Category: Conservatives

‘We are raising more money for the rich’ revisited: some thoughts

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The exposure of Cameron’s lie that the welfare “reforms” are about “making work pay” and his Freudian-style slip – “We are raising more money for the rich” – during Parliamentary debate on 12th December 2012 deserve a little scrutiny and analysis. This was a memorable Commons debate, with Ed Miliband delivering some outstanding challenges to David Cameron, some of which provoked the Freudian-style slip, and exposed the traditional Tory values and neoliberal ideology underpinning their policies.

So Cameron is raising more money for the rich. Get outta town! Well, it’s not as if most of us haven’t spotted the growing gap between the wealthiest and the poorest, and made a fundamental connection there.

Tax avoidance and evasion costs this Country at least £69 billion a year, at a conservative estimate. Also, note that the highest earners each stand to gain a further £107, 000 EXTRA per year, courtesy of the Tory-led Coalition.

That’s most certainly reflects traditional Tory ideological commitments, and it drags Osborne’s sham “economic strategy” shrieking into daylight, revealing it starkly for what it is. The real reason for the austerity measures this Government have inflicted on the poorest citizens is that Tory sponsors and very greedy, hoarding rich people are being handsomely rewarded with tax payers money.

The money for our welfare provision, our healthcare, our public services, schools, and so on, is being stolen from the British public and backhanded to the undeserving rich – there is the REAL “culture of entitlement”.

Private companies, many of which donate to the Conservative party, and have a subsequent powerful (and corrupt) lobbying influence on Tory policies, are making a fortune from the poverty that has been inflicted on many citizens. We have seen that the private sector do not deliver public “services” or meet public needs at all. (Atos, A4E , G4S, for example.)

Private companies simply make profit. Indeed, that profit is all too often made at the expense of the well being of Citizens. That is most certainly and clearly true of Atos.

Ed Milliband said: ‘David Cameron and George Osborne believe the only way to persuade millionaires to work harder is to give them more money.’

‘But they also seem to believe that the only way to make you (ordinary people) work harder is to take money away.’ 

A very well spotted contradiction regarding Cameron’s claims about how “incentives” work. Apparently, the rich are a different kind of human from the majority of human beings. One set of punitive incentives for the poorest, another set of deluxe incentives, based on reward, for the wealthiest. That’s most certainly discrimination, embedded in Tory policy.

Cameron rewards his wealthy friends and has a clear elitist agenda, while he funds his friends and sponsors by stealing money from the tax payer, by stripping welfare provision and public services down to the bare bones. The truly terrible and catastrophic thing is that some are paying for Cameron’s shameful and unwarranted generosity to the already wealthy with their very lives. 73 sick and disabled people die on average every week, having their benefit claim ended by the Department for Work and Pensions.

This Government have written targets into Atos’s contract when they renewed it: 7 out of 8 claimants to lose their benefit. That indicates quite clearly that people are losing their benefit regardless of whether or not they they are fit to work, since the target exists before the claimant is even assessed.

Cameron’s generosity to his pals means eugenics by the back door for the most vulnerable citizens.

  • Article 2 of the Convention of Human Rights uses the following definitions of genocide, amongst others: 
  • Killing members of the group Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group.

However, under the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, disabled people are not currently recognised as a clearly defined protected group. The many deaths of vulnerable people are currently being denied or passed off as “unintended consequences” of Coalition policies.

The persistent denials and consistent refusal to carry out a cumulative impact assessment, or conduct an independent investigation into the many  deaths indicates, to me, that those policies are intentional. The Coalition have no intention of changing them.

Taking money from the most vulnerable and poorest members of Society means they are unlikely  to be able to meet their basic biological needs. Welfare provision – our various benefits system – was based on the carefully calculated amounts we need to survive, so the amount of benefit we have meets just basic needs. The Tories have cut that basic survival level from the money we paid in for our own provisions and services. Meanwhile, those provisions and services are being sold off to Tory-sponsoring businesses. What a truly cunning heist.

This is not just about an ideologically motivated economic theft from the people with the least, and a redistribution of wealth to those that need it least, the Tories have also waged an existential attack: a psychic war is being waged on us every bit as much as a fiscal one, with the media on the enemy frontline, attacking on a linguistic and psychological level every day.

Unemployed, ill and disabled people have been redefined, semantically reduced, dehumanised, and demarcated from the rest of the population and turned into the ‘others’, and this divisive strategy has paid off for the enemy, because we are now regularly attacked by our own side: by those people who are also with us on this increasingly sparsely resourced, economically excavated side of the growing inequality divide.

