Canada’s federal court has ruled that a pact with Washington which prevents migrants from seeking asylum when they attempt to enter the country from the US is invalid because it violates their human rights.
Under the so-called Safe Third Country Agreement between the two neighbors, asylum seekers at a formal border crossing traveling in either direction are turned back and told to apply for asylum in the country they first arrived in. Lawyers for refugees who had been turned away at the Canadian border challenged the agreement, saying the United States does not qualify as a “safe” country under Donald Trump.
More than 50,000 people have illegally crossed the Canada-US border to file refugee claims over the past four years, with some walking through waist-deep snow and fording icy rivers. Canada sought to stem the number of asylum seekers that flowed into the country starting in 2016, after Trump promised to crack down on illegal immigration into the US.
Federal court judge Ann Marie McDonald ruled that the agreement was in violation of a section of Canada’s charter of rights that says laws or state actions that interfere with life, liberty and security must conform to the principles of fundamental justice.
Born to Wealth
One in 10 of UK adults born in the 1980s will inherit more than half as much money from their parents as the average person earns in a lifetime, according to a new report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, one of the nation’s leading economics thinktanks.
It said wealth passed down from one generation to the next was fast-becoming the most important determinant of how well-off people will become.
On average, the inheritances of adults born in the 1980s will be worth as much as 14% of their overall lifetime earnings from work, compared to 8% for people born in the 1960s.
The thinktank found the median inheritance for those born in the 1980s is estimated to be £136,000, compared to £107,000 for those born in the 1970s and £66,000 for those born in the 1960s. This represents a more than doubling in the size of inheritances, at a time when incomes have barely risen for young adults compared to previous generations.
The IFS said people born in the 1980s had accumulated no more wealth than adults born in the 1970s had done by the same age, but that their parents were 40% better-off in comparison.
The IFS said adults born in the 1980s currently earn less than adults born just 10 years earlier had done by the same age. However, it found that while one in 10 of those born in the 1960s would inherit an amount equal to at least 32% of average lifetime earnings, one in 10 of those born in the 1980s will inherit more than 52% of average lifetime earnings.
David Sturrock, a senior research economist at the IFS, said: “So what we see today as differences in wealth between different generations is on course to have important implications for social immobility within younger generations.”
Robert Palmer, executive director of the campaign group Tax Justice UK, said: “This report is further proof of the scale of wealth inequality with inheritances set to grow in coming years.”
Official figures show that the income of the richest 20% of people in Britain was more than six times the poorest 20% in the last financial year.
Australian athletes abused
The blog has posted on the abuse of female athletes in the UK and in Japan and now stories are emerging from Australia of similar behaviour.
Dozens of Australia’s former top gymnasts have spoken out to allege instances of mental and physical abuse within the nation’s elite programme. Many argued that coaches normalised a “toxic” environment.
Dozens of Australia’s former top gymnasts have spoken out to allege instances of mental and physical abuse within the nation’s elite programme. Many argued that coaches normalised a “toxic” environment.
Generations of former gymnasts have posted publicly about damaging experiences. Their allegations include:
Pressure over their weight and incidents of food deprivation; some detailed experiences with bulimia Pressure to train and perform through injuries such as broken bones Being coerced to perform stunts beyond their ability Widespread violations of adult-child supervision guidelines A “toxic” environment of criticism and negativity
Chloe Gilliland, a gold medallist at the 2006 Commonwealth Games, said she had felt depressed and anxious at her “peak”, and left the sport for her own wellbeing when she was 17. She said was regularly insulted by her coaches, called stupid and overweight, and isolated from her teammates. She added she had suicidal thoughts.
Olivia Vivian, who began in the sport when she was nine, said she learnt as a child to hide experiences from her parents. She represented Australia at the 2008 Olympics but after reaching that level became “a broken athlete and a broken person,” she wrote.
Many said they wished to change the environment for other children and teenagers currently in the sport.
“I am scared to share my story, but at some point, someone has to stand up for the athletes,” said Mary-Anne Monckton, who won two silver medals at the 2014 Commonwealth Games. “The abuse (physical, mental and emotional) needs to stop, or at least be stamped out of our sport,” she said.
A young South Korean triathlete has taken her own life after lodging a number of complaints over alleged abuse from her coaching staff.
Choi Suk-hyeon, 22, said she endured years of abuse, but that her complaints to sporting authorities were ignored, reports say. She was selected for the national triathlon team in 2015 as a teenager. A number of sportswomen have reported abuse in South Korea over the years.
