Bankers who torpedoed the economy are set to get away with it after all

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Andrew Green QC, Andy Hornby, bank, banker, Banking Standards, Coalition, Conservative, crisis, David Cameron, Democrat, economic, economy, FCA, financial, Financial Conduct Authority, Financial Services Authority, fred goodwin, fred the shred, FSA, fund, George Osborne, government, HBOS, James Crosby, Johnny Cameron, Lib Dem, Liberal, Lord Stevenson, maxwellisation, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, Mirror, Parliamentary Commission, pension, Peter Cummings, politics, Private Eye, RBS, recession, Robert Maxwell, Royal Bank of Scotland, Tom McKillop, Tories, Tory, Vince Cable, Vox Political

Not even this many: This Economist cartoon paints a false picture of the situation. The magazine has stated: “In Britain, which had to bail out three of its biggest banks, not one senior banker has gone on trial over the failure of a bank.”

Here’s a word that should be in all our dictionaries but probably isn’t: ‘MAXWELLISATION’.

It refers to a procedure in British governance where individuals who are due to be criticised in an official report are sent details in advance and permitted to respond before publication. The process takes its name from the late newspaper owner Robert Maxwell, who fell off a yacht after stealing the Mirror Group’s pension fund.

Maxwellisation is how the irresponsible bankers who caused the economic recession, out of which some of us have just climbed according to the latest figures, are likely to get away Scot (and the word is used most definitely in reference to the land north of England) free.

Current folk wisdom has it that most of us are still unhappy about the banking crisis. We want to see heads roll.

This is a serious headache for the Coalition government, according to Private Eye (issue 1371, p33: ‘Call to inaction’) – because almost nobody involved in that fiasco is likely to suffer the slightest inconvenience.

They really are going to get away with it because the government of the day really is going to let them.

It seems that Andrew Green QC has been hired to find out whether action could and should be taken against those who bankrupted HBOS, beyond corporate lending chief Peter Cummings, who has already been banned for life from the industry and was fined half a million pounds in 2012.

That might seem a lot of money but the HBOS crash, along with that of the Royal Bank of Scotland, cost the taxpayer £60 billion (along with who-knows-how-much in interest payments).

Mr Green has also been asked why HBOS chief executives James Crosby and Andy Hornby were untouched, along with chairman Lord Stevenson.

For the facts, he need look no further than what happened with RBS, the Eye reckons.

In 2010, the Financial Services Authority – discredited forerunner to the FCA – allowed (allowed!) RBS’s top investment banker Johnny Cameron to ban himself from another senior banking job. The following year it pronounced chief executive Fred ‘The Shred’ Goodwin and chairman Sir Tom McKillop effectively blameless. Mr ‘The Shred’ was stripped of his knighthood, however.

This whitewash appears to have been an embarrassment for business secretary Vince Cable, who announced in December 2011 that he wanted to prosecute, disqualify as directors or ban from the financial sector those responsible at RBS and passed his request for disqualification up to the Scottish law officers in early 2012.

He is still awaiting an answer, it seems.

Back to HBOS, where Cable has made “similar disqualification noises”, according to the Eye, after a “highly critical” report from the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards last year.

Unfortunately for him, not only is HBOS also based in Scotland, so any proceedings may have to follow a similar path to those involving RBS, but also the FCA’s report into the bank’s failure is currently “unfinished”.

This is because it is being “Maxwellised” – according to the Eye, “whereby lawyers for those in the frame (if allowed) remove anything critical of their clients”.

The report continues; “With RBS, ‘Maxwellisation’ took several months and resulted in the whitewash that made any future action against those found not guilty difficult, if not impossible.

But the public wants heads to roll! Will anybody get what’s coming to them?

According to the Eye, the answer is a qualified “yes”.

Only one boss of HBOS still has links with any organisation regulated by the FCA – James Crosby is a director of the Moneybarn sub-prime car finance group and its parent, the Duncton Group. The FCA took over regulation of the consumer loan industry in April and has until December 2015 to provide full approval to the Moneybarn operation. The Eye states: “By then chairman Crosby would have to pass its ‘fit and proper’ test. He is completely unauthorised. So, a low-hanging scalp.”

