Rishi Sunak the loan shark

Tory Chancellor Rishi Sunak has announced an insultingly inadequate policy of offsetting soaring energy bills with paltry but mandatory £200 mini-loans for all domestic energy consumers, which then has to be paid back in instalments over the next five years.

The £200 will be automatically discounted from all household energy bills, whether customers want to be drawn into energy-debt or not, then Sunak's five £40 annual repayments will be added onto all energy bills, regardless of whether the bill-payer actually received the £200 discount or not!

Let's consider how this policy will work for students, people working their way out of poverty, people who get a home of their own after a period of homelessness, or couples who separate/divorce over the next five years, which obviously amounts to a very significant number of people.

Imagine a multi-occupancy house, with say five adults. They can be students in the final year of university, or people trying to work their way out of poverty by house-sharing to save rent.

The household receives a single £200 energy bill discount between the five individuals, but then the household splits up and the individuals get houses of their own (the students graduate, the workers go their separate ways).

One household with one energy bill becomes five households with five energy bills, mandating five sets of five £40 annual "repayments".

A £200 loan ends up requiring up to £1,000 in repayments is the kind of exploitation you'd expect from payday lenders and loan sharks.

Separating/divorcing couples will also be forced to repay up to double what they initially received when they were living together.

As for the recently homeless (street-sleepers, squatters, couch-surfers, hostel-dwellers) who find themselves a home of their own in the next few years, they'll be forced to make years of repayments on loans they never even received a penny of!

When it comes to people who are lucky enough to be living in comfortable housing situations for the foreseeable future, Sunak's misleadingly named "rebate" is just an ineffective and insulting 'sticking plaster on a severed limb' solution.

But when it comes to people in multiple occupancy homes, the working-poor, separating couples, people escaping the horror of homelessness, and others in insecure housing situations, Sunak's strategy is pure daylight robbery.

Of course Sunak and his millionaire Tory chums don't give a damn about the young, the working poor, the recently-homeless, or others in insecure housing situations, and when they devised this crackpot policy, they probably didn't even consider the implications for people they perceive to be lower than scum.

But neither do most of the over-privileged UK media commentariat, who, let's remember worked tirelessly to keep these malicious and economically illiterate Tories in power (because they were so utterly horrified at Corbyn's proposal that the wealthiest minority like them should pay a bit more tax, so life could be a bit fairer for the rest of us).

Of course the £billionaire-bankrolled Tories are going to keep legislating against the interests of the young, the poor, and the marginalised, and of course most of the over-privileged commentariat aren't going to hold these vile and vindictive Tories to account for it, because the majority of them are simply far too concerned with promoting their own class interests, to bother about those of us getting trampled and exploited at the bottom.




Don't forget to check out my other article detailing loads of other problems with Sunak's mandatory energy bill mini-loans.

 

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. Access to my online writing will always remain free. If you see some value in what I do, please consider supporting my work with a small donation/subscription.

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Seven reasons Rishi Sunak's energy bill mini-loan policy is an insulting joke

Tory Chancellor Rishi Sunak has announced that the energy price cap is going to rise by an astonishing 54%, meaning a £694 hike in the energy bills of ordinary households.

In order to pretend that he's doing something to help, he's announced that energy consumers will be automatically enrolled in £200 mini-loans, which will be subtracted from their inflated bills, but then be paid back in £40 energy bill additions over the next five years.

In this article I'm going to briefly explain why Sunak's absurd energy bill mini-loans are dishonest, inadequate, over-optimistic, complacent, ineffective, economically illiterate, and driven by hard-right capitalist ideology.

1. Dishonest 

Sunak's mini-loans are being presented as a "rebate". This is astonishingly dishonest because rebates (like the massive UK rebate on EU membership fees before the big flounce) are discounts that do not have to be paid back at a future date.

If it has to be paid back at a future date, like Sunak's deluded nonsense, then it's not a rebate at all, it's a loan.