All this abuse for the sake of promoting national prestige by gaining medals in international competitions.
There is no population time bomb
Popular wisdom has it that the world population numbers are exploding. Recent projections show just how wrong that is – we are actually in a time of a population slowdown. It has been obvious for some time that the human population slowdown began many decades ago, but just how rapid that slowdown is has been apparent only very recently.
In 2013 the United Nations upped its estimate of the future 2100 global human population total from 10 billion to 11 billion. And again in 2015 the UN said the global population would reach 11.2 billion by 2100, and then in 2017 it repeated exactly the same number. The UN methodology had ignored a baby boom. Their models did not take into account the fact that birth rates between 2011 and 2019 were high because these were the great-grandchildren of so many people born worldwide shortly after the Second World War – the original peak was simply working its way through the generations. The UN also failed to recognize what had made fertility so high in African countries in recent years (on which more below) or that the world was still experiencing a huge cultural shift regarding the rights of, and respect for, women.
Jørgen Randers, a Norwegian academic in 1972 predicted a sharp rise to an unsustainable world population of 15 billion people by 2030. Darrell Bricker,and John Ibbitson in their book ’Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline’ now believe that because fertility rates suggest that: ‘The world population will never reach nine billion people… . It will peak at eight billion in 2040, and then decline.’
Wolfgang Lutz, a well-respected demographer, along with his colleagues at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Vienna, also expect that the global human population will stabilize by 2050 and then begin to fall. In 2018 Lutz and his colleagues stated that they forecast the world population peak to occur shortly after 2070. Their projection would mean between two billion and three billion fewer humans by 2100 than the UN currently estimates.
A recent Deutsche Bank report by Sanjeev Sanyal that suggests the peak in human numbers on Earth will be reached at just 8.7 billion in 2055, and decline to 8 billion by 2100.
Danny Dorling in 2013 wrote a book titled ’Population 10 Billion’ proposes that most likely at the time was that we would see a maximum of 9.3 billion around the year 2060, dipping perhaps to 7.4 billion by 2100.
When you can trust that society will look after you, then you can more happily choose to have no babies, or just one. You do not need the insurance policy of having children to look after you in the future – or a great number of children (which people have when their children’s individual chances of survival are poor). And when women are able to make their own choices about whether to have a child and how many to have, then – everything changes. Population growth was enormous worldwide in the 1940s, 1950s, and at the start of the 1960s: the growth rate itself was growing! But then, quite suddenly, but also remarkably smoothly, the rate of growth began to slow. Between 1980 and today, global human population growth rates became stable at around 80 million more people being added per year.
This stable growth is attributable to a combination of fewer births and, crucially, growth mainly because the people alive at that time were living longer. Next, because there are limits to the amount that life expectancy can increase, from 2020 onward that rate of worldwide population growth is itself projected to fall. The UN thinks that it will fall very steadily, to 70 million a year being added in 2030, 60 million in 2040, 50 million in 2050, 40 million in 2060, just over 30 million being added each year in 2070s, and then a little slowdown itself in the rate of slowdown. Why? Because the UN demographers currently believe that the whole world will move toward a two-child norm. However, that key assumption has no historical or scientific basis. Everything has changed so much that choosing to have no children, or just one child, is for the majority of women worldwide now just as easy as – if not easier than – choosing to have two.
CHINA
China’s population is now expected to peak in 2030 at 1.44 billion and then drop to below 1.4 billion in 2044, dip below 1.3 billion by 2060, below 1.2 billion just after 2070, below 1.1 billion in 2086, and fall below 1 billion around the year 2104 – but only if current projections turn out to be accurate. It could drop faster, since the relaxation of the one-child policy has not resulted in a substantial rise in births. Cultural attitudes to family size have changed in a way that would now be hard to reverse. China’s birth rate is currently dropping far more quickly than either the UN or official Chinese projections had envisaged.