Beyond that, expect “a wringing and washing of Coalition political hands, blaming legal loopholes, failures of others and it-was-all-a-long-time-ago”.

It is possible that other directors could be offered the Johnny Cameron deal – agree not to be a director for a few years “and this will all go away quickly and cheaply with no public hearings”.

Cable – along with George Osborne, David Cameron and any other Coalition MP who claimed that they were making laws to ensure the bankers responsible would face prison sentences – will simply walk away from the whole affair and hope that you forget about it.

Are you going to let that happen?

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Why the Tories should know privatising Job Centres won’t work

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benefit, benefits, close, companies, company, competition, Conservative, CReAM, Department, DWP, George Osborne, Iain Duncan Smith, job, Job Centre, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, park, Pensions, people, politics, private, privatise, search, sector, social security, Tories, Tory, unemployment, Vox Political, welfare, work

Parked on the dole: Closing Job Centres and handing responsibility for finding work to private companies would condemn thousands – if not hundreds of thousands – of people to a life on benefits (if they don’t get sanctioned and starve).

It’s incredible that allies of George Osborne are backing proposals to shut down all Job Centres and let private companies fill the void.

The proposal to let the private sector find work for Britain’s unemployed is actually being considered for inclusion in the Conservative Party’s election manifesto for 2015, according to the Huffington Post.

It quotes a ‘senior Tory’ who told The Sun: “Introducing competition into the job search market is a natural Conservative thing to do.”

This means Conservatives are naturally unimaginative, if not altogether stupid.

Have they already forgotten the lessons learnt from the way work programme provider companies treated jobseekers that were sent their way – as Vox Political reported last year?

The process is known as “creaming and parking”.

Work programme providers knew that – because they get paid on the basis of the results they achieve – they needed to concentrate on the jobseekers who were more likely to find work quickly. These people were “creamed” off and fast-tracked into work, thereby creating profit for the companies.

And the others? Those who need more time and investment? They were “parked” – left without help, to languish in the benefit system for months and years on end – in a situation that Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith has said many times that he wanted to reverse.

In fact, his policies have perpetuated the problem.

And now George Osborne wants to spread this practice to all jobseekers, across the country.

It’s time the voting public woke up to what the Conservative Party is, and “parked” it in the history books where it belongs.

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Osborne’s tax avoidance failure reveals the facts about Coalition policies

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Andy Hamilton, Atos, avoid, BBC, Customs, Department, DWP, G4S, George Osborne, haven, high net worth, hmrc, Huffington Post, London Olympics, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, News Quiz, Pensions, public sector, Radio 4, Revenue, Serco, tax, Vox Political, work

Embarrassed: And so George Osborne should be!

What bad luck for George Osborne to get two sums wrong in the same week!

The first sum was a simple times-table question; a school pupil asked him to multiply seven by eight and he couldn’t do it.

The second sum was more serious because it was a sum of money. Rather a lot of money. £1.9 billion, in fact.

The Boy had claimed that around £3 billion in extra tax had been recovered from “high net worth individuals” – tax avoiders – after investigations by HM Revenue and Customs.

Unfortunately, errors in the way HMRC’s performance targets were set meant that these improvements were… well, “overstated” is how the Huffington Post described them.

This meant that, when HMRC said it exceeded its target for tax compliance in 2010-11 by £1.9 billion, in fact it had only just hit its target. The following year, its claim to have exceeded targets by £2 billion was out by the same amount; in fact it had made gains of just £100 million.

There is around £21 trillion in unclaimed, avoided tax sitting in ‘haven’ bank accounts around the world – many of them British territories – and Osborne has managed to collect just £100 million.

Meanwhile unemployed and low-paid working citizens – who have no income apart from state benefits, due to the systematic destruction of the UK’s industrial base by neoliberal politicians who were intent on increasing insecurity among the lower classes – are being starved to death.

