ChatterBank5 mins ago
More Cuts From Labour
And now railcards
Why does Labour hate older people? Not content with stripping pensioners of their winter fuel payments, it is now being reported that concessionary rail fares for the over-60s are also about to be cut.
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I’m afraid the Chancellor and her department lost what (very little) credibility they might have had when Lucy Powell (the Leader of the House of Commons) stated that the WFA had to be scrapped in order to prevent a run on the pound:
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“If we hadn’t taken that action we’d have seen a run on the pound, we’d have seen the economy crashing and the people who pay the heaviest price for that are the poorest and pensioners and those on fixed incomes so that stability is really important.”
She later doubled down on the claim in a second interview, telling Sky News: “We would have seen the markets losing confidence, potentially a run on the pound.”
It is true that the financial markets like stability. However, if the markets were going to react adversely they would have done so when Labour first announced it had discovered the £22bn “Black Hole” in the economy. But they didn’t. The reasons for this may never be discovered, but I have a sneaky suspicion that the money markets were perfectly aware of the state of the economy (having probably been more diligent with the widely available figures than the Labour Party in the run up to the election).
Scrapping the WFA will save around £1.4bn. If anything was to cause a “run on the pound” following the installation of a Labour government, it would have been their immediate and unconditional capitulation to trade unions in order to settle couple of long running industrial disputes and which will see the beginning of a pay and price escalation (i.e. inflation) on an industrial scale.
Plenty of other expenditure could have been trimmed: the £11bn pledged in “climate change” aid to poorer countries could have been cut by 10%. That would have made scarcely any difference to anybody bar a handful of despots who would have trousered most of that sum.
Ms Powell’s statement was ludicrous. The WFA represents about 0.1% of planned public expenditure this year. It was baked into the government’s budget, the money markets knew of it, there was never any suggestion it would be scrapped and it posed no threat to the stability of the economy (and nor did any other expenditure of 0.1%).
The biggest threats to the economy are entirely different Black Holes. One is called overseas aid, which will see vast sums of UK taxpayer’s dosh flown out to places in Africa and Asia, only to disappear in the accounting procedures of the grateful receiving nations. The other is one where increasing power held by Trade Unions over their Labour government puppets will enable them to extract ever greater sums for their members, which will be entirely funded by the wealth creating sector of the economy.
From the Daily Mail, "Discounts offered to Railcard holders is being cut by train operators this month, in a move described as 'a step in the wrong direction' by a pro-rail group.
Savings currently stand at 34 per cent for those who have a Railcard, this includes customers aged between 16 and 30 as well as those over 60.
However the discount offered by Railcard is expected to plummet to 33.4 per cent by mid-September as rail operators seek to increase income from fares."
I'm not sure that a discount reducing from 34% to 33.4% can be described as a, "plummet"...
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