AFRICA
By 2020 Africa’s population will have grown to 1.35 billion people, which means it will still be less than that of China at 1.42 billion. However, very soon after 2020, as China slows down, and as most African countries are expected to continue to experience population acceleration, the continent as a whole is projected to far outstrip China in population. This will be the first time in many thousands of years that there will be more people living in Africa than in China. Recent years, 2000-15, had seen unusually high population growth across Africa. It is the projection forward of that unusual and very recent high rate of growth that drove the UN projection model published in 2017. The projected future rise of the population of so many African states relies on a demographic model that is beginning to look very questionable. It is certainly true that Africa is home to many of the countries that currently have the highest fertility rates in the world. But the supposition that birth rates across Africa will in future slow down only slightly is dubious. It assumes that what is going on in the rest of the world will have little effect on the continent. With much of the rest of the world approaching a population shortage, out-migration from Africa may well rise in future in response to the growing need for younger people around the rest of the planet. This would further dampen the rate of acceleration of population growth across Africa below that which is currently predicted by the UN. With higher adult out-migration from Africa, fewer children would be born within Africa.
Furthermore, migrants who leave countries of high fertility tend to have fewer children over the course of their lives than those who remain. This, of course, also assumes that removal (by emigration) of some fraction of a peer group has no effect on the pace of fertility decline among those remaining. But what if conditions for those remaining also improve, access to secondary and tertiary education improves, and the reasons so many people had for leaving are reduced?
There is growing evidence that the most recent years in Africa have been an aberration. In February 2019, research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences was widely reported around the world. The researchers found that it was most likely a disruption in access to decent education in many African countries in the 1980s, especially for girls, that led to young women having more children, producing this recent (and very possibly temporary) aberration in what had previously been a faster rate of slowdown.
In the past 20 years, access to education for girls across Africa has improved markedly. None of this is taken into account in the UN’s models. The disruption to education in the 1980s was during the worst recorded period of economic decline that the countries of Africa had ever collectively suffered, a decline that occurred under the structural adjustment policies introduced by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Girls who couldn’t attend school in the late 1980s and early 1990s due to structural adjustment became women who on average had children earlier and more children overall. Poverty, despair and ignorance increase fertility. The damage wreaked on the continent by those structural adjustment programmes was devastating.
INDIA
Improved infant survival chances after Indian independence meant that the population of the new state of India grew by more than 20 per cent every decade from 1951 onwards, right through until 2001-11, when growth slowed to just under 20 per cent in the final 10 years for which we have an accurate count. The population of Pakistan grew by just as much but slowed to 20.1 per cent growth between 2001 and 2011, and it has been estimated to be decelerating throughout the most recent years. Most important, Bangladesh has slowed down the fastest, with its population growing by only 16.9 per cent between 2001 and 2011, mostly due to people living longer, rather than more births, and with its rate of population growth also falling each year within that period due to the decline in births.
The period of acceleration of the population growth of the Indian sub-continent as a whole ended in 1995, when 24 million people were added in just one year. The slowdown has already begun. It started a quarter of a century ago in India, but it is currently projected to be a slow slowdown, with growth falling below the addition of 20 million people a year in 2020, below 10 million a year in 2043, and reaching zero growth – peak Indian subcontinent population – in 2063 (or 2059, according to the 2019 UN estimates). After that, the 2017 UN projections suggest the population will shrink by more than seven million people a year for the first time in 2094, when the total is still above two billion people, one billion having been reached in 1987. However, there are very good reasons to believe that the slowdown could be quicker than that, with the very recent falls in fertility being the most obvious sign that the UN’s projections, those made in both 2017 and 2019, overestimated future population in its ‘most probable’ outcome. But the stories of other countries are telling, too. We can learn much from the recent past of other countries – as long as we look.
USA
Migration into the US that had taken place between 1990 and 2017 came from neighbouring Mexico (12.7 million people). This resulted in Central America and the Caribbean accounting for just over 47 per cent (22.4 million) of the total migration to the United States in that period. Mexico was followed by China, India and the Philippines in importance, each contributing over two million people to the in-migration count. Six other countries contributed more than one million people to the US’s immigration numbers: Puerto Rico, Vietnam, El Salvador, Cuba, South Korea and the Dominican Republic.
US politicians reacted to this acceleration with sanctions. The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) was signed into law in September 1996. Deportation from the United States went from being a rare phenomenon to a relatively common one. More immigration enforcement is one big reason why there are so many unauthorized immigrants in the US today. People were actually more likely to remain in the United States because of the difficulty they encountered going back and forth to their country of origin, and obtaining legal status became much more problematic.
Unlike the rest of the Americas, in 2100 the US is still predicted to be growing in population size. UN projections are especially over-optimistic as far as the United States is concerned and its population will actually fall at some point during this coming century.