Osborne has only himself to blame. When the Coalition government came into office, the Tories insisted that they didn’t need anything like as many public-sector workers as were then on the books – and started laying people off wholesale.

Now the DWP has a claimant assessment backlog of 700,000 for ESA alone (compared with less than 30,000 in May 2010) and the government’s flagship Universal Credit project is hopelessly bogged down, to quote just two examples of the remaining public servants being unable to do their jobs.

Meanwhile, outsourcing of government jobs to private companies has created a disaster: The National Health Service in England is slowly falling over the cliff, with privateers taking so much in profit that the service will go £2 billion into debt next year while waiting times at Accident and Emergency departments continue to increase out-of-control (no matter what lies David Cameron dribbles in Prime Minister’s Questions); a £116 million IT programme arranged with French firm Steria to run staffing, procurement and payroll services for civil servants was scrapped at a cost of £56 million – and then Steria was re-hired to outsource British jobs to India, Poland and Morocco, again at UK taxpayers’ expense.

Does anyone remember the fiasco when G4S was hired to run security at the London Olympics, failed to meet requirements, and the Army had to be called in at the last minute?

Atos and the DWP, anybody?

Andy Hamilton commented on this phenomenon during this week’s News Quiz on BBC Radio 4: “For decades, we have watched governments hand over the utilities and services to companies like G4S and Serco and we have watched as they basically ruined them.

“And then once they’ve ruined them, they get given some more to ruin until they’re running all sorts of services; they’re now huge!

“I still hanker after the good old days when G4S was just Group 4, and its core business was letting prisoners escape from vans.”

Some of us still hanker after the good old days when George Osborne was just a department store employee, and his core business was folding towels.

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Starving British children are looking for food in rubbish bins

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bin, child, Conservative, David Cameron, Democrat, Fenton, food, food bank, George Osborne, income inequality, leftover, Lib Dem, Liberal, police, rubbish, scrap, Social Services, starve, starving, Stoke Sentinel, Stoke-on-Trent, Tories, Tory

Who said it could never happen here? Children are starving on the streets of Britain as the Tory-led Coalition’s hate policies bite ever-more-deeply into the poor [Image: Stoke Sentinel].

British children are sifting through bins left outside houses in search of scraps of food because they are starving, it has been revealed.

But Tories and their supporters in rich London won’t have to look at them – because they are in Labour-held Stoke-on-Trent.

The Stoke Sentinel reported that “Youngsters have been searching through bins in the Hollings Street and Brocksford Street area of Fenton before eating any leftovers.”

It said, “Dozens of hungry families are referred to Fenton’s food bank for help every week.”

What’s really sad about this story is that some of the people interviewed seemed to think the problem was with the mess left behind by these children – youngsters who are, remember, so hungry that they are rooting through rubbish for stale leftovers.

One said: “It’s horrible to see… Some days on the school run we have had to actually cross over the road because there’s so much rubbish on the pavement because of this. Luckily I keep my bins to one side so we haven’t been too badly affected.”

Clearly she is full of the milk of human kindness. According to the newspaper, that person was just 26 years old. Perhaps she should consider growing up.

Police in the area said the matter had been reported to them. What did people think they were going to do – arrest starving children?

Fortunately, Sgt Jason Allport demonstrated that police have the right attitude: “The issue isn’t theft; it’s children going around not having enough clothing and food.

“That issue is really something for social services to look at.”

In fact, it is something for every single citizen of the United Kingdom to look at.

This is the sixth-richest economy in the entire world. It is a land of plenty. Yet people here are happy to allow their neighbours to starve – probably to the point of death.

Their only concern is that they shouldn’t have to see it.

If I was living in Stoke, I would be ashamed to share the streets with people who think like that.

If I had voted for the political parties that have inflicted this misery on our nation, I would be ashamed of what I had done.

But you can be sure that David Cameron isn’t ashamed.

He doesn’t see the suffering, and neither does George Osborne, the Chancellor who inaccurately claimed in his budget speech in March that “income inequality is at its lowest level for 28 years”.

