in cost of living crisis is a term that is associated with europe these days more than other parts of the world. the country that is in the lead in europe is the uk. series of labor strikes and industrial disputes have occurred in various industries of the uk's economy as workers have walked out over pay and conditions, the most recent one being junior doctors and consultants. in this edition of the spotlight we will look at why so many workers in so many different sectors of the uk are striking and whether the sun government has been able to hand handle the

issue properly, first let me introduce our guests for this program. keith hilbing, professor of internation and finance at city of university, joins us from london. tony gosling is investigative joins us from bristol. welcome to you both, keith pim. i'll start with you. what are your thoughts on rike by doctors and consultants? um, it's a three-day walkout, but is said that it's going to affect - obviously the care that patients are going to need um and that's another whole question that i'm going to ask on that regard, but um, do they stand a chance, it sounds like the government has to come to the negotiating table, but are they going to do that? well, the government, let's be honest, is out of money, um, they wasted so much money during the covid pandemic, etc., yeah, pp equipment, they don't have much money left, we still got a massive fiscal deficit in this country, all right? um

and therefore there really isn't the money to make b pay rises in the public sector um so at the end of the day the government must of also realize that these strikes are extremely costly because they're leading to people not getting their medical care on time that means they're off work not paying taxes etc. so at the end of the day there has to be some sort of compromise, it's going to be nowhere in the 35% catch up the doctors would like, that's happen. um because it would just spark off further pressures in the public sector, but um, inflation matching pay rise is certainly something the government can afford, and we've got to remember that lot of these um people, you know, particularly consultants, um, they're getting taxed at 62% for quite a bit of their income, between 100,00 pounds and 125,000, i'm sorry, 62%, 62%, 62%, yeah. because they lose their

tax-free allowance, which is also taxed at 40%. so if you earn an extra 25,000 um between 100 and 125, which lot of consultants are in, 15,500 goes to the government and 9,500 goes to them, so not many people know about this, but this is clearly another thing that is um, you know really, mean the government wants to cut taxes for the wealthy, but won't cut it for middle classes who are being taxed outrageously 62% for a certain amount. their income, it goes down afterwards, after 125, it drops down to 47%, which is still pretty high, but it's 62%, that actually get a lot of doctors, you see, so liz truss, when she did these tax cuts very wealthy, okay, above 160,000, which you know, that that seems rather stupid when she could have actually done something for these doctors that are between the 100 to 125, all right, so that's stupidity of the first order, um, and it's a stupid tax anyway, it's

actually holding the economy back because lots of doctors stop working when they've got 99,900 pounds. okay, no one wants to be taxed at 62%. i'm not making this figures up, they're facts, you can go to the hmrc website and check them out, so i just i just i'm sorry to jump in, but i just checked out what you said in terms of taxes and i put average worker and i'm shocked to find out that it says um, the uk's take home pay of average single worker after taxe on benefits was 76. the gross wage compared to the oecd average is 75.4%. yeah um how does that this changes the whole tone of the program how do you how do you figure the government what comes to mind is if they're taking that much taxes away must leave the government more room to negotiate but then they probably are banking on these taxes in terms of revenues that they're spending in other places i'm guessing well you see you also when you earn your money they take off income national insurance off you and everything. like that, but then

of course they taking vat when you're in your spending money, so you just, you're paying even more, when you fill up your car with petrol, you put 100 pounds in, 75 pounds is probably off government, let me bring it, so it's shocking rates of tax. we're facing and basically the government can't taxes anymore, that's clear, right? let's bring antoni gosling here, let's bring in, i'm sorry to take so long to get to you, but this is just shocking um stats on the tax issue, where uh aside from the government, putting that aside, how do people survive if that must taxes are taking out, because that's something that was overlooked uh, and not really spoken much about when it comes to the workers and the pay they're getting in terms of how much tax is that that's me. it's it's built into the system as uh there is inflation as is now running food inflation nearly 20%, it's just coming down a little bit, but that's where it's been uh, so everybody is moved up into the higher tax brackets and what they've been doing is they've not been moving uh the tax brackets,