Imagine what that does to faith and hope. For those of you that are not sick and/or disabled, I can tell you that it is often a very isolating and lonely experience. That is made so much more unbearable by prejudice and hate from other people. To be excluded further from everyday life and experience, both materially and existentially, brings about a terrible, bleak, desolating sense of social abandonment and a very real imprisonment.

We are living in a Government-directed culture of division and hatred.  

It’s no coincidence that hate crime against disabled people has risen steeply over this past two years. Most of us have experienced some verbal abuse from members of the wider public, at the very least. It’s become such a common experience that it may be regarded as almost normalised behaviour.

So let’s get this right… Cameron claims that the wealthy need more money as an incentive to work, whereas the poor need money taking from them via “Reforms” to “incentivise” them to work harder. Sixty percent of the welfare cuts will affect the working poor most of all. So much for the flat lie that Cameron and Co. are “making work pay”. The jobless, of course, are to be starved into finding none-existent jobs, in an economic depression.

Everyone knows that when people are prevented from meeting basic needs – food, fuel and shelter –  they die. It’s an irrefutable fact. Consider the new sanction regime that the Tory – led Government has just introduced from December 3rd 2012. Up to three years with no benefit at all for those benefit claimants that don’t “meet certain conditions for eligibility.” 

That certainly contravenes fundamental and established human rights. And it is certainly calculated and deliberate removal of the means that the poor have of basic survival. That is certainly a calculated and deliberate eugenics agenda.

Bearing in mind that the Government has set sanction targets for the DWP, and also, we know that claimants are set up to be sanctioned by DWP staff, we know that the sanction regime is just another way that the Government are stripping welfare, punishing and harming claimants, and in a recession (some are calling it a depression).

How on earth did it become the ‘norm’ – for a government to punish people by withholding public funds to deny them their basic survival needs? How is it acceptable in any way that people are being punished by starvation and the threat of homelessness? This is a government creating destitution within a targeted sector of the population.

What kind of Government would do that? This is Cameron’s Cruel Britannia. Killing vulnerable citizens via policy IS deliberate.

People are dying so that Cameron can hand out their publicly funded welfare provision budget as pocket money for the already rich.

We are raising more money for the rich

Hansard source and my original article 

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 Many thanks to Robert Livingstone for his brilliant artwork

Worth reading:

Ed Miliband challenges Cameron on the massive growth of food banks over the past two years –“I never thought the big society was about feeding hungry children in Britain,” Miliband tells Cameron.

On the subject of foodbanks – private companies with Conservative connections are benefiting from ‘reform’ of the British welfare state

 

 

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The Blame Game

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The Government are playing a game. They don’t serve the needs of the public. They serve a wealthy elite. The Conservatives don’t care about the consequences of taking money from the poorest and giving it to the wealthiest. But they won’t tell us that. They are playing the game that the game is not a game.

It’s called the “blame game.” As welfare “reforms” and housing cuts bite increasingly harder, do we ever reach the point where the government concedes that the horror and hardship caused to many is an inevitable consequence of their own policies? Not at all.  Instead we see their adeptness at digging ever deeper holes of denial.

At least Thatcher admitted there was increased unemployment, that it was as a tool of economic policy, and it was, in her opinion, a price worth paying to bring down inflation. Shucks, shame that didn’t work, Maggie. We had high unemployment AND high inflation. But at least she was honest about her original intent.

The government denies that there is job insecurity, unemployment and underemployment. Or indeed any hardship at all; public sacrifices made through an elites’ economic policy-making. They blame anyone other than the ministers who have instituted the cuts. Whenever some new example of the horrendous effects of their policies is presented to them, they have a range of stock responses. You have to wonder if there is a standard Whitehall crib sheet for ministers. Cases that clearly indicate a correlation between their policies and harm are dismissed as “anecdotal evidence”, and that “no causal link can be established”. 

Correlation often implies a causal link, but to find it, you have to investigate further, rather than issuing flat denials, loudly.

Here is what the crib sheet looks like, in the interests of democracy and open Government:-

Deny that alternatives to austerity are viable

The repetition of a lie ad nauseum is based on the idea Goebbels had – that repeated lies will somehow convince people that they are true. Cameron was busted when he repeatedly told the lie “We are paying down the debt.“ Despite being rumbled, the Coalition have stuck with this lie doggedly. The bonus of the lie is that it may undermine the opposition’s economic credibility, and the Tories particularly delight in the lie that it’s all Labour’s fault because they “overspent” as it further justifies austerity measures and starving public services of Government funding, with our paid taxes, as well as stripping our welfare provision away.