In fact – as is patently obvious to anyone who sees those children scavenging on the streets of Fenton – income inequality is rocketing.

But then, what else can we expect from a man who cannot answer a simple maths question?

Any of those starving children could be a better chancellor than him.

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Coulson convicted – now Cameron has serious questions to answer

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Andy Coulson, BBC, BSkyB, David Cameron, George Osborne, Harriet Harman, Leveson Inquiry, Media, murdoch, Nick Clegg, phone hacking, press, Rebekah Brooks, Roger Cohen, Rupert Murdoch

Beleaguered: A weary-looking David Cameron tried to defend his choice to employ convicted phone hacker Andy Coulson in a BBC interview.

The conviction of former Downing Street press supremo Andy Coulson on charges of conspiracy to hack telephones should have serious consequences for David Cameron, the Prime Minister who brought him into the heart of the UK government after he committed these crimes.

Cameron has said he takes “full responsibility” for employing Coulson. He may regret those words in the future.

Interviewed by the BBC, he said: “I did so on the basis of undertakings I was given by him about phone hacking and those turn out not to be the case.” What undertakings? That he hadn’t taken part in any hacking or that he was very good at it and wouldn’t get caught?

For a Prime Minister in charge of a barely-legitimate Coalition government with an agenda to destroy Britain’s best loved institutions, such as the National Health Service and the Welfare State, the presence of a person who could infiltrate the telephone communications of others, providing information that could be used to stop them, would be a huge asset.

Pressed on what he asked Coulson and what assurances he was given, Cameron said: “We covered all this in the Leveson Inquiry.” This is not a rock-solid alibi as Cameron was found to have, let’s say, selective amnesia about certain issues. His relationship with the Murdoch press – of which Coulson is a former employee – was one of them, and it is appropriate that more questions should be asked – and answers demanded – about the level of influence exerted on the British government by the man Private Eye describes as the ‘Dirty Digger’.

At the Leveson Inquiry, Cameron could not say:

• Whether or not George Osborne obtained assurances from Andy Coulson about phone hacking before hiring him for the Conservative Party.
• Whether he spoke to Rebekah Brooks about Andy Coulson before his Downing Street appointment.
• How many conversations he had with Mrs Brooks about Coulson.
• Whether he raised the issue of phone hacking with Coulson in Westminster or over the phone while on holiday.
• Where and how Coulson repeated his assurances about phone hacking.
• What Nick Clegg said to him about Coulson.
• Who else raised concerns about Coulson with him.
• Whether or not any Tory MPs expressed concerns about Coulson.
• Whether he discussed Coulson and phone hacking with Rupert Murdoch.
• Whether he sought direct assurances on hacking from Andy Coulson when revelations appeared in the New York Times (isn’t that now a Murdoch paper?) on December 1, 2010.

“I gave someone a second chance and it turned out to be a bad decision,” Cameron said yesterday – but this won’t wash, according to the Labour Party’s deputy leader, Harriet Harman.

“He [Coulson] was not somebody who’d admitted what he’d done and was turning over a new leaf,” she said.

Labour leader Ed Miliband, interviewed (again) by the BBC, got straight to the point: “David Cameron brought a criminal into the heart of Downing Street… David Cameron must have had his suspicions about Andy Coulson, and yet he refused to act.

“This taints David Cameron’s government because we now know that he put his relationship with Rupert Murdoch ahead of doing the right thing… He owes this country an explanation.”

Coulson’s connection with the Murdoch press was also hugely useful to Cameron at the time. Did he hope that the appointment would buy him favour with the 37 per cent of the British media owned by Murdoch? Was there a reciprocal arrangement, with the UK government showing extra favour to the Murdoch media – such as its plan to grant permission for Murdoch to buy the 61 per cent of BSkyB that he did not own (since aborted, partly due to bad publicity)?

As Roger Cohen wrote in the New York Times in July 2011, “It is hard to resist the impression that Cameron was completely in the thrall of Brooks, Murdoch and his son James Murdoch.”

