The most obvious and apparently most simple way to deal with the Cost-of-Living Crisis is just to put the National Living Wage Rate up, as the Tories have planned for the 2022/23 Tax Year that begins in April.

Most low wage earners will jump at the opportunity to earn 50p an hour more, which works out as £20 extra for a 40-Hour Week and £1000 over the course of the year.

The problem that we now face in this respect alone is that prices of everyday items and energy on their own are likely to swallow up that amount from the pockets of many before the changes have even come into effect.

Whilst a Minimum Wage requirement seems like a very logical rule to have, the rather depressing and counterintuitive flip side of the National Living Wage is that it gives big employers a get out of jail free card when it comes to setting a realistic wage level for frontline roles within their business.

Greedy owners, shareholders and managers – often themselves being paid many times more than their frontline staff – are very happy to use the Minimum Wage benchmark because the Government has set the standard. And it works very well for them because there is an assumed belief that Government control is as far as it goes.

Companies are quite literally using the reference point of the National Living Wage as an excuse not to pay more, when in many cases there is no doubt that they could.

The dilemma is that without the Minimum Wage – as was the case until 1999 – businesses will always pay the lowest paid workers the absolute minimum that they can. They would surely return to this way of employing staff in minimum wage levels were to be scrapped.

Just because employers can get away with anchoring wages around the level of the National Living Wage, it doesn’t follow that they actually should.

Many larger businesses could afford to pay staff more right now by reducing their profits. But as so many of these companies are now shareholder-led, there is an expectation that the bottom line and the dividend payouts will always be prioritised above employees instead.

The Cost-of-Living Crisis that our Politicians and Mainstream Media are now being forced to recognise is a life experience for many that is nothing new.

In fact, it is only because of the current circumstances that the Politicians and the Media have unwittingly encouraged that the situation is now beginning to become acute. The price to survive is starting to touch so many different areas of life, that the establishment can no longer avoid the truth that they find so unpalatable. The consequences of years of self-interest and inaction can no longer be kept out of sight.

Last Friday morning, Interviewers on BBC Breakfast News talked to paid carers and homecare companies struggling to find and provide staff to deliver a service that we may not want to accept that many of us at some point may need daily or perhaps more when we reach later life.

Social Care a political hot potato that is the subject of debate in its own right. But as an industry predominantly led by private profit-making companies, it offers perhaps one of the very best examples of how wage levels for staff in frontline hands-on roles are disproportionately low when considering the purpose that they fulfil.

Indeed, many of those who carry out this work require benefits or what are effective subsidies from the public purse in order that they can both work and survive.

Like many of the roles fulfilled by the people who are now beginning to struggle with the Cost-of-Living Crisis first hand, employed healthcare workers are being paid the Government set ‘National Living Wage’ or Minimum Wage, which from April will be £9.50 an hour, or £380.00 for a 40-Hour working week.

£19,760.00 per year simply isn’t enough for anyone to survive fully independently without support, benefits or going into debt on today’s terms.

There is a very important question that needs to be asked of our politicians: ‘Would you want to do, and would you enjoy doing a difficult and physically demanding job for a whole 40-Hour Week and then go to the shops and realise that food is a luxury that you cannot afford?’

The answer would of course be an unmitigated NO.

Whilst the rather obvious answer we would receive from our current Politicians would be sure to be accompanied by comments about all the benefits that are available to low wage earners to support them, there is another very important question the people ruling this Country should answer all of us too: ‘Why does the situation exist where Taxpayers are topping up millions of wages with benefits so that big and otherwise dysfunctional businesses can profit at levels which in most cases are absolutely obscene, given what they pay their frontline staff?’

Paradoxically, the work and effort that it takes those who are able to achieve wage levels that cover the cost of everything that they need is not something that a great many people really cherish or enjoy.

In fact, the quality of life that simple jobs with fixed hours without excessive travel would offer, would be something that many would choose to take – IF that kind of occupational lifestyle could achieve self-sufficiency with the security that everyone deserves as a minimum to achieve.

