Austerity Cuts in Britain
Feeling the squeeze: Workers' living standards in the economic crisis
Socialist Review November 2011 - Laura Cooke and Kevin Devine
Working class living standards are being seriously hit as the economic crisis worsens. As inflation rises and wage repression continues, households' real disposable income is falling. Laura Cooke and Kevin Devine unpick the latest statistics that show the scale of the squeeze ...more
The Tories: An anatomys
ISJ June 2011 - Richard Seymour
After 13 years of exile the Conservative Party has returned to office, but weaker than ever and dependent on a coalition with the Liberals. Amid a global crisis, with a weak incumbent and against a widely disliked government, the Tories only managed to add 3 percentage points to their 2005 share of the vote, bringing them up to 36 percent. This took place amid the ongoing boycott of elections by millions of disappointed Labour voters. As Ed Miliband has acknowledged, most of the five million voters lost by Labour between 1997 and 2010 didn’t switch to other parties, but stayed at home. Still the Tories, under a “modernising” leadership which styled itself as socially liberal and distanced itself from the Thatcherite past, barely exceeded a third of the vote. What explains the Tories’ weakness? ...more