What about the huge volume of emails – around 150 – between Cameron and Brooks that were withheld from the Leveson Inquiry and kept from the public domain, even after a Cabinet Office ruling in October 2012 that the public should see them?

Cameron was expected to face hard questions about his relationship with Coulson during Prime Minister’s Questions today (June 25). At the time of writing (11am), and based on his comments in the BBC interview, it seems likely that all we will hear is more evasion.

Is this really the behaviour of a man who should be the British Prime Minister?

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Heavy rain expected to increase flood risk – in Newark?

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blackmail, bribery, by election, candidate, christies, Conservative, constituency, David Cameron, EA, economic threat, electoral fraud, Environment Agency, flood, George Osborne, house, mansion, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, misinformation, newark, people, politics, risk, The Guardian, Tories, Tory, Vox Political, winter

According to the Environment Agency, there is a “low but increased risk of flooding this weekend across the whole of England, as isolated torrential downpours are predicted”.

The Environment Agency is monitoring the situation and is also supporting local authorities who will respond to any reports of surface water flooding.

One can’t help but wonder if Newark is among the places threatened. The constituency that is hosting today’s by-election was hit badly by the winter floods that hit between November last year and February, but was sidelined by both politicians and the news media, who preferred sites in Oxfordshire and Somerset that were easy to reach along the M4.

Conservatives have been dangling the promise of extra money for flood defences in front of voters like a carrot for donkeys, according to The Guardian, which said George Osborne told residents: “I can’t make the announcement today, it wouldn’t be proper, but I think people in this community can rest assured that I have seen this for myself, I have listened to the community and we will act.”

The paper added that Southwell locals had indicated David Cameron had also been talking to local people about the flood money bid on Monday.

Will the Tories do anything about it if they lose? Doubtful.

Isn’t that electoral fraud, then? Blackmail, economic threats (flooding has a severe effect on local businesses), bribery… misinformation at the very least?

In that case, never mind their candidate’s undeclared directorship of Christie’s and £1.3 million house.

The Tories deserve to lose because they are trying to bribe the voters.

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The ugly face of New Labour rears up again: Chris Leslie and Nita Clarke

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austerity, Blair, Blairite, Chris Leslie, Coalition, Conservative, crisis, Customs, cut, economic, economy, George Osborne, hm, hmrc, Huffington Post, Labour, Margaret Thatcher, National Health Service, neoliberal, New, NHS, Nita Clarke, pension, privatisation, Progress, recession, Revenue, right-wing, thinktank, welfare state

 

It seems the neoliberal Blairites of New Labour are coming out of the woodwork in an effort to ensure that nobody in their right mind supports the modern Labour Party next year.

According to the Huffington Post, shadow chief secretary to the Treasury Chris Leslie reckons that a future Labour government will not undo the Coalition’s hugely unpopular cuts but will continue to impose the austerity that has kept our economy in crisis for the last four years.

In that case, why bother voting for Labour? We’ve already got one lot of Conservatives in power; there’s no need for any more.

Just to recap what we all know already, austerity is no way out of a recession. Economies grow when an increased money supply travels through the system, making profits for businesses and creating the fiscal multiplier effect. This means more tax comes to the government and it is able to pay down its debts. Austerity cuts off that money supply, making it much more difficult for money to circulated, profit to be made and tax to be taken. Evidence shows that the only people who profit from it are those who were rich already.

Indeed, the current economic miracle (if you believe George Osborne) was engineered by government investment – rather than austerity – in a housing price bubble. It’s almost a return to Keynesian economics, but done in a cack-handed, amateurish way that will cause more problems in the long run.

Austerity is, therefore, a Conservative policy and one that should be abandoned if Labour ever comes to power. The fact that this Leslie person is promoting it shows his true-Blue colours. Perhaps someone should start a petition to have him ejected from the party.

Retaining austerity was described by the HuffPost as part of “Labour’s ‘radical’ policy plans”, but this is ridiculous. How can retaining a policy that is already causing uncounted harm be, in any way, radical? It’s just more of the same neoliberal Conservatism.

