Tag: austerity

Sturgeon’s threats demonstrate the anti-democratic, uncooperative inflexibility of nationalism

May 4, 2015May 4, 2015 · 11 Comments ·

Thanks to Dr Éoin Clarke for the infographic

Nicola Sturgeon threatened that she would be prepared to have her MPs vote down a Labour Budget if Ed Miliband was not prepared to cut a deal with the Nationalists at Westminster. Taking part in a live televised debate in Edinburgh with the leaders of the other three main Scottish parties, Ms Sturgeon said she intended to block Labour’s first Budget before negotiating a series of amendments. The Scottish National Party (SNP) leader’s position, revealed just days ahead of Thursday’s general election, was immediately seized upon by the Conservatives as the tedious stuck record styled electioneering “evidence” yet again that a Labour government supported by Ms Sturgeon’s party would result in “absolute chaos” for the country.

Bravo, Nicola Sturgeon. She seems determined to allow a Conservatve victory because of her constant and unqualified attacks on the Labour Party, the issuing of threats like this one, and the perpetuation of nationalist myths aimed at undermining the chance of a Labour victory. It’s bad enough with the Tories’ scaremongering in the press about the prospect of a Labour/Scottish National Party coalition, without Sturgeon fueling it.

I have to add that Cameron’s claim, repeated ad nauseum, that a minority Labour government would be held hostage by the SNP is purely propagandarised tosh. The truth is that the SNP will not in reality be able to hold a minority Labour government hostage unless the Tories allow them to do so, because of course, the Tories also get to vote on things like budgets, defence and so forth, in Parliament.

Scottish Labour leader Jim Murphy said that Sturgeon had already threatened to block his party’s Queen’s Speech.

It’s worth a reminder at this point that crucially, the Scottish National Party’s spending plans imply deeper cuts than Labour’s plans entail over the next five years, as the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) said in a report last month, highlighting a “considerable disconnect” between the nationalists’ rhetoric on austerity and their policies.

“The “anti-austerity rhetoric” of the Scottish National Party is not matched by its detailed spending plans and it would impose deeper cuts than Labour,” said the respected independent fiscal watchdog. The IFS also said that austerity would last longer under the SNP than under the other parties.

Furthermore, the IFS stated: “There is a considerable disconnect between this [SNP] rhetoric and their stated plans for total spending, which imply a lower level of spending by 2019–20 than Labour’s plans.”

This exposes Nicola Sturgeon’s attempt to portray Labour as “Tory-lite” on spending cuts for the outright lie that it is. Sturgeon is no longer credible on every claim she has made, parading the SNP as the only alternative to austerity. In plain language, Carl Emmerson, deputy Director of the IFS said: “There would be more spending cuts under the SNP than under Labour or the Liberal Democrats according to the numbers in the SNP manifesto.”

Shadow Scottish Secretary and Scottish Labour Glasgow East candidate Margaret Curran said: “For all the bombast and the bluster of the SNP it has now been conclusively shown that their anti-austerity posturing is nothing more than a front. Their plans would extend austerity and harm Scotland. And as is always the case the cuts would be felt by the poorest and most vulnerable in our communities. We cannot let that happen.”

She added: “The choice is now simple – continued austerity with the SNP, or an end to Tory austerity with Scottish Labour.”

Nicola Sturgeon claimed to have committed her party to kicking the Tories out of Downing Street. It might be a tad tricky for her to explain to her supporters a Commons vote which could, in theory, allow the Tories back in again. That’s why, it’s was a positive move on Miliband’s part to call her bluff.

And let’s look carefully at the details: Milband has not ruled out the possibility of discussions, consultations, or taking into consideration SNP views when framing future legislation. But he has made it clear he will not be manipulated or threatened.

“The Conservative plans to eliminate the deficit implied at least £10bn a year of unspecified cuts to child benefit, tax credits, housing benefit, disability benefits and other working age benefits out of a total budget of about £100bn,” the IFS said in their report

Even if these cuts were achieved, the Tories would have to cut unprotected departments’ budgets by another 18 per cent in real terms, about the same amount again as over the past five years. These cuts are also unspecified by the Conservatives, who have chosen, undemocratically, to hide the details from the electorate. We simply cannot risk another term of devastating Tory cuts to our welfare, public services and the NHS. Especially considering that risk would be founded on misinformation and lies.

Sturgeon’s most recent revelation that the party could bring the Budget of a Labour government down came under fire from Kezia Dugdale, Labour’s deputy leader in Scotland.

Ms Dugdale said: “Many people who have trusted Nicola Sturgeon will be shocked to hear her say she will vote down a Labour Budget. A Budget which will bring in measures such as the mansion tax and the bankers’ bonus tax.

“This shows that the people of Scotland should not gamble with the SNP.”

Ed Miliband, a principled internationalist, said: “Nationalism never built a school. It never lifted people out of poverty. It never created a welfare state that healed the sick and protected our most vulnerable. Nationalism cannot create the jobs we need.”

“Labour believes in “the principles of sharing and solidarity”, he added, “that underpin the partnerships of four nations in the modern UK.”

He said: “If we set England against Scotland, if we set any part of our country against another, it does not help working people, it harms working people. It undermines the ability to share resources. It drives down wages and conditions in the race to the bottom.”

Mr Miliband hit back at Ms Sturgeon’s claims that if Labour “fails to work with the SNP,” this would see David Cameron win a second term as Prime Minister. He added that if the Scottish Nationalists win dozens of seats from Labour in Scotland, this would increase Tory chances of being the largest party.

Mr Miliband vowed: “I will never put the Tories into government. I have spent my entire political career fighting them.”

However Nicola Sturgeon has spent most of her career fighting the Labour Party and propagating lies about them. (See A crib sheet of responses to the crib sheet of lies about the Labour Party: Part one and Part Two.)

Sturgeon has suggested that though the SNP could be relied upon to help “lock out” the Tories from power, she would “be inclined,” if voting in England, to endorse the Greens.

Doing the latter, it should be observed, makes achieving the former rather less likely. The more Green MPs there are the fewer Labour MPs there are and the fewer Labour MPs there are the more probable it is that David Cameron somehow stumbles his way into a second term. Sturgeon has some strange logic.

Given that the IFS have said that the true scale of the gap between Labour and the Tories has been further revealed – director Paul Johnson said at the post-Budget briefing: “Our latest estimates suggest that Labour would be able to meet its fiscal targets with no cuts at all after 2015-16,” Sturgeon’s ridiculously unevidenced, pure electioneering claim that Labour are “Tory-lite” – so easily refuted – is just one of the many lies she has told, and gives us good reason not to trust her.

If the SNP remain so aggressively uncompromising, divisive, chancing manipulation instead of cooperation, they will usher in another Tory government at Westminster, and in that event, they will certainly face paying a heavy political price among their supporters – as happened in 1979. Unfortunately, the rest of the UK will also pay a heavy price.

Despite Sturgeon’s undoubted rhetoric skill, Scottish nationalism continues to be what all nationalism always has been: parochial, vicious, ugly, divisive and insular. It’s evident that this has fostered a narrow tribalism, an inability to negotiate, or to build cooperation, and an inability to understand and comprehend the rational, logic and legitimacy of differing opinions, which is very evident in the non-democratic threats that Sturgeon has issued. It’s a pity she doesn’t oppose the Conservatives, rather than attacking the only viable progressive party for the UK. Sturgeon presents a superficial progressive rhetoric with no integrity, and no grounding in reality. The SNP’s self-claimed progressive credentials don’t stand up to scrutiny. When Sturgeon was asked at her manifesto launch to name a redistributive policy enacted by the SNP in Holyrood, she was unable to cite a single example.

Sturgeon simply chats about progressive ideas to advance the regressive goal of separatism. It’s all style, with no real substance at all. Other than a clan SNP nationalist agenda.

For people living in England, NOTHING is more important than getting the Tories out. I suspect that is true for many in Scotland, too. So please make sure that your vote is a considered, informed and responsible one. If the Tories get another term, we will lose all of the gains of our post-war settlement. We will see our Human Rights Act repealed, (Labour’s legislation, and Cameron has also pledged to leave the European Convention.) That is why we MUST ensure that the Tories don’t get the opportunity, preferably ever again.

The only sure way of defeating the Tories is with a Labour majority.

The real progressive in the leader’s debate is Ed Miliband

SNP appeal to Tory voters: We are just like you

If you think the SNP are a left-wing force, think again – David Clark

Many thanks to Robert Livingstone for his excellent memes

A few facts about the deficit and the economy, since the Tories are determined to peddle pre-election lies

April 2, 2015September 26, 2015 · 12 Comments ·

The study can be found here.

From the excellent Richard Murphy:

I think this graph tells a story very few seem to know about:

All data is from the HM Treasury Pocket Bank for 30 September. I have extrapolated 2014/15 borrowing from the August data to suggest whole year borrowing of just over £107 billion based on average proportion of total year borrowing to 31 August over the past five years.

The conclusions are stark: the Coalition has borrowed more than four times more a year than 3.3 times a year what Labour did, on average.

In five years the Coalition has borrowed more than Labour did in 13, by a considerable margin.

And there wasn’t an unforeseen banking crisis on the Coalition’s watch.

So why is the story still told that it is Labour who borrowed too much? Purely objectively that makes no sense and says that there is another entirely different story to be told here.

—

From the excellent Simon Wren-Lewis, Professor of economics, who explains how Tory austerity has actually wrecked Britain’s economy, not helped it. Radio 4 World At One, today. (4 minutes)

Just more proof of what we already know – not only that austerity wrecks an economy, but that the Tories were going to make their cuts ANYWAY, because that’s what they believe in, and simply used the Global Crash of 2007-8 as their excuse, and the previous government as their scapegoat. With many thanks to Robert Livingstone for capturing both audios: Listen here.

And from the excellent Professor David Blanchflower – austerity has prevented recovery: Listen here.

Ideology is the reason for the Tory austerity cuts and not economic necessity.

Austerity has not encouraged investment in the UK:

The Coalition have a track record of lying and trying to mislead the public. David Cameron has now been rebuked several times for making false claims: on NHS spending, the rising national debt and the impact of his tax rises and deep spending cuts on economic growth. The Tories invented figures to claim people are now “better off”, but which totally ignored and excluded an account of the impact of significant factors like the rise in VAT, the cost of living, cuts to tax credits and other benefits.

The government is committing fraud on a grand scale. The reason for such deceit has nothing to do with public finances or the state of the economy, and everything to do with shrinking the public realm. There is an irreducibly ideological dimension to Tory economics, and by making it sound “scientific” when really, it’s more akin to philosophy or Tory buck passing, they attempt to lend it an air of authority and legitimacy it does not deserve.

