Philippa Stroud was appointed chair of the Low Pay Commission, a body reporting to Kemi Badenoch’s Department of Business and Trade, on 30 January. The government-appointed role pays £530 per day for three days of work per month (£19,114 per year).
The Conservative peer is the CEO of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC), a new pressure group that shares its funders with GB News and is linked to some of the world’s most prominent climate crisis deniers, including psychologist Jordan Peterson.
Stroud has been described by The Telegraph as “the most powerful right-winger you’ve never heard of”.
The government is taking advice on how to lower wages even further?!
They ordinarily attempt to double-speak the intention of these groups & roles in how they name them, or at least go for neutral-seeming, so a shift to a title which so bluntly states intent seems to me to indicate something. I don’t know what that something could be, and drawing a blank when I attempt to speculate.
Last week was reminded that they unofficially appointed a “Minister for Common Sense” (MP without Portfolio, Esther McVey) but that seems a different flavour of brazen, openly mocking Orwell’s warnings, but we also know it is designed to appeal to voters who are unable to cope with the complexity of reality.
Anyhow, enough of my pointless ramblings. Am off to seek further verification of this story. Well know Tories to be ghoulish, and those currently controlling the party to be especially so, but feel that think tanks, etc. mostly push to have their ideas adopted, rather than the party pushing them to provide ideas.
Which is a nitpick if the ideas are implemented, but an accurate view of the workings of these relationships seems a necessary aspect of a robust counter-offensive.
How I loathe all of this. Ugh.
In 2008 when the banking crisis/credit crunch hit I was doing some work for a solicitor. This man was highly respected and tended to be pretty accurate in his opinions. When chatting about the prospect of the coming recession he said it would drag on for 15 years of reduced incomes. At the time I was sceptical. 16 years later he wasn’t wrong.
There always seems to be a reason to tighten the belts, the problem is that whomever is tightening the belt it’s not theirs.