“George Osborne has had his five years to eradicate the deficit. I am determined that we finish that task on which he has failed,” said Leslie in the article. How does he propose to achieve that aim, if his methods are the same? The man just isn’t making sense.

Meanwhile, a former Blair aide named Nita Clarke has defended another pillar of neoliberalism – privatisation – by making the absurd claim that Labour should not criticise private firms when they fail to deliver public services.

Speaking at a conference by the right-wing thinktank Progress, she said: “We have to be really careful that we’re not always seen as attacking the private sector and celebrating their failures. How do you think that makes the staff who work there feel?”

How does Nita Clarke think British citizens feel about being let down on a regular basis by these profit-guzzling clowns, ever since Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives first started letting them into places where they did not belong?

How does Nita Clarke think British citizens felt when neoliberal New Labour refused to push back the tide of privatisation?

How does Nita Clarke think British citizens should feel about the fact that privatisation is now threatening the welfare state, the National Health Service and even state pensions?

Only today, Vox Political reblogged an article warning that HM Revenue and Customs may be undergoing preparations for privatisation.

Like austerity, privatisation is a fundamental pillar of the current neoliberal agenda. It has no place in the Labour Party, if the Labour Party is serious about opposing the Conservatives at the next election.

There should be no place in Labour for Chris Leslie, Nita Clarke, or anybody who supports their views, either.

It’s a view that might be unpopular with the Blue suits that make up the current Labour leadership.

But it’s the only way Labour will ever come up with a really ‘radical’ – and workable – plan.

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Tax credit debt collection is a double-edged attack on the poor

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agencies, agency, alarm, Anne Begg, avoid, bank, benefit, benefit cap, benefits, call, Coalition, collection, collector, Conservative, Customs, Dame, debt, Department, descriptor, disability, disabled, distress, donate, donation, DWP, evade, evasion, fund, George Osborne, government, harass, hmrc, letter, message, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, mobile, offshore, overpaid, overpay, Party, Pensions, people, phone, politics, Revenue, sanction, self-employed, social security, tax, tax credit, telephone, Tories, Tory, Vox Political, welfare, work

There’s more than a little of the piscine about the fact that our Conservative-led has set debt collection agencies onto poor families who have been overpaid tax credit due to errors made by HM Revenue and Customs.

Firstly, the move undermines the principle behind the tax credit system – that it is there to ensure that poorly-paid families may still enjoy a reasonable living standard. Tax credits are paid on an estimate of a person’s – or family’s – income over a tax year and the last Labour government, knowing that small variances could cause problems for Britain’s poorest, set a wide buffer of £25,000 before households had to pay anything back.

By cutting this buffer back to £5,000, the Conservatives have turned this safety net into a trap. Suddenly the tiniest overpayment can push households into a debt spiral, because their low incomes mean it is impossible to pay back what the government has arbitrarily decided they now owe.

And the sharks are circling. Instead of collecting the debt on its own behalf, HMRC has sold it on to around a dozen debt collection agencies who are harassing the families involved with constant telephone calls, mobile phone messages and letters to their homes.

In total, HMRC made 215,144 referrals to debt collectors in 2013-14. Of the working families involved, 118,000 earned less than £5,000 per year.

This takes us to our second area of concern. Remember how the Department for Work and Pensions has been encouraging people – particularly the disabled – to declare themselves as self-employed in order to avoid the hassle and harassment that now go hand in hand with any benefit claim? You know – the refusal of benefits based on arbitrary ‘descriptors’ that were originally devised by a criminal insurance company as a means to minimise payouts, and the constant threat of sanctions that would cut off access to benefits for up to three years unless claimants manage to clear increasingly difficult obstacles.

And do you remember how the DWP reported earlier this year that more than 3,000 people who were subjected to the government’s benefit cap have now found work? This blog suggested at the time that many of them may have been encouraged to declare themselves self-employed in order to escape the hardship that the cap would cause them.