so people at the moment average wages are being taxed like uh maybe decade ago the super rich were uh so these rates of tax and it's the same with house. exactly the same with housing, so you now say for example, you uh the inheritance tax threshholds haven't been raised, even though the price of housing is going up, so as as the economy starts to fall apart, more and more middle earners and low wage earners are are moving up into the high tax rates and actually what's happening is is work is no longer a way out of poverty, so people are starting to work and then finding that they're actually ending up with less money than they've had on benefit. simply cannot pay the rent and they're being evicted from their homes, this sort of thing, so you're right, welcome to uh basket case britain, because the economy is an absolutely terrible state, in a way, it's a kind of hybrid war, the same hybrid war that's being waged on ukraine, and of course if you think about, but it's being wasted on the british

people as well, and if you think about the amounts of billions that have been spent on ukraine, it's quite obvious, the government does have the money to pay the doctors, they have a choice to make, do they want that money to go? uh to arms and to arming this proxy war we're doing for the americans over in uh far distant eastern europe or do they want to pay doctors properly and the fact uh the strikes i'm absolutely 100% with the doctors because the doctors know that what's happening is the senior staff in the health service particularly the professionals that are making the life and death decisions, the consultants, the doctors, the registrars uh are moving abroad because the pay is too low here, they cannot afford to pay the rent the mortgage on those wages and so they're going off to get much better wages abroad and so they are the ones who are trying to save the health service by flagging up to the nation that they need to be paid proper wages in order to keep the nhs alive and of course if you think about the government we've got at the moment the conservatives have always

wanted to destroy the national health service this free health service for everyone in the country the conservatives don't like that they want to go over to a american style health insurance system. and actually the american um health companies are all they've got very busy london offices because they are lobbying for this change too, so they're trying to destroy the national health service and they're doing that by making sure the doctors just leave the country, flee the country and go abroad. well let's move on beyond just the health service and uh take a look at other sectors of the uk economy if we can because this uh thing about taxes has thrown me off, but keith pillem nevertheless uh like to ask you about one of the things that are in the basket of expenses of the average person there and uk and across the world really in a matter of speaking, and that's the cost of food. we know food prices have risen, but by how much have they risen? i'm trying to get an idea based on uh going through the inflation, which puts it at around seven or eight percent, but i think it's a lot more than that, because when you look at uh categories of food or just food

itself, whether it's marjorin or eggs or other items, you can see that it's a lot more than that, it depends what you're looking at, it doesn't really come out to the 7 or 8%. the're talking about, what's the story there? um, well, food inflation is much higher than seven or eight percent. um, it is actually around 17%. of course it depends for different people it be higher or lower, depending what food they eat, but food has been running particularly high, which pats the poorest people, you see the headline rate of inflation 6.8 now, but don't forget it was 10.9, um, that that doesn't mean everything went up by 10.9 or 6.8%. all right, some things go up far more, and of course. poor people spend proportionately more of their money on food, so the inflation rate facing poor people substantially higher than the headline figure, everybody knows that, the government knows that and no one can deny it, so that is causing poor people prob because you know spend more of their money on food

and rent of course, which has also been sky rocketing, so the bank of england, i believe is trying to do some analysis of this, but you know, if you're in the lower 20%, right, um, british income, you're you're you're getting you know inflation plus tax rises, and um and council tax going through the roof, it it's it's it's miserable, it is, well tony gosling when i read this headline i thought uh, i felt a si of relief for the people there in the uk, where the guardian, i'm going to say, the name ran said food prices fall in september for the first time in two years, but then you read the print below that, taking a closer look, it dropped by 0.1%. if we're looking at 19.4%, or 19.1%, and they cited that as being food inflation for 2022, that's not much of a price drop. uh, if you ask me, i mean it doesn't sound like lot at all, compared to the rate of footion, what's impact that it has had on

poverty there in the uk? let me just explain, it's not really a price drop at all, what's been happening is the german owned supermarkets, liddle and eldy have been opening across the country over they've been doing very well and opening new stores uh over couple of years and so what we're seeing is more and more people leaving the mainstream um british supermarkets and going to... these german chipo supermarkets and so therefore the lot of the the that that's the only thing that's really been bring the fact the matter is that these massive food cartels have been price fixing they've been they know they've got a pretty much strangle hold on the market that the small grocer shops uh dotted around the country there's not many left uh are really uh not able to compete with these massive supermarkets anymore and so they do deals with the supermarket as a cartel and they've been slowly putting up the prices, in fact there've been one or two supermarkets uh such as saindsburys here in

