Millard — 3 years ago(November 19, 2022 08:46 AM)

WORKING people are facing two decades of lost living standards under the government’s new budget, the TUC warned today after analysis by think tanks labelled Chancellor Jeremy Hunt’s plans “undeliverable.”
Mr Hunt set out £55 billion of tax hikes and spending cuts against the backdrop of a bleak set of economic forecasts from the Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR) on Thursday.
The Resolution Foundation said the Autumn Statement saw the biggest deterioration in forecasts since the OBR was launched in 2010 due to the “damage” from higher interest rates.
The think tank’s research director James Smith said: “[The cuts] don’t look obviously deliverable.
“If you take the spending cuts that are in place and subtract out the protected departments like health and defence, you end up with really big falls in those unprotected departments.”
He said unprotected departments would face “2014-15 levels of austerity.
“Given the legacy of austerity, given public-sector wages are already lagging behind and given this is effectively tying the hands of governments, it’s really hard to see how those will be delivered,” he added.
The Resolution Foundation also warned that workers are living through a two-decade wage stagnation, costing £15,000, piling further pressure on those in the “squeezed middle,” who face a permanent 3.7 per cent income hit — higher than the very richest.
Right-wing think tank the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) said that the government’s “series of economic own goals” had worsened Britain’s “long, hard, unpleasant journey.”
It warned that the fall in living standards forecast for the coming years will be the largest since records began.
IFS director Paul Johnson said: “The truth is we just got a lot poorer,” adding that “higher taxes and a bigger state” are likely to stay for the “next several decades.”
Even Tory ministers have taken a swipe at Mr Hunt’s tax plans, with former business secretary Jacob Rees-Mogg accusing him of taking the “easy option.”
TUC general secretary Frances O’Grady said: “We need an economy that rewards work — not wealth. But working people are facing two decades of lost living standards.
“The Tories are presiding over the longest real wage squeeze in more than 200 years.
“They are holding down the pay of key workers across the public sector, while telling bankers to help themselves to unlimited bonuses.”
Ms O’Grady hit out at the Conservatives for “marching the country into recession and making working people take the hit,” having already “crashed” the economy.
She said: “That is the price of 12 years of Conservative government.
“If we don’t get pay rising across the economy, we will just keep lurching from crisis to crisis.
“It’s time to stop the rot. Households up and down the country are at breaking point.”
Shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves accused the government of “pickpocketing” ordinary working people and said that its decision not to extend the windfall taxes on energy companies is “unforgivable.”
“Every pound left on the table on windfall tax is a pound that could be spent in easing these cost-of-living pressures that exist at the moment,” Ms Reeves said.
MPs have raised concerns about how the poorest areas and the most vulnerable will be able to cope without more support.
Labour MP Apsana Begum hit out at the Tories for being “determined to push” her constituents into “desperate poverty so they can prioritise the wealthy.”
She said the government has chosen to “condemn millions of key workers in the public sector to years of pay misery while awarding bankers unlimited bonuses.
“They have chosen to scapegoat people on universal credit while protecting the super-rich,” the MP for Poplar and Limehouse said.
“They are choosing to increase taxes on working people while refusing to fairly tax the wealthy.
“And they are choosing to put our future at risk by escalating austerity again despite knowing the harm and suffering that this will cause — especially for those already oppressed and marginalised.”
Poplar and Limehouse has one of the highest child poverty rates in Britain at 50.6 per cent.
In Leicester East, more than 42 per cent of children live under the poverty line.
Its MP, Claudia Webbe, said that the Autumn Statement contained huge blows for the “financial, physical and mental health of the people of Leicester East” and the rest of the country.
She said: “[The Chancellor’s] plan paddles in the shallow end of the corporate greed that has continued to profit throughout the cost-of-living crisis.
“While the Autumn Statement nods at the need to prevent people who are already struggling from sinking even deeper, it does nothing to end the in-work poverty, child poverty and housing crisis that 12 years of government austerity has created.”
Former shadow equalities minister and Labour MP for Battersea Marsha de Cordova said that households in her constituency are facing a “massive squeeze” in living standards and that 92 per cent of those she surveyed did not believe the