@Rachael_Swindon

Let’s start with a few questions today.  You’re disabled. You survive simply down to payments of ESA (Employment and Support Allowance) and a small amount of PIP (Personal Independence Payment). It might be the case you get Universal Credit with the disability ‘premium’ added on. You have a key meter for your gas and electric, which means you are paying more than someone who is billed monthly or quarterly. You regularly sit in your accommodation in the dark, because you have used up all of the £5 emergency credit. You cannot afford to drive. The cost of tax, MOT, insurance and fuel would likely use up most of your ESA, so car ownership is normally out of the question. Your weekly food shopping bill has gone through the roof, and you’re on first-name-terms with the kind volunteers at your local food bank. The indignity can only be described if you’ve been there. You’ll get it.  Essentially, you are facing the biggest decline in living standards since the days of rationing.  So I need t

If you’re a regular reader you may well remember last weeks blog was very much focused on not allowing the government to bury the cost of living crisis - *their* cost of living crisis - under the devastating humanitarian disaster we are seeing grow worse by the day before in Ukraine .  So today we will carry on very much in that spirit, and we will dig a little further into the cost of living crisis, and the mind blowing hypocrisy of the (mostly) Conservative MPs that have used expenses to pay their utility bills.  If you follow me on Twitter you’ll know I’ve been on this for most of the last week. I cannot get my head around the fact we have MPs claiming thousands and thousands in expenses for their utility bills while the long-suffering British people are told to take out a £200 loan and put on another jumper. If you followed me 6 years ago you’ll probably remember I would spend most of my time asking Conservative MPs to justify their extortionate expense claims while continuing to

The cost of living crisis is here, and it is escalating.  Wages are stagnant, benefits have been slashed, taxes are going up, a basket full of shopping has never cost so much, you need a mortgage to fill your car up, inflation hasn’t been this high for three decades and your energy bill reads more like a telephone number.  Meanwhile, you’ve got a Chancellor of the Exchequer whose family are richer than the Queen, a spare £250 million for a royal yacht, not a clue what happened to the £37 billion we spent on Dido’s track and trace malarkey, billions and billions of pounds worth of Covid fraud written off as if it was nothing, members of parliament picking up a £2,000 wage increase, and just last year, 316 of those MPs put in utilities claims averaging £1,138.  A special mention must go to Tory MP Danny Kruger, son of TV chef Prue Leith. He claimed a whopping £3,598 in 2020-21 in six separate claims for electricity at a rented constituency home in Wiltshire.  The argument for publicly-ow