britain who have actually uh refused to stock products like hence products for example uh because these massive food conglomerates uh have been price fixing and they're saying well this is far too much we want to sell someone else's baked beans or whatever and we're not going to sell yours because your price is way too high your margins are high and of course this is just being done to the benefit of shareholders uh because they now have such a strangle hold on the food market that they can start to jack up prices anywhere they want and i mean this uh this is of course as uh keith says uh it's affecting the poor far more and that's the perversity of all of this is that you've now got the rich paying virtually no tax this is these are the people by the way if we wanted to raise tax we've got lots of super rich people that we could be taking this money off them from their investments you know say for example you've got hundreds of millions of pounds invested well if you were to lose half of that you wouldn't even notice a single difference in your lifestyle uh and so that we should be morally doing, we should be

grabbing that money uh even if it is offshore or if as soon as we should - you know we we need to take the money off the rich and what's happening is with this food price inflation is the poor are being hit uh and the rich are being left scott free so it's almost certain i mean we've had the big speech today by british prime minister rishi sunak at the conservative party conference they've got a general election next year so it's probably his... chance uh to sell the conservative vote to the voters, and he's come up with absolutely nothing, nothing at all, and he's talking about change, but he we know that he's not changing anything, so it seems to me, and in fact i've heard this from insiders, that there are many people at the top of the conservative party here that don't want to win the next general election, so they're not interested in dealing with these issues, they're only interested in looking at their apps on their phones to see how much uh dividends on their big share investments that they're getting. that's their interest, the public and the voters are nowhere in the equation. we're going to talk about a little

bit more, but i'd like to ask you economic question here, keith, because uh, it seems like it's a contradiction, but yet it works out for the benefit of the economy somehow, which is why i want to ask you, and that's the deal with the interest rates. all right, we know that uh, there's interest rates that have been risen a number of occasions by the central bank, and that is the way to tame inflation for lack of better word, uh, but when you know when when you raise the interest rates is guses and minuses can you please explain to us how that works out uh because uh we know that there are obviously setbacks based on the impact it had on the different sectors of the economy well interest rates of course they've gone up but what one must remember is that they were manipulated by the bank of england the record levels for a numerous years barely below 1% all right so even on 10 years the government could borrow listen at .6% with inflation uh target of 2%. that made no economics

whatsoever by the way, that's you know, and all these people that invested in those bonds, including pension fund by the way, that was stupid of the highest order, i mean no one should be lending to governments at .6% with inflation target of 2%. all right, so now they can't print any more money, they've printed so much that it's actually one of the big causes of inflation, they won't admit it, andrew failey, i insist on calling him. bailey, not bailey, he printed so much money, it's just incredible, 300 billion in one year to pay for this covid and fiscal deficits, so eventually you see that's come hand to roost and indus rates are bound to go when inflation goes up and now inflation is up and not really under control because people are still trying to catch up because they lost out last year on their wage raises you know less than inflation so they're trying to catch up this year it's not going to go down quickly the bank of england was as usual asleep at the wheel they said inflation would would go to 4.5 you know well

outside their target by the way then it went to six then they were forecasting eight then they forecasted 10. i mean the bank of england should be. and the governor, so we got to get used to much higher interest rates, all right, because we've now got levels of debt, the government has borrowed so much that the national debt has gone from you know to over 100% of gdp, companies have borrowed too much, all right, when interest rates were low, what do people do, they borrow, borrow, borrow, and of course people borrow to buy houses at absurd prices and when interest rates go up, it's bound to hit the property sector. and many sectors, zombie companies, they've been kept alive through low interest rates, okay, but now interest rates are going up, those zombie companies to liquidate, go bankrupt, and we're seeing that increasingly bankrupties everywhere, and it was all because of the incompetence of the bank of england, um, but it should not be accelerating getting inflation down to 6.8 or five, it is ridiculously high, it is still

well above the maximum of 3%, it's 2% plus or minus 1%. okay, so this is not any success, this is failure, you can't celebrate failure of that degree and say you're doing something. all right, tony gosling, you talked about sunak, one of the things that has come out, i'd like to ask from you, whether it's a reflection of the types of decisions that go uh against uh, maybe improving the economy, that was the cancellation from we understand with the scrapping of the hs2, was said that it would have cut journey times, would have created more space on the network and also boost jobs outside of london. uh what what are your thoughts first of all on his decision on doing that and tell us some of the flops uh that he has actually um is is guilty of when it comes to the economy, the decisions that maybe that he made that uh has impacted the economy negatively? well look, these massive infrastructure projects like hs2 should never have been signed off in the first place, that money could far better have been spent on