Full article at
The Kurdish Issue
It’s hard to believe that not so long ago the Kurds were being lauded on the international stage as victors and heroes. The plucky ones who, with international coalition support, saw off Islamic State (IS) in Syria. Whose women and men had bravely led the ground fight against IS and taken back the Syrian city of Raqqa that the extremists had made ‘capital’ of their caliphate. Who, as part of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), partnering with the US, drove IS militants out of their last stronghold of Baghuz in early 2019.
Young female fighters of the Women’s Protection Units (YPJ) were the symbol, not only the more acceptable face of the Kurdish armed struggle, but also the most interesting and media-friendly one. Rojava was viewed as a haven of grassroots democracy, based on principles of feminism, ecology, cultural pluralism, participatory politics and a co-operative sharing economy. Since 2012 it has presented a radical alternative to the nation state, articulated as ‘democratic confederalism’ by Abdullah Öcalan.
David Graeber describes Rojava’s revolutionary autonomy as ‘a synthesis of the ideas of American anarchist and social ecologist Murray Bookchin and other authors, Kurdish tradition, and wide-ranging experience in the pragmatics of revolutionary organization.’ It had inspired people around the world. Dreams of a pan-Kurdish state of greater Kurdistan seem remote today.
Then, on 6 October 2019, Trump announced, after a phone call with Turkish leader Erdoğan, that he was pulling US troops out of North and East Syria. It gave a green light for Turkey to invade Rojava, which it did three days later. Faced with Turkish military might, Syria’s Kurds struck a deal with Assad, their former enemy, for an attempt at security.
On 22 October Russia and Turkey reached an agreement. Turkish troops would remain in the areas they had seized and Russian troops and the Syrian army would control the rest of the border. The Kurdish People’s Protection Unit element of the multi-ethnic SDF had 150 hours to withdraw. Both powers agreed they would not allow ‘any separatist agenda’ in the territory.
Turkey had got away with creating a 5,000-square-kilometre, ideally Kurd-free, buffer zone within Syrian Kurdistan. The Syrian Kurds, still under attack today, had been stitched up by the great powers and hung out to dry by their former allies.
The geopolitics are complex and gives Turkey clout. Turkey is host to 3.5 million refugees, many of whom would rather go to Europe. For Erdoğan they are a weapon that can be unleashed at any time on the EU and its neighbours. The countries of Europe have domestic, populist, political imperatives for keeping migrants out that trump humanitarian (and economic) reasons for letting them in. Turkey has the second-largest army of all members and housing 50 US nuclear bombs. It’s the world’s fifth-largest buyer of arms, 60 per cent coming from the US and plenty from the UK, France, Spain and Russia. Turkey also invests lavishly in lobbying power, spending $6.6 million on influencing the US government in 2018.
What’s happening in where 15 million Kurds live affects Kurds in the wider region too. Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party won the March 2019 local elections, the People’s Democracy Party , a pro-peace, pro-Kurdish, bottom-up, Left alliance, did very well in the majority-Kurdish east of the country. Erdoğan instigated another round of politically motivated trials against party members, officials and politicians, accusing them of links with the outlawed PKK, which the government designates as terrorist. Elected mayors belonging to the opposition were arrested, stripped of office and replaced by government trusties. With local democracy being destroyed, power transferred to paramilitary forces. Modelled on the hated ‘village guard’ system of government spies, ‘neighbourhood guards’ are operating in Kurdish-majority cities, armed and with the authority to search and harass locals. The so-called NGO, People Special Forces arms people to “protect” the state from its enemies. They are a paramilitary force, equipped and trained to attack opposition groups and movements. The policy is to build fear and anxiety.
The Bezos Billions
Bezos is among the elite set of American billionaires who have seen their net worth skyrocket since the pandemic began. The wealth of Amazon’s CEO has grown by $74 billion since the beginning of the year and now sits at approximately $189 billion.
The pandemic has also ushered in a crisis of housing insecurity, with nearly a third of Americans missing their mortgage or rent payments in June. Twenty percent of renters didn’t pay their rent on time in May and 31% weren’t able to in April.
As Common Dreams reported Monday, the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP) also saw unprecedented growth in demand this spring.
While Amazon reported $13.9 billion in income in 2019, Bezos’ company managed to pay just $162 million in federal taxes last year—a 1.2% tax rate despite the United States’ 21% federal tax rate for corporations. The previous two years, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, Amazon paid $0 in federal income tax.
While setting a new record on Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index, the group wrote, Bezos’ company also cut a $2 per hour temporary raise given to warehouse employees when the pandemic began and in May Amazon reportedly told workers its paid sick leave policy doesn’t apply to its warehouses.