The only thing that unites Tories is wealth, they mostly thrive on creating social divisions. The Tories have used a justification narrative based on a moral entrepreneur approach to scapegoat and vilify vulnerable social groups in order to justify transferring our public wealth to private bank accounts, behind the façade of austerity. What we are witnessing is a governments’ nonchalant adherence to Tory ideology, no matter what the consequences for the poorest, the sick and disabled, the unemployed and most vulnerable. Or the economy.

The Tories peddled the lie that due to Labour’s management of the economy, the UK was “on the brink bankruptcy” and claim the solution to is to cut government spending with a painful programme of austerity cuts. Of course the UK economy was growing in 2010 when the Tories took over and was subsequently plunged back into recession by Osborne’s austerity policies which have meant that the economy has not grown at all under the coalition; and for much of their tenure , it has been contracting.

Many economist have said consistently that this is the wrong approach. The best solution is to borrow or, better, create money to invest in infrastructure. But what we have instead is Osbornes’ closed economy, with a colossal redistribution of public funds to few private businesses and millionaires, who are sat on our money, whilst the government is steadily removing even more of our public capital through deep cuts. There is no investment in the infrastructure, public services – it’s a framework of increasing and devastating socio-economic entropy.

The Tories seem to think we have forgotten that it was they that lost the Moody’s Investors Service triple A grade, despite pledges to keep it secure. Moody’s credit ratings represent a rank-ordering of creditworthiness, or expected loss.

The Fitch credit rating was also downgraded due to increased borrowing by the Tories, who have borrowed more in 4 years than Labour did in 13. In fact this Tory administration have borrowed more than every single Labour government ever, combined.

The Tories have seized an opportunity to dismantle the institutions they have always hated since the post-war social democratic settlement – institutions of health, welfare, education, culture and human rights which should be provided for all citizens. The Tories attempt to destroy fundamental public support for the health, education and welfare of its people. Offering and inflicting only regressive, punitive policies and devastating cuts, the Tories lie to drag the compliant, conforming and increasingly shell-shocked electorate along as they dismantle our social democracy, our public services, fundamental rights and the very basis of our civilisation.

Whenever this authoritarian government have been challenged and opposed effectively, they simply ignore or edit the law, veto tribunal rulings or invoke archaic government privilege to bypass opposition and to get their own way with unpopular policies, such as The Health and Social Care Bill and the Welfare “Reforms”.

That a government needs to engage in such underhanded methods to pass their policy through the legislative process, and justify such policies by lying, and by the malevolent scapegoating of vulnerable sections of society via the media, informs us that those policies are not addressing public needs, and wishes; that they are not democratically motivated or processed and that they reflect a political ideology which does not accommodate social and economic realities, nor is it fitting for a so-called first world liberal democracy that is a signatory to several international human rights charters to witness a government so deceptive and arbitrary in its approach to legitimacy.

Here is a catalogue of officially recognised Tory lies used to justify their unjustifiable policies which have resulted in official reprimands.

The Tory election strategy is more of the same: Tories being conservative with the truth.

The Great Debt Lie and the Myth of the Structural Deficit.

One of the most destructive Tory myths has been officially debunked.

“The mess we inherited” – some facts with which to fight the Tory Big Lies.

Political scrapbook: Telegraph business leaders letter ‘was padded out with Sam Cam’s luvvie friends’

Thanks to the excellent Robert Livingstone for the excellent memes.

One of the most destructive Tory myths has been officially debunked

December 11, 2014May 8, 2017 · 21 Comments ·

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has discovered what most of us already knew: that income inequality actually stifles economic growth in some of the world’s wealthiest countries, whilst the redistribution of wealth via progressive taxation and benefits encourages growth.

The recent report from the OECD, a leading global think tank, shows basically that what creates and reverses growth is the exact opposite of what the current right-wing government are telling us, highlighting the truth of Miliband’s comments in his speech today – that the Tory austerity cuts are purely ideologically-driven, and not about effectively managing the economy at all. But again, many of us knew this was so.

The Labour Party’s economic plan, based on progressive taxation, equality and funding of public services is the best way forward for economic growth and social stability. The Conservatives have killed the potential for a sustainable economic recovery, and will continue to do so, because they promise endless austerity. This is rather akin to treating a disease with more disease.

Osborne’s economic policy is comparable with riding the fabled rubber bicycle.

We aren’t going anywhere.

The report showed evidence that the UK would have been at least 20 percent better off if the gap between the rich and poor hadn’t widened since the eighties under Thatcher, and successive Conservative administrations – the most recent having reversed the equality measures put in place by Blair. (Yes, he really did).

Prior to the global recession, the Tories said they would match the Labour government’s state spending and suggested they may even further it. However, when the global crash happened, a sudden opportunity presented for Tories to become fully-fledged… Tories, grinding their ideological axe, taking a neoliberal swing at the “bloated” public sector and at Labours’ public spending for the protection of public services and the most vulnerable citizens during the economic crisis.

It’s worth remembering that the Coalition has borrowed more in just 3 years than Labour did in 13. In fact Osborne has borrowed more than every Labour government since 1900 combined. And the current government have nothing to show for it, whereas the Labour government at least adequaltely funded public services and effectively sheltered the poorest citizens from the worst consequences of the global crisis.

Let us not forget that this feckless government inherited an economy that was in recovery. They destroyed that and caused a UK recession by imposing austerity, savagely cutting public spending and public services. Thatcher used the same basic strategy to redistribute public wealth to private bank accounts and create inequality, although she didn’t cut as deeply. It didn’t work back then either. She caused a deep recession, as did John Major – Tories being Tories.

Let us not forget that despite the finger-pointing blame game that the Conservatives indulge in – their perpetual attempts to undermine Labour’s economic credibility and bolster their own ineptitude – that it was Osborne that lost the triple A Fitch and Moody credit ratings, despite his pledge that he wouldn’t. We are regarded as an economic liability on an international level, which flies in the face of Osborne’s lies about economic growth and removes any credibility from his blustering, swaggering claims. I do wish the public more broadly would engage in some joined-up thinking, since many have believed that the cuts were inevitable, but Tory propaganda, in fairness, is designed to fragment the truth and disjoint rationality.

The truth is that Gordon Brown was right with his ideas about fiscal stimulation (rather than Osborne’s coercive fiscal contraction): it’s been a confirmed model over and over by economists and by the fact that we were out of recession in 2010. The Tories’ austerity measures have since damaged the economy profoundly.

But austerity was never about what works. Austerity is simply a front for policies that are entirely founded on Tory ideology, which is all about handouts to the wealthy that are funded by the poor.

Accumulation for the wealthy by dispossession of the poor.

The OECD report highlights the fact that Conservative economic rhetoric is based on utter nonsense: it isn’t remotely rational. Tory ideology is incoherent, vindictive towards the poorest and extremely damaging, socio-economically. It shows us that the sacrifices of austerity, which were cruelly imposed on those least able to carry that burden, were justified by a malicious lie dressed-up as a promise of economic growth. But that is precisely what the Tories are destroying.

We knew that the laissez faire capitalism of industrial capitalism and the more recent financial capitalism of post industrial neoliberalism extend inequality. How can such systems, founded on competitive individualism, not do so? But now we have the evidence that inequality damages rather than encourages economic growth.

I’ve said elsewhere that Conservatism is centred around the preservation of traditional social hierarchy and inequality. Tories see this, erroneously, as an essential element for expanding economic opportunity. But never equal opportunity.

Conservatives think that civilised society requires imposed order, top down control and clearly defined classes, with each person aware of their rigidly defined “place” in the social order. Conservatism is a gate-keeping exercise geared towards economic discrimination and preventing social mobility for the vast majority.

David Cameron’s Conservative party got into Office by riding on the shockwaves of the 2008 global banking crisis: by sheer opportunism, dishonesty and by extensively editing the narrative about cause of that crisis. The Conservatives shamefully blamed it on “the big state” and “too much state spending.”

They have raided and devastated the public services and social security that citizens have paid for via taxes and national insurance. Support provision for citizens is cut to the bone. And then unforgivably, they blamed the victims of those savage, ideologically-directed cuts for the suffering imposed on them by the Conservative Party, using the media to amplify their despicable, vicious scapegoating narratives.

Conservatives really do think that inequality is necessary, they think that our society ought to be divided and hierarchical. They are traditional rather than rational. They have an almost feudalist approach to economic policy, blended with a strong old boys network of corporocrats.

The Tories have long been advocates of the market society, which turns everyone and everything into a commodity. Neoliberalism is an invisible hand in an iron glove, with its whispered broken promise of a mythological “trickle down” as justification – now the new right neoliberals are officially a cult of vicious cranks.

The word “Tories” is an abbreviation of “tall stories”

Conservatism in a nutshell

Osborne’s Autumn statement reflects the Tory ambition to reduce State provision to rubble

A list of official rebukes for Tory lies

Many thanks to Robert Livingstone @LivingstonePics

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The BBC expose a chasm between what the Coalition plan to do and what they want to disclose

December 6, 2014March 12, 2015 · 33 Comments ·

“Traditions are not killed by facts” – George Orwell.

The Conservatives are creatures of habit rather than reason. Traditional. That is the why their policies are so stifling and anti-progressive for the majority of us. It’s why Tory policies don’t meet public needs.

There’s always an air of doom and gloom when we have a Tory government, and a largely subdued, depressed, repressed nation, carrying vague and fearful intuitions that something truly catastrophic is just around the corner.

I can remember the anxiety and creeping preternatural fear amongst young people in the eighties, and our transcendent defiance, which we carried like the banners at a Rock Against Racism march, back in the Thatcher era. We always witness the social proliferation of fascist ideals with a Tory government, too. It stems from the finger-pointing divide and rule mantra: it’s them not us, them not us. But history refutes as much as it verifies, and we learned that it’s been the Tories all along.

With a Conservative government, we are always fighting something. Poverty, social injustice: we fight for political recognition of our fundamental rights, which the Tories always circumvent. We fight despair and material hardship, caused by the rising cost of living, low wages, high unemployment and recession that is characteristic of every Tory government.

I think people often mistranslate what that something is. Because Tory rhetoric is all about othering: dividing, atomising of society into bite-sized manageable pieces by amplifying a narrative of sneaking suspicion and hate thy neighbour via the media.

The Tories are and always have been psychocrats. They insidiously intrude into people’s everyday thoughts and try to micro-manage and police them. They use Orwellian-styled rhetoric crowded with words like “market forces”, “meritocracy” “autonomy”, “incentivisation”, “democracy”, “efficient, small state”, and even “freedom”, whilst all the time they are actually extending a brutal, bullying, extremely manipulative, all-pervasive authoritarianism.

