A RESOLUTION Foundation report was published on July 4 – Independence Day – titled the Living Standards Audit 2022. As a person living in the UK, reading it will make you weep – if it doesn’t, you are “weel aff” and “dinna gae a stuff”.
Many will not be able to read it as it is an online resource. Many will be looking at their menu planner to make sure that they can feed their family for £20 per week or near as possible.
Highlights are that prior to 2004-05, typical average household incomes for non-pensioners grew by 2.3 % per year. From 2004-05 and 2019-20, however, that growth slowed to just 0.7 %.
Even more starkly, the typical incomes of the poorest fifth of the population were no higher on the eve of the pandemic than they were back in 2004-05.
Let that sink in for a moment. The poorest in the UK are being paid on average the same as they were in 2005. Yet the UK now has 177 billionaires, an increase of 500%, more than a similar period.
Across European countries, only households in Greece and Cyprus saw a worse performance between 2007 and 2018 than the UK. In another recent report by the ONS, UK economic performance is just ahead of Russia. Wow, what a performance.
By 2018, typical incomes were notably higher than those in the UK in Ireland (by 6%), France (10%) and Germany (19%). In 2016, people in the UK voted to leave the EU – doesn’t this seem a flawed strategy now?
Some people predicted this would happen, but there are others still looking towards the “sunny uplands”.
It seems only the “entitled” groups have been able to protect their revenue stream and investment/wealth portfolios. The least well-off are having what wealth they have systematically extracted by failure of the safety net system of benefits, and the Covid pandemic is a being used as a cover story.
The “Levelling Up” agenda will be used to protect the UK “Blue Wall”, to keep UK Conservatives in Government, even with a slim majority, again with the DUP.
Scottish Conservatives, Labour and Liberal Democrats don’t matter as the UK Conservatives are into “circle the waggons” mode, and will be for the next 20-plus months, till next General Election in 2024.
Alistair Ballantyne
Birkhill, Angus
HALF past 2022!
When Leave.eu started spreading their lies in 2015 and spent huge amounts illegally on discrediting the EU, our politicians – sensitive to the terrible impact on Scotland that such a move would have – did nothing useful. Was that sheer ignorance or was it deliberate?
Despite The National’s front-page splash on May 8 2015 celebrating the exceptional landslide for the SNP in that year, the looming reality of the situation was ignored. Far worse, actually!
The SNP, both in Holyrood and Westminster, set about stopping England from getting the independence it wanted and had campaigned for.
The SNP continued this “anti-independence” behaviour for four long years, without a single constructive brick being laid for our own path on that independence journey for which they had a clear mandate.
So here we are. Our country and our people are in dire circumstances due to that lack of bricks, and yet negotiation with proven liars and manipulators of the truth in London remains the favoured way to proceed.
This is untenable! The Tories have made it crystal clear that they will NOT agree to an indyref. That they will NOT agree to negotiate after the result is delivered, and so what is the point of waiting well over a year to start the legal proceedings? What is to be gained by this delay?
For England, that answer is easy: they’ll gain another £200 billion from our resources! At the very least. But for Scotland, matters simply continue to worsen.
The lies Westminster caused to be told, so as to influence both the 2014 and the 2016 referenda in their favour, were eye-watering and they simply overwhelmed the Scottish Government.
The Scots believed, naively, that Westminster would play fair. They didn’t and they won’t either. The wealth they derive from Scotland directly affects their personal wealth and their ultimate power and therefore their influence in the greater world. They are quite at ease with sacrificing as many Scots as it takes to retain power.
The period leading up to and including a successful vote for independence will have the greatest asset-stripping exercises ever seen, as Westminster punishes Scotland for daring to answer back. This makes it harder, but not impossible, for our politicians to raise this matter with the United Nations and the European courts NOW! Today!
By doing so, we stop their thefts at that point. Scots will be better off after the event. International courts will prove invaluable, especially the EU courts. The EU understands what Scotland has had to go through and are sympathetic and will tend to treat England a little like England actually treats Scotland: with disdain.
Christopher Bruce
Taynuilt
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