A shocking survey of 2,000 UK adults revealed 43 per cent are short of the cash they need to pay the bills an average of seven months each year.
But one quarter said money is an uphill battle for them every single month.
The average adult is forced to turn to their credit cards or overdraft to get them through to payday four out of every 12 months, with one in 10 saying this is the case each month.
Six in 10 even went as far as to say they feel they are never going to make ends meet on their current salary.
Louise Harper-King, spokeswoman for OnePoll.com which carried out the research, said: “With rising costs and wages not following suit, it’s not a surprise so many people are struggling....Welcome to the precariat. The article gets worse as it goes along.
The London Economic
Almost half of all Brits now admit they struggle to make ends meet
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5 comments:
Yes: I'm "shocked" too. The proportion of the population with a car has quadrupled since the 1950s. Most of the population jumps on a jet to go to mainland Europe, the US etc for their holidays, rather than (as per the 1950s) holiday in the UK, etc etc. People are short of cash because the haven't got the will-power to stop spending the stuff....:-)
The article sounds very grim. Clearly the neoliberal project has been a spectacular success for the rich and their toadies.
FROM THE ARTICLE: “Researchers found 49 percent blame their struggle to make ends meet on the rising cost of food, while another 46 percent put it down to utility bills becoming more expensive.”
I don't know if that's true, but if it is, then the neoliberals are entering dangerous waters. As I have noted before, rebellions have varied and complex causes, but the trigger is usually hunger. The masses will submit to any amount of poverty and abuse as long as they have enough to eat. If the masses do not have enough to eat (because food becomes scarce and / or unaffordable) their rage and anxiety multiplies quickly and exponentially. When this happens, the government and the corporate media outlets can no longer silence or sidetrack the masses with the usual bullshit charges of “racism” or “sexism” or “anti-Semitism.” When the peasants become genuinely hungry, they decide that they have nothing to lose by revolting. Police departments, no matter how militarized, cannot control them. A starving mob is an unstoppable mob.
RALPH MUSGRAVE WRITES: “Most of the population jumps on a jet to go to mainland Europe, the US etc for their holidays, rather than (as per the 1950s) holiday in the UK, etc etc. People are short of cash because they haven't got the will-power to stop spending the stuff.”
I had a different impression in the UK. I toured the London metro area, Wales, and the Midlands. To me it seemed that most of the population was not “jumping on jets,” but was barely hanging on. Trains and subways were parades of the walking dead. I mean ZOMBIES. Males sat in pubs drinking ale and jabbering about nothing. They treated me like I was a trespasser. When I struck up conversations with strangers, they looked at me with an expression of fear and disgust. In London the despair, anxiety, and racial friction were almost palpable.
To be sure, none of this occurred among the elderly, who have lived through all the horrific changes. They were warm and outgoing, at least to me.
It is true that Britons cannot stop spending money. However they do not spend money on each other. If they did, then the UK economy would be very strong, since a lot of money would be circulating. Instead, Britons spend all their money on rent, food, utilities, car payments, and so on. All the money flows upward, vertically. It does not circulate horizontally. As a result, the gap between the rich and the rest grows wider every day.
That was my impression anyway.
Brits are used to deprivation, they can be austeritied down for decades to come. Stiff upper lip and all that. They got a long way to go to catch up to 'Mericans.
Keep calm and carry on.
It's grim for many people in the UK. Many live in expensive crowded rented accommodation and wages are rock bottom. God knows how they can afford children. That rich lifestyle Ralph talks about is manly people maxed out on debt.
Michael Hudson says years ago economists thought as technology improved we would begin to live in a leisure economy with automation doing plenty of the work. I read how in the 30's people would talk about how people would spend their time in the industrial age, and in the 70's I remember a BBC programme called Tomorrow's World which often had articles on the same theme. We will going to do a lot of social work, they said.
But instead things went the other way. Jobs were off-shored, and mass immigration was encouraged because the wealthy overlords wanted British companies to compete with the slave labour companies abroad.
People now work 50+ hours a week, many doing multiple jobs. They accept it thinking it is just natural causes, like earthquakes, they have no idea it has been orchestrated.
The machines are going 24/7 365 days per year, and people are maxed out on work and debt and the elite are now multibillionaires, but they want more competition and austerity, and longer hours at work.
This is what unregulated capitalism does, it's a race to the bottom. The working class are driven into the underclass, and the middleclass is gutted out.
The over 50's keep voting in the Tories. They have their nice houses and state-of-the-art pensions and are sitting pretty even though their children might be struggling and maxed out on students loans. They will need the NHS more as they get older but they don't think about that. They are entirely selfish and the Ayn Randian elite encouraged that.
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