Bezos gained $13 billion today. That’s more than the GDP of about 50 countries. Bezos has added $61.4 billion to his net worth this year. A report in from the US labor department suggests that if the US Economy does recover the vast majority of US workers can expect to return to work at a lower wage. This will be due primarily to two factors. One an overly large pool of unemployed workers all competing for the same job and secondly the Corporations needing to recover lost profits through the pandemic. There are already a large number of “white collar workers” who have taken wage cuts so as to keep their jobs and those Corporations will not restore those cuts when (if) the economy recovers.
Questions on a Falling Populations
Falling fertility rates – the number of live births per woman go hand in hand with better education and career opportunities for women, their access to contraception and abortion and lower child mortality rates which mean women on average have fewer children.
For lower-income countries, a falling birth-rate could spell better living standards as a smaller number of children each get a bigger piece of the pie, whether that’s health or education.
However, in countries where fertility rates have already been falling for years, shrinking further could cause problems. These countries will have to work out how to care for a growing older population, with fewer younger people to work as carers and to pay into the safety-net system.
A lot of the worries about caring for an ageing population assume everyone will be ill in old age.
But as well as life expectancy, the world has been making gains when it comes to “healthy life expectancy”.
In pretty much every country around the world, with the notable exception of Syria, new babies are expected to spend more years in good health than those born in the year 2000 – five extra healthy years on average.
In Rwanda, the average baby has gained 22 additional years of expected life in good health since the start of the millennium.
In higher-income countries like the UK, Germany and the US, healthy life expectancy has increased by between one and three years.
“The fears around an ageing population have to be put into perspective,” says Prof Sarah Harper at the Oxford Institute of Population Ageing.
“The health of older adults is already much better than it was,” even a few decades ago, she points out, meaning older people can be “active, healthy” and paying in for a greater proportion of their lives. The elderly may well have to work for a lot longer. Governments are already raising the retirement age for pensions.
And, as Dr Hannah Ritchie at the University of Oxford’s Our World in Data team points out: “We don’t even know what the world of work will look like in 50 years”.
Fertility rates and life expectancy are two parts of the equation when it comes to whether a population is growing or shrinking. The third is migration.
Countries that end up with much smaller populations of young people might want or need to attract young people from elsewhere. The world could become even more culturally and ethnically mixed, says Dr Ritchie.
No matter how big the gains in healthy life expectancy, the “oldest old” will probably always need care towards the end of their lives.
Dr Tiziana Leone at the London School of Economics warns countries with ageing populations face a crisis in terms of their health and social care systems.
We need to start now, by training the right workforce – “we’ll need fewer paediatricians and gynaecologists”, she says. Carers will be “as important as doctors”
A shrinking population is “a good thing” for the environment, according to Prof Harper.
But Dr Ritchie points out that economic growth is a stronger driver of climate change than population growth. If the world becomes richer and consumes more despite the numbers of people shrinking, environmental gains aren’t guaranteed. Equally, while wealth and pollution have been linked over the past century, in recent years it’s the richer countries that have been able to reduce their CO2 emissions by investing in technology. And this pattern could continue.
Population and socialism
Yes, it would be correct to say that socialism would be a lot easier to implement and operate with less people to provide for. But if wishes were horses, all beggars would ride, as the old saying goes. Socialism will inherit the problems capitalism has created for itself.
The reality is that globally the population is growing and the question is, can it be reduced? The stark answer is not immediately – even if fertility rates were lowered. The number of people in a country continues to rise for years after people stop having children– a phenomenon known as population momentum.
Thus, the projection is that global population will go from approaching 8 billion today to about 11 billion in around year 2100 then plateauing and then finally begin to drop back to about what it is today. But even now such high figures are being challenged by experts in the field who suggest lower numbers and a an earlier date for the decline to commence
So socialists fully expect and are required to plan for an increased number of people, something that we cannot avoid regardless of any family planning which is already being increasingly adopted without any compulsion by better educated and more empowered women, even in patriarchal dominated cultures.
Our argument is that with rational allocation of resources that should not be a problem and free access can still be accomplished. We do have the capability of comfortably coping and still create a sustainable steady-state, zero-growth economy eventually.
This is not to say that population numbers and density will not be a critical crisis for capitalism and another reason why for the sake of humanity it must be done away with.
Along with a population rise we also have the related issues that will arise in the future.
