Category: Conservatives

Amber Rudd’s masterclass in Doublespeak

· 13 Comments ·

crudd.jpg

Yesterday, heartless Amber Rudd was accused of shrugging off ‘heartbreaking’ Universal Credit experiences and stories by suggesting they are about only “one or two” people. 

This is a government who tell us with a straight face that inflicting absolute poverty on the poorest citizens is somehow going to make them less poor. This ideological framework is also imposed upon people in low paid work, struggling to meet their basic living costs. So the government slogan “making work pay” is meaningless Orwellian tosh, as is the Conservative’s longstanding ‘culture of dependency’ thesis and ideological justification narrative for inflicting devastating cuts on those who can least manage to get by. 

The Work and Pensions Secretary made the outrageous comments after being confronted by the Mirror about flaws in Universal Credit.

For years many of us have published articles ranging from flaws in the social security system, affecting millions, to struggling readers who’ve been forced to food banks, as well as administrative ineptitude and bullying that has often had catastrophic consequences. The roll out of Universal Credit has caused hunger, destitution, deaths and suicides, let’s be frank and pay some attention to the empirical evidence, rather than expedient ideological soundbites.  

Amber Rudd told the Mirror: “Some of the criticisms that have come from various publications have been based on one or two particular individuals where the advice hasn’t worked for them.”

That statement flies in the face of empirical evidence. On this site alone there are MANY individual accounts of the harms arising as a result of Universal Credit. And to claim the reason for these harms is because “the advice hasn’t worked or them” is a serious and disgusting trivialisation of the psychological distress and trauma, the deaths, suicides, rising numbers of those facing hunger, hardship, and destitution that Universal Credit, combined with such systematic government denial and indifference, is causing.

She added: “But in the vast majority of cases, and I would urge everybody who hasn’t to take the opportunity to speak to work coaches, the sort of support that individuals get is a completely different approach to what they had previously.”

Yes. It’s not actually support. It’s a programme of discipline, coercion and punishment.

However it isn’t work coaches who have to live with the consequences of a system that was designed to be an increasingly standardised Conservative hostile environment. The government seem to believe that publicly funded public services should serve as a deterrent to people needing support from the public services they have paid into. 

What matters most is the accounts of citizens, which tell their experiences of the system, not of those administrating it. But citizens’ voices are being intentionally stifled, edited out and worse, their accounts are being re-written by politically expedient civil servants and government ministers. This presentation of ideological fictions and the use of gaslighting techniques is usually the preserve of totalitarian regimes, it’s not the behaviour one would expect of a democratic government in a so-called liberal society. 

Governments with such limited social intelligence don’t lie very convincingly, but they do tend to be hard faced and tenacious. The real horror is their utter indifference and lack of responsiveness: that they really don’t care. They continue to demand our suspension of belief and dizzying cognitive dissonance. The relationship between citizen and state is one of abuse, founded on gaslighting strategies.

Rudd added: “And it is delivered with professionalism and care and compassion.”

Sure. The kind of “professionalism, care and compassion” that leaves a terminally ill man without sufficient support to meet his most basic needs, or that leaves a pregnant mother in extreme hardship, homeless, and resulting in the loss of her unborn child. Or one that pushes people towards suicide.

There is very little empirical evidence of the “professionalism, care and compassion” that Rudd claims. Furthermore, the trivialisation and persistent denials of the harm, distress and extreme hardship that is being inflicted on people because of government policies are all utterly unacceptable behaviours from a government minister, reflecting a profound spite within policy design, a profound lack of political accountability and a profound indifference for the consequences of these behaviours on the lives of ordinary people.

In fact, former Universal Credit staff reveal call targets and ‘deflection scripts, which means staff having to block or deflect vulnerable claimants, telling them that they would not be paid, or would have to submit a new claim, or have a claim closed for missing a jobcentre appointment, or be sanctioned – a penalty fine for breaching benefit conditions – or go to the food bank.

One whistleblower said that her role often felt adversarial. She said: “It was more about getting the person off the phone, not helping.” That’s a very strange kind of “compassion.”

As researchers have concluded, Universal Credit is a complicated, dysfunctional and punitive’ system that makes people increasingly anxious, distressed, with some of the most vulnerable citizens in the UK being pushed to consider suicide, and it ‘simply doesn’t work.’ (See Universal Credit is a ‘serious threat to public health’ say public health researchers, for example).

A devastating National Audit Office report last year about Universal Credit concluded that the DWP was institutionally defensive and prone to dismissing uncomfortable evidence of operational problems. Welfare secretary at the time, Esther McVey, felt the need to make a speech in July in which she promised that where problems arose in future the department would “put our hands up, [and] admit things might not be be going right”.

It’s also clear – in the words of the public accounts committee – that there is a “culture of indifference” within the DWP and wider government.

It’s time that government ministers started to listen to citizens’ voices, to service users – as well as campaigners, researchers, charities and the opposition Parties. And the United Nations – instead of presenting denials that policies are seriously harming people. But there is every indication that they won’t. 

Universal Credit’s malign effects are obvious to anyone who actually looks, and is willing to listen to the voices of those affected by this punitive, mean-spirited and fixated, theory-laden, ideologically driven, miserly provision, that was, at the end of the day, paid for by the very public who are claiming it.

Labour MP Maria Eagle flatly stated that Rudd’s comments are “not true” and are “out of touch”.

She said: “The entire design of the system puts people in debt and the benefit cuts accompanying its introduction have made it far worse.” 

Rudd was questioned by the Mirror after she said yesterday: “Maybe things that were  proposed previously weren’t effective or weren’t compassionate in the way that I want them to be.”

Mirror journalists asked if she could, ‘hand on heart’, say it was “compassionate” to double UC claimants this year, keep the two-child limit and keep the benefit freeze until 2020.

Rudd did not respond to the question, instead replying: “The overall product that is Universal Credit is absolutely compassionate.”

Product? That’s a very odd word to use for lifeline support – the public services that are our social insurance which people have paid into for those times when they need it. 

And using key words from a government strategic comms crib sheet – James Cleverly among others has also opted for the word ‘compassionate’ to describe the welfare ‘reforms’ – does not make those narratives the reality experienced by citizens who need to access support from public services. Saying it does not make it real. This is something the Conservatives seem to have overlooked – that their narratives don’t match people’s realities. That’s the problem with telling lies – the empirical evidence catches up with you sooner or later.

Starving people and leaving them in destitution is not ‘compassionate’. Using a publicly funded public service to deliver punitive and a blunt, coercive, authoritarian behavioural modification programme is not ‘compassionate’. These are the actions and narratives of a government dipping a toe into the realms of totalitarianism.

Rudd claimed that UC needs to be ‘improved’, including to make it fairer to woman, but also said it was a “vital reform delivering a fair and compassionate welfare system”, “by far the most important and crucial reform” and a “force for good”.

Yesterday, the high court concluded that the Universal Credit assessment is illegal. The first judicial review verdict of Universal Credit found that the cutting of severe disability premiums from those who had previously claimed ESA was discriminatory.  How many more legal changes will it take to make the government act with some decency and observe basic laws and human rights?

Ideological mythologies

Rudd went on to claim, somewhat incoherently, that the ‘old system’ was “broken”, “not a utopia that we should return to” and under Labour someone unemployed could receive “£100,000 housing benefit per year.”

The charity Fullfact submitted a freedom of information (FoI) request to the DWP in 2012, following the same claims from David Freud, among other Conservative minsters, that people claiming social security support were receiving £100,000 housing benefit per year. The figures in the response showed that over four out of every five Housing Benefit claims are below £100 per week (the equivalent of £5,200 per year) according to the September 2010 figures, while only 70 out of over 4.5 million recipients claimed over £1000 per week, around 0.001% of the total.

Even this is likely to overstate the number claiming £100,000 per year however, as a family would need to claim over £1,900 per week to hit this total. Previous FoI responses from the Department have suggested around five families were awarded this amount.

Ministers and the media repeatedly failed to highlight what is such a small number of the total, and printed screaming and misleading headlines that were inaccurate, without putting this into a wider context. While the evidence suggests that there are a small number of Housing Benefit claims of more than £100,000 per year –  around five – these cases are very much the exception rather than the rule. Focusing exclusively on these outliers without first putting them into context, where over 80% of claims are below £100 per week, has [intentionally] distorted the debate about welfare, aimed at de-empathising the public and providing a justification narrative for cuts.  

Other information drawn from the FoI request found that larger claims tended to come from larger families, and the average household size for people claiming over £40,000 was six. For more details, do check out the numbers in the request itself, which is available here.

People weren’t suffering profound distress, hunger, destitution, suicide ideation and dying because of the ‘old system’.

Perhaps ‘utopias’ are relative. What we are currently witnessing is not “compassionate” or a “force for the good”: it is the dystopic system of an authoritarian state inflicting punishment, discipline and coercion on our most vulnerable citizens.

It’s a state programme that dispossesses citizens, with catastrophic human costs, to fund the tax cuts demanded by a handful of powerful and wealthy vultures, who live lavishly within a culture of entitlement, while the rest of us are increasingly impoverished.

facade-welfare

Amber Rudd claims that Universal Credit is ‘compassionate’. She must have been taking lessons in Doublespeak again.

—

 

I originally published this as part of a larger article. 

 

My work is unfunded and I don’t make any money from it. This is a pay as you like site. If you wish you can support me by making a one-off donation or a monthly contribution. This will help me continue to research and write independent, insightful and informative articles, and to continue to provide support others who are affected by the welfare ‘reforms’. 

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The DWP left a terminally ill man penniless until after he died

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0_jill-fennell mark

Jill Fennell and her partner Mark Scholfield. She says: “The benefits system is barbaric and inhumane.” (Image: Jill Fennell/Facebook).

A man who was terminally ill with cancer was forced to spend his final days penniless as he waited for a Universal Credit payment that cruelly arrived the day after he died.

Mark Scholfield was made to endure an eight-week delay for the social security payment before he died, aged just 62, of mouth cancer.

Mark’s partner, Jill Fennell, who was with him for 23 years, said: “When you’ve been given a devastating blow, being told you have terminal cancer, money is the last thing anyone should be worrying about.

“The benefits system is barbaric and inhumane.”

Jill, also 62, said self-employed musician, Mark, was unable to work for two months before he had his diagnosis in February 2017. He was told his condition was terminal, she said, and initially, he was  encouraged to apply for fast-track Employment Support Allowance (ESA) to help him meet the costs of living and pay bills.

However, because he lived in Camberwell, South London, where the government’s controversial flagship failure – Universal Credit – was being rolled out, he was told that he did not qualify for ESA.

