The Shadow Chancellor has today called on Philip Hammond not to go ahead with the £3.7bn worth of cuts to Personal Independence Payments (PIP) which will hit 160,000 disabled people.

The announcement, which was sneaked out last week, will mean 160,000 disabled people could see a loss in their income as a direct effect of the changes made by the government to how PIP is awarded.

John McDonnell MP, Labour’s Shadow Chancellor, said:
“Theresa May has used the cover of the by-elections to sneak out this announcement hurting so many vulnerable disabled people.

“This is a return to the worst politics of spin that so tarnished our politics for so long. It is an act of immense bad faith. She is degrading politics and demeaning the role of Prime Minister.

“Next week the Tories will make out that the economy and the public finances are doing better, however, they are planning to go ahead with a £3.7 billion cut to the disabled.

“This time last year when the economy and public finances were not doing as well, and the then Chancellor George Osborne tried to cut PIP, Labour stopped him. And in his u-turn he claimed that he could “absorb” the cost of reversing this cut.

“Hammond can’t hide from these PIP cuts in his Budget. He needs to explain why he can’t absorb them like his predecessor while he is still going ahead with tax giveaways to the very wealthiest in our country.”

Chinese police seized more than 800 suspects in 380 major cases worth 900 billion yuan (US$131 billion) related to underground banks in 2016, said the Ministry of Public Security (MPS) on Sunday.

A campaign against underground banks to maintain financial order and security is helping the country’s anti-corruption drive recover the assets of fugitive officials, said the ministry.

In 2016, the ministry worked with the central bank and the State Administration of Foreign Exchange to crack down on the transfer of illicit money via offshore companies and underground banks.

Officials with the MPS said that the ministry will continue action against illegal private banks in cooperation with the central bank and the foreign exchanges regulator in 2017.

“For a long time, underground banks have become a fast channel to transfer money, for they are anonymous and hidden. Many criminals have taken advantage of the channel to transfer their illegal gains to the overseas,” said Zhang Niannian, an official with the central bank.

Underground banks have also offered a quick passageway for corrupt officials to transfer their properties, Zhang added.

The central bank will track and analyze new methods of crimes, especially in special non-financial institutions and sector, and improve measures of anti-money laundering, Zhang said.

Shu Jianping, head of the anti-money laundering office of the economic crime investigation division of the MPS, said that cases related to underground banks covered several industries, including foreign trade and real estates.

Harms of underground banks are increasing, Shu said, adding that local public security organs were urged to continue the campaign against underground banks.

China’s environmental inspectors named and shamed more cities on Sunday for poor air quality control as the fight against smog continues.

Inspections of 18 cities in north China’s Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei (BTH) region and nearby areas used unannounced checks at night and undercover methods, the Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP) said.

Handan city of Hebei Province continues to illegally operate coal-fired boilers though officials had ordered them closed. After the inspections, the boilers were dismantled and a police investigation opened.

In Cangzhou, also in Hebei, an oil pipe maker, a major source of emissions, was not included in the list of companies to halt production on heavily polluted days.

A cement producer in Beijing used more electricity than usual in December, when it should have suspended production. Two other cement firms were wrongly exempted from production suspensions.

On Friday, the MEP criticized several cities in Hebei, Shanxi and Henan for not doing enough in curbing the use of “scattered coal,” coal burned by households or small factories for heating and is much more dirty than that used by thermal plants, which have the equipment to reduce emissions.

China is intensifying efforts to fight pollution and environmental degradation after decades of growth left the country saddled with problems such as smog and contaminated soil.

A total of 720 people were detained and 6,454 held accountable in China for environment-related wrongdoing in 2016, according to earlier official information.

Chinese cities suffered from more days of air pollution in January, with northern areas being the worst affected.

The share of days with good air quality in BTH were a mere 36.2 percent in January, a year-on-year drop of 19.6 percentage points.

Jinggangshan, the heartland of the early revolutionary activities of the Communist Party of China (CPC) in east China’s Jiangxi Province, announced Sunday that it has been officially taken off the list of impoverished areas.

Jinggangshan was home to the CPC’s first rural revolutionary base established in 1927. Today, people who live under the poverty line account for 1.6 percent of the total population, lower than the national standard of 2 percent, according to the city government.

The local government contributed the precision poverty relief campaign, which is in full swing across the country. Precision means that money should be spent exactly where it is needed, and no more than is needed.

Jinggangshan helped people start businesses or find jobs, while provided a safety net for those who were unable. In addition, it also helped poor people move into quality homes and improved infrastructure in rural areas.

The Chinese government has decided to eradicate poverty by 2020, the target year for China to become a “moderately prosperous” society.

EU has come to mean European Unemployment. The Euro seems to stand for European Unemployment and Recession Organisation.  One of the main reasons the Euro and the Euro elite are under attack in so many Euro countries by new political forces challenging the project is their insouciance to the economic problems created by or co-existing with their single currency and single market.

If the Euro and the single market were all they are cracked up to  be by the EU elite governing parties and senior officials they would have banished high youth unemployment and general unemployment in Greece, Spain, Italy, Portugal and others by  now. They would have boosted the zone’s growth rate up at least to that in the USA, UK, and the other leading non Euro advanced western countries. Instead Greece remains mired in a long recession punctuated by the odd quarter or two of slow growth. Italy languishes well below the levels of GDP achieved before the 2008 banking crash.  They have no convincing explanation of why half the young people in Greece are out of work, or why one fifth of the Spaniards are still out of work after a year or so of recovery.

I first realised that the single market was not going to add jobs and incomes to the UK or anywhere else when I became the UK’s single market Minister. I had accepted the verdict of the referendum in 1975 that UK voters wanted to be in a common market free trade area, though I  had cast one of my first votes against, as the Treaty did not say it was going to be a free trade area. It looked in those early years like a Customs Union , with asymmetric relaxation  of trade in goods where the UK was relatively weak and little or no relaxation in services where the UK was strong.

So it proved, with our big balance of payments deficit with the EU becoming a permanent feature based on the continental car industry and others outcompeting the UK.  I tried to make it more like the free trade common market people had been promised. With so many matters settled by majority vote it  became more and more difficult for the UK to stop measures which simply added to costs and made the EU less able to create jobs.

Instead the single market became the method by which large multinationals based in the EU lobbied to secure rules, laws and regulations that suited their existing way of doing business, and made market entry for competitors dearer and more difficult. The Common Agricultural Policy was well protected by heavy tariffs against cheaper food from poorer countries, and the Common Fishing Policy turned the UK with one of the richest fisheries in the world into an importer of fish. The single market was invoked as a reason for the EU to undertake wide ranging legislation on the environment, movement of people, transport, research and much else. The UK growth rate slowed after we joined the EEC and slowed again after the completion of the single market. The EU’s Exchange Rate Mechanism did particular damage to our economy, costing us many jobs and lost output. The Euro crisis more recently hit the Euro badly and had some knock on effect to us.

The EU elite tell all those who are unhappy about Euro area growth rates, unemployment and wage levels that it works fine for Germany so the others just need to get their national governments to cut wages more and get on with competing. They’ve been trying this for years and it doesn’t work economically. They may  be about to find  out it does not work politically for them either. The future of  Euro and the zone’s economic policy is now effectively on the ballot paper  in national elections in several countries.