The Conservative starting point is control of the media and information. All Conservatives do this, and historically, regardless of which country they govern. (As well as following the hyperlinks (in blue) to British and Canadian media takeovers, also, see the Australian media Tory takeover via Murdoch, from last year: The political empire of the News Corp chairman.)

As we saw earlier this year when the Tories launched an attack on Oxfam, any implied or frank criticism of Conservative policies or discussion of their very often terrible social consequences is stifled, amidst the ludicrous accusations of “politically biased.”

When did concern for poverty and the welfare of citizens become the sole concern of “the left wing”? I think that casually spiteful and dismissive admission of indifference tells us all we need to know about the current government’s priorities. And no amount of right-wing propaganda will hide the fact that poverty and inequality rise under every Tory government. And how is it possible to discuss poverty meaningfully without reference to the policies that cause it? That isn’t “bias”: it’s truthful. Tory policies indicate consistently that when it comes to spending our money, the Tories are very generous towards the wealthy, and worse than parsimonious regarding the rest of us.

Then there are the Tory pre-election promises, all broken and deleted from the internet. And valid criticism of their spinner of Tory yarns and opposition smears, also deleted. This is not a democratic government that values political accountability, nor is it one that is prepared to bear any scrutiny at all.

The Conservatives are attempting to intimidate the BBC (again) into silence regarding its candid commentary regarding the autumn statement made by Osborne, exposing the vast scale of cuts to come for the British public. I’m pleased to see the BBC hitting back, for once, with a robust defence, declaring that: “We’re satisfied our coverage has been fair and balanced and we’ll continue to ask ministers the questions our audience want answered.”

It was BBC assistant political editor Norman Smith’s description of the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) response to the autumn statement document as “the book of the doom” and his suggestion that the UK was heading “back to the land of Road to Wigan Pier” that provoked Osborne’s outrage.

But whilst journalists are hardly unknown for hyperbole, Smith certainly can be cleared of this charge. Because many agree that the figures contained in the OBR blue book are truly remarkable and worry-provoking. Many of us have concluded the same, from the OBR and Institute of Fiscal Studies (IFS) to an army of quietly reflective bloggers, who have collectively anticipated this purely ideological outcome for some time.

The BBC are absolutely right to point out to the public that there will be severe social repercussions as a consequence of the scale of cuts that Osborne is planning, especially given that sixty percent of the cuts are yet to come.

The judgements of the OBR, which Osborne set up, and IFS, were at least as damning as the BBC’s, but it’s worth noting that the Chancellor doesn’t publicly attack either report. Because he can’t.

Instead the Conservatives have accused the BBC of “bias” and “systematic exaggeration,” David Cameron and George Osborne launched an unprecedented attack on the coverage of the Autumn Statement. However, the Conservatives have been openly policing the media for a while. (See: Tories to closely monitor BBC for left wing bias ahead of party conference season and: Once you hear the jackboots, it’s too late.)

Senior Tory MP Andrew Bridgen suggested there was a risk that unless the BBC was “scrupulously fair” in its reporting, it may “drive voters into the arms of Labour”, adding the threat “and may even find its future funding arrangements affected.”

A blatant threat.

On Thursday, Bridgen wrote to Rona Fairhead, the BBC Trust’s chairperson, to complain “about a pattern of systematic exaggeration in the BBC’s reporting of the Autumn Statement”. It’s not his first complaint about alleged bias, either: he whined when the TUC’s senior economist Duncan Weldon became Newsnight’s new economics correspondent earlier this year.

Mr Bridgen said he wanted “to seek assurances that in the remaining six months until the general election your coverage will demonstrate the impartiality and balance that the public, and indeed the BBC charter, demand”.

He added: “Over the last four years the entire nation has pulled together to achieve something many said could not be done: we are now the fastest growing advanced economy in the developed world. The sacrifices and hard work of the British people are ill-served by pessimistic reporting which obscures our economic success with the language of fear and doom.”

I don’t think this is about “impartiality” or what best serves the British people. This is about the Conservatives not getting their own way, so they resort to bullying and attempts to discredit people who have simply told the truth.

The Chancellor responded angrily to the references to Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier in the Today report on BBC Radio 4. He said: “I would have thought the BBC would have learned from the last four years that its totally hyperbolic coverage of spending cuts has not been matched by what has actually happened. I had all that when I was interviewed four years ago and has the world fallen in? No it has not.”

Well, that all depends George. For many people, the only genuine growth we’ve seen is in poverty, inequality, destitution, hunger, suffering and referrals to foodbanks. And deaths. So yes, for growing numbers, their’ world has fallen in.

A BBC spokesman said the BBC was satisfied that the Today programme’s coverage had been “fair and balanced and we gave the Chancellor plenty of opportunity to respond on the programme.”

And the comments were justified because the Office for Budget Responsibility had itself said that nominal government consumption will fall to its lowest level since 1938, the BBC said.

Both the OBR and IFS said in their responses to the autumn statement that Britain has not seen public spending reduced to this level as a proportion of GDP since the grim days of the 1930s.

The public sector spending cuts over the next five years set out in the autumn statement may force a “fundamental re-imagining of the state,” the Institute for Fiscal Studies said in their report.

The warning from the IFS – Britain’s public spending analysts – came only hours after Osborne had angrily rounded on the BBC, accusing its reporters of “totally hyperbolic” reporting about his spending plans and “conjuring up bogus images of the 1930s depression”.

The IFS confirmed that the scale of cuts to departmental budgets and local government would reduce the role of the state to a point where it would have “changed beyond recognition.” The government’s spending watchdog, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), also said yesterday that Osborne’s statement indicated that with the cuts set out in Treasury assumptions, we would see the state reduced to its smallest size relative to GDP for 80 years – since the 1930s.

It was about this era, the Great Depression, against which Orwell set The Road to Wigan Pier, in his account of the bleak living conditions, social injustices, suffering and misery of the working class in the Northwest of England. Norman Smith made an apt comparison.

Scenes from the Jarrow Crusade, 1936, Marchers from Jarrow in the North East of England, walk to London where they will hand in a petition to the House of Commons in a plead for more work as the depression and starvation of the 1930's hits hard

Scenes from the Jarrow Hunger March, 1936, Marchers from Jarrow in the North East of England, walked to London where they handed a petition to the House of Commons in a plead for more work as the depression and starvation of the 1930’s hit hard

Osborne admitted to John Humphrys two hours later, that “difficult” decisions on welfare would include freezing working age benefits for two years and lowering the welfare cap on spending from £26,000 for a family each year on benefits to a maximum of £23,000. But he maintained his glib assurances that the outlook was not as grim as Smith and Humphrys were claiming.

With the cost of living rising sharply year after year, and with the catastrophic consequences of the first wave of welfare “reforms” now clearly evident, it is difficult to envisage how the outlook for the poorest can be deemed anything other than enduringly, grindingly bleak.

If any evidence was needed that the Conservatives fear the political consequences of the cuts to come, the assault on the BBC’s coverage of the autumn statement has certainly provided it. The Conservative responses are strictly about discrediting the BBC as a means of pre-election damage-limitation, and not about the accuracy or “bias” of the reporting, because Osborne had not anticipated that the real consequences of his budget plans would be shared with the public. Most people don’t, after all, read the OBR or IFS forecasts and reports. As it is, Osborne had set out to mislead the public, and was well and truly exposed.

The IFS director, Paul Johnson, said: “The chancellor is right to point out that it has proved possible to implement substantial cuts over this parliament. One cannot just look at the scale of implied cuts going forward and say they are unachievable. But it is surely incumbent upon anyone set on taking the size of the state to its smallest in many generations to tell us what that means.“

It’s also worth bearing in mind that Clegg has claimed co-authorship of the budget statement. Clegg’s absence from parliament for the third Wednesday in a row suggests he is farcically trying to distance himself from David Cameron and Osborne in the run-up to the election.

However, he attempted to take credit for the central policies of the statement, including the stamp duty overhaul unveiled by Osborne, when questioned on his LBC 97.3 radio show by Ed Balls, the shadow chancellor.

“Everything in that autumn statement is there because we’ve agreed it and I fully support it,” Clegg said.

The BBC exposed the chasm between what the Tory-led Coalition plan and what they are prepared to disclose and discuss publicly. That’s because of a chasm that exists between Tory ideology and a genuine economic problem-solving approach to policy: Osborne’s autumn budget statement was entirely about political gesturing, designed to divert attention from the sheer extent of social and economic damage wreaked by five years of strictly ideologically-prompted policy.

This is a Chancellor who rested all of his credibility on paying down the debt and has borrowed more than every Labour government combined.

It must be abundantly clear that the Tory aim of much bigger and destructive cuts after 2015 is not about deficit reduction, but the destruction of the public sector, our services and social safety nets, the undoing of a century of our the hard-won achievements of civil rights movements, and all in favour of greedy, elevated, unbridled market forces.

Conservatism is centred around the preservation of traditional social hierarchy and inequality. Tories see this, erroneously, as an essential element for expanding economic opportunity. But never equal opportunity.

Conservatives think that civilised society requires imposed order, control and clearly defined classes, with each person aware of their rigidly defined “place” in the social order. Conservatism is a gate-keeping exercise geared towards economic discrimination and preventing social mobility for the vast majority.

It is these core beliefs that fuel Osborne’s stubborn adherence to austerity policies, even though it is by now patently obvious that austerity isn’t working for the economy, and for majority of the public. It never will.

Thanks to Robert Livingstone for the memes.

Ed Balls: response to the Autumn Statement

Children’s Commissioner warns that UK is now in breach of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child

December 2, 2014January 25, 2016 · 38 Comments ·

In February last year, I wrote an article about Conservative attitudes towards poverty that entail a victim-blame narrative. It was written at a time that the government were developing “better measures of child poverty” to provide a “more accurate reflection of the reality of child poverty.”

According to the Tory-led Coalition, poverty isn’t caused through a lack of income. Iain Duncan Smith is responsible for this outrageous nugget of calculated, preemptive denial. Because the government knew in advance what the consequences of the austerity cuts would be: a massive increase in inequality and poverty. I concluded that the austerity cuts contravened the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.

And they do.

As Chancellor George Osborne, prepares to release his mid-term (Autumn) budget statement, the government’s Children’s Commissioner for England has published a report criticising the Coalition’s austerity policies, which have reduced the incomes of the poorest families by up to 10 percent since 2010.

The Children’s Commissioner said that the increasing inequality which has resulted from the cuts, and in particular, the welfare reforms, means that Britain is now in breach of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which protects children from the adverse effects of government economic measures.