Instead he had to apply to Universal Credit (UC). The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) often use Credit Reference Agencies to verify the identity citizens making a claim, but Mark had never had credit, and he was told that must visit a Jobcentre with ID.

Jill said that despite his failing health and diagnosis of terminal cancer, Mark was forced by the DWP to go through a health and work assessment over the phone. She  said that she was distraught, and  left “screaming hysterically down the phone”, asking “did they realise he was dying?”

After five weeks Mark received his first payment, which just about covered rent and council tax, but left him with little to live on. But for the next eight weeks he did not receive any more money, and died on July 19, 2017.

It was only after Mark’s death that Jill discovered an ESA payment had been made a day later, as well as a UC payment.

She said: “Mark had needed the money while he was alive to live his final months in some level of comfort and dignity, but he was denied that.”

A DWP spokesperson said: “Our thoughts are with Mr Scholfield’s friends and family.

“While Mr Scholfield was receiving Universal Credit, we are extremely sorry for the delay in his ESA payment which should have been fast-tracked.”

That response is simply unacceptable. Because this kind of glib, standardised apology for an apology is happening far too frequently, it to reflect any shred of sincerity, meaning, reflection or learning on the part of the DWP.  

Linguistic behaviourism: cruelty is compassion, indifference is care

Yesterday, heartless Amber Rudd was accused of shrugging off ‘heartbreaking’ Universal Credit experiences and stories by suggesting they are about only “one or two” people. 

This is a government who tell us with a straight face that inflicting absolute poverty on the poorest citizens is somehow going to make them less poor. This ideological framework is also imposed upon people in low paid work, struggling to meet their basic living costs. So the government slogan “making work pay” is meaningless Orwellian tosh, as is the Conservative’s longstanding ‘culture of dependency’ thesis and ideological justification narrative for inflicting devastating cuts on those who can least manage to get by. 

The Work and Pensions Secretary made the outrageous comments after being confronted by the Mirror about flaws in Universal Credit.

For years many of us have published articles ranging from flaws in the social security system, affecting millions, to struggling readers who’ve been forced to use food banks to survive, as well as administrative ineptitude and bullying that has often had catastrophic consequences. The roll out of Universal Credit has caused hunger, destitution, deaths and suicides, let’s be frank and pay some attention to the empirical evidence, rather than expedient ideological soundbites.  

Amber Rudd told the Mirror: “Some of the criticisms that have come from various publications have been based on one or two particular individuals where the advice hasn’t worked for them.

That statement flies in the face of empirical evidence. On this site alone there are MANY individual accounts of the harms arising as a result of Universal Credit. And to claim the reason for these harms is because “the advice hasn’t worked or them” is a serious and disgusting trivialisation of the psychological distress and trauma, the deaths, suicides, rising numbers of those facing hunger, hardship, and destitution that Universal Credit, combined with such systematic government denial and indifference, is causing.

“But in the vast majority of cases, and I would urge everybody who hasn’t to take the opportunity to speak to work coaches, the sort of support that individuals get is a completely different approach to what they had previously.”

Yes. It’s not actually support. It’s a programme of discipline, coercion and punishment.

It isn’t work coaches who have to live with the consequences of a system that was designed to be an increasingly standardised Conservative hostile environment. The government seem to believe that publicly funded public services should serve as a deterrent to people needing support from the public services they have paid into.

Work coaches don’t have to live with the direct consequences of state policies. What matters most is the accounts of citizens, which tell their raw, first hand experiences of the system, not of those administrating it. But citizens’ voices are being intentionally stifled, edited out and worse, their accounts are being re-written by politically expedient civil servants and government ministers. This presentation of ideological fictions and the use of gaslighting techniques is usually the preserve of totalitarian regimes, it’s not the behaviour one would expect of a democratic government in a so-called liberal society. 

Governments with such limited social intelligence don’t lie very convincingly, but they do tend to be hard faced and tenacious. The real horror is their utter indifference and lack of responsiveness: that they really don’t care. They continue to demand our suspension of belief and dizzying cognitive dissonance. The relationship between citizen and state is one of abuse, founded on gaslighting strategies.

There is very little empirical evidence of the “professionalism, care and compassion” that Rudd claims. Furthermore, the trivialisation and persistent denials of the harm, distress and extreme hardship that is being inflicted on people because of government policies are all utterly unacceptable behaviours from a government minister, reflecting a profound spite within policy design, a profound lack of political accountability and a profound indifference for the consequences of these behaviours on the lives of ordinary people.

Rudd added: “And it is delivered with professionalism and care and compassion.”

Sure. The kind of “professionalism, care and compassion” that leaves a terminally ill man without sufficient support to meet his most basic needs, or that leaves a pregnant mother in extreme hardship, homeless, and resulting in the loss of her unborn child. Or one that pushes people towards suicide.

And former Universal Credit staff reveal call targets and ‘deflection scripts, which means staff having to block or deflect vulnerable claimants, telling them that they would not be paid, or would have to submit a new claim, or have a claim closed for missing a jobcentre appointment, or be sanctioned – a penalty fine for breaching benefit conditions – or go to the food bank.

One whistleblower said that her role often felt adversarial. She said: “It was more about getting the person off the phone, not helping.” That’s a very strange kind of “compassion.”

As researchers have concluded, Universal Credit is a complicated, dysfunctional and punitive’ system that makes people increasingly anxious, distressed, with some of the most vulnerable citizens in the UK being pushed to consider suicide, and it ‘simply doesn’t work.’ (See Universal Credit is a ‘serious threat to public health’ say public health researchers, for example).

A devastating National Audit Office report last year about Universal Credit concluded that the DWP was institutionally defensive and prone to dismissing uncomfortable evidence of operational problems. Welfare secretary at the time, Esther McVey, felt the need to make a speech in July in which she promised that where problems arose in future the department would “put our hands up, [and] admit things might not be be going right”.

It’s also clear – in the words of the public accounts committee – that there is a “culture of indifference” within the DWP and wider government.

It’s time that government ministers started to listen to citizens’ voices, to service users – as well as campaigners, researchers, charities and the opposition Parties. And the United Nations – instead of presenting denials that policies are seriously harming people. But there is every indication that they won’t. 

Universal Credit’s malign effects are obvious to anyone who actually looks, and is willing to listen to the voices of those affected by this punitive, mean-spirited and fixated, theory-laden, ideologically driven, miserly provision, that was, at the end of the day, paid for by the very public who are claiming it.

Labour MP Maria Eagle flatly stated that Rudd’s comments are “not true” and are “out of touch”.

She said: “The entire design of the system puts people in debt and the benefit cuts accompanying its introduction have made it far worse.” 

Rudd was questioned by the Mirror after she said yesterday: “Maybe things that were  proposed previously weren’t effective or weren’t compassionate in the way that I want them to be.”

Mirror journalists asked if she could, ‘hand on heart’, say it was “compassionate” to double UC claimants this year, keep the two-child limit and keep the benefit freeze until 2020.

Rudd did not respond to the question, instead replying: “The overall product that is Universal Credit is absolutely compassionate.”

Product? That’s a very odd word to use for lifeline support – the public services that are our social insurance which people have paid into for those times when they need it. 

And using key words from a government strategic comms crib sheet – James Cleverly among others has also opted for the word ‘compassionate’ to describe the welfare ‘reforms’ – does not make those narratives the reality experienced by citizens who need to access support from public services. Saying it does not make it real. This is something the Conservatives seem to have overlooked – that their narratives don’t match people’s realities. That’s the problem with telling lies – the empirical evidence catches up with you sooner or later.

Starving people and leaving them in destitution is not ‘compassionate’. Using a publicly funded public service to deliver punitive and a blunt, coercive, authoritarian behavioural modification programme is not ‘compassionate’. These are the actions and narratives of a government dipping a toe into the realms of totalitarianism.

Rudd claimed that UC needs to be ‘improved’, including to make it fairer to woman, but also said it was a “vital reform delivering a fair and compassionate welfare system”, “by far the most important and crucial reform” and a “force for good”.

Yesterday, the high court concluded that the Universal Credit assessment is illegal. The first judicial review verdict of Universal Credit found that the cutting of severe disability premiums from those who had previously claimed ESA was discriminatory.  How many more legal changes will it take to make the government act with some decency and observe basic laws and human rights?

Rudd went on to claim, somewhat incoherently, that the ‘old system’ was “broken”, “not a utopia that we should return to” and under Labour someone unemployed could receive “£100,000 housing benefit per year.”

The charity Fullfact submitted a freedom of information (FoI) request to the DWP in 2012, following the same claims from David Freud, among other Conservative minsters, that people claiming social security support were receiving £100,000 housing benefit per year. The figures in the response showed that over four out of every five Housing Benefit claims are below £100 per week (the equivalent of £5,200 per year) according to the September 2010 figures, while only 70 out of over 4.5 million recipients claimed over £1000 per week, around 0.001% of the total.

Even this is likely to overstate the number claiming £100,000 per year however, as a family would need to claim over £1,900 per week to hit this total. Previous FoI responses from the Department have suggested around five families were awarded this amount.

Ministers and the media repeatedly failed to highlight what is such a small number of the total, and printed screaming and misleading headlines that were inaccurate, without putting this into a wider context. While the evidence suggests that there are a small number of Housing Benefit claims of more than £100,000 per year –  around five – these cases are very much the exception rather than the rule. Focusing exclusively on these outliers without first putting them into context, where over 80% of claims are below £100 per week, has [intentionally] distorted the debate about welfare, aimed at de-empathising the public and providing a justification narrative for cuts.  

Other information drawn from the FoI request found that larger claims tended to come from larger families, and the average household size for people claiming over £40,000 was six. For more details, do check out the numbers in the request itself, which is available here.

People weren’t suffering profound distress, hunger, destitution, suicide ideation and dying because of the ‘old system’.

Perhaps ‘utopias’ are relative. What we are currently witnessing is not “compassionate” or a “force for the good”: it is the dystopic system of an authoritarian state inflicting punishment, discipline and coercion on our most vulnerable citizens.

It’s a state programme that dispossesses citizens, with catastrophic human costs, to fund the tax cuts demanded by a handful of powerful and wealthy vultures, who live lavishly within a culture of entitlement, while the rest of us are increasingly impoverished.

facade-welfare

Amber Rudd claims that Universal Credit is ‘compassionate’. She must have been taking lessons in Doublespeak again.

 

My work is unfunded and I don’t make any money from it. This is a pay as you like site. If you wish you can support me by making a one-off donation or a monthly contribution. This will help me continue to research and write independent, insightful and informative articles, and to continue to provide support others who are affected by the welfare ‘reforms’. 

