The Cost of Living blog is proud to have an international readership but the majority of our content does focus on events in the UK. Here it has been a tough year. Politics in general, and specifically the politics of health and healthcare, is lurching to the right. And this looks to be a worrying trend across much of Europe and elsewhere. There is an endless list of examples but it has been particularly apparent in: the rise of intolerant rhetoric about the deserving and undeserving poor; the increasingly stringent and cruel examination of eligibility for those people seeking long term disability payments; and in the spectacle of an incompetent Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, who is unable to tell the truth, and while wasting public money on a failed computer system, at the same time deliberately inflicts suffering on the poor and needy. Add to this the effective dismantling of the NHS in everything but name, and the rise of regressive programmes such as workfare. All this is to just scratch the surface of some very nasty changes and ‘reforms’ facing us all………Click here to read the full blog post on the Cost of Living Webpage.