So when the Chancellor of the Exchequer; and a load of Tory MPs; and Britain's woefully biased media hacks keep describing these loans as "rebates", they're being profoundly dishonest.

2. Inadequate

You don't have to be any kind of maths genius to figure out that a £200 loan is insufficient to cover a £694 price hike.

3. Over-optimistic 

Sunak's decision to force a "borrow now, pay later" strategy on all UK energy consumers relies on the very big assumption that energy prices will quickly fall back to lower levels by next year.

But what happens if they don't fall back, and remain high, or even continue inflating even further?

The answer of course is that UK energy consumers would then be facing sky-high energy bills, with repayments on Sunak's mandatory loans piled on the top.

4. Complacent 

Sunak's complacency is obvious if you just care to look at what other European nations are doing in the face of inflating energy prices.

The left-leaning Spanish government have temporarily scrapped energy taxes, banned energy suppliers from cutting off non-paying customers, and introduced windfall taxes on energy company profits.

Meanwhile in France the liberal-capitalist Macron government have imposed energy windfall taxes and limited energy bill rises to 4%.

If the Spanish or French governments had allowed prices to soar by 54% and offered anything as pathetically inadequate as Sunak's mini-loans, there'd be massive public protests, especially in France.

But Sunak complacently expects the British public to just quietly suck it up like good, obedient little plebs.

5. Ineffective

Sunak's shoddy little mini-loans are a spectacularly ineffective sticking plaster on a severed limb sized economic problem.

What's needed is serious consumer protections, and urgent reforms to the UK's absolute shambles of an energy sector.

Here are a few ideas:

• The Energy Price cap should only have only been increased at the rate of inflation, if at all.
• There should be new legislation to protect non-paying customers from being cut off.
• Windfall taxes to be levied on the obscene profits of private energy companies.
• Energy suppliers that go bust should be renationalised.
• Energy infrastructure should be brought back under public ownership in order to put the energy needs of the nation above the profit-seeking behaviour of private businesses.
• The government should implement a Green New Deal to speed up adoption of renewable energy, in order to end the UK's dangerous over-reliance on expensive imported gas.

But instead of any real action to combat the current crisis, or to protect the UKs energy security in the future, all we get is Sunak's insultingly inadequate energy bill mini-loans.

6. Economically illiterate

Anyone who has ever run a business will know that there's absolutely nothing wrong with taking out loans in order to make investments, in things like property, machinery, or training. 

But if you're taking out loans to cover the cost of your day-to-day expenses, like payroll, materials, or bills, then you're in really serious trouble and veering towards insolvency.

Rishi Sunak is so economically illiterate that he thinks that loans to cover expenses are such a good idea that he's going to forcibly sign every energy customer in the UK up to them!

Surely now it's time to turn the persistent myth of Tory economic competence into the joke it should have been ever since they started enforcing their ludicrous and economically illiterate "let's cut our way to prosperity" austerity ruination agenda in 2010?

7. Ideological

Sunak is allowing profiteering energy companies to keep their unearned gains, while insulting the British public with the fake-help of these ludicrously inadequate mini-loans.

His decision to protect capitalist interests while throwing insulting crumbs at the public in order to pretend he's helping is a product of his hard-right capitalist ideology.

The entire purpose of the modern day Tory party is to prioritise the interests of capital above what's best for the British people and the British economy.

Just look at who bankrolls the Tory party operation, and look at all the multi-millionaires in Johnson's cabinet of hard-right ghouls, topped by Sunak himself.

You'd have to be hopelessly naive to expect the Tories not to side with capital, and against ordinary British people, which is why some of us have been consistent in our advice to "Never Trust a Tory".

Conclusion

Sunak's energy bill mini-loans are clearly dishonest, inadequate, over-optimistic, complacent, ineffective, economically illiterate, and driven by hard-right capitalist ideology.

But the Tories firmly believe they can get away with offering nothing but this insultingly inadequate fake-help in the midst of the worst living standards collapse in decades.

