Don't be deceived by what Osborne is doing.
9 July 2015
This summer budget day, Osborne has created a budget in which the young are pitted against the old, the private tenant against the council tenant, large families against small ones, poor students against the rich. The healthy against the disabled and so on no matter where you look. All on the basis that 36% voted for him and his cronies who cheered every announcement to the rafters with IDS in raptures.
The Tories message is: Don't be under 25, don't have kids, don't be a single parent, don't lose your job, don't be ill, don't be poor, don't go to uni.
Don't be deceived by what Osborne is doing.
Low-wage or single wage families can expect to lose out seriously from cuts to Working Tax Credits and to Child Benefit. The working poor will be hit hardest by this budget.
A wage of £7.20 an hour may seem attractive to many in the East Riding, or Barnsley East, or Hull, the region’s 3 worst areas for paying the Real Living Wage (which is actually £7.85 this year).
But people are contacting me saying they’re going to be seriously out of pocket because of these changes, even down £850 to £1200 a year.
One Hull North family with two children under 5, has told me they will be £1276 a year worse off.
So where's the money going? Tax Research expert Richard Murphy has worked out that what Osborne’s budget really means: it's a
£28 billion tax giveaway to corporations.
He says: Over the next five years as George Osborne punishes the worst off in our society and imposes the harshest of pay regimes on public servants, business will get a tax giveaway of £27.8 billion in cash terms as a result of the tax cuts he is giving to companies.
The Green Party wants a Robin Hood Tax on the banks, but Osborne shows himself a real Sheriff of Nottingham - stealing from the poor to give to the rich.
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Martin Deane
Chair, Hull and East Riding Green Party