Both of these circumstances are likely to lead to a verdict of overpayment by HMRC, as the self-employment reported by these people is likely to be fictional, or to provide less than required by the rules – either in terms of hours worked or income earned.

Suddenly their debt is sold to a collection agency and they are suffering government-sponsored harassment, alarm and distress (which is in fact illegal) far beyond anything they received from the DWP; debt collection agencies are not part of the government and, as Dame Anne Begg pointed out in the Independent article on this subject, “The tactics they use to collect the debt are not tactics a government should use.”

Maybe not. So why employ such tactics?

Let’s move on to our third, and final, worry. By setting sharks on the hundreds of thousands of minnows caught in the government’s trawler-net (that was formerly a safety net – and I apologise for the mixed metaphor), the Tory-led administration is creating a handy distraction from the huge, bloated, offshore-banking whales who donate heavily into Conservative Party funds and who are therefore never likely to be pursued for the billions of pounds in unpaid taxes that they owe.

The government has promised to clamp down on tax evasion and avoidance, but ministers would have to be out of their minds to attack the bankers and businesspeople who pay for their bread and butter.

George Osborne suffered huge – and entirely justified – derision last year when HMRC published a list of its top 10 tax dodgers, which revealed that public enemy number one was a hairdresser from Liverpool who had failed to pay a total of £17,000.

It seems likely that the Conservatives have decided that future announcements will involve the reclamation of far larger amounts, and from far more people…

Innocent people who were either cheated by Tory-instigated changes to the system or by Tory-instigated misleading benefit advice.

Meanwhile the guilty parties continue to go unhindered. Their only payouts will continue to be made to – who was it again?

Oh yes…

To the Conservative Party.

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Why is it fair for taxpayers to subsidise businesses but not the disabled?

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business, Conservative, depress, disability, disabled, economy, employment, George Osborne, in-work, Labour, living wage, low-paid, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, minimum wage, pay, people, politics, salary, social security, subsidise, Sunday Times rich list, taxpayer, Tories, Tory, Treasury, UKIP, unemployed, Vox Political, wage, welfare

Swivel-eyed loon: This is the kind of many who thinks subsidising businesses to be lazy, while refusing to support disabled students (no matter how intelligent they are) is a clever idea. [Picture: Left Foot Forward]

George Osborne was today set to attack both the Labour Party and UKIP as being bad for business. Isn’t that a bit rich, coming from a man whose party uses taxpayers’ money to subsidise private firms?

Across the UK, firms of all sizes – ranging from huge multinationals right down to the smallest traders – take advantage of the taxpayer-funded benefit system that supports people who earn less than the Living Wage (the minimum amount necessary for a working person to be able to pay their own way).

Osborne would have you believe this is good for Britain; more firms are employing more people – and that’s got to be good, right?

Wrong. More people may be employed, but on increasingly less money, meaning the burden on the taxpayer is increasing all the time.

But the taxpayer has increasingly less money to give to the Treasury, meaning that – instead of saving the economy – Osborne has put us into a vicious spiral of diminishing returns.

That’s what you get when you ask a towel-folder to do a real job!

It would be far better to demand that businesses pay the Living Wage. It isn’t an impossible dream – only a few decades ago, it was possible for one parent to earn enough to house and feed an entire family. Why doesn’t this happen anymore?

There is, in fact, no reason for it to have stopped.

The only conclusion we can reach is that the Tory government is using the system to leach money into the pockets of wealthy businesspeople. By pushing benefit payments so low that the unemployed and low-paid struggle to support themselves, they have made it possible for employers to pay less and pocket more.

That is why the names on the Sunday Times Roll Call of Shame (otherwise known as the Rich List) are so much richer this year than they were before the Tories weren’t elected.

The answer is simple: Compel businesses to pay the Living Wage.

Oh, but you think that will be bad for business too, do you?

Mr Osborne would tell you so, would he?

How odd – because this would be no different from a policy his government has been happily forcing on benefit claimants since 2010.

