Tendring Topics……….on line
For the seven
years I have been writing and publishing this blog I have been banging away
about the way in which successive Chancellors of the Exchequer have acted like
Robin Hoods in reverse, for ever widening the gap (already the widest in the EU)
between the incomes of the rich and the poor, and using the taxation and
benefits system to punish the poorest people in Britain in order to reward the
very richest. Now we learn that George Osborne’s
austerity programme has failed. Instead
of reducing the national debt he’s managed to increase it. I have little doubt that it is the poor who
will be expected to pay for his failure.
Last
week London Evening Standard
columnist Armando Ianucci made all
the points that I have been trying to make, but much more effectively than I
have, in a feature article on the subject of Punishing Poverty, a
practice of which he accuses politicians of all the main parties. Below are the
introductory paragraphs:
It’s now a rite of passage for any aspiring
political leader to state that he or she is keen to cut the welfare budget;
it’s a mantra as regular as putting a penny on tobacco or vowing to protect the
NHS. That’s why it drew no real howls of outrage when George Osborne got up at
his party conference last month and declared that to cut the deficit further he
needed to find another £25 billion of savings, and that he’d get them from cuts
to welfare. You don’t have to be a Harvard-trained economist to know that the
last people to have a spare £25 billion sloshing around are the poor. Yet
no one seemed that bothered by the Chancellor’s economics.
Similarly Ed Miliband, who has spent the past few years putting his party through intensive social policy reviews, seems to be restricting his public pronouncements to “tough” decisions to limit child support payments and to put a cap on welfare spending.
There’s nothing “tough” about kicking someone when they’re down. In
fact, it appears to be the easiest job in British politics. So, even though benefit fraud itself is dwarfed thirtyfold
by annual tax fraud by companies and individuals, headlines express more
contempt for the shirker than for the City’s creative accountants and financial
experts who caused the economic crisis in the first place. There are no
poster campaigns asking us to snoop on tax fraudsters; but it’s become a common
trope in any portrayal of benefit culture that it’s peopled entirely by women
banging out babies to get better housing, and men claiming sickness benefit
while out ten-pin bowling.
The passage that I have printed in bold type should be
written in letters of fire on the walls of the House of Commons and in every
newspaper editorial office! The article
in the Evening Standard goes on:
The true
picture is a much more sobering one: it’s of an increasing section of society
working or trying to find work while living within touching distance of
poverty. We may be through the worst of the Great Recession but many have had
to drop down in pay level, endure frozen salaries, move to find work at great
personal cost, or take themselves off the unemployment register by entering the
fickle world of self-employment. This weekend’s figures that show there are now
a record 5.2 million workers in low-paid jobs point to a significant section of
the community being pushed to the margins.
Meantime, those claiming benefit are evaluated by firms such as Atos
and Maximus, charged with keeping welfare costs down. Claimants are subjected
to an undignified, demoralising series of tests and conditions which, if
flouted, result in a sanction, an automatic suspension of payment. Fair enough, you might think, were it not
that these firms are under pressure to hit targets. There are thousands of
examples of claimants sanctioned for missing interviews when they’re
incapacitated, or in hospital, or receiving notice of the date after the event,
or being sent it on line even if they’ve said they don’t have wi-fi. You can appeal against a sanction, in case
you’re wondering, but the process can take six months, and benefits stay
suspended for the whole of that time.
Even claiming disability benefit draws suspicious looks. The suggestion
by welfare reform minister Lord Freud that certain disabled people were not
worth the minimum wage can only reinforce a current unspoken prejudice against
disabled claimants. There are more and more accounts of people in wheelchairs
receiving verbal abuse and worse on the streets.
We are now in the middle of a shocking rise in poverty in all its
forms, most shocking of all being hunger. Since 2012 both Save the Children and
the Red Cross, institutions set up to provide charity overseas, have been busy
working in Britain UK
The experiences of volunteers there are not of dealing with skivers or
cheats, but with vulnerable people whose dignity has been washed out of them by
austerity and who are embarrassed by their situation. Some come admitting they
skip evening meals so they have enough to feed their children. Some are
children bringing fathers or mothers who are too proud to make the trip on
their own. Many are working, sometimes with two jobs, but on low pay.
I
think that that is a pretty damning article and one that goes against the
policies of most politicians and most of the popular press. I can only congratulate and thank the author of the article
and the editor of the Evening Standard for
swimming against the tide. I hope that
this blog will be instrumental in gaining it a wider publication both at home
and overseas. In the UK today
hard-working tax payers do not support an idle and feckless poor. On the contrary, it is the labour of poor
people, the majority of whom work hard for long hours for meagre pay (who pay,
through indirect taxation, a far greater proportion of their income back to the
state than even the richest income-tax payer) that maintains and increases the wealth of the
richest fraction of our society.
Why
do you imagine that multi-millionaires contribute so generously to traditional
political parties? It’s to keep them
acting as Robin Hoods in reverse!
Some unquestionably Good News!
One
has to look hard for unequivocally good news in the news media today. Murders, child abuse, uncontrolled epidemics,
wars and rumours of wars fill the newspapers and the tv and radio news
bulletins. I have to keep telling
myself that what is newsworthy is the exception and that most of my fellow men
and women are friendly, law abiding and peace-loving. No-one is going to buy a local newspaper with
the headline No-one was assaulted, robbed or murdered in Clacton-on-Sea
Yesterday! It’s the occasional
violent crime not the much more usual boring old peace that makes the
headlines!
Yet
during the past fortnight we have had what was at least to me, a completely
unexpected piece of good news and the possibility of more to come. Surgeons in Poland (yes, that’s the same
country that produces all those unwanted migrants!) had performed an operation on
someone whose spinal cord had been severed and who had been told he would never
walk again! The basis of the surgery
seems to have been the removal of some tissue from the back of the nose and its
transplant in the area of the broken spinal cord. The British consultant who had carried out
the research that had made this possible commented modestly that he felt this
was equivalent to ‘A man walking on the
moon’. I think it is far more important
to human-kind than that. It offers hope where, in the past, there had been
none.
Nearly half a century ago, when
I was Clacton ’s Housing Manager, we had a
young newly-married couple in one of our Council Houses. The young man was very keen on 'keeping fit' and went for
a jog and a quick plunge into the sea every morning. One morning he plunged head-first into what
he had thought was 6ft depth of water.
It was actually little over 18 inches – he was rescued and survived, but
with a broken neck that left him paralysed from the neck down, and with no hope
of ever recovering movement in his limbs.
The
Council moved him into a bungalow specially adapted for his restricted life but,
of course, he needed twenty-four hour care.
I felt desperately sorry for his young wife; still in her early twenties.
The prospect of being a carer for 24 hours a day 7 days a week had not been in
her mind when on their wedding day, only a few months earlier, she had promised
to love and support him 'for richer, for poorer, in sickness and
in health' as long as they both should live.
Nowadays,
thanks to British research and the skills of those Polish surgeons, such a
young couple could be offered at least the
hope of an eventual happy ending. Dante knew what he was doing when, at the entrance of his imagined Hell, he put the notice 'All hope abandon, ye who enter here'. We
humans need hope to make our lives worth living.
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