Give with one hand and take with the other!

So tomorrow many of us (lucky enough to have a job) get paid, it’s that time of the month when we look at what we have earned, we subtract all our bills, and wonder why we bother at all when we see what we have left to live on.

This month National Insurance Contributions changed for millions of public sector workers across the whole of the UK. Basically public sector workers in exchange for lower National Insurance contributions gave up part or all of their additional pension from the state and received extra pension from their occupational scheme or personal/stakeholder pension instead. This has now been scrapped and will basically see a back door tax rise ranging from £22 per month to more than a £100 depending on what they earn and will result in an increase in the NHS bill of over 1 Billion pounds and local authorities of over £800 million pounds (effectively more hidden cuts). This will of course be passed on to local communities across the whole of the UK in the form of cuts to vital services.

Place this in the context of basically a 2% pay rise in the last 8 years, and due to inflation many workers have seen their earnings fall by 10% since 2008 while prices continue to rise. Tax bands will change in 2017 to a starting rate of £11.500 but not this year. In 2015 working age benefits were frozen for 4 years resulting in 13 million families being at least £260 worse off which will again feel like even more as the cost of living continues to rise.

MPs received a pay rise of 10% in 2015 and will receive a further pay rise of 1.3% this year. In 2015 the Queen got a whopping 18% pay rise taking the sovereign grant to £40.1 million by 2016. Over 3000 bankers, you know the ones who crashed the world economy, now earn over £1 million per year and one even earns £25 million a year.

You might be asking yourself what is the point of this blog?

The point is that since this Government came to power everything has been a slight of hand to take money away from the poorest and give it to the wealthiest, while conning the media and voter into believing that these things had to happen or the poorest were being protected. It is all a lie and one that continues to go hidden daily, we are being robbed blind while companies avoid tax, the wealthy avoid tax, David Cameron avoids tax. The employees of BHS have found out, on top of potentially losing their jobs, that their pension fund has been raided and now has a deficit of hundreds of millions, while the previous owner paid his wife 1 Billion pounds plus into a Monaco account to avoid tax.

We need to wake up and see what is happening around us, we need to remember when we go to the polls next week who supports this system and who wants something different. When you go to put your x in the box remember who will stand by and watch while you are being robbed and who wants to chart a different path. The Tories, with help from the other unionists over the years, have stolen more from us than anyone in History and it’s time that we make it stop. They are scum and don’t deserve a second thought let alone your vote or your trust.