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Amber Rudd admits link between Universal Credit and rise in people needing for food banks

· 13 Comments ·

Yesterday I wrote an article about housing minister James Brokenshire’s Christmas Eve revelation that the increase in homelessness ‘may’ be linked with government  policies. 

Now it seems that Amber Rudd has also admitted that the Government’s flagship Universal Credit policy has been responsible for driving record numbers of people to food banks, however, she still insists the new benefit is “a force for good”.

Call me a cynic, but perhaps this apparent softening from the Conservatives, a move away from the usual position of rigid denial of harm caused by their punitive welfare policy regime may be rather more an indication of a possible early General Election, rather than revelation because of a visit by the ghost of Christmas present.

The new Work and Pensions Secretary, who took over the role from Esther McVey, made the comments during a visit to a Jobcentre in Longton, Staffordshire, on a ‘fact-finding tour.

Rudd resigned from her previous role when it became apparent that the Home Office had designed a hostile environment, making deportation threats to the children of Commonwealth citizens. Despite living and working in the UK for decade, and being given indefinite leave to remain in the UK in the 1970s, UK Windrush citizens have been told they are living here ‘illegally’ because of a lack of ‘official paperwork’. Some of the Windrush generation have been denied health care, housing and employment as a consequence.

The Home Office did not keep a record of those granted leave to remain or issue any paperwork confirming UK citizenship – meaning it is difficult for Windrush citizens to prove they are in the UK legally.

And in 2010, landing cards – proof of identity – belonging to Windrush migrants were destroyed by the Home Office.

Rudd has stepped into another role which has seen the creation and maintenance of a hostile environment, which has been designed to ‘disincentivise’ people from claiming social security, ‘nudging’ people into work. The ‘nudge’ comprises of  conditionality: a series of coercive ordeals that are designed to ensure no one feels comfortable or secure claiming lifeline support.

Given that most people have worked, contributing taxes to pay for their social insurance, it’s controversial, to say the least, that citizens are being subjected to such a punitive system, which is about ‘discouraging’ them from claiming the support they have paid into. 

The visit to the jobcentre in Longton was part of what she described as a “nationwide tour” to promote Universal Credit, which has, since its introduction, faced widespread criticism from both MPs and charities alike.

She said: “The purpose of me coming here, as part of a nationwide tour, is to see what’s happening on the ground, to reassure myself that Universal Credit is working and also to find out what we can do better.

Work and Pensions Secretary Amber Rudd

Amber Rudd, the Department for Work and Pensions secretary.

“I recognise that there have been problems as it [Universal Credit] has been taken forward.

“That has made people fearful of it, and so one of the reasons I’m visiting different Jobcentres is to speak to the work coaches, and to clients as well, to find out what has been working well for them, as well as what hasn’t been.

“There have been issues previously, when Universal Credit started, with the time it took to get people the money that they needed, and we have addressed some of those.” 

Rudd then claimed: “First of all, the vast majority of people, around 84 per cent, get the money they are expecting on time. I want to continue the improvement on that. It wasn’t like that when it first started.

“I’ve been told that in this office, there were three people on the Friday before Christmas who were able to get advanced payments on their application that day.

“It was those elements, of getting the money into people’s hands earlier, which were critical to stop the growth in food banks.

“I regret the growth there has been in food banks and I hope that these changes will stop that.”

However, Rudd said she still believes Universal Credit “is a force for good”, that delivers “better outcomes for people” than the benefits it replaces. However, any advance in payment is subsequently deducted from the ongoing award, which means people are still not receiving payments for the first five weeks of their claim – the advance is a loan to cover the period where no support is awarded. Repayment of the advance is deducted from the amount people get monthly, when their award is finally made, often leaving people more short of money to make ends meet.

She said: “It offers what we seek it to offer, which is to be a safety net and also to help people into work, without the terribly huge tax rate that there used to be.”

She clearly needs to consider her use of the phrase “safety net” here, since many people claiming Universal Credit are unable to meet the costs of their most basic  needs. This has led to the rise of absolute poverty in the UK, at levels not seen since the 1930s. People not having enough to eat is an example of absolute poverty.

Rudd also said that she was struck by the ‘huge enthusiasm’ of Jobcentre staff in Longton.

However, surely what matters are the views of service users, rather than those administering it. After all, many a despotic regime has been administered by ‘enthusiastic’ jobsworths.

In November last year, the UK’s largest food bank network – the Trussell Trust -published figures showing a 13% increase in users between April and September 2018.

The charity attributed the rise to the minimum five-week wait for new Universal Credit claims before people they receive an initial payment.

Chief Executive Emma Revie commented: “We created systems like our national health service, fire service and benefits system because we’re a country that believes in protecting each other.

“Our benefits system is supposed to anchor any of us from being swept into poverty, but if Universal Credit is to do that, we need to see urgent changes.

“It’s not right that people are being forced to use food banks after weeks of waiting for Universal Credit payments.”

“We’re seeing soaring levels of need at food banks”, she added. “The time to act is now.”

“If the five-week wait isn’t reduced, the only way to stop even more people being forced to food banks this winter will be to pause all new claims to Universal Credit, until funding is in place to reduce the five week wait.

“Food banks cannot continue to pick up the pieces – we have to make sure our benefits system can protect people from hunger.”

trussell-trust-referral-numbers-2018

I don’t make any money from my work. I have a very limited income. But you can help if you like, by making a donation to help me continue to research and write informative, insightful and independent articles, and to provide support to others affected by the Conservative’s welfare ‘reforms’. The smallest amount is much appreciated – thank you.

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The government prioritises corporate welfare at the expense of social welfare

· 9 Comments ·

facade welfare

The welfare ‘reforms’: public policies for private profit

It’s widely assumed that public services are organized and delivered for the benefit of citizens. The reality, however, is very different. The more we scrutinise the role and function of different government departments and programmes, the clearer it becomes that they are being redesigned to bring direct and indirect benefits to private businesses.

In 2014, Aditya Chakrabortty wrote in the Guardian: “[…] as the Tory faithful cheered on George Osborne’s cuts in benefits for the working-age poor, a little story appeared that blew a big hole in the welfare debate. Tucked away in the Guardian last Wednesday, an article revealed that the British government had since 2007 handed Disney almost £170m to make films here. Last year alone the Californian giant took £50m in tax credits. By way of comparison, in April the government will scrap a £347m crisis fund that provides emergency cash for families on the verge of homelessness or starvation.

“Benefits are what we grudgingly hand the poor; the rich are awarded tax breaks. Cut through the euphemisms and the Treasury accounting, however, and you’re left with two forms of welfare. Except that the hundreds given to people sleeping on the street has been deemed unaffordable. Those millions for $150bn Disney, on the other hand, that’s apparently money well spent –whoever coined the phrase “taking the Mickey” must have worked for HM Revenue.”

Ministers have admitted this week that more than 4,500 disabled people were wrongly stripped of their benefits despite having a good reason for missing reassessments. The Department for Work and Pensions has now acknowledged the ‘blunder’ – more than one year after a court ruling that the disability living allowance (DLA) payments should not have been stopped. The grossly unfair withdrawal of support happened when disabled people were being transfered from DLA to the government’s cost cutting replacement benefit, personal independent payments (PIP). Disabled people had their lifeline payments stopped entirely.

“We expect around 4,600 people to gain as a result of this review exercise,” a statement from Sarah Newton to MPs says.

But those disabled people are not “gaining” anything. They are simply being paid what they should have been paid.

The admission was slipped out as MPs left Westminster for their Christmas break, as one of a dozen last-day announcements. The disability equality charity Scope described it as “deplorable”.

The latest mistake comes in the wake of the DWP admitting to £970m of underpayments to people being migrated onto Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) between 2011 and 2014. Ministers were accused of creating a “hostile environment for sick and disabled people” following the blunder, which occurred when claimants were transferred onto the main sickness benefit, ESA.

Both PIP and DLA are designed to help people with the extra costs of disability, or long-term health conditions, yet any award is reluctantly made, and all too often people have to go to court to challenge extremely inaccurate assessment reports and enormously unfair decision-making.

If the British public are to fund corporations, they should expect and demand that those businesses observe certain conditions of basic fairness. It’s difficult, however, to challenge what is hidden from view.

In his article, Chakraborrty discusses the work of Kevin Farnsworth, a senior lecturer in social policy at the University of York, who has spent the best part of a decade studying corporate welfare – delving through Whitehall spreadsheets and others, and poring over Companies House filings. He’s produced the first ever comprehensive audit of the British corporate welfare state.

Chakrabortty says: “Farnsworth has achieved something extraordinary: he has yanked into the open an £85bn subsidy that big business and the government would rather you didn’t know about.

“Thinking over this giant corporate bung, two responses immediately suggest themselves. First, it shows up the stupidity of all those newspaper spreads and BBC discussions constantly demanding “What would you cut?”, like some middlebrow ransom note (“Choose now: or the lollipop lady gets it”). It’s a question you’ll be hearing more and more in the run-up to the election. Perhaps next time, as well as mentioning schools, fire services and benefits, some brave Radio 4 presenter will mention the business coaching and marketing and advocacy services provided by the Department for Business (annual cost: nearly £5bn).”

But it was more a case of “choose now and disabled people still got it.” The cuts to the welfare support for the poorest citizens – paid for by the public FOR the public – were carefully planned and coordinated. Private companies were hired to fulfil a role of  discrediting disabled people’s accounts of their disability, and to engage in very bad report writing, with an ultimate aim of resource gatekeeping. At the same time, legal aid was withdrawn to prevent citizens from accessing justice and seeking redress.

Meanwhile, the government and media constructed a narrative to demonise and condemn the poorest citizens, labelling them as undeserving “scroungers” and would be “fraudsters.”

The state’s costly private gatekeepers of public funds

The government has awarded at least £1.4billion of outsourcing contracts linked to the roll-out of Universal Credit and other welfare reforms since 2012.

As Universal Credit continues to be rolled out, forcing the poorest citizens into debt, food poverty and rent arrears, new data has shown the  private companies that have profited from implementing the government’s social security reforms.

The data, which was obtained by HuffPost UK,  was generated by searching Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) public contract tenders for Universal Credit and related keywords. It reveals the vast sums the DWP has spent carrying out health and disability assessments on disabled people claiming support.

The information has prompted mental health and disability charities to call for the DWP to urgently review the failing system of assessment.

Among the companies that have won contracts are global consultancy giants. Some of the firms’ names are known to the public, but details of the awarded contracts are not.

A huge £595million contract was awarded to American consultancy group Maximus to provide health and disability assessments, the largest single DWP contract related to welfare reform since 2012, according to the data.