The Conservatives have REALLY messed up the economy. We know it’s a big fat Tory lie that cutting spending at a time of economic recession will re-balance public finances. As many academics and economists have stated, cutting spending when the economy is flat is likely to cause further contraction to the economy, and that will negatively affect public finances, rather than help at all.

The government will never confess to this because they are so tightly ideologically bound to an übertreiben Neo-Liberalism, no matter what the cost is in human terms, or even in economic terms. What we need is Labour’s expansionary fiscal policies, not contractionary ones. Real, sensible economists know that the only way to address a recession is to grow the economy, and that means more public spending in the short term, to stimulate economic activity, and cutting if needed when the economy is back on the up (which needn’t mean absolute cuts, but relative cuts because the economy is growing).

Repeat that implementing the cuts is avoidable

The trick is to give the impression that all the cuts can be made painlessly by eliminating luxuries and sacking “backroom staff”. Cameron used this one at PMQs last week when he accused Councils of making high-profile cuts “to try to make a point,” and not because they need to. Delivered with a straight face and psychopathic calm, this sounds like a feasible lie that some will believe.  So, central government is severely reducing budgets to Local Authorities, leaving them with a kind of impossible table cloth pulling trick to accomplish. Rip away the funding and hope the contents of the table – local services and provisions – stay put, and don’t crash to the floor. Of course, Labour Councils will be affected by the cuts more than other Councils, too. That also works out well for the Conservatives.

Blame the previous Labour Government. A lot

“It’s all their fault we have too few homes.” The Conservatives focus on the fact that housebuilding in Labour’s very last year was the worst they achieved, even though we know that was because of the credit crunch. The government won’t admit either that housebuilding under the Coalition is on average 45,000 homes less per year than the output under Labour, or that 2010/11 and 2011/12 were the two worst years since the war for English housebuilding. They don’t mention that Thatcher sold off all of the social housing stock, either. Again, they blame local government. Westminster is putting homeless families up in expensive hotels and Camden is sending them to Coventry (or Leicester, Liverpool, or somewhere else absurdly far from London). The Government say, hiding their smug smiles, how stupid this is, and tell them to stop it, even though both they and we know they cannot.

(See also The UK deficit scam: George Osborne is nailed, we are paying down the debt and rumbled).

Don’t admit that cutting welfare affects anything else.

Cuts in all benefits for private tenants and the bedroom tax will mean that more people will become homeless, and more people will need accommodation with lower rents ad fewer rooms in the social sector. The government deny that this will happen. Most of the political debate at the moment is focused on the consequences of the bedroom tax, which they claim is “fair”and the implications of private sector high rents, local rent allowance caps, (and in some areas, councils are quietly imposing a bedroom tax on those in privately rented properties, too, despite the rhetoric that this will affect only those tenants in social housing) the poll tax style council benefit reductions and DWP related benefits cap have been somewhat obscured.

Current debate does not, and probably cannot cover the depth of utter disruption and destruction to people’s lives that these changes are going to bring about. That is partly because the full details of the changes are not being released by this government in a transparent and timely manner.

If any evidence emerges that shows them to be wrong, under no circumstances will the government agree with it. All valid criticism and evidence will be passed off as “scaremongering”. Better still, the government don’t read the evidence then no-one can accuse them of knowing the facts but ignoring them. Alternatively, officials may be able to find an obscure or outdated source that on the surface appears to contradict the evidence.

Blame the victims

Extravagant housing benefit claims may only happen in a few isolated cases, but even so the press will amplify and stigmatise those few, especially if they are large families, unemployed, migrants or – even better – all three. The government gives the impression that such claims make up most of the welfare budget. They won’t ever admit that over half of welfare spending goes to older people, as they are seen as deserving of it, by the general public. Athough older people may not be as secure as they think – there’s a little rhetoric creeping in that portrays elderly people needing social care as being a “burden” on “the tax payer”. That never bodes well for a social group, it usually signals some significant cut to their income and support.

If the government is talking about housing benefit, they will try to give the impression that it’s spent by the tenants themselves to fund their indolent lifestyles – they won’t ever confess that the money goes directly to landlords who are pushing up rents because there are insufficient houses available. There is the old Poor Law binary conceptual schema, especially resurrected to inform Tory narratives  – the notion of  “deserving” and “undeserving” poor, which is implicit in all of their anti-welfare and anti-public service rhetoric.