Despite what anyone with an interest in maintaining the perverse status and rules that allow all of this to exist will tell you, it is not impossible to change things and create a capitalist-based system where everyone can thrive and enjoy their lives fairly – rather than everything being funneled at the few and being maintained at the cost, expense and pain of everyone else who exists.

It is just a shame that we have a political class that is fixated with its own existence rather than seeing the real ills that society faces as something that can actually be fixed.

Sadly, for us all, in their obsession to maintain their positions, our Politicians have bolted shut the democratic doors.

Right now, there is no way we can get real leaders into Parliament who have the ability, wherewithal and commitment to do everything necessary to make life affordable and fair for all.

Balancing news input has become an unwitting challenge for many, simply because of how polarised and partisan the mainstream media has become. Whether it is leaning one way, another, or amplifying the more forceful cultural narratives of the moment, there is very little that genuinely captures the full picture or sits comfortably in the middle.

The environment created by a world of echo chambers wouldn’t be quite as problematic for societal problem‑solving or the legacy it leaves behind if it weren’t for the seemingly widespread absence of critical thinking skills today. The troubling truth is that we are navigating a phase of our history where real‑life problems are elevated or dismissed depending on where the story was broken and the assumption that the readership will be voting one way or another based on who is involved.

Over the weekend, I read the article written by Jack Monroe in The Observer / The Guardian, ‘We’re pricing the poor out of food’ (which I cannot link at the time of writing as it appears to have disappeared). Beyond the timeline and list of things Jack has arguably achieved by drawing attention to the realities of what it costs to eat when you are temporarily or long‑term poor, it was striking just how clear it is that, for the past decade, a failure to gain real traction in the fight against food poverty in the UK is in no small part because it has been treated as an issue championed mainly by one side of the political spectrum.

That recent governments have often appeared out of touch with the uncomfortable realities people across the UK face is difficult to dispute. Not because policymakers are consciously uncaring, but because many of those shaping policy – who are unlikely to have experienced free school meals, hand‑me‑down clothes or the joys of playing outside on a housing‑estate street – genuinely believe that poverty and unemployment are effectively the same thing. And those who follow them too readily often lack the integrity to question what they are told.

This reality is borne out in the news even now. Senior public figures regularly highlight the number of new jobs created and the number of people back at work, while overlooking that many of these roles pay the bare minimum. That the ‘work’ is often part‑time or similar. Worst of all, that in many cases securing a ‘job’ creates a minefield for those encouraged into self‑employment, only to discover that seemingly reasonable pay must also cover all of their expenses – leaving a real hourly rate far below what anyone can reasonably live on.

It’s a brutal reality that many of those leading the country appear to be in a state of denial about the circumstances and experiences of the poor. Their lack of appreciation is bolstered by the self‑assurance they give themselves as their heads hit the pillow each night, hiding behind measures such as the minimum or living wage, believing this is as far as legislative responsibility needs to extend to make life affordable for all.

At this point, it might be easy to read this blog as leaning left. Parties across the political left talk a good story about poverty, hunger and the unfolding cost‑of‑living crisis too. But their words – and actions – when they have had the opportunity to govern, also leave behind a record that is far from flawless.

The solutions often offered, based on spending and redistribution, don’t actually solve or even begin to address many of the wider issues that impractical or overly ideological approaches to policymaking have created. And this issue has never been more relevant as we collectively stare into an abyss of what could become a genuine financial crisis, where throwing money at these problems will not be something that even a future government could realistically afford to do.

The problems that leave people unable to afford the food to feed their children – even if they go without themselves – are massively complex in nature.

The cold, hard reality is that giving people more benefits or directing more money to charities such as the Trussell Trust – which really shouldn’t have to exist in 21st‑century UK – is no better than creating schemes and headlines that suggest everything is fine if you are ‘officially’ classified as having a job.

Wilful blindness across the political class has contributed to a situation where politics is no longer the means to solve societal problems. Politics has become the end in itself.

The evidence that any good politician needs as the basis to start building the questions, arguments and recognition of how many areas of public policy are involved – just to begin addressing these problems – is there for all to see.