You see, as stated above, the policy has been to make living on benefits extremely difficult in order to force people to seek employment. This in turn allows firms to depress wages because they can tell the workforce there are plenty of other people waiting to take their places.

Only today, on this blog, we were discussing Tory David Willetts’ plan to cut Disabled Student Allowance. He wants us to believe that this will get students with disabilities to work harder, rather than expecting the taxpayer to lay everything at their feet; in fact, he is taking away their lifeline and leaving them to starve.

But the argument works just as well with employers. Any government with the guts to tell them that the crutch of in-work benefits is being removed and they will have to pay the difference is sending out the same message to employers as they did to benefit claimants: You’ve had it easy for too long. Now it’s time for you to earn your keep.

Some firms will go under. Unlike the disabled people being victimised by David Willetts (et al), we should shed no tears for them; they weren’t helping the economy.

More will pay up – finding new markets to fund the extra expenditure. These are the businesses that will build the real economic recovery.

Labour is one of only a few political organisations that support the Living Wage, and therefore the only mass-appeal political party that would have a genuinely beneficial effect on the economy.

Oh, but I forgot.

You were listening to George Osborne.

And he says Labour is bad for business.

But then – he’s no economist.

He’s a towel-folder.

Follow me on Twitter: @MidWalesMike

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Unwell person incited to commit suicide – on David Cameron’s Facebook page

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allowance, Atos Miracles, benefit, benefits, Conservative, David Cameron, Department, disability, DWP, employment, ESA, Facebook, George Osborne, hate, incite, Job Centre, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, Pensions, people, politics, sanction, sick, social security, suicide, support, Tories, Tory, Vox Political, welfare, work

Just when you think you’ve seen the lowest the Conservatives can go, something happens that is completely beyond the pale.

Yesterday a message was posted to David Cameron’s Facebook page from a person who said they were going to commit suicide because they had been wrongly sanctioned.

The response – from one of Cameron’s supporters – was as follows: “Well get on with it then.”

This serious disability hate remark has been allowed to remain ever since – on the Prime Minister’s own Facebook page, which we are led to understand is overseen by professionals who, let’s not forget, paid for people to visit it and press the ‘Like’ button in order to make him look popular, and who may reasonably be expected to moderate such offensive behaviour off the page before it causes any real harm.

You can read more details on the Atos Miracles Facebook page.

Part of the post that encouraged Cameron’s supporter to incite this person to suicide went as follows:

“I am in receipt of ESA. I am trying my best to get better. I want to get better as I fully believe I have a lot of offer. However I am being continually lied about because when I ask for help I find a lot wrong with the system. Mainly due to the unfair cuts imposed by your government to public sector services and … as a consequence I have not got any better in fact I have got worse. A lot worse. To the point I no longer want to live anymore.

“I have now been sanctioned for not getting better. I don’t mind anymore today I telephoned them and told them this… Because of how many people your government have murdered through the Sanctions regime and taking away their rights to financial aid the DWP have stopped counting how many people have died. Yet George Osborne keeps telling everyone how well the country is prospering. This is a lie… the benefits office informed me I had telephoned the wrong number to discuss my sanction. Perhaps you have too many telephone numbers he did inform me it was my choice to take my life.”

If you had seen this on Facebook, would you have told the author to “get on with it then”?

Or would you have sent a message of support and tried to get them the help they need?

The rational choice would be the latter.

If you had been overseeing that Facebook page, would you have allowed such a dangerous comment to remain or would you have removed it and reported the sender?

The very least that could have been done by the Tory overseers of Cameron’s page would have been to check up on the Job Centre advisor mentioned in the post, whose response was just as bad. “He did inform me it was my choice to take my life” – that person should have got in touch with the relevant authorities and rallied help, but no. It seems some people will do anything for a “positive benefit outcome”.

I’m told the person who wrote the message has been found and is safe and well – no thanks to the Job Centre, to the inhabitants and moderators of David Cameron’s Facebook page, or to Cameron himself.

He should be utterly ashamed.

But he probably doesn’t even know this has happened.

Follow me on Twitter: @MidWalesMike

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