Want to help 1.6 million households in extreme debt? Raise their incomes
Austerity has fuelled a personal debt boom caused by low incomes and wages
Geoff Tily
George Osborne is in denial and Carney can’t do it alone – we need an action plan for the economy
As well as responding to the shock of Brexit, our economic policy must begin to repair the country
The length of this period of economic stagnation is almost unprecedented
The only era remotely comparable is the 1920s, covering the economic chaos at the end of the war and the disastrous return to the gold standard
Finally, employment growth and wage gains. But…
As risks to the global economy increase, these cuts are all the more dangerous
Today marks the first quarterly unemployment rise in four years
In terms of headcount, 1.8 million people are unemployed, still higher than ahead of the crisis
Recent labour market gains do not make up for years of losses
There is still a long way to go before we return to the pre-crisis world
ONS Economic Review: the irrelevance of labour market ‘tightness’ to the inflation outlook
The higher the implied ‘tightness’ the lower the inflation reading
Labour market: working people are still paying the price for austerity
Many have argued that employment gains somehow compensate for earnings losses, but this is false
The Budget changes nothing: the road from austerity has led only to more austerity
Cuts in the next parliament still to be far more severe than the last
More positives, but this remains far from a normal labour market
Positive labour market figures are to be understood in the context of the post-crisis period as a whole and must not detract from the long-standing pressures on working people.