David Cameron announced his intention to stop being an MP this week, at the same time as two news stories acted to highlight how his ideologically driven austerity policies as prime minister devastated communities and the lives of people across Britain, increasing inequality and poverty.

On Wednesday, a debate in Parliament drew attention to how thousands of people have had their tax credits wrongly taken away by a shamed US outsourcing firm, which won a three-year payment-by-results deal worth up to £75 million in 2014 to tackle “fraud and error” in the tax credits system.

Figures released by HM Revenue and Customs show 6,755 decisions to alter or stop benefits were “amended” between November 2014 and mid-August 2016. Concentrix received 10,467 mandatory reconsideration requests, meaning that an amazing 65 per cent were successful.

In another news story, the trade union Unison announced this week that 17 care workers have launched the biggest ever legal claim over alleged non-payment of the minimum wage, with the claimants saying that payslips appear to show contractor Sevacare had some staff in north London on a rate of £3.27 an hour — less than half the then minimum of £6.70.

The case centres on unpaid time spent travelling between people’s houses. Unison said on a normal day they might be working away from home for 14 hours, but could receive payment for only half of them, leaving them earning as little as £3.85 an hour. Care workers who provide live-in care can earn even less, getting as little as £3.27 an hour, well under half the legal minimum.

The group, all but one of whom are women, are employed on controversial zero-hours contracts to care for elderly and disabled residents — speakers at this week’s TUC pointed how the number of workers on zero-hours contracts leapt by 20 per cent in the last year.

Both these stories are illustrative snapshots of the results of the combination of years of reducing working people’s rights and weakening regulation which seeks to protect people’s livelihoods, while also doggedly sticking to a failing, ideologically driven neoliberal economic policy that has seen the richest 1 per cent watch their wealth double while millions of people struggle to make ends meet.

Cameron’s legacy is that we now have the joint sixth most unequal incomes of 30 countries in the developed world. The top fifth have 40 per cent of the country’s income and 60 per cent of the country’s wealth, the bottom fifth have only 8 per cent of the income and only 1 per cent of the wealth.

As the Daily Mirror’s Kevin Maguire commented, under Cameron “Austerity destroyed lives and ruined services as he piled up more debt than every previous Labour PM combined.”

Additionally, “the value of wages remains £40 lower than before the financial crash and economic growth never matched the three-month 1 per cent inherited from Gordon Brown.”

Indeed, in what Andy Haldane, the Bank of England’s chief economist, described as a “lost decade” of earnings, 80 per cent of households have either seen no increase or falling incomes since the financial crash, showing that Cameron and George Osborne’s policies failed the overwhelming majority of Britons.
And at the sharp end, the human cost of austerity has been very real. Office for National Statistics (ONS) findings showed that in Tory Britain a third of the population experienced poverty at some time between 2011 and 2014, with the poverty rate in 2014 standing at 16.8 per cent of the population. Despite Tory promises to “make work pay,” just under two-thirds of children and working-age adults in poverty are in working households.

If this situation wasn’t bad enough, last week Theresa May said she would not rule out delivering yet more brutal cuts if the economy suffers further following the Leave vote in the EU referendum.

While Osborne announced in March that he had “no further plans to make welfare savings” before 2020, May refused to rule out further cuts offering the perspective of continuing the relentless Tory attacks on welfare since 2010.
The new Chancellor Philip Hammond had already said he may “reset” the government’s tax-and-spend policy if the economy starts to hit choppy waters before the Autumn Statement.

The reality is that the overwhelming majority of economists agree that the British economy needs more austerity like a hole in the head, and despite press speculation suggesting May’s government may move away from this ideologically driven economic and policy framework there is little evidence of this.

Indeed, George Freeman MP, head of May’s new policy board, is on record as having a plan to slash back employment rights and lower wages for workers in poorer areas. He has also advocated that people working in new firms should have no employment rights, potentially including maternity pay, paid leave and the minimum wage.

And he has argued that Britain’s biggest firms should pay just 10 per cent corporation tax and that green energy subsidies could be “abolished.”
These ideas can be found in Freeman’s joint 2013 paper with Kwasi Kwarteng MP The Innovation Economy Industrial Policy for the 21st Century, where he advocates that both the minimum wage and public-sector pay should be “regionalised.”

The deep-rooted structural problems facing the British economy, which these further neoliberal “solutions” will only exacerbate, require radical and real change.

With his keynote Bloomberg speech this week, Jeremy Corbyn showed that he has both a real grasp of the issues facing the British economy — most notably chronic underinvestment — and is advocating the economic policies to deliver the change we need.

In the speech, Corbyn explained that: “In the wake of the referendum vote to leave the European Union … and a summer of political turmoil … our economy stands poised between two alternative futures.”

Contrary to Tory myths, he identified that: “there is huge potential in our society [and] there are millions who want a decent job, or to set up in business… or use their skills for the wider social good,” and correctly that they “have an economy and a set of institutions that let them down badly, and “there is an alternative to the drift and decay of the Tories.”

With his commitment to £500 billion investment, as detailed his 10 pledges to rebuild and transform Britain, Corbyn has set out a real alternative to the Tories that can not only be popular for Labour on the doorstep but also genuinely address the long-term, structural problems of our economy.

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