Austerity cuts are disproportionately targeted at the poorest. It’s particularly shameful that absolute poverty has returned to Britain since 2010, given that we are the 5th wealthiest nation in the world. That indicates clearly just how much inequality has increased.

Government spending decisions made in 2010 have a disproportionate impact particularly on disabled children and their families.

Another report from the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission indicates some very worrying trends regarding decreasing living standards, increasing employment insecurity and low pay, and the return of significant, rising levels of absolute child poverty not seen in the UK since the advent of the welfare state. Until now. (See here for the findings from the State of the Nation report.)

Dr Maggie Atkinson, the Children’s Commissioner, said: “Nobody is saying that there isn’t a deficit to close. Our issue is that at the moment, it is the poorest in society who have least to fall back on that are paying the greatest price for trying to close that deficit. It is patently unfair. It is patently against the rights of the child.”

Dr Atkinson says that this means the UK has broken the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, under which each country is obliged to protect children from the detrimental consequences of economic policies. The Commissioner condemned the government for placing undue financial pressures on poorer parents, despite being one of the most developed countries in the world.

“The basic fact is that there are families living in the fifth-biggest economy in the Western world who are making choices about whether they can afford to heat their house or feed their children,” she said.

“We need as a nation to decide whether we are in the business of making the poorest pay the highest penalty when there is a gap between what the country has in its coffers and what its expenses are.”

The Commissioner’s report found that the government cuts have led to the UK infringing upon Articles 3, 6, 18, 23, 24, 26, 27 and 31 of the Convention. These Articles guarantee children the right to life, development, health, social security and leisure.

Researchers collected data on the experiences of people in three categories: children and young people under 16 years old, young people aged 16 to 20, and parents.

There is “an urgent need to reconsider some of the budgetary proposals which leave families struggling to be able to afford to buy essential items”, the report concludes.

The United Nations (UN) Committee on the Rights of the Child will examine the report in 2016 as part of an evaluation of the UK’s performance on children’s rights issues. Dr Atkinson said the UK would face “very, very damning” criticism from the UN if the government does not make changes.

The Labour government had introduced a legal safeguarding framework that included all areas of children and young people’s well-being, under their flagship Every Child Matters policy. The policy was quietly repealed the day after the Coalition took Office. Enshrined at the heart of Every Child Matters is the Paramountcy Principle: this states that the welfare of children is at all times paramount and overrides all other considerations. This reflects a “whole child” approach to welfare and child protection, as well as a holistic inter-agency approach to achieving that. The emphasis was on prevention, rather than the current “crisis management” approach. And it’s very evident that crises are not being managed at all.

68 per cent of our front line children’s services have had cuts to their budgets in 2011 alone. Bearing in mind these are also providing statutory services and also considering that many local authorities are pessimistic about the future of these services, and with most charities previously funded to undertake ECM outcome based work – work with families in which children are struggling at school because of problems at home including poverty, adult mental health problems, domestic violence, substance abuse truancy and poor housing – being also fearful for the future of the most vulnerable members of society. In some areas, support for vulnerable children of school age has just been cut from the budget completely. And as we know, the worst of the cuts is yet to come.

The government has rejected the findings of what they deem the “partial, selective and misleading” Children’s Commissioner report.

But denial and derision is the standard Conservative response to professional, authoritative reports that use thoroughly researched evidence to highlight and criticise the government’s prejudiced, discriminatory and punitive policies. Denial is a standard response by those who wish to abdicate responsibility for the problems that they have created. When a so-called democratic government adopts and standardises this strategy, it is surely time to be very worried.

For example, when presented by the UN housing envoy Raquel Rolnik with the harsh facts and excruciatingly dismal human consequences of Britain’s housing crisis and the discriminatory nature of the bedroom tax, Tory ministers opted to leap unhesitatingly for the rhetorical low ground, with housing minister Kris Hopkins dismissing Rolnik’s report as a “Marxist diatribe.”

Raquel was also denounced by the Tory party chair Grant Shapps as “that woman from Brazil”. Fellow Tory MP Stuart Jackson weighed in with the classy, thoughtful comment: “Loopy Brazilian leftie”.

Then there was the Department for Work and Pensions response, rubbishing the robust, well-researched, professional report on the grounds that the evidence is based on “anecdotal evidence”. Yes, that’s the department run by Iain Duncan Smith, who, when asked to provide robust evidence for the claimed success of the benefit cap replied: “I believe I am right.”

The UN ruled that the highly discriminatory bedroom tax breaches human rights.

The United Nations have also found that the government is in breach of its obligations to uphold the human rights convention on gender discrimination.

In 2010 the Equality and Human Rights Commission warned the government about its potential failure to meet its legal duties. This followed concerns raised by the Fawcett Society and others, regarding the estimated grossly disproportionate impact of the austerity cuts on women. The Commission recognised the serious concerns about the impact of the deficit reduction measures on vulnerable groups and, in particular, following the House of Commons library report, the impact of the budget on women. The Commission report stated:

“We have written to the Treasury to ask for reassurance that they will comply with their equality duties when making decisions about the overall deficit reduction, and in particular in relation to any changes to tax and benefits for which they are directly responsible.”

In August last year, concerns raised by the Committee include protection from discrimination under the Public Sector Equality Duty, the impact of austerity measures on women and women’s services, and restrictions on women’s access to legal aid. The report highlights the key areas where women’s rights in the UK have come to a standstill and in fact some are being reversed.

It’s emerged more recently that the UK has become the first developed country to face a UN inquiry into disability rights violations. The UN Committee has the power to launch an inquiry if it receives “reliable information” that violations have been committed, and as the Labour Government signed up to the protocol in 2009 – the UNCRPD and the international covenant on economic, social and cultural rights – it is legally binding.

Austerity measures and welfare “reforms” such as the bedroom tax (which is in itself established by the UN as being a contravention of human rights law) mean the rights of disabled people to independent living, work, and adequate social security have been seriously undermined, causing significant hardship. Last year, Amnesty International also condemned the erosion of human rights of disabled people in UK.

Earlier this year, the level of UK benefits paid in pensions, jobseeker’s allowance and incapacity benefits was deemed “manifestly inadequate” because it falls below 40% of the median income of European states, by the Council of Europe in Strasbourg.

The finding in an annual review of the UK’s adherence to the council’s European social charter is likely to provoke a fresh dispute between the government and European legal structures. Of course Iain Duncan Smith dismissed the finding as “lunacy.”

The Council of Europe, which has 47 member states, said the conclusions were legally binding in the same way that judgements relating to the European Convention on Human Rights had to be applied by member states.

We ought to be very concerned about the government’s declaration that they intend to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights, (ECHR) and to repeal our own Human Rights Act, (HRA). One has to wonder what Cameron’s discomfort with the HRA is. The Act, after all, was formulated by the Labour Party to protect the vulnerable from neglect of duty and abuse of government power.

The rights protected by the HRA are drawn from the 1950 European convention on human rights, which was a way of ensuring that we never again witness the full horrors of the second world war, and overwhelmingly, one of the greatest stains on the conscience of humanity – the Holocaust.

Human Rights establish a simple set of minimum standards of decency for humankind to hold onto for the future. The European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms was drafted as a lasting legacy of the struggle against fascism and totalitarianism.

We need consider, as a matter of utmost urgency, what kind of government would blatantly disregard international law; would want to avoid international scrutiny; would not welcome any concerns for the well-being of UK citizens, and would want to see those basic protections for citizens overturned.

Certainly not one that values or plans to uphold the universal protection of its citizens.

Many thanks to Robert Livingstone for the memes

Conservatism in a nutshell, part 2: Laissez-faire isn’t.

November 19, 2014May 27, 2017 · 8 Comments ·

“David Cameron and George Osborne believe the only way to persuade millionaires to work harder is to give them more money.

But they also seem to believe that the only way to make ordinary people work harder is to take money away.”

Ed Miliband.

Source: Hansard, December 12, 2012.

Oh, the irony of Cameron trying to blame the “global economy” for the utter mess of the UK economy that his party has created. (Well, unless you are a millionaire, then it’s all a pretty good mess, actually.) Cameron’s mess is an entirely homegrown one, and is entirely down to his policies. Worse still, no matter how desperate things get, his message to the UK is that the only solution is to stick to his plan – more austerity – the plan that has created the problems in the first place.

Labour dealt with the global banking crisis without the need for austerity, and had steered the UK out of recession by 2009/10, Cameron, and his government caused a homegrown recession just like Thatcher and Major did, through redistributing public wealth to private pockets and offshore bank accounts.

The Conservative’s “long term economic plan” is to continue transferring public funds to private bank accounts. Not for the benefit of the economy, or the public, but for the sole benefit of hoarding millionaires and Tory donors who are sucking our public funds out of circulation and killing the economy.

“Trickle-down economics” is a term imported from the US, to refer to the idea that tax breaks and other economic benefits provided to businesses and upper income levels of society will benefit poorer citizens by improving the economy as a whole. It’s linked with Laissez-faire ideology.

Laissez-faire is basically the theory of Conservative/Liberal governments that uphold the apparent autonomous character of the economic order, believing that government should not intervene in the direction of economic affairs. “Free markets” and “free competition” are seen as a reflection of the natural system of liberty.

From a Laissez-faire perspective, the State has no responsibility to engage in positive intervention to promote equality through wealth distribution or to create a welfare state to protect people from poverty, instead relying on charity to provide poor people with relief. I rather suspect this is what Cameron means by “big society”.

The claim that people who have their taxes lowered, with greater wealth, will distribute their benefit to less wealthy individuals, so that a fraction will reach the general population and stimulate the economy, is of course completely unfounded and absurd. It’s worth noting that proponents of the policy generally do not use the term “trickle-down” themselves. But the underpinning assumptions of trickle-down theory are implicit in the rhetoric of Laissez-faire/supply-side economics, and clearly expressed in social policy.

The phrase “trickle-down” has been attributed to humorist Will Rogers, who originally said of the US New Deal (the response to the Great Depression of 1930s) that “money was all appropriated for the top in hopes that it would trickle down to the needy.”

It’s original use was entirely pejorative and it was drawn on as a lampoonery device .

The Depression of the 1930s profoundly influenced our theories of economics and resulted in many changes in how governments dealt with economic downturns, and the subsequent widespread poverty, such as the use of stimulus packages, Keynesian economics, and Social Security, manifested in our post-war settlement.

Cameron is dismantling those civilised foundations we built, using the malfeasance of his own administration – austerity – and of the finance sectors that caused the global crash, as an excuse to drive their prize ultra-conservative Ayn Rand ideology into manifest existence – the withdrawal of State support for anyone who may need it. For those that don’t, the State is there as your best buddy, and will continue to intervene on your behalf to feed you great gifts.