Atos and Capita also won contracts totalling £634million to carry out assessments for Personal Independence Payments (PIP), a disability benefit.

Consultancy firm Deloitte was awarded a £750,000 contract for work to support the Universal Credit programme and a £3million deal was signed with IT firm Q-Nomy to develop an appointment booking service for the social security payment, which is intended to simplify working-age benefits.

Recap: “Deloitte were responsible for advising Carillion’s board on risk management and financial controls, failings in the business that proved terminal. Deloitte were either unable to identify effectively to the board the risks associated with their business practices, unwilling to do so, or too readily ignored them.” Frank Field

Another £60,000 contract was awarded for the purchase of MacBooks for Universal Credit to Software Box Limited.

Vicki Nash, head of policy and campaigns at mental health charity Mind, told HuffPost UK: “Despite the vast amounts the government spends on benefits assessments – delivered by companies like Atos, Capita and Maximus – we hear every week from people with mental health problems who get the wrong decision, leaving them without support.

“We’ve long been calling for an overhaul of benefits assessments so that they work for those being put through them. For many people with long-term mental health problems, there’s no need to be put through the stress and pressure of repeated reassessments.”

Geoff Fimister, of the Disability Benefits Consortium, which represents 80 charities, added: “These are very large amounts of public money to be spending on services that are falling short.”

The DWP has awarded 76 separate contracts related to welfare reform since 2012, totalling £1.4billion.

But it is estimated that the true figure will be higher as prior to 2015 some government procurement tenders were not published publicly. This changed from 2015 onwards when new rules under the Public Contracts Regulations 2015 meant all tenders had to be made public.

Four of the contracts also show a £0 value and do not include the contract amount.

Tussell’s figures show the DWP has awarded £4.7billion in outsourced contracts across all areas of its work since 2012.

It is clear from the information publicly available that contracts relating to Universal Credit and Personal Independence Payments (PIP) constitute the vast majority of the DWP’s sub-contracting pre-2015. 

But from 2015 onwards, when the data is more robust, this trend was reversed.

Since January 2015, only about 2% (£66million) of DWP contract awards relate to Universal Credit or other welfare reforms of a total £2.8billion bill.

The most valuable contract since 2015 was an £8.2million award to Serco to manage a call centre for claimants of the disability benefit PIP.

The second was a £6million award to Advanced Personnel Management Group to provide healthcare staff to help conduct work capability assessments for Universal Credit and Employment Support Allowance. 

Also included are multiple contracts awarded in 2017 regarding Phase 2 of the New Enterprise Allowance scheme, which offers support to those claiming Universal Credit to become self-employed and start businesses.

A contract of £8.2million has been awarded to Serco to deliver a new claims telephony service for Personal Independence Payments.

Gus Tugendhat, founder of Tussell, said: “With the controversial rollout of Universal Credit still very much a work in progress, contract notices analysed by Tussell provide insight into some of the challenges the government is facing, including with IT systems and recruiting healthcare professionals for assessments.

“While the challenges are many, the government deserves credit for its transparency which we hope to see maintained.”

Universal Credit is being introduced to replace six existing benefits with one monthly payment and the government says it is a more streamlined system that will ‘help move people into work.’ 

But it is rather more expensive to deliver.

The DWP said that technical support was vital to carry out a digital delivery on the scale of Universal Credit and said the department operates within strict procurement guidelines to ensure maximum value for money.

The DWP claim that while Universal Credit will cost £1.7billion to deliver, the new system will bring about £8billion a year in economic benefits when fully rolled out. 

A DWP spokeswoman told HuffPost UK: “This is a random selection of some of our contracts spanning six years covering a range of DWP services and benefits, used by hundreds of thousands of people, that offer support to jobseekers to move into work, while having the right care in place for those that cannot work.”

The 10 highest value contracts awarded by DWP linked to Universal Credit and welfare reforms since 2012

  • £595million to Maximus People Services Ltd for health and disability assessment services. 
  • £207million to Atos for Personal Independence Payments assessment service Lot 1 contract extension (Lot numbers refer to different geographical areas)
  • £184million to Atos for Personal Independence Payments assessment service Lot 3
  • £122million to Capita for Personal Independence Payments assessment service contract extension Lot 1
  • £122million to Capita for Personal Independence Payments assessment service contract Extension Lot 2
  • £90million to Atos for a medical services IT contract
  • £8.2million to Serco to deliver a new claims telephony service for Personal Independence Payments
  • £6million to Advanced Personnel Management Group to provide healthcare staff to conduct work capability assessments for Universal Credit and Employment Support Allowance
  • £3.9million to Pinnacle People Limited for Phase 2 of the New Enterprise Allowance Scheme in the north east to support people into self-employment and to start their own businesses
  • £3.3million to Ixion Holdings (Contracts) Limited for Phase 2 of the New Enterprise Allowance Scheme in London and the home counties

Source: Tussell

Farnsworth’s research should have triggered a public debate about the size and uses of the corporate welfare state.

In his article about corporate welfare, Aditya Chakrabortty goes on to say “[…] what you get on the issue is silence. A very congenial silence for the CBI and other business lobby groups, who can urge ministers to cut benefits for the poor harder and faster, knowing their members are still getting their bungs.

“An agreeable silence for Osborne and David Cameron, who still argue that the primary problem in Britain is that the public sector “crowds out” private enterprise, without ever acknowledging how much the public subsidises business.”

Most of all, a silence at the very centre of our democracy.

Personally, I agree with Chakrabortty’s conclusion: I’ll believe we’re getting somewhere when Channel 4 puts on Corporate-Benefits Street – with White Dee replaced by the likes of Amazon founder and inveterate tax-dodger Jeff Bezos, or the sweatshop  king pension-swindling crook, Philip Green.

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Jeremy Corbyn’s calm decency is the best antidote to the Conservatives’ perpetual politics of spite

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Yesterday I wrote two articles about the Conservative’s latest grotesque dead cat strategy. The second was concerning an email I got in the early hours from the Conservative Party’s Vice Chair, Helen Whatley, which gave the whole series of  ever-complicit mainstream media commentaries and events in parliament a staged and an “integrity Initiative” kind of feel to it. I wrote a very angry and swift response. The bloomin’ cheek and brass neck of the Tories, asking ME to join their party to “show” Jeremy Corbyn. Needless to say I told them exactly what I thought of their psyop-styled invitation.

The Conservatives turned parliament into a spite-riddled pantomine yesterday, despite the fact that a homeless man who had collapsed outside the houses of parliament died hours before. He is the second homeless person to die after falling ill outside parliament this year. True to form, the heartless government refused to see this as a wake-up call, and instead, unabashed, they indulged in disrespectful and vindictive performances to attack  HMs opposition leader.

Data released on Thursday by the Office for National Statistics shows nearly 600 homeless people were found dead on the streets or in temporary accommodation in England and Wales in 2017. They are the first official government figures and show a 24% increase in deaths over five years.

Deaths have risen every year since 2014, increasing from 482 to 597 last year, according to the figures. The average age of a rough sleeper at death was 44 among men and 42 for women. Eighty-four percent of the homeless people who died were men. London and the north-west had the highest mortality of homeless people in England and Wales.

Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn addresses a demonstration against nuclear weapons this year.

The trials, tribulations and triumphs of Jeremy Corbyn

Jeremy Corbyn has done more to increase his party’s vote share since Clement Attlee in 1945. Corbyn has remained calm, measured, rational and reasonable despite the general hatred directed at him by the Conservatives, from some of the ‘moderate’ left and of course, the far-right. Despite being targeted by truly evil and relentless propaganda and smear campaigns which a amplified by the media, he has, nonetheless seen considerable electoral success in spite of it all.

A whistleblower, Peter Francis, revealed in 2015 that the Special Branch were ordered to put Corbyn under surveillance, and they compiled secret files on the political activities of Corbyn and nine other MPs, even after they had been elected to the House of Commons. Francis disclosed that he had read the files on the 10 MPs while he worked for the Metropolitan Police’s special branch.

He added that he had personally collected information on Corbyn, and two other MPs, while he was working undercover infiltrating anti-racist groups in the 1990s.

In March 2015, Francis named the other Labour MPs whom police had kept files on – Harriet Harman, Diane Abbott, Joan Ruddock, Peter Hain, Dennis Skinner, Jack Straw, Ken Livingstone and the late Bernie Grant and Tony Benn.

The revelations prompted criticism from some of the MPs who swiftly went to the Commons and demanded answers from the police. (This is a transcript of the parliamentary debate, and Guardian articles here and here).

John Bercow, the Speaker of the House of Commons, has told MPs that the revelations were “extremely serious”, warning: “This matter will not go away”.

Hain, a former cabinet minister, (here) wanted to know why he was being watched by the police when he was an MP, adding that the revelations raised “fundamental questions about parliamentary sovereignty”. Two politicians have established that the police maintained files on their political activities in recent years. Neither of them – Jenny Jones, a Green Party peer, and Ian Driver, a Kent councillor who stood against ex UKIP leader Nigel Farage at this year’s general election – have a criminal record. 

The police were unable to say how many elected progressive politicians have been monitored by its ‘domestic extremism’ unit (whose formal name has been the National Domestic Extremism and Disorder Intelligence Unit.)

It’s an utter outrage, and clearly demonstrates the sheer unaccountability and contempt for democracy that the establishment have and hold. Yet the despicable prop and propaganda mouthpiece for a profoundly antidemocratic establishment, the Daily Telegraph, reported that undercover police officers had monitored Jeremy Corbyn for two decades. It was claimed that he had been put under surveillance “amid fears that he was attempting to undermine democracy”.

It was part of a barrage of stories from the rightwing press intended to damage his attempt to win the election.

But those of us with more sceptical (and less cynical) minds are asking a different question – why were the police spying on an elected MP who has been committed to nonviolent protest? 

As Corbyn has previously said: “I am a democratically elected person and it turns out I was put under surveil­lance for a long time because I campaigned on human rights issues and was involved in justice campaigns.”

Meanwhile, the Conservatives see universal human rights as an inconvenience to be  disregarded for those who can’t afford the privilege. They think social justice is about property rights, the right for employers to exploit workers, the right for the state to coerce ill and disabled people into exploitatively low paid jobs, regardless of whether or not they are well enough to work. 

It’s high time the UK public asked itself what kind of leader isthe best kind for the majority. Authoritarian leaders seem to conventionally appeal to historically stereotypical notions of “strength”, but who genuinely believes that this bunch of arrogant, sneering, narcissistic bunch of public school bullies has any real strength? And why does anyone imagine they give a toss about the majority of people’s lives? 

