Middle-class families could face higher water bills to subsidise poorer households
Labour ministers will be urged to introduce a nationwide scheme that would see poorer families given huge discounts on their charges.
The recommendation on creating a national social tariff will be presented to Sir Keir Starmer in a Government-ordered review of the water industry on Monday.
This probably has more to do with rebuilding Labour's traditional class structure. Could become complicated though, as some poorer families already subsidise Ed Miliband's middle-class windmill fantasies via their electricity bills.
Oh! what tangled bungs we weave
When first we practise to deceive!
Not quite Sir Walter Scott
4 comments:
It is a mistake to think that Labour (and other Socialists) care about people - of any class.
They care only about grabbing power, and hanging on to it, to progress their political vision. And recently their political vision is blinkered and narrowed to a vanishing point on the far horizon. They pay no attention to the people alongside their long march.
Why not take this further? Let's say an upmarket coffee and sandwich chain decided to charge their more wealthy customers more for their takeaway lattes and sticky buns, thus enabling the less well off to have theirs at a discount. How long would that chain remain in business? Of course, MPs, their SPADS, and other hangers on would not be affected as the subsidised refreshment rooms in Parliament would remain, er, subsidised. I wonder where these morons get their ideas from?
Penseivat
Trying to book swimming sessions for my granddaughter, I discovered that the family’s local leisure centre is a ‘charitable social enterprise’ which boasts of giving completely free use of facilities to refugees and asylum seekers and offering heavily subsidised membership to those in receipt of means-tested or disability benefits.
Everyone else - including my son and his wife, raising a child on a single moderate income - has to pay through the nose: £15.60 for a 50-minute swim, rising to £20 for the three of them when the child is 3. Meanwhile, the council has given the centre millions of pounds of council tax money in refurbishment grants and subsidies presumably funded by (extortionate) council tax.
There’s a lot of it about: better.org boast that their 240 leisure centres, operated in conjunction with 59 local councils ‘include some of the most prestigious sporting facilities in the UK […] along with essential community facilities’.
I suspect we will see more and more of this kind of thing - the RSC and other theatres are already charging a premium on ticket prices for groups of pupils form independent schools - and I have a horrible feeling the end result (which is already approaching fast) will be a society where a sector comfortably off on benefits and an affluent cohort of high earners and the wealthy are bookending an increasingly squeezed middle living precariously from hand to mouth on modest earnings taxed to the hilt to finance government largesse.
The point at which they can’t cope any longer and down tools for good is the point at which the whole house of cards will finally collapse; I have a horrible feeling it won’t be long now.
@Macheath: years ago my wife calculated the cost of using the municipal pool including the parking charge. It was cheaper to sign up to the pool/gym at a local hotel.
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