For a party claiming to reduce the State and reduce interventions, they sure intervene a lot. Talk about an Adam Smith sleight of hand…with one “invisible hand” they take money from the poor, by introducing policies that purposefully cut income and public services, and with the other, they hand out our money to the millionaires.(See: Follow the Money: Tory Ideology is all about handouts to the wealthy that are funded by the poor.)

The trickle-down theory is not a genuine feature of the economy, but an illusion maintained by Conservatives to fool the poor into believing that there is opportunity for social mobility, and to excuse their miserly, cruel cuts to the poor, and generosity to those that don’t actually need it. It’s political hocus-pocus.

What we need, as history has taught us, is broad fiscal policies that are directed across the entire economy, and not toward just one specific income group: that merely condenses wealth into the private bank accounts of a few, reducing the entire economy and society to a few stagnant pools of hoarding greed. It also reflects the implicit Conservative advocacy of Social Darwinist philosophy, with the “market place” absurdly operating as “natural law”, generating a socioeconomic hierarchy.

A 2012 study by the Tax Justice Network indicates that wealth of the super-rich does not trickle down to improve the economy, but tends to be amassed and sheltered in tax havens with a negative effect on the tax bases of the home economy. (See: Wealth doesn’t trickle down – it just floods offshore, research reveals.)

The trickle down theory and Laissez-faire philosophy formed the basis of economic policy during the industrial revolution of the 1800s. It didn’t work then either, in the wake of widespread absolute poverty resulting from deeply exploitatively low wages combined with very dangerous work environments, it became evident that exclusively Laissez-faire economic attitudes resulted in the political engineering and endorsement of exploitation and harsh mistreatment of citizens. It shortened people’s lives and reduced most citizens to a harsh, miserable existence. It was a time when economic theory was mistranslated into a social doctrine of”survival of the fittest.”

Conservatives: the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Bloody Feudalists.

As Hilary Mantel observed this week, the Tory-led Coalition are more brutal towards the poor and vulnerable than Thomas Cromwell was, she said that the Middle Ages appeared a positively enlightened era compared to the “retreat into insularity” which the UK had currently embraced. Mantel summed up criticism of this Government’s regressive justification narratives very well:

“The government portrays poor and unfortunate people as being morally defective. This is a return to the thinking of the Victorians. Even in the 16th century, Thomas Cromwell was trying to tell people that a thriving economy has casualties and that something must be done by the state for people out of work.

“Even back then, you saw the tide turning against this idea that poverty was a moral weakness.”

Of course we know that poverty is caused entirely by Government policies. And if you didn’t know that, then ask yourself how the following policies could possibly cause anything but inequality and increasing poverty for the poorest:

These cuts, aimed at the poorest, came into force in April 2013:

1 April – Housing benefit cut, including the introduction of the bedroom tax
1 April – Council tax benefit cut
1 April – Legal Aid savagely cut
6 April – Tax credit and child benefit cut
7 April – Maternity and paternity pay cut
8 April – 1% cap on the rise of in working-age benefits (for the next three years)
8 April – Disability living allowance replaced by personal independence payment (PIP)
15 April – Cap imposed on the total amount of benefit working-age people can receive.

At the same time, note the Tory “incentives” for the wealthy:

Rising wealth – 50 richest people from this region increased their wealth by £3.46 billion last year to a record £28.5 billion.
Falling taxes – top rate of tax cut from 50% to 45% for those earning over £150,000 a year. This is 1% of the population who earn 13% of the income.
No mansion tax and caps on council tax mean that the highest value properties are taxed proportionately less than average houses.
Benefited most from Quantitative Easing (QE) – the Bank of England say that as 50% of households have little or no financial assets, almost all the financial benefit of QE was for the wealthiest 50% of households, with the wealthiest 10% taking the lions share
Tax free living – extremely wealthy individuals can access tax avoidance schemes which contribute to the £25bn of tax which is avoided every year, as profits are shifted offshore to join the estimated £13 trillion of assets siphoned off from our economy.
Millionaires were awarded a “tax break” of £107,000 each per year.
The richest 1,000 in UK double their wealth since crash while average incomes drop 6%

That most definitely does not indicate any “trickle-down” of wealth.

It was noted by the Keynsian economist John Kenneth Galbraith, adviser to President John F. Kennedy, that trickle down theory was originally less elegantly called the “horse and sparrow” theory in the 1800s.

The original theory was based on the idea that if you feed a horse enough oats, it will shit enough to feed a lot of sparrows.

And the Conservatives are certainly feeding us horse shit.

Conservatism in a nutshell

The World At One, Radio 4, 17th November, 2014: “The economic situation explained in 3 minutes.Tory austerity has given us the slowest recovery since the South Sea Bubble.Professor David Blanchflower absolutely slaughters Cameron over his pre-excuse warning over the world economy, he blames Tory austerity for tanking Britain’s economy and preventing a recovery, and states that any recovery we do have is simply part of the cycle as long as you don’t wreck it with austerity, and confirms that our economy was on the RISE in 2009 / 2010.” Robert Livingstone.

Some highlights of the Conservative long term economic plan so far:

Fitch and Moody triple A credit rating lost
The return of absolute poverty and Victorian malnutrition-related illnesses, such as rickets and scurvy.
Austerity was never about “paying down the debt”, that was a Tory lie: it is entirely about “raising more money for the rich“.
This is conservatism in a nutshell

Conservative socio-economic ideology is incompatible with human rights.

Many thanks to Robert Livingstone for his persistence in exposing the Tory lies and hypocrisy in his pictures.

Cuts to employment support allowance are being “considered” by ministers

October 30, 2014January 7, 2016 · 9 Comments ·

Tory ministers are considering drastically cutting the main Employment and Support Allowance sickness (ESA) benefit, internal documents seen by the BBC suggest.

New claimants, judged to be capable of work with appropriate support, could be given just 50p more per week than people on job seekers allowance.

Current recipients get almost £30 per week more. This is to meet additional costs that arise because of a person’s disability.

The Department for Work and Pensions said the ESA proposals were “not government policy.”

The documents reveal that the government has also been forced to hire extra staff to clear the backlog on the benefit.

Some 100 healthcare professionals are being hired to carry out fitness-for-work tests. The staff, who will be employed through the Pertemps agency, will help to reduce a backlog of more than 600,000 cases.

They will be in addition to any extra staff brought in when a new contractor is announced shortly to replace ATOS. The American firm, Maximus, has been awarded the contract. Controversies and scandals have been unearthed by UK researchers since Maximus was handed the lucrative contract in July to deliver the government’s new health and work service in England and Wales.

Leaked documents over the summer showed that ministers considered ESA – formerly known as incapacity benefit – to be “one of the largest fiscal risks currently facing the government”.

They also revealed “concerns” about claimants moving off jobseekers allowance onto ESA.

Giving consideration to cutting the differential paid to ESA recipients in the Work Related Activity Group (WRAG) – individuals who have to prepare for employment – is a reflection of that concern. However these are people that have been declared unfit for work by their doctor. They currently receive £28.75 more per week but the documents show plans are being discussed to cut that to just 50p more than jobseekers allowance. People receiving JSA, who are aged 25 or over, currently get £72.40 per week.

However, disabled people do have have additional needs and higher living costs, which is why ESA was set at a higher amount than JSA. Furthermore, because ESA is paid to people who can’t work, that means they are potentially reliant on benefit to meet their living costs indefinitely, and certainly longer term than those claiming JSA. ESA wasn’t designed to be such a temporary means of support as JSA was.

Employment and Support Allowance is paid to approximately two million people. Claimants have to undergo an extremely controversial Work Capability Assessment (WCA) to determine whether they are eligible and at what level.

Many people have been wrongly assessed as fit for work, and have been forced to appeal in order to receive the benefit that they are entitled to, and the high success rate of appeals in itself indicates that the WCA is deeply flawed. People have died within weeks of being told they are fit for work, also indicating that this assessment process is heavily weighted towards ensuring that sick and disabled people lose their lifeline benefit.

Labour MP, Dame Anne Begg, who chairs the Commons Work and Pensions Select Committee, said she would support overhauling the delivery of ESA but: “did not envisage any reduction in the value of the benefit.”

She added: “That’s not reform, that is just saving money. I hope that is not something the government is going to come forward with.”

Of course the Conservatives have used the word “reform” as a euphemism for severe cuts since 2010.

Dame Anne Begg MP‏ has recently called again for a cumulative impact assessment during debate on government’s policies towards disabled people. She has also fought to keep the the Independent Living Fund that supports around 21,000 people with severe disabilities to help them live independently at home has also been closed to new applicants, and will be shut down completely by 2015. This is despite a court ruling in May that stated closure of the fund is unlawful, as it breaches the Equality Act 2010, which was introduced by the Labour Party.

If we look at how the Coalition austerity cuts have been targeted, we see that:

People in poverty are targeted 5 times more than most citizens
Disabled people are targeted 9 times more than most citizens
Disabled people needing social care are targeted 19 times more than most citizens.

Further cuts to benefits are neither feasible nor justifiable.

Sheila Gilmore MP has responded:

“When Labour created the Work-related Activity Group in 2008, the rationale was to ensure that sick and disabled people who couldn’t work in the short term but might be able to in the future weren’t simply written off. Those in this group would receive support from Jobcentres and be encouraged to do appropriate training.

However we were clear that up until their next reassessment – which would occur at least every two years – these people were still unable to work. This is something Tory Ministers now seem keen to ignore. By cutting payments to those in the Work-related Activity Group by nearly £30 per week, Ian Duncan Smith is effectively saying that these people are only a hop, skip and a jump away from being a fully fit, able-bodied Jobseekers Allowance claimant.

This just isn’t the case in reality, as has many people who are placed in this group have serious mental health issues or are recovering from serious accidents.Cutting the benefits of sick and disabled people who are unable to work through no fault of their own is cruel – Ian Duncan Smith and his Tory Ministers should be ashamed.”

I suggest that the government looks at reducing the £107,000 each per annum that the Tories have awarded to millionaires in the form of a “tax break”, using money taken from the public purse. Cameron pledged in 2010 that only those with the “broadest shoulders” would be expected to carry the burden of austerity cuts. Perhaps he needs someone to explain to him that this doesn’t actually mean handing out tax payers’money to millionaires, whilst savagely cutting vulnerable people’s lifeline benefits and services.

After all, it’s not millionaires that are losing their dignity, health and well-being. Living in desperation is pushing the most vulnerable people to join the queues at food banks. Diseases associated with malnutrition, which were very common in the Victorian era in the UK, became rare with the advent of our welfare state and universal healthcare, but they are now making a reappearance because of increasing numbers living in absolute poverty. This is a direct consequence of Coalition policies, which basically take money from the poorest and provide generous handouts to the wealthy.

