment had led to “unacceptable levels of leaks”. Water companies currently leak around a quarter of their supply through old pipes, with 2,954m litres a day seeping away last year.

“When the crisis hit, our water system was not ready”, Singleton-White said, blaming “the greed of the water companies, the weakness of the regulators and the complacency of the government”.

Former Conservative environment minister Rebecca Pow said, “These salaries are unacceptable if they can’t with a clear conscience provide clean, plentiful and sustainable water.”

Thames Water

Area: Greater London, parts of Kent, Essex and Gloucestershire

Chief executive: Sarah Bentley

Pay: £2m

Tenure: September 2020-present

Bentley landed £2m in pay and bonuses last year. She held senior roles at the telecoms giant BT, the consultancy Accenture and Severn Trent Waterbefore joining Thames Water with a £3.1m “golden hello”, including two £727,000 one-off payments. Last year, the firm was fined £4m for discharging raw sewage in two Oxford streams.

Anglian Water

Area: East of England including Norfolk and Cambridgeshire

Chief executive: Peter Simpson

Pay: £1.3m

Tenure: 2013-present

Last month he had landed a £337,651 bonus despite the company notching up one of the worst pollution records in the industry.

Severn Trent

Area: Stretches from the Bristol Channel to the Humber, and from mid-Wales to the east Midlands

Chief executive: Liv Garfield

Pay: £3.9m

Tenure: 2014-present

 The firm was fined £1.5m for dumping sewage in Worcestershire last year.

Pennon

Area: South-west England

Chief executive: Susan Davy

Pay: £1.6m

Tenure: 2020-present

 South West Water has faced criticism over pollution levels affecting the Cornwall and Devon beaches.

Wessex Water

Area: Parts of south-west England including Dorset, Somerset and Wiltshire

Chief executive: Colin Skellet

Pay: £975,000 last year

Tenure: 1988-present

Wessex Water has issued a warning about “non-essential” water use and he has a 40ft swimming pool at his home in a village outside Bath, thought to be worth more than £3m. Wessex Water paid out £975,000 over raw sewage spills in Dorset in 2018.

United Utilities

Area: North-west England

Chief executive: Steve Mogford

Pay: £3.2m

Tenure: 2011-present

Northumbrian Water

Area: North-east England, Essex, Suffolk

Chief executive: Heidi Mottram

Pay: £648,000

Tenure: 2010-present

Southern Water

Area: Hampshire, West Sussex, Isle of Wight, parts of Kent

Chief executive: Lawrence Gosden

Pay: Undisclosed

Tenure: 1 July-present

Last year Southern was fined a record £90m for deliberately pouring sewage into the sea.

Yorkshire Water

Area: Yorkshire, north Lincolnshire, Derbyshire

Chief executive: Nicola Shaw

Pay: Undisclosed

Tenure: 9 May-present

The former National Grid UK executive director, who was also boss of High Speed 1, is likely to receive similar pay to her predecessor, who received £1.4m.

Scottish WaterArea: Scotland

Chief executive: Douglas Millican

Pay: £558,000

Tenure: 2013-present

 The Kent Miners’ Festival is back on Saturday and Sunday 27th to 28th August (from 10am), and Kent & Sussex branch has booked a pitch in the heritage and community exhibitors marquee.

 Not often that this blog has very much positive to say about the UK military but this is an exception.

Gen Sir John McColl, who served in Afghanistan as the first head of Nato’s International Security Assistance Force (Isaf) in Afghanistan told BBC Radio 4’s World at One that the defence secretary, Ben Wallace, and other ministers should “hang their heads in shame” in regard to the treatment of Afghan refugees.

Two RAF flights carrying as many as 500 Afghans who worked with British forces and their relatives are landing in the UK each month from Pakistan but there is deep frustration within the Ministry of Defence about how the rest of government is struggling to accommodate arrivals. The MoD sources accused other parts of Whitehall of “struggling” to know what to do, and failing to put adequate plans in place.

Britain’s original evacuation of Afghans was “random” and at times dogs had been prioritised over people, he said, adding: “The system was broken when we withdrew from Kabul last year and it remains broken. It was a source of shame then and it continues to be a source of shame.”

Sources at the MoD said that about 1,050 people who were brought out of Afghanistan under Arap were currently in hotels in Pakistan, awaiting processing and transportation to the UK or another destination.

About 6,200 people – including some 1,200 “principals” who worked for the UK, and typically four to five members of their families – are currently understood to be eligible for relocation under the Afghan relocations and assistance policy (Arap), one of two government programmes. The figure includes some who are still in Afghanistan and others who have made it out, more often than not to Pakistan, though Afghans have also attempted to cross the border into Iran, where the strained relationship between Britain and the regime in Tehran complicates the ability to help people. The Arap scheme has brought more than 10,100 eligible Afghans to the UK while another, the Afghan citizens resettlement scheme (ACRS), will allow up to 20,000 to settle in Britain.

However, there has been strong criticism that the UK has effectively abandoned many Afghans to persecution and execution under the Taliban for the crime of having worked with British forces and officials.

Nine expert groups on Afghanistan criticised the British government’s resettlement schemes as “unjustifiably restrictive”. They said it was deeply concerning that the government was currently not offering a safe route for many Afghan women and girls or to oppressed minority groups.

UK treatment of Afghan refugees ‘continues to be source of shame’ | Immigration and asylum | The Guardian

  The pay of the top 1% of earners across the UK – those already on more than £170,000 a year – is rising at an average annualised rate of 9.1%.

At the same time, those in the lowest 10% – those earning below £8,000 a year – have seen their pay rise by just 1.3%. 

the rate of inflation, currently at a 40-year high of 9.4% and forecast by the Bank of England to hit 13% in the coming months. 

Frances O’Grady, the general secretary of the Trades Union Congress, says such stories are familiar up and down the country. “Working people are at breaking point, having been left at the mercy of soaring bills after a decade of standstill wages and universal credit cuts. But for the wealthiest, it’s business as usual. It’s not just pay at the top that is soaring. Bonuses in the City are at a record high and dividend payouts to shareholders are booming. Without urgent action, the cost of living crisis will deepen the class divide in this country even further.”

‘Some people must be earning millions’: inequality in the UK’s highest-earning constituency | Inequality | The Guardian

 Vast swaths of the continental US will be experiencing prolonged and dangerous heatwaves by the middle of the century, with the heat index in some areas above 100F (38C) for weeks on end, according to a new study .

Almost two-thirds of Americans, who live in mostly southern and central states, will be at risk from the critical temperature increases, according to a Washington Post analysis of data from the non-profit First Street Foundation, which used current trends to predict the number of extreme heat days 30 years into the future.

“A changing environment means higher temperatures and changing humidity, creating conditions which exacerbate the effects of extreme heat,” the study reports.

“We’re talking about taking summer, which is already hot, and expanding it for months,” the director of the Houston Healthy Cities program for the Nature Conservancy in Texas, Jaime González, told the Post. “That’s going to cause all sorts of disruptions to everyday life.”

It means as many as 100 million Americans will be living in an “extreme” heat zone that the foundation believes will see the heat index exceed 125F on at least one day of each year, and most probably more.

“While the experience of heat may vary from community to community, there are certain health effects from heat that cannot be ignored.”

Weeks of heat above 100F will be the norm in much of US by 2053, study finds | US news | The Guardian