upgrading existing railways opening maybe some of the railways which were shut in the 19th. 60s and that sort of thing would have been extremely good for the environment, but no, the most of the um pressure to sign those contracts to build this railway were there from the construction companies because they've made an absolute fortune on this railway to nowhere, and it is just from london to birmingham, which is there is an existing fairly good service there anyway, which they could have used maybe one tenth of this money upgrade that so, the whole thing is i think a contract fraud uh that was... signed by the labor the end of the last labor government in 2009 and then the conservatives if they had - had look proper look at the books should have just scrapped it as soon as they came into office in 2010 but they don't like that it's embarrassing and there may be costs uh they actually had jacob quite bravely said that the whole thing should have been scrapped five years ago he said that so

uh you know this is a disaster it's good that it's gone uh the other thing is the other infrastructure project near me in bristol is this hinkly c nuclear power station, again there's no real guarantees this is going to deliver affordable electricity ever, and yet billions are being spent on these projects. i think it's just really about the construction contracts, those companies are going to definitely get lots and lots of money, but there may be nothing at the end of it to deliver, so this is i think a massive fraud and enormous mistakes he's made tsunac and of course the chance are he's never to make it to uh uh to uh to win an election. next year, no chance, it's most probably going to be a hung parliament, because the reason is because there this has not been a economic crisis everybody, the super rich 0.1% have done incredibly well out of this conservative government, and they have actually seen their their billions multiply, and those are the people who are calling the shots and that's why it's almost impossible that sunak,

because he he came out with something today about smoking for example, which you think, well this is not going to win you the election mate. no chance uh and and so he's got nothing to offer really except empty words and so we're probably going to see labour government next year and the conservatives are gonna applaud their leader as he just drags them down into a black hole never to be seen again all right i got one last question over here i was going to talk about how the rich got richer but that almost sounds like a cliche so uh keith pillby my last question is about manufacturing in the uk where it is said that there's been a not it is said it's been a on the decline to the point where many headlines read why uh the government has actually abandoned the manufacturing sector, is it that bad? has manufacturing declined to the point that the uk doesn't really make anything any? more um a minute if you can please, well we've still got the manufacturing base, but it's been decimated by brexit, and uh, you see that in the car industry, you know, output is now

half what it was in 2016, no wants to invest here, you get the odd thing that comes up because the government's subsidizing it, yeah, second the subsidies run out, they'll be either asking for more money or closing these factories, um, so it's been in decline for many years, this government doesn't care about manufacturing, we do have some good manufacturers by the way. but um the death now has been paperwork, bureaucracy and brexit, their closest market is of course now very difficult for them, especially small manufacturers, you know, they used to use the eu to grow a bit bigger, now they don't grow bigger, they stay in the uk, and and also they can't get the parts so easily from europe because they don't want to supply them because of the paperwork again, so it's all self-inflicted, it's you know the whole country's gone to pot really and the and it's incompetence of the government, it's not just brexit, it is the most... incompetent government we've probably ever had in the last 10 years, i can't think of any government over the last 10 years including you know that includes boris of course, but this shambles is it's just 13 years of

disaster. okay, 30 seconds, 30 seconds, yes okay, well look, the trouble is that britain lost control of its industrial policy not because of brexit, but when they entered the eec, back in the 1970s, britain has never had, britain's governments have never had control of the... economic policy, at least we still got the pound which gives us a little bit of um of leeway, and ultimately, i'm afraid britain is not going to be, and it's not just britain, it's the whole of europe, germany is now slumping its manufacturing base, so britain can shake hands with the germans and say we go down together, thank you, sorry to interrupt you, tony gosling their historian and investigative journalist, and thank you keith pilbeam, professor of international economics and finance at sydney university, thank you to you both, would that we come to end for this edition of the spotlight.

now entering its uh fourth day, we're looking at uh. strongly condemns britain's medalsom statements its latest satellite launch calling it a sign of london's anger at tehran scientific progress. human rights groups have condemned in israeli far right ministers plan to authorized the use of live ammunition against palestinian protesters. and uh cuba

slams us sanctions policy blaming it for the country's economic downturn and increased number of cubans leaving the country.