By Clive Wakely. According to recently released figures the average British family experienced a £9 per week drop in disposable income during June alone; making it increasingly difficult for a substantial and growing number of hard-working, taxpaying, families to make ends meet.
Figures reveal that after the deduction of income tax, food and energy bills, the average household has just £167 to spend each week on so-called “non-essentials” – a wide range of outgoings ranging from entertainment through to insuring the car.
Annualized it means that the average family now has around £470 less to spend this year after deductions for essentials, than they had this time last year – that’s a drop in disposable income of around 5%.
As a consequence families are cutting back and spending less on eating out, holidays and other non-essentials; yet for a growing number of families even an occasional outing to their local cinema is a luxury too far.
One manifestation of ever-tightening home budgets is a switch from patronising the major mainstream supermarket chains to discount outlets, and the substitution of regular buys with inferior quality, but cheaper, alternatives for the dinner table.
As anyone involved with the weekly shop will know the price of food has been relentlessly rising for some time now.
According to one major supermarket chain, market-wide food prices rose by an astonishing 6.9 per cent during June alone – a figure well in advance of most annual salary rises.
Figures also confirm that transport costs, that is petrol, diesel, train and bus fares, were the strongest contributor to the rising cost of living last month; the price of petrol rising 15.2 per cent compared to June 2010 and diesel by 16 per cent over the same period.
If media reports are correct then train fares are set to rise on average by as much as 8 per cent next January – almost twice the prevailing rate of inflation.
Meanwhile figures released by the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) show a massive 22 per cent rise in the number of households hit by higher domestic fuel bills, up one million to a staggering 5.5 million.
According to the department’s figures, between 2008 and 2009, gas prices rose by 14 per cent and electricity prices by 5 per cent – figures many consumers would consider underestimates.
Worryingly, these statistics do not factor in the recent announcement from British Gas that they intend to raise domestic tariffs for gas by 18 per cent and electricity by 16 per cent from next month, this representing an annual price hike of £190 for the average family and comes on top of all the other hikes this year for essentials.
One related scandal the media have largely ignored is that of how fuel price hikes have impacted on some of the most vulnerable in society – namely pensioners and the disabled with children.
Fuel poverty, the inability to afford adequate heating, in such households, has increased by 20 per cent since 2009 to over 4 million currently.
In response to rocketing domestic fuel bills one government minister has “helpfully” suggested that customers could stay one step ahead of price rises by switching suppliers; government ministers, it will be remembered, having their home and vehicle fuel bills picked up by the taxpayer.
Unfortunately most families neither enjoy a government ministers’ income nor have their essential bills paid by the taxpayer; instead they have to increasing make their (more often than not) joint incomes stretch to cover the essentials.
This country of ours is full of decent hardworking households where, increasingly, both mum and dad are “breadwinners”; families that are finding it neigh on impossible to get by on their income and who are slowly sinking in an ocean of debt.
Scenarios were both mum and dad augment their incomes from regular jobs by additional part time working are not rare and would be even more commonplace if more such “McJob opportunities” existed.
Times are hard for working Britons and destined to get even harder as the cost of food, fuel and practically everything else for that matter, escalates far in advance of increases in incomes.
Under the circumstances one would have imagined that the likes of Tory-toff Cameron and the millionaires club that comprise his coalition cabinet would be more attuned to the needs of the working people of this country – that is, the people they claim to represent.
Evidently they are not – which is perhaps not surprising considering the altogether elevated and exclusive social circle that has spawned and nurtured them, and whose interest they exist to serve.
Cameron and his ilk in many respects are much like the self-serving missionaries of the Victorian age, hypocrites who journeyed to Africa allegedly to alleviate the poverty of that place – whilst ignoring even greater poverty at home in the slums and workhouses of the towns and cities of this land.
Indeed, witness Cameron today – turning his back on Britain’s desperate and needy to act out the role of “Lady Bountiful” on the world stage at our expense.
Marie Antoinette is reputed to have remarked: “Let them eat cake” – Cameron and his kind would do well to ponder her fate.
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I fail to see how missionaries who went into remote,possibly incredibly hot &/or humid, disease -ridden areas of Africa and elsewhere, months or even years of journey time away from their native land, to live among quite possibly very dangerous strangers could possibly be described as ‘hypocrites’
They brought the Christian Religion and also education and medicine to people who had none of these things,not primarily to ‘relieve poverty’, altho they encouraged this.
It is rapidly reaching the stage when the tempers of the ordinary people will ignite. When that happens, there is very likely to be a violent revolution against the entire government and establishment who run the country. I know whose side I shall be on! This excellent article mentioned Marie Antoinette. Her time, too, was a popular uprising of angry citizens against their rulers.