just five years.
So when you hear them call themselves the "pensioners' friends" you know they aren't talking about the people who have to scrape by on £79.60 a week.
Restoration of the earnings link would see the current state pension rise to £109.40 for a single person and £174.95 for a couple. That's the way you end pensioner poverty Harry Sloan As the pre-election campaigning lurches into full swing, New Labour's controversial marketstyle reforms within the NHS are increasingly recognised by ministers to represent a major gamble.
The implementation of the new system of payment by results" which was due to take eitect from April 1 has been further scaled back, and additional steps have been taken to forestall the impending bankruptcy of any major NHS Trusts until after the votes have been safely counted in May.
Cash deficits among Trusts and Primary Care Trusts currently stand in excess of E500 million, with just weeks to go until the deadline for balancing the books. Ministers could yet be confronted with more cuts and closures on the eve of polling day.
But there has been further embarrassment as a top Laboursupporting businessman, Lord Browne, chief executive of BP, used a speech at the World Economic Forum to challenge the core assumptions on which New Labour has imposed internal markets on health, education, and prison services.
Browne claimed that the use of "pseudo-markets" was "damaging professional people" but also turning the wider public against business in general.
The civil servant wheeled out to defend the New Labour reforms, Sir Steve Robson, was a former second permanent secretary to the Treasury, and oversaw the Tory privatisation programmes. He has now been involved as Labour has cranked up the use of the private sector to increase competition in health care and other sectors.
He denounced Lord Browne as "talking rubbish", and asked why businessmen should hold such strong views on "something they know nothing about". They should leave that to top Whitehall mandarins. the amount that the British financial system will provide at the given interest rate then the money has to be borrowed from abroad. This brings us to the second development currently helping to stabilise growth levels.
Britain has maintained a trade deficit of around £50 billion over the last year. However, more than half of this has been funded by a combination of earnings from the financial sector and profits generated by past investments overseas.
Both of these sources of income are dependent on continuing strong growth in the world economy.
Last year the OECD countries grew by 3.6% overall, and on an increasingly uncertain international outlook. But with house prices beginning to dip and debt at record levels, the option of switching back to reliance on domestic household consumption is also problematic.
All the indications are that the growth of the last few years has done nothing to eliminate the inherent instability of capitalism.
Whoever becomes Chancellor after the next election is likely to find themselves facing a harsher set of constraints than those which Gordon Brown has had to deal with up until now, and the opportunities for socialists to argue for an economic alternative will correspondingly grow.
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The high cost of the workers in the sector. UNISON