It’s time for us to emancipate ourselves from the conventional, overbearing authority, hierarchy and other forms of centralised, commanding domination of government. A collaborative, facilitating kind of leadership and political organisation is the only one with which we can genuinely engage and be engaged.

I’ve spent quite a bit of the last few years reflecting on the baleful influence of shadowy pressures coming from the establishment – ‘the permanent state’ – who quite simply will go to any lengths to prevent a thoroughly decent democratic socialist who means what he says, to be Prime Minister. 

And that in itself shows just what a flimsy facade democracy has become, serving as little more than a fact-proof screen erected around a very nasty long standing authoritarianism embedded in a deepest, darkest state. It’s time to knock it down and rebuild an accountable responsive government that serves the people, rather than simply enduring one that thinks we should serve it.

I’ll leave you with Jeremy Corbyn’s comment on yesterday’s shenanigans in parliament.

 

I don’t make any money from my work.  If you want to, you can help me keep going by making a donation to support me in continuing to research and write informative, insightful and independent articles, and to continue to provide support and advice to others affected by the Conservative’s punitive welfare ‘reforms’.

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My furious response to Helen Whately’s malicious communication asking me to join the Tory party

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Image result for helen whatley

Helen Whatley

I was absolutely shocked and appalled to receive the following targeted and malicious Integrity Initiative styled strategic communication from the Conservative party:

From: Helen Whately MP, Conservative Party Vice Chair, Women
Sent: 20 December 2018 00:50
To: suejones
Subject: Don’t stand for thisTory psyop 1

Ordinarily I write fairly measured, factual and challenging responses when the Conservatives have previously contacted me. However I am far too angry on this occasion to be polite.

Here is my rapid response: 

No. I wont be standing for this.

How DARE you send this utter crap to my inbox. Firstly, it was ALLEGED that the leader of HM’s opposition made that comment. My friend is deaf and can lip read extremely well. He says that Jeremy Corbyn mumbled “stupid people”. I scrutinised the video footage and agree that he said he did say “stupid people”. Other people who can lip read on social media have said the same. Your party’s orchestrated outrage and howling spite was completely wasted on me.

Your own party’s behaviour was an absolutely disgusting and disrespectful pantomime in parliament, with MPs and Ministers mocking, howling and braying like uncouth, malicious barnyard animals, as usual. You behaved in fact exactly like very authoritarian and stupid people.

I made my own mind up, so you’re wasting your time trying to make it up for me. Here is my own view of the Conservatives’ latest dead cat strategy, along with that of one surprisingly reasonable Conservative MP: https://kittysjones.wordpress.com/2018/12/19/a-conservative-mp-defends-jeremy-corbyn-as-he-responds-to-conservatives-dead-cat-strategy-allegations-of-sexism/

As for your claims about female employment, and wages, I made my own mind up about that too, by looking at the empirical evidence, and your claims are utter rubbish: https://kittysjones.wordpress.com/2018/12/13/about-the-governments-claims-on-real-wages-being-the-highest-since-2011/

That is why the ONS and statistical authority has constantly had need to officially rebuke this government for telling lies and misusing statistical data.

This is not the kind of action that I would expect from a party that was principled and genuinely fighting sexism: Tories reinstate MPs suspended over sex allegations for confidence vote: Labour calls restoration of Andrew Griffiths and Charlie Elphicke ‘betrayal of women’. 

Nor would I expect a genuinely principled party fighting sexism to impose the 2 child policy, the rape clause, the condition that social security is paid to one person in a household – usually males – rather than being split to protect women and children from potentially abusive partners.

You know, people can actually see the chasmic gap between what you say you do and what you actually do. Feigned principles fool no one for long.

Just so you know, I will NEVER join the Tory party, particularly after the way I have witnessed how you have treated ill and disabled people, because of YOUR party’s vile, punitive, patronising and despicably mean spirited policies. Many people worked for years and contributed to the Treasury until they couldn’t any more, and then got treated as if they are some kind of fraud just for becoming seriously ill. Welfare is not your money to cut: social security is paid for by the public FOR the public. 

It was intended as a system of support and protection from absolute poverty, not a system to administer punishment based on traditional Tory prejudices. Or as a source of pocket money for millionaires.

I’ll be voting Labour. Stick your spin “bulletin”, your rotten dead cat strategy and rehearsed strategic comms. where the sun doesn’t shine and rotate it all. Don’t ever insult my intelligence with rubbish like this ever again.

I will be reporting this strategic, profoundly undemocratic and malicious communication, by the way, to the Electoral Commission and other relevant agencies. 

Sincerely.

—

PS. Your email to me, a long standing Labour party member and campaigner, was almost as big a balls-up as this one:  Tories apologise after couple receive letter addressed to ‘Mr Youmustbe F******joking’.

 

 

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A Conservative MP defends Jeremy Corbyn as he responds to Conservative’s dead cat strategy – allegations of ‘sexism’

· 15 Comments ·

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn was accused of calling Prime Minister Theresa May a “stupid woman” in parliament today. 

Corbyn was seen after the alleged event on parliamentary footage muttering after he sat down following an exchange with a particularly vindictive May at the weekly Prime Minister’s Questions session during which she peevishly mocked him for not calling a vote of confidence in the government, turning the debate quite literally into utterly disrespectful pantomime.

A number of Conservative MPs demanded that Speaker of the House John Bercow  intervened but he refused, stating that he hadn’t heard Corbyn utter the alleged phrase. That resulted in Conservative MP and Leader of the House Andrea Leadsom aggressively critcising Bercow, saying the speaker had not apologised for calling her a “stupid woman” earlier in the year. 

Some of the media claimed that ‘lip speakers’ said Corbyn had said “stupid woman”. The BBC said that this was unanimously agreed among lip readers. However it isn’t:

alison

Corbyn stated: “I referred to those who I believe were seeking to turn a debate about the national crisis facing our country into a pantomime as ‘stupid people’,’ he said. ‘I did not use the words ‘stupid woman’ about the Prime Minister or anyone else, and am completely opposed to the use of sexist or misogynist language in absolutely any form at all.”

It’s very true that the Conservatives, taking their cue from the prime minister, turned PMQs into an utterly disrespectful, diversionary and vindictive pantomime, complete with the usual spiteful smirks, and barn yard braying that the Conservatives have normalised in the Commons . You can see the clip of the pantomime here 

Professional lip readers have been divided on what they think he said.

Desmond Swayne MP

One Conservative MP, Desmond Swayne, has actually defended Corbyn, saying that condemning what an MP might have said under their breath is entering the “realms of thought crime”.

He said: “What unnerved me was the enthusiasm with which colleagues preyed-in-aid the skills of lip-readers to work out exactly what he said.

“I sometimes whisper things under my breath: They are my private thoughts, perhaps to be shared with a close neighbour only, that’s why I whisper them rather than stating them out loud for the record.

“The notion that we should be watched by lip-readers to see what we are whispering, so that we can be hauled before the authorities (in this case Mr Speaker), is deeply worrying.

“This is dangerous territory: we are on a slippery slope to the ‘thought crime’ of which George Orwell so eloquently warned in his novel 1984. We should make it compulsory New Year reading for all MPs.”

I thought the Conservatives were actually using 1984 as a manual.

Swayne is right. No-one in the media seems worried that a man mumbling something  to himself that no-one actually heard warrants the authoritarian response of employing lip readers to police the thoughts and quiet mutterings of the leader of the opposition. The abuse and rudeness he has to confront day after day in the Commons is conveniently ignored, of course. Shame on the majority of mainstream media outlets for printing from the Tory PR crib sheet without question.

Around 200 Tory MPs clamoured to make a point of order, amid howls of outrage and shrieked demands for an apology.

It’s extraordinary that the government have become the first in the UK to be found in contempt of parliament, they have systematically avoided accountability, they have conducted Commons debates behaving disruptively, maliciously, without decorum, showing the utmost disrespect towards opposition parties and the general public. 

The Labour leader’s spokesman had said afterwards that Corbyn had said ‘stupid people’, referring generally to Conservative MPs who were not taking the issues being debated seriously. That’s an understatement, the Conservatives were behaving as they usually do, as vindictive, baying barn yard bullies.

He said he had confirmed the word spoken with the Labour leader personally, adding: “He did not call her a stupid woman and so I don’t think there’s any basis for an apology.” before adding the following insightful words: “Anyone interested in the crisis facing the country?”

It’s a dead cat

Dead cat strategy refers to the introduction of a dramatic, shocking, or sensationalist topic to divert discourse away from a more damaging topic. Not to be confused with Wag the Dog, which is a 1997 black comedy film where a spin doctor and a Hollywood producer fabricate a war to distract voters from a presidential sex scandal. It was produced and directed by Barry Levinson. Wag the Dog was released one month before the outbreak of the Lewinsky scandal and the subsequent bombing of the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Sudan by the Clinton administration in August 1998, which prompted the media to draw comparisons between the film and reality. The comparison was made again in December 1998 when the administration initiated a bombing campaign of Iraq just prior to Clinton’s impeachment over the Lewinsky scandal.

Diversionary strategies are just what the term implies: tactics used to try to derail and silence an argument rather than address it. It’s a somewhat overused strategy by the Tories, it typically involves diverting the discussion by attempting to aggressively shame an opponent or critic complete with complicit crib sheeted multiple media echoes and variations of “Shame on you”. 

Raise the issue of racism, and the Conservatives will call you racist. Highlight some example of bullying and you are ‘the real bully’. Express concern about low wages for the working majority and you are accused of waging ‘class warfare’. Black is white, up is down, and nowhere does this actually make sense.

The Conservatives have become masters of public spin campaigns to distract or neutralise legitimate debate about issues.

Tories reinstate MPs suspended over sex allegations for confidence vote: Labour calls restoration of Andrew Griffiths and Charlie Elphicke ‘betrayal of women’

 

I don’t make any money from my work. I am disabled because of illness and often struggle to get by. If you want to, you can help by making a donation to help me continue to research and write informative, insightful and independent articles, and to provide support to others.

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More than 500 homeless people have died in the last 12 months in the UK

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A landmark, year-long independent investigation by The Bureau of Investigative Journalism found that 544 homeless peolple have died on Britain’s streets since last winter, although they say the true number is likely to be much higher.

The Bureau’s count of people who have died homeless in the UK since last winter was published just days before the Office for National Statistics (ONS) is due to produce its own first ever count of deaths.

Those that died include an 81 year-old man who was sleeping on the streets, a mother of two that died in a night shelter and a 47 year-old man who died after being tipped into a bin lorry.

