Poor getting poorer?

DAVID Cameron promised to make work pay, yet figures released by the Joseph Rowntree foundation reveal record levels of poverty amongst working people, whose wages have fallen by eight per cent since 2009. Conversely Cameron’s friends in the city are collecting bonuses worth four times their annual salary, as he believes that the rich will only work if you pay them more, and the poor will only work if you pay them less. Vince Cable has rightly cast doubt over the strength of the economy, calling it the wrong sort of recovery, built on low interest rates and wages, consumer spending, with record levels of personal and government debt. The coalition has now borrowed twice that of the last Labour government. Osborne is quietly pumping £50 billion a year into the economy via quantitative easing. He has failed to deliver an export led recovery, despite a 25 per cent devaluation of sterling. UK productivity is the same as Italy, behind France, Germany and USA. As for paying off deficit, that’s another failure. The governor of the Bank England’s reluctances to raise interest rates exposes the fragility of the economy, with a third of mortgage debt held by households who have borrowed more than four times their income. The US sub-prime mortgage crisis and its British equivalent were built on encouraging mass home purchasing in inflated markets, the UK has clearly learned nothing from the global crash.