After all, the British public have let the Tories get away with an entire decade of economically illiterate austerity ruination, so why on earth would they suddenly rise up and demand change over soaring energy bills and Sunak's woefully inadequate insult of a response?
 

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. Access to my online writing will always remain free. If you see some value in what I do, please consider supporting my work with a small donation/subscription.

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Analysing the Daily Express budget analysis

These days the Daily Express is basically nothing more than a pravda propaganda rag for the Tory party, so you'd have to be pretty naïve to expect anything other than heavy pro-Tory bias in their Budget analysis, but in 2021 they went the extra mile with a quite astonishing front page.

Rishi Sunak has just raised the UK tax burden to the highest level since the post-WWII recovery period in the 1950s!

He even admitted it in his budget speech, using the passive voice to say that  "taxes are rising to the highest level of GDP since the 1950s", as if the taxes are somehow rising of their own accord, rather than him being the person who is raising them!

Yet the front page of the Express blares Cheers! Rishi On A Mission To Cut Taxes

He's just raised taxes to the highest rate in over half a century, but hooray for his future ambition to cut taxes!

The disjunct between the reality and the presentation is absolutely laughable.

There are an awful lot more issues in the small print too (too many for me even to fit into the article header infographic!).

2 Billion extra for schools This might sound great if you've been living in a sensory deprivation chamber for the last 11 years, but in reality it's not enough to even return per-pupil funding back above 2010 levels this year, next year, or the year after. 

It'll finally catch up in 2024/25, meaning that an entire generation of school kids will have had their education hindered by massive budget cuts for no discernible reason whatever. Yet the Express somehow consider this decade and a half of wanton destruction of our nation's future economic potential as a cause for celebration!

£150 billion spending spree Hang on. We just suffered a decade of austerity cuts because public spending in the wake of a crisis was supposedly terribly bad, yet the debt's gone up dramatically since 2010, and now we're supposed to celebrate £150 billion in post-crisis spending as if the last 11 years simply didn't happen?

If spending in the wake of a crisis is good, then that obviously means a decade of Tory austerity extremism was pointless, ruinous self-harming, economically illiterate, and extremely bad, doesn't it?

Business Rates Boost For High Street  Everyone knows that tax-dodging online retailers have been dramatically undercutting High Street outlets for the last decade, and that giant out-of-town supermarkets are now soaking up entire family shopping budgets that used to be divided amongst perhaps a dozen different small independent High Street businesses.

Nothing's been done about this until it's far too late, and now High Streets across Britain have been reduced to derelict ghostly shadows of their former glories, occupied mainly by boarded up premises, thrift stores, gambling outlets, and charity shops.

There's some limited help on the table now, especially for the likes of pubs, restaurants, and tea rooms, but it's far too little, far too late.  The lockdown measures have absolutely hammered the majority of the retail economy by forcing them to close their doors, while online retailers and supermarket giants were allowed to continue operating, soaking up £billions in artificially inflated profits. 

There's no effort to rake any of these artificial gains back, and nor will there ever be with a Tory rich-boy like Sunak running the show.

Universal Credit Giveaway The framing here is absolutely insidious. What Sunak's actually done is ever-so-slightly reduced the amount that the state confiscates out of low-earners' wages through reduced social security payments.

Under the Tory-designed Universal Credit system the government used to confiscate 63p in every additional pound a low income worker earns, but Sunak's reduced the confiscation rate to 55p in the pound (which is obviously still more than half!). 

Somehow confiscating a tiny bit less of low-income workers' wages is a giveaway, but the £billions he's handed to bankers by cutting the Surcharge Tax to 3% isn't a giveaway.

In fact it somehow doesn't even warrant a mention!

"By the end of this parliament I want taxes going down, not up" Somehow the Express is celebrating this statement from Rishi Sunak as if it's some almost divine political objective, rather than one of the key strategies of Tory electoral politics:

Front-load all the tax-hikes and attacks on people's incomes into the years after winning power, then ease the boot of people's necks a little bit prior to the next election so they feel like things are getting better and vote Tory, and repeat, and repeat, and repeat.