Oxfam’s director of campaigns and policy, Ben Phillips, said: “Britain is becoming a deeply divided nation, with a wealthy elite who are seeing their incomes spiral up, while millions of families are struggling to make ends meet.”

“It’s deeply worrying that these extreme levels of wealth inequality exist in Britain today, where just a handful of people have more money than millions struggling to survive on the breadline.”

Many are now below the breadline.

Chris Leslie MP, Labour’s Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury points out that the Coalition have raised taxes 24 times. Whilst millionaires have been given a huge tax cut, ordinary people are paying more because the Tories have raised VAT and cut tax credits and other benefits.

“Independent figures from the IFS show that by next year families will be at least £974 a year worse off because of tax and benefit changes since 2010″. Meanwhile, the cost of living continues to rise, and Cameron still won’t rule out raising VAT again to pay for £7 billion of unfunded tax promises.

The Conservatives aim to dismantle our welfare state and National Health Service. They have already drastically cut public services and provisions down to the bare bones. Their regressive ideology is all about looking after those who don’t need support – the very wealthy – at the expense of the poorest.

My grandmother once said to me that when she was younger, there was no welfare state, no national health service, and that people had to “make do”. I said that I always thought that our post-war settlement reflected the very best of us as a society, and that ensuring vulnerable people are supported and cared for distinguishes us as civilised. She thought about it, and said: “Yes, I always wanted better than we had for my children and grandchildren.”

We did have better, we evolved and we recognised that anyone could become vulnerable at some point during their lifetime, through no fault of their own. Illness, accident, losing a job – these are events that may happen to anyone. So we each paid for our own provision to ensure that everyone is supported if they need it.

And that is in our human nature: to want better for each generation, to evolve and make progress as a society.

This is the lesson that we need to teach the Tories, once and for all. They invent problems and maliciously scapegoat the poor to justify their dislike and resentment of our supportive provisions and to justify dismantling them. Yet our public services and support, owned by us for us, ought to be a source of pride, and we mustn’t let them get away with taking it all away.

Many thanks to Robert Livingstone for all of his excellent memes

Aktion Arbeitsscheu Reich, Human Rights and infrahumanisation

October 25, 2014September 13, 2022 · 39 Comments ·

The European Convention on Human Rights, which came into force on 3 September 1953, guarantees a range of political rights and freedoms of the individual against interference by the State. The Convention came about as an international response to the horrors of World War Two, and the Holocaust.

Before the incorporation of the Convention, people in the United Kingdom could only complain of unlawful interference with their Convention rights by lodging a petition with the European Commission of Human Rights in Strasbourg. That all changed on 2 October 2000 when Labour’s Human Rights Act 1998 came into force, allowing UK citizens to sue public bodies for violations of their Convention rights in domestic courts.

David Cameron wants to scrap the Human Rights Act and has pledged to leave the European Convention. Human Rights are the bedrock of any democracy. He also wants to scrap consultations, impact assessments, audits, judicial reviews: all essential safeguards for citizens and mechanisms of democracy.

Government policies are expressed political intentions, regarding how our society is organised and governed. They have calculated social and economic aims and consequences.

How policies are justified is increasingly being detached from their aims and consequences, partly because democratic processes and basic human rights are being disassembled or side-stepped, and partly because the government employs the widespread use of propaganda to intentionally divert us from their aims and the consequences of their ideologically (rather than rationally) driven policies. Furthermore, policies have become increasingly detached from public interests and needs.

A clear example of an ideologically-driven policy is the Welfare “Reform” Act, which is founded on a stigmatising, Othering narrative: benefit recipients are portrayed as the enemy that battles against fairness and responsibility. The mythological economic “free-rider,” a “burden on the state.” The “reforms” left people in receipt of lifeline benefits much worse off than they were, the word reform has been used as a euphemism for cuts.

Iain Duncan Smith’s Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has launched a new propaganda scapegoating advertising campaign encouraging people to phone a hotline if they suspect somebody they know is fraudulently claiming benefits.

I’m sure that serious fraudulent claimants inform their friends and neighbours of their every activity, including holidays, sleeping arrangements, moments of intimacy and all of their benefit payment details, all the time, so that makes sense…

Mark Harper said: “Those who cheat the system need to know we will use everything in our power to stop them stealing money from hardworking taxpayers.”

Yet we know that there isn’t a real distinction between benefit claimants and hard-working taxpayers, as the Tories would have us believe. Many people on benefits are also in work, but are not paid a sufficient wage to live on. Most people claiming benefits, including disabled people, have worked and contributed income tax previously.

It’s worth bearing in mind that the poorest citizens, including people claiming benefits, pay proportionally more indirect taxes than the wealthiest citizens, such as VAT. The strivers/skivers rhetoric is simply a divert, divide and scapegoating strategy. Growing social inequality evidently generates a political necessity for creating scapegoats and cultivating prejudices.

The real cost of out-of-work benefits is over-estimated in relation to the welfare bill for pensions and in-work benefits such as tax credits and housing benefit, obscuring the increasing role that the British state plays in subsidising the scandalously low wages paid by increasingly exploitative employers, in order to meet a minimum standard of living for the hardworking.

The hardworking taxpayer myth is founded on a false dichotomy, since it is estimated that around 70% of households claim benefits of one kind or another at some point in their lives. In the current climate of poor pay, poor working conditions, job insecurity, and high living costs, the myth of an all pervasive welfare-dependent something for nothing culture is being used to foster prejudice and resentment towards those unfortunate enough to be out of work. It also serves to bolster right-wing justification narratives that are entirely ideologically driven, which are aimed at dismantling the welfare state, while concurrently undermining public support for it.

As the Huff Post’s Asa Bennett points out, there are much bigger costs to the taxpayer that the government are reluctant to discuss.

For example, the tax gap, charting the estimated amount of taxes unpaid thanks to evasion, avoidance, error and criminality, soared to £34 billion, according to HM Revenue and Customs. This equates to £1 in every £15 owed in taxes not being collected last year.

The National Audit Office found that the Department for Work and Pensions had made £1.4 billion in declared benefit overpayments, an increase of nearly 6%.

Meanwhile, the DWP estimate that between £7.5 billion and £12.3 billion of the six main benefits it administered were left unclaimed in 2009/2010. On top of that. HMRC suggest that several billion pounds more is most in unclaimed tax credits, with childless families missing out on £2.3 billion worth. That’s a grand total of 22.1 billion that ordinary taxpayers aren’t claiming, even though they are entitled to do so.

Iain Duncan Smith’s Department have wasted an estimated total of £6,221,875,000.00 of taxpayers’ money on the implementation of Universal Credit and private company contracts, amongst other things. (See We can reduce the Welfare Budget by billions: simply get rid of Iain Duncan Smith ).

Duncan Smith’s claims that his policies are about fairness and saving taxpayers’ money, simply don’t stand up to scrutiny.

The policies are entirely ideologically-driven. We have a government that uses words like workshy to describe vulnerable social groups. This is a government that is intentionally scapegoating poor, unemployed, disabled people and migrants. One Tory councillor called for the extermination of gypsies, more than one Tory MP has called for illegal and discriminatory levels of pay for disabled people. A conservative deputy mayor said, unforgivably, that the “best thing for disabled children is the guillotine.”

These weren’t “slips”, it’s patently clear that the Tories believe these comments are acceptable, and we need only look at the discriminatory nature of policies such as the legal aid bill, the wider welfare “reforms” and research the consequences of austerity for the most economically vulnerable citizens – those with the “least broad shoulders” – to understand that these comments reflect how conservatives think.

This is a government that is using public prejudice to justify massive socio-economic inequalities and their own policies that are creating a steeply hierarchical society based on social Darwinist survival of the fittest neoliberal “small state” principles.

The Tory creation of socio-economic scapegoats, involving vicious stigmatisation of vulnerable social groups, particularly endorsed by the mainstream media, is simply a means of manipulating public perceptions and securing public acceptance of the increasingly punitive and repressive basis of the Tories’ welfare “reforms”, and the steady stripping away of essential state support and provision.

The political construction of social problems also marks an era of increasing state control of citizens with behaviour modification techniques, (under the guise of paternalistic libertarianism) all of which are a part of the process of restricting access rights to welfare provision and public services.

The mainstream media has been complicit in the process of constructing deviant welfare stereotypes and in engaging prejudice and generating moral outrage from the public:

“If working people ever get to discover where their tax money really ends up, at a time when they find it tough enough to feed their own families, let alone those of workshy scroungers, then that’ll be the end of the line for our welfare state gravy train.” James Delingpole 2014

Delingpole conveniently fails to mention that a majority of people needing lifeline welfare support are actually in work. He also fails to mention that while this government were imposing austerity on the poorest citizens, the wealthiest got generous handouts from the Treasury, in the form of tax breaks – hundreds of thousands of pounds each per year.

Poverty cannot be explained away by reference to simple narratives of the workshy scrounger as Delingpole claims, no matter how much he would like to apply such simplistic, blunt, stigmatising, dehumanising labels that originated from the Nazis (see arbeitssheu.)

This past four years we have witnessed an extraordinary breakdown of the public/private divide, and a phenomenological intrusion on the part of the state and media into the lives of the poorest members of society. (For example, see: The right-wing moral hobby horse: thrift and self-help, but only for the poor. ) Many people feel obliged to offer endless advice on thrift and self help aimed at persuading poor people to “manage” their poverty better.

Hannah Arendt wrote extensively about totalitarian regimes, in particular Nazism and Stalinism, which she distinguishes from Italian Fascism, because Hitler and Stalin sought to eliminate all restraints upon the power of the State and furthermore, they sought to dominate and control every aspect of everyone’s life. There are parallels here, especially when one considers the continued attempts at dismantling democratic processes and safeguards since the Coalition took office.

Many policies are aimed at ‘incentivising’ certain behaviours and perceptions of citizens, using psychology to align them with political and defined economic goals. Citizens are increasingly seen by government as a means to an end.

Further parallels may be found here: Defining features of Fascism and Authoritarianism.

Between February 1933 and the start of World War Two, Nazi Germany underwent an economic “recovery” according to the government. Rather like the “recovery” that Osborne and Cameron are currently claiming, which isn’t apparent to most citizens.

This economic miracle, sold to the people of Germany, entailed a huge reduction in unemployment. However, the main reason for this was fear – anyone who was found guilty of being “workshy” (arbeitssheu) could then be condemned to the concentration camps that were situated throughout Germany. Hitler frequently referred to the economic miracle, whilst people previously employed in what was the professional class were made to undertake manual labour on the autobahns. People didn’t refuse the downgraded status and pay, or complain, lest they became Arbeitsscheu Reich compulsory labor camp prisoners, and awarded a black triangle badge for their perceived mental inferiority and Otherness.