Hiding in plain sight is the truth that few with a public voice speak, and few with the public gaze upon them dare to acknowledge.

We need politicians to be dealing with the questions that arise when people earning the basic wage that has been championed can only afford to live if the public purse continues to subsidise them.

How did this happen.

Why is it continuing.

Who is responsible.

How much do people need to earn to support themselves without help.

When production is arguably more efficient than ever, why is any food on a supermarket shelf a luxury that someone earning a full‑time wage cannot afford.

The truth is that many politicians would not like the answers to even these few questions, let alone the many more that follow. That’s why they don’t listen. It’s why they don’t look. It’s why they reach for quick fixes and disingenuous soundbites designed to mislead and to convince the very people they should be helping that the problem is somehow their own fault.

Yet the reality is that the people who should and could be dealing with these problems are not.

These are problems we have elected people to deal with. People who have taken our votes and our trust, with the expectation that they will fulfil their responsibilities to us and put them before their own.

They are there to find and deliver solutions to the difficulties in life that we cannot resolve ourselves – such as ensuring that we all have the basics we need.

Instead, we have politicians who are in politics for politics’ sake. And because many are unsuited to what they do, we have a situation where those already comfortable become richer and richer, while everyone else has less and less – even having their status devalued as those in power play games with what it means to be poor.

Originally published 24 January 2022. Lightly updated on 6 May 2026 for clarity and flow.

20 Years ago, I was in the final months of running and developing the JumpStart Project for the Gloucestershire Rural Community Council before I moved over to Shire Hall at the beginning of the following February.

I’d been with GRCC for a couple of years and really enjoyed developing new services for a Charity project operating around the rural Districts of Gloucestershire that helped unemployed people who were trying to access jobs or training and couldn’t get there because they didn’t have any transport.

We were already lending out mopeds and bicycles, as well as buying people their first weekly bus ticket or just opening another door to someone else who might be able to help them.

I was looking for creative ways to provide more options for the people we were helping, that would also encourage the local Councils and our existing partners to keep supporting us by experiencing even better results.

One day, I saw an editorial for what may have been the first or certainly one of the very first companies to start importing battery powered bikes into the UK at the time. You may not believe it, but sustainability was already a big thing outside of the mainstream and I quickly concluded that these bikes were just the thing that we needed and really would provide a win-win.

The funders I approached agreed with me too. In fact, our main partner on this new offering was the local Rural Transport Partnership who had recently taken on a PR guy called Stuart Bexon, who I still suspect had got lost on his way somewhere else and thought he’d just have six months out whilst he was here and see if he could humour the public sector in some way.

When I met Stuart for the first time to talk about the funding we’d just won, we hit it off in comical style and it felt like a meeting of caper-driven minds and a bit of a coming home.

Very keen to make the best of the opportunity for publicity that we realised we had; we bantered our way through one of the funniest brainstorms you could imagine.

Armed with the sense that we had been tasked to promote the concept of integrated transport in its most literal form, we soon concluded that the best way to do so would be to take a fold-up battery powered bike around the whole of Gloucestershire’s Public Transport network – with yours truly dressed as Santa Clause.

Over three days in mid-December 2001 using the borrowed Toyota Prius ‘support car’ that Stuart had blagged from Bill Allen Toyota – the Cheltenham Toyota Dealer at the time, we set about delivering on our ridiculous – but very successful plan.

The local media absolutely loved it. Wherever we ended up or passed through, a reporter or journalist wasn’t very far away and the picture here that I borrowed from the Countryside Agency Publication ‘Two Wheels Work’ was taken on Cheltenham Promenade shortly after we ended what I believe was the final day at the front door of John Dower House – which was the base of the CA at the time.

I think my only (possible) regret was the look of bewilderment on the face of a very young child when they got on to the bus to Cirencester at the next stop after we started in Tetbury and sat opposite Santa for the whole journey. It was quite clear they were wondering where the hell the Reindeer and Sleigh had gone and why Santa had turned up early riding on the same bus with his giant arm draped over a fold-up bike!!!