It's an expression of standard, cynical, short-term electoral political strategy, not some kind of saintly moral mission!

Cheers! Rishi The main headline, and the picture of Johnson and Sunak (who doesn't even drink) holding pints are an example of the oldest trick in the budget book.

Place a slight cut in the price of a pint at the forefront of the budget, in order to distract the plebs from the horrifying details you don't really want them thinking about:

• Highest tax rate in seven decades
• Massive tax break for bankers
  
• Cutting tax on short-haul flights (just days before hosting a climate conference!)
• Implicit admission that austerity was a huge mistake
  
• National Insurance hike for millions of ordinary workers
• Insufficient help for High Streets
  
• School funding still below 2010 level
• No windfall tax for pandemic profiteers

Unrivalled coverage This is just about the only thing they managed to get right on their entire front page. It's so laughably bad that not even the Daily Mail or S*n managed to do worse!

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Why Clement Attlee was the greatest PM of the 20th Century

Clement Attlee was born on January 3rd 1883 and served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom between July 1945 and October 1951. He was, in my view, by far the best UK Prime Minister of the 20th Century and his government was an inspiration to the developed world.

When Attlee's Labour government came to power in 1945 the UK was a blitzed-out and war fatigued nation with the biggest national debt in its entire history (more than 237% of GDP). Attlee's government rapidly reconstructed and restructured the UK economy to avoid a post-war crisis, founded the NHS, improved pensions, introduced Legal Aid, nationalised core industries, improved workers' rights and built hundreds of thousands of decent houses a year to replace the appalling slums that George Orwell wrote about in The Road To Wigan Pier.

The really incredible thing is that this amazing post-war government reconstruction and investment frenzy actually resulted in a huge drop in the national debt.

Attlee's government took on a massively complex post-war reconstruction project; lifted millions of people out of dire poverty, ill-health and slum dwellings at the same time; and they did it in such a way that he actually ended up significantly reducing the national debt in the process.

In light of all of his incredible achievements, not least the foundation of the NHS during his tenure, I have no hesitation in saying that Attlee was the best Prime Minister of the 20th Century.

It's very interesting to contrast the 40%+ drop in the national debt Attlee's government achieved between 1945 and 1951 through their investment and reconstruction agenda with the massive increase in the scale of UK public debt after a decade of this ruinous Tory austerity agenda.

After a decade of being continually blitzed with Tory austerity propaganda lies that public debts can be reduced by slashing wages, public services, education, and investment, it may seem somewhat surprising that the national debt fell dramatically despite all of Attlee's spending and investment.

The reality of course is that all of the Tory austerity propaganda has always been economically illiterate nonsense designed to dupe the gullible into supporting the radically right-wing Tory agenda of massively enriching the tiny mega-rich minority, whilst making the rest of us pay the tab with an unprecedented period of wage repression, public service cuts, infrastructure under-investment, and ideologically driven vandalism of the social safety net.

Attlee proved the correct way to reduce debts and dramatically increase prosperity is through infrastructure investment, decent wages, education, public ownership, social housing, and the development of advanced public services.

History is shouting us a clear message that strategic investment is the key to recovery, not some ludicrous economic fairy tale that there is no alternative to a load of endlessly repeated Tory "let's cut our way to growth" austerity nonsense.

Clement Attlee proved that it is absolutely possible to make life better for all sectors of society through strategic investment, whilst actually reducing the national debt in the process.

In the wake of the coronavirus pandemic the Tory Chancellor Rishi Sunak is proposing to let whole sectors of the UK economy simply die off, and threatening the most savage package of cuts to the social safety net in history, proving the Tory determination to do the precise opposite. 

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. Access to my online writing will always remain free. If you see some value in what I do, please consider supporting my work with a small donation/subscription.

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