Behaviour can be controlled by manipulating fear, using a pattern of deprivation. Benefit sanctions, for example, leave “workshy” people without the means to meet their basic survival needs and are applied for periods of weeks or months and up to a maximum of 3 years.

That the government of a so-called first world liberal democracy is so frankly inflicting such grotesquely cruel punishments on some of our most vulnerable citizens is truly horrific. It’s also terrifying that the media and the British public are complicit in this: they fail to recognise that the Social Darwinism inherent in Tory ideological grammar is being communicated through discourses and policies embodying crude behaviour modification techniques and an implicit eugenic subtext .

There were various rationales for the Nazi Aktion T4 programme, which include eugenics, Social Darwinism, racial and mental “hygiene”, cost effectiveness and the welfare budget.

Those involved with the operation of the Aktion T4 programme used the term euthanasia as bureaucratic cover, in the minimal public relations effort to invest what was essentially eugenics. It is clear that none of the killing was done to alleviate pain or suffering on the part of the victims. Rather, the evidence, including faked death certificates, deception of the victims and of the victims’ families, and widespread use of cremation, indicates the killing was done solely according to the socio-political aims and ideology of the perpetrators. The Nazis believed that the German people needed to be “cleansed” of the so-called racial enemies, but the Aktion T4 programme also included people with disabilities, the poor and the workshy.

Although many were gassed using carbon monoxide or killed by lethal injection, many more of these people deemed “life unworthy of life” were simply starved to death.

The Holodomor – “extermination by hunger” – was Joseph Stalin’s intentionaly inflicted famine, designed to destroy people in the Ukraine seeking independence from his rule. As a result, an estimated 7,000,000 people starved to death. The attitude of the Stalinist regime in 1932–33 was that many of those starving to death were “counterrevolutionaries” “idlers” or “thieves” who “fully deserved their fate”. In 2008, the European Parliament adopted a resolution that recognised the Holodomor as a crime against humanity.

Implementing policies that lead to members of vulnerable social groups starving, which is an INTENTIONAL political act, however, is not currently included in the UN Treaty definition of genocide. Nor are disabled people amongst the categories of groups protected by the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

While I am very aware that we need take care not to trivialise the terrible events of Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany by making casual comparisons, there are some clear and important parallels on a socio-political level and a psycho-social one, that I feel are crucially important to recognise.

Gordon Allport studied the psychological and social processes that create a society’s progression from prejudice and discrimination to genocide. In his research of how the Holocaust happened, he describes socio-political processes that foster increasing social prejudice and discrimination and he demonstrates how the unthinkable becomes tenable: it happens incrementally, because of a steady erosion of our moral and rational boundaries, and propaganda-driven changes in our attitudes towards politically defined others, that advances culturally, by almost inscrutable degrees.

The process always begins with political scapegoating of a social group and with ideologies that identify that group as the Other: an “enemy” or a social “burden” in some way. A history of devaluation of the group that becomes the target, authoritarian culture, and the passivity of internal and external witnesses (bystanders) all contribute to the probability that violence against that group will develop, and ultimately, if the process is allowed to continue evolving, extermination of the group being targeted.

Economic recession, uncertainty and political systems on the authoritarian -> totalitarian spectrum contribute to shaping the social conditions that seem to trigger Allport’s escalating scale of prejudice.

In the UK, the media is certainly being used by the right-wing as an outlet for blatant political propaganda, and much of it is manifested as a pathological persuasion to hate others. The Coalition clearly have strong authoritarian tendencies, and that is most evident in their anti-democratic and behaviourist approach to policy, human rights, equality, social inclusion and processes of government accountability.

Vulnerable groups are those which our established principles of social justice demand we intervene to help, support and protect. However, the Coalition’s rhetoric is aimed at a deliberate identification of citizens as having inferior behaviour. The poorest citizens are presented as a problem group because of their individual faulty characteristics, and this is intentionally diverting attention from wider socio-economic and political causes of vulnerability. Individual subjects experiencing hardships have been placed beyond state protection and are now the objects of policies that embody behaviourism, and pathologising, punitive and coercive elements of social control. Vulnerable people are no longer regarded as human subjects, the state is acting upon them, not for or on behalf of them.

People are still debating if Stalin’s Holodomor conforms to a legal definition of genocide, no-one doubts that Hitler’s gas chambers do, though Hitler also killed thousands by starvation.

Our own government have formulated and implemented policies that punish unemployed people for being “workshy” – for failing to meet the never-ending benefit conditionality requirements which entails the use of negative incentives, coercion and behaviour modification to “support” a person into work – by withdrawing their lifeline benefit. We also know that sanction targets have led to many people losing lifeline benefits for incoherent and grossly unfair reasons that have nothing to do with an unwillingness to cooperate or work.

Since benefits were originally calculated to meet basic living requirements – food, fuel and shelter – it’s inconceivable that the government haven’t already considered the consequences of removing people’s means of meeting these fundamental survival needs. Of course, the Tory claim that this draconian measure is to incentivise people to “find work” doesn’t stand up to scrutiny when we consider that there isn’t enough work for everyone, and certainly not enough work around that pays an adequate amount to actually survive on.

Furthermore, the Tories “incentivise” the wealthy by rewarding them with more money (such as the £107,000 tax break that was handed out to each millionaire every year from our own taxes by Osborne). It flies in the face of our conventional and established wisdom that reducing people to starvation and desperation will somehow motivate people to do anything other than to try and survive. (See Maslow’s Hierarchy, and two tragic accounts of the consequences of imposed sanctions.)

Tory austerity is all about ideology – the dehumanisation of the poor, and the destruction of public services and provisions – state infrastructure – and nothing to do with the state of the economy. It’s also about cutting money from the poorest and handing it to the wealthiest. Many economists agree that austerity is damaging to the economy.

There has been a media complicity with irrational and increasingly punitive Tory policies. But why are the public so compliant?

Decades of research findings in sociology and psychology inform us that as soon as a group can be defined as an outgroup, people will start to view them differently. The very act of demarcating groups begins a process of ostracisation.

As well as the political and social definitions of others, there also exists deeper, largely unconscious beliefs that may have even more profound and insidious effects. These are related to whether people claiming benefits are even felt to be truly, properly human in the same way that “we” are.

This is called infrahumanisation. Infra means “below”, as in below or less than fully human. The term was coined by a researcher at the University of Louvain called Jacque-Philippe Leyens to distinguish this form of dehumanisation from the more extreme kind associated with genocide.

However, I don’t regard one form of dehumanisation as being discrete from another, since studies show consistently that it tends to escalate when social prejudice increases. It’s a process involving accumulation.

According to infrahumanisation theory, the denial of uniquely human emotions to the outgroup is reflective of a tacit belief that they are less human than the ingroup.

Poor people, homeless people, drug addicts and welfare claimants are the frequently outgrouped. It is these most stigmatised groups that people have the most trouble imagining having the same uniquely human qualities as the rest of us. This removes the “infrahumanised” group from the bonds, moral protection and obligations of our community, because outgrouping de-empathises us.

This would explain why some people attempt to justify the cuts, which clearly fall disproportionately on the most vulnerable. This is probably why fighting the austerity cuts is much more difficult than simply fighting myths and political propaganda. I think the government are very aware of the infrahumanisation tendency amongst social groups and are manipulating it, because growing social inequality generates a political necessity for social prejudices to use as justification narratives.

During a debate in the House of Lords, Freud described the changing number of disabled people likely to receive the employment and support allowance as a “bulge of, effectively, stock”. After an outraged response, this was actually transcribed by Hansard as “stopped”, rendering the sentence meaningless. He is not the only person in the Department for Work and Pensions who uses this term. The website describes disabled people entering the government’s work programme for between three and six months as “3/6Mth stock”.

This infrahumanised stock are a source of profit for the companies running the programme. The Department’s delivery plan recommends using “credit reference agency data to cleanse the stock of fraud and error”.

The linguistic downgrading of human life requires dehumanising metaphors: a dehumanising socio-political system using a dehumanising language, and it is becoming familiar and pervasive: it has seeped almost unnoticed into our lives.

Until someone like Freud or Mellins pushes our boundaries of decency a little too far. Then we suddenly see it, and wonder how such prejudiced and discriminatory comments could be deemed acceptable and how anyone could possibly think they would get away with such blatantly offensive rhetoric without being challenged. It’s because they have got away with less blatantly offensive comments previously: it’s just that they pushed more gently and so we didn’t see.

It’s also the case that the government distorts people’s perceptions of the aims of their policies by using techniques of neutralisation. An example of this method of normalising prejudice is the use of the words “incentivise” and “help” in the context of benefit sanctions, which as we know are intentionally extremely punitive, and people have died as a consequence of having their lifeline benefit withdrawn.

As Allport’s scale of prejudice indicates, hate speech and incitement to genocide start from often subliminal expressions of prejudice and subtle dehumanisation, which escalate. Germany didn’t wake up one morning to find Hitler had arranged the murder of millions of people. It happened, as many knew it would, and was happening whilst they knew about it. And many opposed it, too.

The dignity and equal worth of every human being is the axiom of international human rights. International law condemns statements which deny the equality of all human beings.

As a so-called civilised society, so should we.

Pictures courtesy of Robert Livingstone

The word “Tories” is an abbreviation of “tall stories”

October 1, 2014December 16, 2016 · 23 Comments ·

“The deficit reduction programme takes precedence over any of the other measures in this agreement” – stated in the Coalition Agreement.

For a government whose raison d’etre is deficit reduction, the coalition really isn’t very good at all.

Of course the truth is that this whole process of prolonged austerity is NOT about deficit-cutting. It’s just the cover for Tory ideology. It is actually about “shrinking the state” and squeezing the public sector until it becomes marginal, then none existent, in an entirely market-driven, competitively individualist society. The banker crisis-generated deficit has been a gift to the Tories in enabling them to launch the scuttlebutt that public expenditure has to be massively cut back, which they would never have been able to get away with without the deficit-reduction excuse in the first place.

And I am still seeing the “inherited debt” LIES that the Tories are still telling, despite official rebuke from the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) chief Robert Chote. This is the same Tory-led government that lost our triple A Moody and Fitch credit rating, and that borrowed more in 3 years than Labour did in 13. Figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) showed that the coalition had borrowed £430.072 billion in just 3 short years, whereas the last Labour government managed to borrow just £429.975 billion in 13 years, and unlike the Tories, Labour invested most of what they borrowed in public services.

