Describing the chancellor’s speech as “hyperbole that crumbles under scrutiny” is a kind way of making clear that it was nothing more than a cynical jumble of half-baked, half-true assertions (This party split the country. A cash splurge can’t repair it, 1 October). We’ve grown used to – but shouldn’t accept – duplicity and hyperbole. Examples of misdirected but eye-catching spending include how the problems associated with social care, of quality, availability and cost, will not disappear as a result of a hospital-building programme. Communities cut off by swingeing cuts to public transport as a consequence of reductions in local authority funding that once used to subsidise such routes will not benefit from plans to upgrade roads – or the introduction of contactless payments on buses that don’t run.
Of course low-paid workers will benefit from significant increases in the national minimum wage, but such gains will disappear under the weight of fast-rising food and fuel bills as quickly as they emerged.
Les Bright
Exeter, Devon
• Re your report (Javid takes aim at Labour marginal with target of £10.50 national living wage, 1 October), the figure announced by Sajid Javid represents a rise of just 5% a year over five years. Worth a damp squib, not fanfare, when the Office for National Statistics says national wage inflation is 4%. Ritual moans from the Institute of Directors and British Chamber of Commerce should be read in the context of the tiny difference between these percentages.
Alison Whitehouse
London
• In the post-election budget of 8 July 2015, George Osborne announced, for workers aged 25 and over, “a new national living wage. We will set it to reach £9 an hour by 2020.” The current figure is £8.21 and the Low Pay Commission “forecast” a rate of £8.67 for April 2020. The £9 figure has been quietly buried. Why should we believe the £10.50 target for 2024 announced by Sajid Javid? In August, the Low Pay Commission recommended that in April 2021 the age for the national living wage be lowered from 25 to 23 (with a subsequent reduction to 21). Javid is now taking the credit for this.
Dr Dave Lyddon
Keele University
• Will the Tories abolish high wages too?
Sylvia Ackling
High Kelling, Norfolk
• Contrary to the view of the head of shows at the Three Counties Showground (Three tonnes of goods donated to food bank, 30 September), this is not “getting back to the real meaning of harvest”. The Christian understanding is encapsulated in the hymn couplet “for a just and equal sharing, of the things that earth affords”. Our local churches support our food bank, but while the demand for family parcels has nearly doubled in 12 months we cannot keep up with the need. The Labour party aims to eradicate the need for food banks within three years by ensuring a fairer share of our country’s wealth. That is a proper expression of harvest.
Rev David Haslam
Evesham, Worcestershire
• You rightly state in your leader (1 October) that universal credit is a “stain on the Conservatives”. In fact it is a cynical and manipulative misnomer, being neither universal nor giving much by way of credit to its many victims. For a benefit to be universal it must by definition apply to all, as in purportedly universal healthcare or education. Shadow chancellor John McDonnell has proposed pilot schemes for universal basic income (UBI) and put forward plans for universal provision of basic services (UBS) including housing, transport, health and education.
In his report for McDonnell on UBI and in his books Basic Income and How We Can Make it Happen and Plunder of the Commons, A Manifesto for Sharing Public Wealth, the economist Guy Standing makes a creditable and credible case for the very real benefits that society could accrue from universal provisions. To Labour’s credit, the search for more equitable universalist solutions shows more vision for the good of society than all the Conservative attempts to whitewash the iniquities of universal credit.
Austen Lynch
Garstang, Lancashire
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