Firstly, the demographic problem of higher numbers of elderly with less adults of working-age to support them. China’s one-child policy resulted in what was called the 1 – 2 – 4 paradox. One active worker supporting retired parents and because of better health prospects his or her grand-parents. Such family support is essential in countries lacking social safety-nets for the old and frail.
Secondly, we also have the situation of urbanisation and over-crowding in slums and shanty towns of some major cities as the industrialised plantation-type cash-crop farming leads to the demise of the small-farmers. (To be exacerbated by climate change in many areas of the world)
And thirdly, we have the nationalist prejudice against the movement and migration of people. We witness this right now. The youth of Africa thwarted by lack of prospects seek opportunities in Europe where there is already a declining work-force that requires an influx of newcomers. But rather than be welcomed, they are being excluded.
Socialists cannot deny these conditions result in suffering and misery for as long as we live under capitalism. But we challenge the view that solutions cannot be achieved with the establishment of a cooperative society. In fact, only socialism can overcome them.
And that is the reason why great changes in people attitudes on how we view our world are required.
More Houses to Live In
Promises to revitalise high streets with a new breed of shops should be abandoned in favour of turning town centres into residential hubs, creating at least 800,000 homes, according to a report by the Social Market Foundation (SMF)that aims to influence a Downing Street review of planning laws. Its report, ‘A New Life for the High Street,’ that under a “conservative assumption” 5% of commercial land could be released for development, allowing at least 800,000 homes to be built.
It said the decline of the traditional high street could not be reversed by policies that “turn the clock back” to a time before online shopping, especially after the trend accelerated during the coronavirus pandemic. Homeworking was also likely to become a permanent feature of many jobs, leading to further declines in footfall in town and city centres and the closure of more retail outlets.
Empty shops should be given a new lease of life as homes or be demolished in favour of modern apartments to support “new and more beneficial uses for town-centre sites”.
SMF research director, Scott Corfe, “Nothing can stop the demise of traditional high street shopping so it would be better for politicians to support the next chapter in the story of the high street, with hundreds of thousands of new homes that bring new life to our urban centres.”
Worse to come?
British households have suffered the biggest hit to their finances since the oil crisis of the mid-1970s. Against a backdrop of rising job losses four months into the crisis, the Resolution Foundation thinktank said the average household in Britain had suffered a 4.5% drop in income in the month of May, compared with their average monthly income level in the financial year ending March 2020, before the pandemic struck.
Despite the government ramping up spending to cushion the economic blow, with 9.4m jobs furloughed on its coronavirus job retention scheme and £9bn of fresh funding for the benefits system, it said income levels for the typical family had crashed back down to 2006-07 levels in a matter of months.
The thinktank said the hit to incomes was bigger than the one families suffered during the 2008 financial crisis. The income of typical working-age households fell by 2.7% as a result of the banking crash little more than a decade ago.
The Resolution Foundation said the financial impact from Covid-19 comes after a decade of stalling improvements for living standards in Britain. After one of the weakest economic recoveries on record following the 2008 financial crisis, workers’ average pay after accounting for inflation only returned to its pre-crisis peak in December, following 12 years of sluggish growth. It said the decade of lacklustre gains meant the poorest 10th of households in Britain had incomes no higher on the eve of the coronavirus pandemic than in the early 2000s.
The Resolution Foundation said ministers providing emergency funds to cushion the economic fallout had prevented a worse outcome, with the study finding that the poorest fifth of households had seen no immediate hit to their income at all during the first phase of the crisis. Without action, the poorest families would have seen their incomes collapse by at least 8%, it said.
The Treasury’s furlough scheme is due to be cut back from the start of next month, before it is closed completely at the end of October. Last week, the government’s economics forecaster, the Office for Budget Responsibility, warned at least 10% and up to 20% of the 9.4m jobs protected by the scheme could be made redundant when it is closed. The OBR warned unemployment was on track to more than double to levels unseen since the 1980s before Christmas.
Frances O’Grady, the general secretary of the TUC, said, “Working people must not pay the price of the pandemic. The government should step in with much greater targeted support to save jobs in hard-hit sectors like retail, manufacturing and aviation,” she said. “The more people we keep in work, the faster we can get ourselves out of recession and get living standards rising again.”
Adam Corlett, a senior economist at the Resolution Foundation, said: “The government’s unprecedented policy response has played a critical role so far in protecting millions of households, and particularly the poorest, from the worst of the crisis. But for many the threat of further income falls looms large.”