Mrs May's Incomprehension

In an emotional Commons sitting yesterday, Mrs May displayed her total incomprehension of the realities of life for the very people she has said she wants to convince that 'Britain is a country that works for everybody'. She absolutely refused to pause in the roll-out of the new single benefit, even though Tory MPs had lined up to warn her of the stress that this was causing in households up and down the land. She lauded the principle of the benefit, and gloated that it was forcing people to take low-paid jobs [though, of course, she did not formulate it quite in those terms].

The government more generally have emphasised that people can get an advance of 50% of their benefit for the six-plus weeks they have to wait to draw the main sum; downplaying the speed with which repayment of the advance is required once receipt of the benefit is confirmed. It is a matter of indifference to the government whether the 'helpline' charges 50p+ per minute or is free: no doubt, if more people can access, it more of the callers will find it constantly engaged.

The same day, figures were produced that show that more than a quarter of young mothers all over the country and of the people in north-east England lead the large league table of people who are locked-in to low-paid jobs, with no hope of shifting to better situations in the short term. Thus more people are more deeply depressed than have ever been since the introduction of the welfare state; with the food banks planning for a bumper Christmas this year.

A long way beyond Mrs May's comprehension is the fact that as more people are driven into low-paid employment, that is also low-productivity employment.  So the more people 'gain' from the single benefit, the lower will be the average wage and the less will be the average output per head over the whole workforce: so the lower will be the average 'productivity' of labour: brilliant!

Today Mrs May is off to Brussels, to reveal her equally profound incomprehension of the plain English, French and German in which she and David Davis [and their team] have been told what the EU expects before they are willing to talk about giving Britain special access to the EU single market after Brexit. The Tory headbangers have sent her a formal warning not to be led into making any 'concession' to the EU: as if the UK has any real choice in the matter. Of course, none of the clots who have issued the warning lives on the breadline. None of them are dependent on the minimum wage, or on the single benefit; indeed, many of them have no need to earn their current income at all as they are rentiers or pensioners [or both]. So none of them will be in the categories who would experience extreme deprivation in an economically-isolated UK; but there are millions of people in Britain whose precarious living standards would be smashed to smithereens under WTO Rules. Thus these Privy Councillors and party hacks are showing the same arrogance of affluence as Mrs May and her Secretary of State for Work and Pensions showed yesterday. They are flexing their power to destroy the Conservative Party: perhaps they should be allowed to do just that; before the final vote in Parliament on the implementation of Brexit is held.