The project prompted the Office for National Statistics (ONS) to start compiling its own figures on homeless deaths in England and Wales, which it will release on December 20. Scotland and Northern Ireland’s national records offices are now also considering similar counts.

In October the government pledged to make sure deaths were investigated by local authorities so that lessons could be learned. The Bureau’s figures are “utterly shocking,” said Housing Secretary James Brokenshire, and “it is so important that we understand what has caused those deaths, [by] actually having serious case reviews.”

However, while Brokenshire admitted the figures were “utterly shocking”, he rejected allegations that government policies are behind the growing housing and homelessness crisis. He insisted instead that the “causes of homelessness and rough sleeping are multi-layered and complex”.

“I don’t see it in those terms,” he said – referring to the alleged impact of government policies on low-income and vulnerable people.

“I see it as a combination of concerning elements in terms of addiction, family breakdown issues.”

Brokenshire said he believes that homelessness is driven by factors including the spread of psychoactive drugs such as spice, the growth in non-UK nationals on the streets and family breakdown. These are, however, traditional Conservative stereotypes that are used to explain every social problem and instance of poverty that is linked with the government’s punitive welfare policy and wider austerity programme.  

He continued: “The thing that struck me over recent months in speaking to some of the LGBT charities in terms of young people, because of their sexuality, being thrown out of home.”

He continued waffling: “The causes of homelessness and rough sleeping are multi-layered and complex and therefore we do need to look at this in that way and ensure that councils and other agencies are getting ahead of this and preventing people becoming homeless in the first place.

“That is the agenda I want to move to in the new year.”

However the government has admitted that it has not offered any extra funding or support to councils to help them do this. 

The Bureau has found many local authorities are still failing to carry out such reviews, citing lack of resources or saying they do not believe the cases meet the relevant statutory requirements. 

“In one of the world’s richest nations, people with nowhere to turn are dying.” 

In Norfolk, where at least 10 people have died homeless in the last year, the director of Public Health, Dr Louise Smith, said there would be no case reviews because of the review’s “significant cost and our limited resources”. 

Despite the fact that five people died in the same homeless hostel in one year, Brighton and Hove council said that no Safeguarding Adult Reviews would be undertaken, because the deaths had not met the “statutory criteria”. Redbridge council also echoed this reasoning. 

It is crucial that all homeless deaths are investigated so that lessons can be learned, said Matt Downie, director of policy and external affairs at Crisis. “It is disappointing that no progress has been made to support local authorities to implement this.” 

He added: “These statistics are a harrowing reminder of how deadly life on the streets can be.

“As we get closer to Christmas and temperatures are dropping, rough sleepers are facing exposure to dangerous conditions, above and beyond the violence and abuse often experienced when living on the streets.

“It’s a failure of the largest magnitude that in one of the world’s richest nations, people with nowhere to turn are dying.

“This has to stop and the government must put in place a full-scale plan to end homelessness once and for all.

“We also need to see the review system used to investigate the deaths of vulnerable adults expanded to include all cases of people who have died whilst street homeless.

“With this in place, crucial lessons can be learned that help prevent further deaths.

“The government recently pledged to make this happen, but it is disappointing that no progress has been made to support local authorities to implement this.

“We cannot wait any longer, we need to see action now.”

“It’s a failure of the largest magnitude that in one of the world’s richest nations, people with nowhere to turn are dying. This has to stop and the government must put in place a full-scale plan to end homelessness once and for all.”

Howard Sinclair, Chief Executive of St Mungo’s, went even further and called for specific funding for reviews: “We think there is a strong case for Government to fund a separate programme outside of the Safeguarding Adult Review process to ensure every death of someone sleeping rough is reviewed. This way we can identify the changes needed, at the local and national level, to stop these tragedies,” he said.

A recent report from the housing charity Shelter warned that rising homelessness is due to a ‘combination of unaffordable rents, frozen housing benefits and a severe shortage of social housing’.

Polly Neate, CEO of Shelter, blamed “the perfect storm of spiralling rents, welfare cuts and a total lack of social housing” for causing the increasing numbers of homeless people in the UK.

Other research has found that more than 24,000 homeless people will spend this festive season sleeping rough, exposed not only to the harmful elements but also at risk of verbal and physical abuse – and far too often – death.

 

Related

Meet Liam and Michelle. It’s time to listen to the voices of homeless people about the fatal flaws of Universal Credit

Two very vulnerable homeless men left to die in sub-zero temperatures

Please don’t just walk on by, we are better than this

Government backs new law to prevent people made homeless through government laws from becoming homeless

From the abstract to the concrete: urban design as a mechanism of behaviour change and social exclusion

Conservative MPs accuse citizens of ‘scaremongering stories’ about experiences of Universal Credit.

 

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3,500 military troops on standby to ‘help’ police in event of a no-deal crisis, MPs told

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Chief of Defence staff, Sir Nick Carter

As many as 10,000 troops could be deployed on the streets of Britain in case of  chaos arising through a no deal Brexit chaos, a report says. Members of the military are ordered to help keep public order and bring medical supplies to hospitals, and also assist with traffic problems close to ports such as Dover.

There is every indication that a no deal Brexit is anticipated to be potentially devastating for the UK public. The UK defence secretary Gavin Williamson told MPs about the plans on Tuesday. The Cabinet says that contingency plans must now be implemented across government.

The cabinet has said it would publish some 160 technical notices, with 80,000 emails going out to businesses this week, plus a 100-page ‘Partnership Pack.’ The move comes as Theresa May’s deal with the EU comes up for a parliamentary vote in January.

A spokesman said it was the government’s “continued duty to prepare for every eventuality, including a no deal situation”. Ministers acknowledged the steps that had already been taken, No 10 said, including 320 “no-deal workstreams” across all departments and 106 no deal technical notices.

Plans have been put into motion for soldiers to help the police and NHS if the UK ends up leaving the EU without a deal in March. As well as the thousands of military troops already set to be deployed under the proposals, an additional 1,200 troops will be on 24-hour standby, it is said.

Defence Minister Tobias Ellwood added: “The Armed Forces stand ready to support Britain on a practical basis… We have to plan for every single scenario.”

Gavin Williamson, said his department “will have 3,500 service personnel held at readiness, including regulars and reserves, in order to support any government department on any contingencies they may need”.

Worryingly, Williamson said “Citizens will be informed how to prepare through a “range of channels” that could include TV adverts and social media.” It’s sobering to consider that those are also the bunker mentality kind of measures the government would take in the event of a nuclear threat and imminent attack. 

Ministers agreed to allocate money from a £2bn contingency fund to departments such as the Home Office and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

HMRC will prepare a 100-page pack for all UK businesses on preparing for no-deal, and will send out about 80,000 emails to businesses.

During the meeting, the work and pensions secretary, Amber Rudd, told her colleagues preparing for a no deal Brexit was a sensible precaution but “just because you put a seatbelt on doesn’t mean you should crash the car”.

The justice secretary, David Gauke, who said publicly at the weekend he would resign rather than be part of a government that deliberately pursued no deal, told the meeting that a “managed no deal is not a viable option”.

“It’s not on offer from the EU and the responsibility of cabinet ministers is not to propagate unicorns but to slay them,” he said, according to a cabinet source.

A “managed no-deal” is the approach favoured by Brexit-backing ministers including Penny Mordaunt and Andrea Leadsom, who believe the government could pay part of the £39bn the government has agreed it owes the EU to “purchase” a status quo transition period.

Downing Street said delivering the prime minister’s deal “remains the top priority”, but when presented with three options on whether to increase, maintain or wind down preparations, there was unanimity in cabinet to implement all no-deal contingency planning across departments.

All agreed that they would implement contingencies across Whitehall. Previously, departments had been given some freedom to decide when and what they spent on no-deal planning.

“Cabinet agreed that with just over three months from our exit from the EU, we have now reached the point where we need to ramp up these preparations. This means we will now set in motion the remaining elements of our no-deal plans. Cabinet also agreed to recommend businesses ensure they are similarly prepared enacting their own no-deal plans.”

Downing Street suggested preparations could include reserving space on ferries in order to ensure a supply of food and medicines.

The proposals have been drawn up by the military under the rubric of Operation Temperer.In the most extreme scenario, infantry battalions will guard petrol stations should there be unrest in the event of “temporary rationing.”

The contingency planning is being developed by a six-strong team based at Army headquarters in Andover, Hampshire, should it be officially requested by the Government.

The public mood

Theresa May’s Brexit plan has failed to win the backing of the British public, with the recent YouGov opinion poll, conducted on Thursday after the Prime Minister’s deal with Brussels was unveiled, found twice as many people oppose it as support it, 42% to 19%. The survey of  a sample of 3,154 people found that Leave and Remain supporters had similar views on the deal, with 42% of Brexit supporters against it, along with 47% of pro-EU voters, with just  22% and 20% respectively in favour of it.

The current Brexit plan has also failed to find favour among Tory voters, the survey suggests, with 41% of 2017 Conservative voters opposing it, against just 28% backing the Prime Minister.

A separate poll suggested almost half of voters now back a second Brexit referendum. Support for a fresh vote on EU withdrawal was backed by 48% in a YouGov survey carried out after May’s withdrawal agreement text was published on Wednesday night.

It also found voters were split 54% to 46% in favour of remaining in the EU. Little more than one in 10 (12%) believed that the UK was going to get a good deal with the EU.

The poll of 1,153 people, commissioned by the People’s Vote and published in the London Evening Standard, found that only 34% were against a new vote.

With “don’t knows” removed, the ratio was 59% to 42% in favour of a new referendum.

The Sunday Times reports that themilitary standby operation will be overseen by around 20 Operation Temperer officers – who are typically reserved for army response to terror attacks.

The team were ordered last week to step up no-deal Brexit planning. Army general, Sir Nick Carter told the reporters that troops are on standby to take part in a “No Deal scenario.”

He said: “What we always do is make sensible contingency plans for all sorts of eventualities.

“At this stage, I think people are confident there will be a deal, if there’s not one then we stand ready to help in any way we can.”

MPs are currently holding the emergency debate on the EU summit and Theresa May’s Brexit deal proposed by the SNP.

It was opened by Ian Blackford, the SNP’s leader at Westminster. He said he had seen secret government reports on the impact of a no-deal Brexit, in his capacity as a member of the privy council, and that the details were “sobering”. He told MPs:

“The information shared with me should now be made public. It is sobering.

The first job of any government is to protect the interests of its people.

This government is wilfully exposing its citizens to risk, whether it is on job security, procurement of medicines, food supply or indeed on aircraft being able to take off.

We have to wake up to the impact of Brexit and the options that are in front of us.”

