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”.
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.