After continuously lying that the UK had the biggest debt in the world, George Osborne admitted to the Treasury Select Committee that he did not know the UK under Labour had the lowest debt in the G7. Also, confirmed by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Those who have used cash terms (instead of percentages) have done so to scare, mislead and give less than half the story.

The much banded about 2010 deficit of “over 11%” is false. This is the Public Sector Net Borrowing (PSNB – total borrowings) and not the actual budget deficit which was -7.7%. (See OBR Economic and Fiscal Outlook March 2012 page 19, table 1.2.)

Secondly, in 1997 Labour inherited a deficit of 3.9% of GDP (not a balanced budget) and by 2008 it had fallen to 2.1% – a reduction of a near 50% – now that’s impressive. Hence, it’s implausible and ludicrous to claim there was “overspending.”

It’s common sense, in cash terms, that a millionaire’s debt would be greater than most people’s. Therefore, the UK would have a higher debt and deficit than most countries because we are the sixth largest economy. Therefore, its laughable to compare UK’s debt and deficit with Tuvalu’s who only have a GDP/Income of £24 million whilst, the UK’s income is £1.7 trillion.

In 1997, Labour inherited a debt of 42% of GDP. By the start of the global banking crises 2008 the debt had fallen to 35% – almost a 22% reduction (page 6 ONS). Surprisingly, a debt of 42% was not seen as a major problem and yet at 35% you would think the sky was suddenly falling, to hear the Tories acting up.

The deficit was then exacerbated by the global banking crises after 2008. (See HM Treasury archives). The IMF have also concluded the UK experienced an increase in the deficit as result of a large loss in output/GDP caused by the global banking crisis and not even as result of the bank bailouts, fiscal stimulus and bringing forward of capital spending. It’s basic economics: when output falls the deficit increases.

The large loss in output occurred because the UK, like the US, have the biggest financial centres and as this was a global banking crisis we suffered the most, and not as a result of overspending prior to and after 2008 – as the International Money Fund (IMF) concur.

The UK national debt is the total amount of money the British government owes to the private sector and other purchasers of UK gilts. The national debt now stands at £1.5 TRILLION (and rising).

So a further saving of £3 Billion in benefits, as proposed by Osborne, will clear the debt in, say, a mere… 500 YEARS.

Once again, this exposes the nonsense of the “reducing the deficit” excuse as being a genuine motivation behind cutting the incomes of the poorest and the most vulnerable citizens in the UK.

Gosh. Tories in “telling lies” shocker. Here’s a few more:

In October 2010, Cameron said : “But it’s fair that those with broader shoulders should bear a greater load.”

The prime ~~sinister~~ minister talked of “fairness” as he tried to dodge the criticism that the poorest would suffer from the second big announcement of that week: a cap on benefits paid to out-of-work households.

Cameron said his government would: “always look after the sick and the vulnerable”, but said that: “society will have to rethink its approach to fairness.”

It hasn’t been “rethought” : it was the very first austerity cut.

He lied, because:

People in poverty are targeted by the cuts 5 times more than most citizens
Disabled people are targeted 9 times more than most citizens
People needing social care are targeted 19 times more than most citizens.(From: A Fair Society? How the cuts target disabled people )

Cameron also said said : “Too many people thought: ‘I’ve paid my taxes, the state will look after everything.’ But citizenship isn’t a transaction – in which you put your taxes in and get your services out. It’s a relationship – you’re part of something bigger than yourself and it matters what you think and feel and do.”

Well actually, Cameron, your arrogance will be your greatest downfall, because we DO have a right in a so-called democracy to demand transparency and accountability from government, the state IS responsible for maintaining essential public services and provision, AND for upholding our human rights. Citizenship isn’t all about responsibility and giving to the government and an elite of millionaires – there IS something of a contract which we call “democracy”.

Citizenship is a foundational and structural institution of democracy, insofar as it is both a legal status and a societal and political value. As a status, citizenship bestows a collection of rights and a set of responsibilities on individuals who are free and equal in rights.

In a democracy, citizenship is not a privilege that may be granted by the government at their discretion; it is a right.

Someone should remind Cameron that the term democracy comes from the Greek language and translates simply as “rule by the people”. The so-called “democracies” in classical antiquity (Athens and Rome) represent precursors of modern democracies. Like modern democracy, they were created as a reaction to a concentration and abuse of power by the rulers. Yet the theory of modern democracy was not formulated until the Age of Enlightment (17^th/18^th centuries), when philosophers defined the essential elements of democracy: separation of powers, basic civil rights / human rights, religious liberty and separation of church and state.

In order to earn the label democracy, a country needs to fulfill some basic requirements – and they need not only be written down in it’s constitution but must be kept up in everyday life by the government:

Guarantee of basic Human Rights to every individual person (including poor people and sick and disable people) vis-à-vis the state and its authorities as well as vis-à-vis any social groups (especially religious institutions) and vis-à-vis other persons.
Separation of Powers between the institutions of the state:
Government [Executive Power],
Parliament [Legislative Power] and
Courts of Law [Judicative Power]
Freedom of opinion, speech, press and mass media
Religious liberty
General and equal right to vote (one person, one vote)
Good Governance (focus on public interest and the absence of corruption).

I think the Conservatives have spectacularly failed on meeting most of these criteria.

We also have an absolute democratic right to ask: what have you done with OUR money?

This was (allegedly) a liberal democracy before you took office, Cameron, not your “kingdom”.

Democracy isn’t something the government is elected to redefine and “manage”.

—

It’s worth noting that the word “Tory” was originally used as term of abuse. It derives from the Middle Irish word “tóraidhe” which means outlaw, robber or brigand. That explains Conservative policies, then. This Government is certainly robbing the poor to give handouts to the rich.

Further reading

The Great Debt Lie and the Myth of the Structural Deficit

The mess we inherited” – some facts with which to fight the Tory Big Lies

Tory dogma and hypocrisy: the “big state”, bureaucracy, austerity and “freedom” State

A catalogue of official rebukes for Tory lies: Austerity, socio-economic entropy and being conservative with the truth

Pictures courtesy of Robert Livingstone

Inequality has risen: Incomes increased for the richest last year, but fell for everyone else

September 15, 2014April 26, 2017 · 30 Comments ·

On 04 June, 2014, at 3.52pm BST, Cameron said inequality is at its lowest level since 1986. I really thought I’d misheard him. This isn’t the first time Cameron has used this lie. We have a government that provides disproportionate and growing returns to the already wealthy, whilst imposing austerity cuts on the very poorest. How can such a government possibly claim that inequality is falling, when inequality is so fundamental to their ideology and when social inequalities are extended and perpetuated by all of their policies? The standard measure of inequality is certainly being used to mislead us into thinking that the economy is far more “inclusive’ than it is.

Dr Simon Duffy authored report – A Fair Society? – last year, for the Centre for Welfare Reform, about how the austerity cuts have been targeted. He said:

People in poverty are targeted 5 times more than most citizens
Disabled people are targeted 9 times more than most citizens
People needing social care are targeted 19 times more than most citizens

“The UK is the third most unequal developed country in the world and most disabled people live in poverty. The current policy is guaranteed to increase inequality and to make extreme poverty even worse.”

I also wrote an article last year – Follow the Money: Tory Ideology is all about handouts to the wealthy that are funded by the poor. I said:

The following cuts came into force in April 2013:

1 April – Housing benefit cut, including the introduction of the ‘bedroom tax’
1 April – Council tax benefit cut
1 April – Legal Aid savagely cut
6 April – Tax credit and child benefit cut
7 April – Maternity and paternity pay cut
8 April – 1% cap on the rise of in working-age benefits (for the next three years)
8 April – Disability living allowance replaced by personal independence payment (PIP)
15 April – Cap on the total amount of benefit working-age people can receive

Here are some of the “incentives” for the wealthy:

Rising wealth – 50 richest people from this region increased their wealth by £3.46 billion last year to a record £28.5 billion.
Falling taxes – top rate of tax cut from 50% to 45% for those earning over £150,000 a year. This is 1% of the population who earn 13% of the income.
No mansion tax and caps on council tax mean that the highest value properties are taxed proportionately less than average houses.
Benefited most from Quantitative Easing (QE) – the Bank of England say that as 50% of households have little or no financial assets, almost all the financial benefit of QE was for the wealthiest 50% of households, with the wealthiest 10% taking the lions share
Tax free living – extremely wealthy individuals can access tax avoidance schemes which contribute to the £25bn of tax which is avoided every year, as profits are shifted offshore to join the estimated £13 trillion of assets siphoned off from our economy.

I also said: “A simple truth is that poverty happens because some people are very, very rich. That happens ultimately because of Government policies that create, sustain and extend inequalities. The very wealthy are becoming wealthier, the poor are becoming poorer. This is a consequence of “vulture capitalism”, designed by the opportunism and greed of a few, it is instituted, facilitated and directed by the Tory-led Coalition. ”

Inequality Briefing reports that richest fifth of the UK population saw their incomes increase by £940 in 2013. But incomes were down by £250 for the other 80% of the population… and by £381 for the poorest fifth , according to data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS)

Incomes increased for the richest fifth of the population last year, but fell for everyone else

Thanks to Inequality Briefing for the info graphic and summary

To download the full pdf, click here

Explaining the data

This data compares the ‘equivalised disposable household income’ for 2011/12 and 2012/13. It was published by the Office for National Statistics as part of ‘the effects of UK tax and benefits on household income 2012/13 study.’ ONS have found that the recession did have a small effect on reducing inequality, but it now looks as though inequality is set to increase.

It has increased. Just as we have predicted.

Picture courtesy of Robert Livingstone

Other relevant articles:

Quantitative data on poverty from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation

Welfare reforms, food banks, malnutrition and the return of Victorian diseases are not coincidental, Mr Cameron

The poverty of responsibility and the politics of blame

“We are raising more money for the rich” – an analysis

Cameron’s Gini and the hidden hierarchy of worth

How the Tories chose to hit the poor

Politics and Insights

Public interest issues, policy, equality, human rights, social science, analysis

Tag: austerity

Sturgeon’s threats demonstrate the anti-democratic, uncooperative inflexibility of nationalism

A few facts about the deficit and the economy, since the Tories are determined to peddle pre-election lies

One of the most destructive Tory myths has been officially debunked

The BBC expose a chasm between what the Coalition plan to do and what they want to disclose

Cuts to employment support allowance are being “considered” by ministers

Inequality has risen: Incomes increased for the richest last year, but fell for everyone else

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“David Cameron and George Osborne believe the only way to persuade millionaires to work harder is to give them more money.

But they also seem to believe that the only way to make ordinary people work harder is to take money away.”

Ed Miliband.

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