Could a no deal Brexit result in martial law being imposed?

Martial law is defined as the imposition of direct military control of normal civilian functions of government, especially in response to a temporary emergency such as invasion or major disaster. That is, basically the army is in charge.

In the UK, what the government would most likely use instead of martial law is a declaration of a State of Emergency under the 2004 Civil Contingencies Act. Responders are responsible for warning and informing the public in relation to emergencies.

Local authorities are required to provide business continuity advice to local businesses. It also places legal obligations for increased co-operation and information sharing between different emergency services and also to non-emergency services that might have a role in an emergency such as electric and water companies.

The introduction of the Act comes with increased funding for emergency planning in the United Kingdom to help organisations comply with the Act and brings emergency planning funding more on par with European levels.

The only primary legislation which may not be amended by emergency regulations is the Human Rights Act 1998 and Part 2 of the Civil Contingencies Act itself. The second part of the Act provides that temporary emergency regulations are normally made by the Queen through Order in Council or by a Minister of the Crown if arranging for an Order in Council would not be possible without serious delay. Such regulations are limited in duration to 30 days, unless Parliament votes to extend this period before it expires.

However, we do not know what kind of situations will arise in the event of a no deal Brexit.

The government’s own analysis indicates:

“In the second scenario, not even the worst, the port of Dover will collapse on day one.” 

“The supermarkets in Cornwall and Scotland will run out of food within a couple of days, and hospitals will run out of medicines within two weeks.”

They added: “You would have to medevac medicine into Britain, and at the end of week two we would be running out of petrol as well.”

Whitehall preparing for food and medicine shortages in event of ‘doomsday’ no deal Brexit

Personally, I think it is wise to prepare for a worst case scenario. 

Related

None of these articles are from government sources. They are from doctors, economists and people who run shops and supermarkets, which makes it less likely that Brexiteers can call the concerns expressed the consequence of “unfounded scaremongering”:

What to expect from a no-deal Brexit: The terrifying consequences if nothing is sorted

Brexit will be very bad for the NHS, survey of UK doctors reveals

NHS fears over no-deal Brexit highlight risk to patients

A No-Deal Brexit Risks U.K. Food Crisis, Sainsbury CEO Warns

NHS faces £2.3bn bill in no-deal Brexit in medicine and supplies cost surge

Brexit stockpiling can’t protect us from fresh food shortages

 

I don’t make any money from my work. I am disabled because of illness and have a limited income. But you can help me if you like by making a donation to help me continue to research and write informative, insightful and independent articles, and to provide support to others. The smallest amount is much appreciated – thank you.

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Gaslighting Conservative MP says Universal Credit protest is a ‘political stunt’

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A Conservative MP, Simon Clarke, has condemned a protest against Universal Credit in Guisborough, dismissing it as a “political stunt”.

Clarke said the protest will ‘disrupt local businesses’ on one of the busiest days in the run up to Christmas.

Local Labour MPs and unions are holding a march in the town on Saturday. They join thousands of other people, accusing the government of a “callous approach”.

They said the so-called flagship reform – which replaces six existing benefits, and has been introduced across Teesside in recent months – was “causing real poverty and hardship in our communities”.

Redcar and Cleveland Council has written to the Government three times to delay the roll-out until after Christmas, saying that claimants’ waiting five weeks for their first payment would leave families penniless over the Christmas period.

However Clarke, whose Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland is the only Conservative seat on Teesside, claims he has not had a single constituent flag any problems with the system.

Clarke claims: “At the heart of Universal Credit is the principle that work should always pay and those who need support should receive it.” 

“That is what it delivers – bringing an end to the broken culture we inherited from Labour, where the number of households where nobody had ever worked doubled between 1997 and 2010.”

Clarke continued with his myth making: “I have liaised really closely with the brilliant team at Loftus Job Centre in recent weeks. The team there could not have been clearer: they think Universal Credit will help people, they are well trained to deliver it and they are fed up of being demonised by politicians who only want to frighten their clients unnecessarily.”

However, it is very problematic to accept the narratives of administrators and to completely discount the negative experiences and citizen accounts of those Universal Credit is being imposed on. The system is so riddled with design flaws and process faults that it is practically guaranteed to generate mistakes and delays that would push vulnerable benefit claimants into hardship, according to administrative whistleblowers. 

Service centre workers have told the Guardian that glitches and errors in the “cobbled-together” system have commonly led to peoples’ benefit payments being delayed for weeks or wrongly reduced by hundreds of pounds. Mistakes and delays can add on average an extra three weeks to the formal 35-day wait for an initial benefit payment, pushing claimants into debt, rent arrears, and reliance on food banks.

Campaigners warn that the problems may get worse next year when more than 3 million claimants start to be “migrated” to the new system.

One employee said: “The IT system on which Universal Credit is built is so fundamentally broken and poorly designed that it guarantees severe problems with claims.”

He said the system was “overcomplex and prone to errors that affected payments and often proved slow to correct.”

“In practical terms, it is not working the way it was intended and it is having an actively harmful effect on a huge number of claimants.”

Bayard Tarpley, who left the Grimsby service centre after two years as a telephony agent, told the Guardian that he had been dealing with distressed claimants every day. “My hope is that by speaking out I can help explain why these processes have such a significant, harmful impact on claimants.”

He gave several examples of where poor system design and practice caused delays and payment errors, including:

  • Staff are not notified when claimants leave messages on their online journal; for example, if they wish to challenge payment errors. As a result, messages sent to officials can go unanswered for days or weeks unless claimants pursue the inquiry by phone.
  • Claimants are discouraged by staff from phoning in to resolve problems or to book a home visit and instead are actively persuaded to go online, using a technique called “deflection”, even when callers insist they are unable to access or use the internet.
  • Callers have often been given wrong or contradictory advice about their entitlements by DWP officials. These include telling severely disabled claimants who are moving on to universal credit from existing benefits that they must undergo a new “fit for work” test to receive full payment.
  • Although the system is equipped to receive scanned documents, claimants instead are told to present paper evidence used to verify their claim, such as medical reports, either at the local job centre or through the post, further slowing down the payment process.
  • Small delays or fluctuations in the timing of employers’ reporting of working claimants’ monthly wages via the real time information system can lead to them being left hundreds of pounds out of pocket through no fault of their own.

Food banks are regarded as a formal backstop for when the system fails, he said. Officials are told to advise those claimants who are in hardship and who do not qualify for cash advances to contact charities or their council for help. However, many councils have closed local welfare provision as a result of central government cuts to funding.

These disclosures add to the mounting concerns over Universal Credit, and provides evidence that the system is not supporting people with even their most basic living costs. Universal Credit roll out is six years behind schedule but will eventually handle £63bn of welfare support going to 8 million people.

Campaigners and researchers say their concerns have been met with a “defensive and insular” approach to managing welfare reform by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP). 

The department came under withering fire from a cross-party group of MPs who accused it of a “culture of indifference” after it had repeatedly ignored warnings of basic process errors that led to 70,000 disabled benefit claimants being underpaid an estimated £500m over six years.

The then work and pensions secretary, Esther McVey, sought to limit the damage in a speech in which she admitted there were problems with Universal Credit, and promised to listen to campaigners, claimants and frontline staff to find ways to change and improve the system.

If Universal Credit is so ‘helpful’ for citizens, wouldn’t you think that the United Nations would have recognised that this was the case during the recent inquiry? As it is, Philip Alston said that Universal Credit is “entrenching people in poverty” and inflicting “unnecessary misery” on citizens, because of the government’s “radical social re-engineering programe”. 

Alston concluded: “In the fifth richest country in the world, this is not just a disgrace, but a social calamity and an economic disaster, all rolled into one.” 

He also warned that the motivation behind the controversial benefit reform was to slash spending, despite finding little evidence that there had been any savings, and that the message to claimants is, “You are alone” and that state assistance is the “last resort”.

Yet Clarke says: “Since roll-out began here last month, not a single constituent has come forward with a problem for me to help with. My staff have all received training if anyone does. No amount of staff training, however, can ensure that people have enough money to meet their basic living costs within a punitive framework that is purposely designed to create a hostile environment to deter people from claiming social security support. 

“But I think people in Guisborough will rightly be unimpressed that their town is being disrupted on one of the busiest shopping days before Christmas by what is frankly a political stunt,” said Clarke, using what is frankly a deplorable gaslighting technique.

I can’t imagine that many people experiencing problems with their Universal Credit claim would find Clarke particularly approachable. He seems to be surrounded by an impervious wall of denial.

Redcar MP Anna Turley has also called for the roll out of Universal Credit to be stopped until flaws in the system are put right. She said that low income families and vulnerable people would be left reliant on food banks and forced into personal debt.

A similar protest, organised by Unite the Union, was held in Redcar last weekend.

Cllr Sue Jeffrey, leader of Redcar and Cleveland Council, said: “I am dismayed at the callous approach being taken by this Government.

“We know that there is likely to be difficulties for many people who are forced to move onto Universal Credit in the month before Christmas.”

The TUC said that the Conservatives “are in denial about the hardship Universal Credit will cause in our area”.

Accusing the accuser: Conservative techniques of neutralisation and perception management

However, it’s an intentional, evidence-vaulting sort of deliberated response – a habitualised, patterned, crib sheet, ‘strategic communication’ (communication tactically aligned with the government’s overall strategy and ideological aims, to enhance its strategic positioning) kind of denial:

Another MP who called for an end to “scaremongering” about Universal Credit last year is Wendy Morton. Speaking in a Commons debate about Universal Credit, she said: “It is this government who are helping people, which is why I am disappointed to have sat through a lot of this debate and heard scaremongering stories from Opposition Members.”

She responded with the sloganised, detached and meaningless comment: Universal Credit “makes work pay and helps people into work” and staff at job centres, who administer the benefit, were “working hard to get it right.” 

In October, during a parliamentary debate, St Austell and Newquay’s MP, Steve Double, claimed that jobcentre staff “love it, and claimants like it” and that “one of the problems is all the scaremongering, primarily from the Labour party.”

The evidence from a wide variety of sources, however, strongly suggests otherwise. 

As Labour MP Liz McInnes said at the time: “If these claims are in fact true, who could possibly object to impact assessments being released? They will no doubt reflect the happiness and joy being spread to Universal Credit claimants in beautiful Cornwall. One would think that the Government would be shouting this marvellous news from the rooftops – if it were true.”

Esther McVey memorably refused to agree to meet with the women so bady affected by Universal Credit that they were forced into sex work to avoid destitution. She coldly asked former Labour minister Frank Field, who raised his concerns, to remind them “there are now record job opportunities” in the UK.

