Green Party

Today is blog action day, and this year’s topic is poverty.

Greens are rightly associated with supporting higher aid budgets for people in poverty abroad and for our stand against trade rules that impoverish developing countries. Green Party Leader Caroline Lucas was this week named MEP of the Year for Trade for her work battling new Business Secretary Peter Mandelson’s, 'Global Europe' trading strategy, which has forced open markets and driven down wages in some of the poorest countries in the world.

But poverty in the UK is also something the Greens are working hard to stamp out - not only by reducing money flowing out of family budgets by cutting fuel bills with free insulation – but also by increasing the money coming in, by fighting for a real Living Wage to be paid to all workers.
 
The fact is that the minimum wage is in fact a poverty wage in most areas of the UK. Of children living in poverty across the country, 57% have one or both of their parents in work, but their wages are not enough to support their families because the minimum wage has not kept up with the soaring costs of their household bills, housing and transport.

Greens nationally have made campaigning for a Living Wage a key priority for action. The London Living Wage is now £7.45 per hour. It is now paid to thousands of workers who were previously receiving the minimum wage, which is  just £5.73, thanks to the research work of the London Living Wage Unit, which was brought in by Green Assembly Members four years ago, and the campaigning work of citizens' groups and Greens across the city.
 
In Oxford, Greens have succeeded in passing a motion through the City Council, bringing in a living wage of £7 per hour for council workers. And in Lewisham, the six strong Green Group is proposing a paying the London Living Wage to all council employees, and is proposing extending this to all council contractors as well.
 
Here in Norwich we have startling high levels of inequality. In the inner city, an estimated one in three families are living and working in poverty - defined as 60% of the Median income, which means just £185 per week. This has meant Norwich Citizens' Advice Bureau seeing families that survive from food thrown out by supermarkets at the end of the day because they could not afford it otherwise.

As a councillor I have been contacted on several occasions by desperate families who have been made homeless as a result of their house being repossessed. The council has housed them in temporary accommodation but they have always ended up in smaller accommodation than where they started. In each case they could not keep up with their mortgage repayments. Not only do we need tougher action from government on the less reputable loan companies that sign up people on mortgage schemes with huge interest levels, but we need a Living Wage to help the poorest people in society keep up with rent and mortgage payments.

Two weeks ago, the Greens on Norwich City Council successfully passed a motion pledging the council to put issues around decent work, including low wages, poverty and inequality in the city and the development of a Living Wage, at the core of its agenda in the future.

The motion was proposed and supported by the thirteen-strong Green Party Group, and was supported by both Labour and LibDem councillors. The Conservative councillors refused to back the motion, claiming that the decent work agenda inherently implied greater powers for unions which ‘were not appropriate in these economic times’. Given that it is the poorest who are suffering the most from rising basic living costs, the right to be part of a trade union and press for decent wages is surely as important at the moment as ever.

Strangest, though, was the attitude of the LibDems, who voted for the motion, but announced in the meeting that they did so reluctantly because - they said - of concern for the potential negative wider economic implications of setting minimum rates of pay that are higher than ‘the market rate’. I know that the LibDems and the Conservatives used such arguments when they opposed the introduction of the minimum wage ten years ago but I thought they had moved on since then.

It seems that if you want a progressive party you can trust to take real, effective action on poverty, you’re best off with the Greens.

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