The government use keywords and sound bites in debate, speeches and in the media. They repeatedly refer to “scroungers”, “hard working families” , “the workshy,” “strivers” and “skivers” and talk about “subsidised housing,” and not council homes. (£23,000,000,000 every year is given to private landlords in subsidies by tax payers). This helps “confirm” the impression that most welfare spending is a waste of (“striving” tax payers’) money.

Suggestions for new and even more derogative terms are always welcome. IDS made a good attempt to link welfare recipients in the public collective consciousness with drug addicts and alcoholics. Other MPs are following his lead. Again, evidence that is presented to the contrary is dismissed, usually with angry derision and a renewed psychological and linguistic assault on the victims, and/or the label of  “scaremongering” directed at the critic that presented the evidence.

Another important strategy employed by the Tories is to manipulate the victims of their savage cuts via propaganda, so they blame each other. Those in low paid work can blame the poor unemployed for the economic recession and the misery of the cuts, those unemployed people can blame poor immigrants, and everyone can blame the poor “feckless” and “fraudulent” sick and disabled people. The Conservatives are very adept at creating  social divisions by constructing folk devils and generating moral outrage. It’s an old and established bullying tactic to blame the victim, as this serves to cover up the abuse of the victim or to “justify” that abuse.

The Tories managed to use others to persecute victims further in order to oppress and silence them. Scapegoating victims and persecution of selective social groups is also one of the hallmarks of an authoritarian government, one that does not serve the needs of the public, but rather, sees the public as a means of serving government ends.

Deny that the cuts are taking place

The government will point out if there is any part of any budget that they decided to protect, however small, and they will grossly exaggerate its importance. Take a historical lesson from Grant Shapps: every time someone has said funding for homelessness is being cut and services are being decimated, he would point to his department’s very small fund for homelessness prevention, and claim that because it hadn’t been reduced, other services had been unaffected, or – oh yes of course – any cuts are the fault of the Local Authorities. The ones that have had their funding drastically cut by central government, and that face even more cuts once the Localism Bill has been implemented.

It’s obvious to all that the scale of the welfare cuts in reality must mean massive suffering and hardship. Furthermore, Labour find and present deserving examples of cases, such as people dying of cancer, homeless ex-servicemen, that sort of thing. (There are many, many deserving examples of cases, too.) One Tory tactic is to almost always offer to investigate the particular case, implying they may do something (even though they won’t.) Another is that they point to the money that’s been set aside for special cases (e.g. Discretionary Housing Payments). They never fail to give the impression that this is sufficient to deal with any genuine hardship.

Usually there is mention of an amount e.g. Discretionary Housing Payments total £60 million in 2012/13. This will seem a large sum to the public even though it’s only a tiny fraction of the cuts taking place. There isn’t a chance in hell that such a small amount of funding “on one side” will alleviate the chaos, suffering and mass homelessness as a result of the bedroom tax, council “poll” tax and benefit cap and all of their terrible effects hit hard, which they undoubtedly will despite the pseudo-reassuring Tory rhetoric that glides with glib indifference over the surface of these socially regressive horrors. 

Stick a public plaster on it

Unfortunately some problems are so big and so obvious that the government have to pretend they are doing something about them. For example, everyone knows builders have almost stopped building. Given that the housing budget had one of the biggest cuts of all in the latest Spending Review, there’s precious little they can can do, but they will nonetheless pretend otherwise. Firstly, they argue that output is going up even when it’s going down (Tory tip – don’t appear on Sunday Politics, choose programmes where they don’t do their research.) Secondly, the government always have to hand some useful initiative available that sounds like it might solve the problem, even if it’s far too small to make any difference.

Grant Schapps gave us NewBuy and FirstBuy, which both sound sufficiently impressive, but then they may need to invent one or two more when people realise how inconsequential they are. The government have said they are selling more homes under the right to buy scheme, as if this helps solve the problems, even though they aren’t and it doesn’t.

Richard Vize made an excellent point in the Guardian last week that Cameron and Co. are undermining Local Government and failing to prepare people for the depth of the cuts that are now hitting them – with much worse still in the pipeline. He says that ministers are “giving the impression that public services can indeed manage cuts without pain or profound change. They can’t.”

How on earth can the government expect to be taken seriously, if they make cuts on an unprecedented scale over a dangerously tight time-scale, but refuse even to admit there might be consequences for public services?

Perhaps  the frightening answer is that they refuse to admit it because their intention is to push ahead relentlessly, and regardless of public opinion, and that they don’t care about the consequences.

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Picture courtesy of Robert Livingstone