During that particular debate, Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary Margaret Greenwood called on the government to stop the  roll-out, adding: “There’s a real danger that hundreds of thousands of people could fall out of the social security system altogether and be pushed into poverty and left at risk of destitution.”

McVey dismissed those concerns as “scaremongering”. And again in March, McVey accused Labour of “scaremongering and misinformation”, saying an extra 50,000 children would benefit under the Universal Credit system, when MPs raised concerns of growing childhood poverty.

In March, at a meeting ,the Conservative Mansfield MP and Hucknall councillor Ben Bradley said, ludicrously, that Labour were “weaponising poor people” and “scaremongering rubbish”.

The government are weaponising social security.

And Labour councillor Michael Payne, who represents Arnold North, quoted parts of a disgraceful blog written by Bradley in which he said people on benefits should have vasectomies. 

There are many on the Opposition Benches who have expressed legitimate concerns about the catastrophic Universal Credit roll out on behalf of their constituents only to have them passed off as “scaremongering.”

However, the government should not ignore the concerns shared by affected citizens, many outside the House, by the charities and organisations at the forefront of supporting people through such difficult and distressing periods when they don’t have the means to meet even their basic living needs, leaving them extremely vulnerable. 

Last week I wrote about Dan Carden’s letter to Amber Rudd, also asking her to postpone the roll out of Universal Credit in his Liverpool Walton constituency. 

He said: “We have families experiencing poverty on an unprecedented scale and now facing further avoidable hardship in the run up to Christmas. 

“I have now been informed that job centres across Liverpool are advancing payments to my constituents to obtain provisional driving licences for the purposes of identification and then deducting the cost from their benefits.

“Constituents are also having to pay for postal orders, passport photographs and postage, just to obtain provisional licences.”

He explained that the DVLA says there is a five-week wait for provisional licences, and highlighted the delays before the first payments are made when someone is transferred on to Universal Credit.

Carden added: “Continuing with this roll-out will leave many of the most vulnerable families in Liverpool Walton destitute by Christmas and I am therefore asking you to intervene as a matter of urgency.”

The secretary of state for work and pensions, responded despicably and oppressively, as follows:

However, it seems Rudd failed to bother checking her own government’s web site for advice and evidence.

When people apply for Universal Credit, they are asked to verify their identity online via the GOV.Verify service. 

To do so, you need either;

  • A valid UK driving license
  • A valid UK passport.

Of course this creates problems for those without the documents. Their Universal Credit claim cannot go ‘live’ without conforming to the ID verification framework. People generally can’t get an advance because their claim isn’t live. Once they’ve received their new ID document, (takes around 6-8 weeks usually), it’s then a further 5 weeks (at least) until their first Universal Credit payment.

According to the government web site, you can only apply for an advance on your first payment if you have already verified your identity.

You can apply for an advance payment in your online account or through your Jobcentre Plus work coach.

You’ll need to:

  • explain why you need an advance
  • verify your identity (you do this online when you submit your Universal Credit claim or at your first Jobcentre Plus interview)
  • provide bank account details for the advance (talk to your work coach if you cannot open an account.)

It seems that the “terrific” job coaches are not applying rules consistently, leading to a post code lottery concerning the verification requirements for claims. 

The Verify framework:

 

The response from Rudd and other ministers has become a deplorable, standardised and authoritarian tactic of repressing legitimate criticism for the Conservatives, however. Other ministers who have habitually used the term ‘scaremonger’ as a gaslighting technique include Sarah Newton and David Gauke among others. 

Traditional Conservative prejudices about poverty: blame the victims

Gordon Henderson the Conservative MP for Sittingbourne and Sheppey in Kent, has tried to argue that the move to Universal Credit was not responsible for a significant rise in the use of foodbanks.

He said that he had secured information from a local foodbank about claimants who had faced difficulties with Universal Credit, and he claimed he had ‘discovered’ that many of them were “living in a local hostel that provides temporary accommodation for homeless adults” conflating cause with effects as a matter of prejudice, ideological preference and despicable politcal expediency.

He went on that it “soon became obvious that some of them suffered from underlying problems that affected their ability to manage the transition to Universal Credit, and that forced them into using the food bank”, such as “drug addiction, alcoholism, mental health problems, an inability to manage money, or plain fecklessness”.

It’s not possible to ‘manage’ no money, or amounts that are insufficient to meet basic survival needs. 

He added, disgracefully, that making Universal Credit perfect overnight would not “solve their mental health problems” and issues with drugs and alcohol and “would not make them less feckless” and that “they would still have the same problems, whatever benefits system was put in place”. 

He concluded that he was “glad” that such people were “in the minority” and appeared to suggest that those with mental health problems – and seemingly people with learning difficulties – were to blame for their difficulties with Universal Credit, after adding that there were also “some people who have genuine concerns”.

In 2014, Anglican bishops and the new Roman Catholic Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster joined the Left to claim that a national crisis had driven half a million people to use food banks.

Deplorable right wing ideologue Simon Heffer said “Government ministers knew that was nonsense. The level of benefits is, they believe, sufficient to feed those who receive them.”

Yet a huge and growing amount of evidence says otherwise.

He continued: “Though Leftists cynically exploit the existence of food banks as proof that a Tory-led government has inflicted terrible hardship on the poor, there is a widespread belief that some people use them because they have chosen to spend their money, instead, on drink, tobacco, slot machines, tattoos or pornography. This leaves little cash to buy food.” Heffer was advocating the use of prepaid cards welfare cards, to restrict what people can spend their money on, to “incentivise them out of dependency and into work”. 

Exposing Conservative mythologies

them-and-us-640x300 (1)

One of the biggest myths that the Conservatives peddle is that of ‘intergenerational dependency on welfare’. However, only 0.3% of households have two generations that have not worked, according to studies of the Labour Force Survey.  The majority of these households included children who had only come out of education within the last five years and in a third of these households, the member of the younger generation had been out of work for less than a year. The Conservative folk devils created from the “longterm undeserving benefit claimant” sponger stereotype is very much exaggerated.  

Detailed research into what ordinary people think should go into a minimum household budget showed that actual out of work benefits are no way near as generous as some politicians would have you believe – and were actually well below the minimum level before the welfare cuts were implemented.

Research by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation found that while pensioners did receive 100% of what people think they need, a single adult of working age received just 40% of the weekly minimum and a couple with two children received just 62% of the weekly minimum. Those amounts have been further reduced because of the welfare caps, Universal Credit, bedroom tax and reductions in Emloyment and Support Allowance (ESA), council tax support, in a context of ever-rising living costs.   

The biggest part of social security spending – 53% – actually goes to pensioners. Overall, out-of-work benefits account for under a quarter of all welfare spending. Even excluding pensioners’ benefits, nearly half of welfare spending goes on benefits such as Disability Living Allowance or Personal Independence Payment, which helps disabled people (both in and out of work) with extra costs; Child Benefit and Tax Credits or Universal Credit to working families; and Statutory Maternity Pay. The majority of children and working age adults in poverty in the UK live in working, not “workless” households. 

Cuts to the social security budget are having a huge impact, and will continue to have an even bigger impact on those in work, especially the poorest families. 

Furthermore, the idea that social security spending has increased and is currently out of control is shown to be incorrect as spending in 2011-12 accounted for 10.4% of GDP, lower than an average of 11% in the mid-1980s and 12% in the mid 1990s. 

The commonly held public perceptions of large numbers of long-term social security claimants are incorrect as less than 10% of Job Seekers Allowance claimants claimed for more than one year. Moreover the majority of people claiming social security support are in work.

An interesting Conservative council’s report on Universal Credit: off the crib sheet 

Sedgemoor in Somerset has a Conservative district council.  Last year the council produced a report about the impact of Universal Credit, which was rolled out in 2016 in Somerset. The intention behind the report was to formally present the findings to the Department for Work and Pensions. 

The authors of the report say that although they support Universal Credit, they are concerned about the way in which the system is being rolled out.  They say that Sedgemoor District Council’s experiences mirror those of both Citizens Advice and Digilink, particularly in terms of the level of support required.

However, they also raised concerns around the administration of the scheme and the additional costs to local service providers. They maintain Universal Credit Telephone Records (and a sample of these are attached as Appendix B in the report).

Here is a list of some of the concerns expressed in the report, which contradict the Conservatives’ official line:

Inadequate support for most vulnerable in Society;
 Lack of understanding of the nature and often severity of some customers’ personal circumstances (see case study 6 on the report);
 Delay in receiving first payment and the need to budget carefully (case study 7);
 Rent element of UC not paid in the first instance and clients using the personal element on housing to stay in their homes until the ‘top-up’ is received;
 Additional work with tenants to prevent them going into arrears (and the additional cost of this to service providers);
 Some concerns that the administration of the virtual call centres around the country are failing, for example through providing inadequate answers and explanation, and these cases are being picked up by Citizens Advice and others;
 The policy of the scheme is set centrally and the delivery of the scheme is controlled  nationally, yet solutions on a local level are needed; 
 Specific issues with some customers unable to make an online application due to no computer/internet access or the skills to do so;
 Inadequate funding to support the scheme, e.g. the £6,000 for Digilink sessions;
 Lack of understanding and explanation of the scheme and the frustration this causes (case studies 8 and 9).

Other concerns raised were that the “DWP’s approach encourages all applicants to take responsibility for their own claim, which means that service providers cannot interact with the DWP without the client being present. Unfortunately, this does not take into account that many of the most vulnerable residents are not in a position to fully manage their own claim, for example, if they do not have the technological skills.”

Despite some Conservatives disgracefully attempting to link food bank use with individuals’ “fecklessness”, in the council’s report it says that the Trussell Trust, which runs foodbanks in Somerset, has reported nationally that benefit delays/changes remain the biggest cause of foodbank use, accounting for 42% of all referrals, up from about a third the previous year. Around 10,000 emergency food parcels were distributed in Somerset in 2015/16. Bridgwater has seen an increase in referrals in the last year.

The government claim that the social security system is designed to target and provide for those who need support. Yet the report above raises concerns that those most in need are not getting the support they need.

However, it is clear that Conservatives generally believe that many people needing support don’t ‘deserve’ it because of traditionally held Conservative prejudices about poor people. These prejudices are plainly evident in their narratives that justify punitive ‘behavioural change’ policies and the creation of a hostile environment to deter members of the public from accessing a public service that most of them have paid for via taxes and national insurance contributions. 


Related

Universal discredit

I don’t make any money from my work. I am disabled because of illness and have a limited income. But you can help me if you like by making a donation to help me continue to research and write informative, insightful and independent articles, and to provide support to others. The smallest amount is much appreciated – thank you.

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