Don’t blame the poor when the rich are bleeding you dry

Tags

abraham lincoln, andy burnham, benefit, cambridge, co-operation, Conservative, Daily Mail, Democrat, development, disability, douglas alexander, economic, Ed Balls, Ed Miliband, Goebbels, harvard, illness, joseph rowntree foundation, Labour, Liam Byrne, Liberal, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, national, neoliberal, OECD, office, ONS, organisation, oxford, poor, statistics, Sun, Tories, Tory, Tory Lite, unemployment, Vox Political, welfare, yvette cooper

You know that things have come to a pretty pass when Labour Party supporters turn against the poor.

This has happened at a time when the number of people with money to spare has dropped dramatically, meaning more of our people have become poor.

The change may reasonably be blamed on Labour’s adherence to Liam Byrne’s diabolical welfare policy, that aims to continue where the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats leave off – demonising people who have done nothing wrong, unless you count illness, disability and unemployment as a personal choice.

It suggests that people of good heart are leaving the party in large numbers, allowing those who are left to turn it into what its critics have claimed it to be for a considerable time now: Tory Lite.

The change is identified in a report by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, that showed 47 per cent of Labour supporters surveyed in 2011 thought that, if benefits were less generous, people would learn to support themselves – up from 17 per cent in 1987.

The fact of the matter, of course, is that benefits are much less generous now than they were in the 1980s. In 1987, unemployment benefits totalled around 20 per cent of the average weekly wage; now they come to around 10 per cent – around half of what they were. But Labour supporters – Labour! – say they are too generous.

It looks like the Tories really are brainwashing people with their nonsense rhetoric, as repeated in newspapers that Labour supporters shouldn’t be reading, like The Sun and the Daily Mail. That good friend of the Conservative Party, Joseph Goebbels, was right – “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”

Of course, Goebbels added: “The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent.”

So those of us who are interested in the facts may be looking forward to hard times. It’s still better than being a fair-weather friend of social justice – only interested in the good of our fellows if it doesn’t impact on us.

But it is already impacting on everybody!

The Office for National Statistics, using Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) figures, has reported that the UK has plummeted down the international league table of economic well-being, from fifth to 12th within the six years up to 2011.

On a separate labour-market ranking, the country fell even further, dropping 12 places. In the labour market league table it ranked 21st out of 34 countries. Top of the league was Norway, which has just three per cent unemployment and, as I understand it, a thriving welfare state. Think about that.

The ONS noted changes to taxes and benefits as key factors in the drop.

This morning, one of Vox‘s longest-serving commentators reported that there is a change among the people around him; that those who argued against his criticism of the Conservative-led government are now turning to the Left. If so, it seems they are not turning to Labour.

Recently we have witnessed a movement to form a new political movement, representing socialist views but untarnished by the memory of New Labour’s 13 years of Neoliberal mistakes. Several contenders have cropped up but none of them will carry any weight at the next general election – instead, all they are likely to do is sap enough votes from Labour to let the Conservatives back into office again. That would be a calamity for the country.

No, the best thing to do is to take Labour back for the people it was meant to serve. First step in that direction must be to consign Liam Byrne and his vile mess of a welfare policy to the back benches, and design a new plan, attacking the causes of unemployment and workplace sickness and disability, rather than their symptoms. This is simple logic.

And we need to get people into the shadow cabinet who have actually held proper jobs. Look at Ed Miliband: Oxford graduate – short media career – Westminster job for Labour. Ed Balls: Oxford graduate (Politics, Philosophy and Economics) – short media career – Westminster job for Labour. Douglas Alexander: University graduate – six-month career as a solicitor – Westminster. Yvette Cooper: Oxford (Politics, Philosophy and Economics) – Westminster researcher job for Labour. Andy Burnham: Cambridge – researcher for Tessa Jowell. Many of these also went to Harvard.

Liam Byrne, the demon of the Labour Party: University (Politics and Modern History at Manchester) – Harvard – then work for a multinational consulting firm (Accenture) and then the Rothschild merchant bankers(!) before going to Labour to help lead its ‘New Labour’ business campaign. This man has nothing whatsoever to do with real working people.

When everybody in a particular group – in business, politics, socially, whatever – is from the same background, they tend to agree about key subjects. From the above group we can see that many of the Labour front bench have followed exactly the same career path. What do they know about working-class people? At least two of them – Ed Balls and Yvette Cooper, no less – graduated from the same Oxford degree course as David Cameron, the comedy Prime Minister.

No wonder people are having a hard time distinguishing between the two main parties and want a left-wing alternative.

It’s time for Labour to grow up and realise it needs to change. It must come back to its voting base and start to represent the people of the UK once again – rather than Oxford, Cambridge and Harvard graduates. If Ed Miliband wants to keep his position, he needs to clear out his shadow cabinet and get some fresh thinkers in. Someone recently mentioned Abraham Lincoln’s ‘cabinet of enemies’, and the fact that it was good for him to have opposing views at the heart of his government.

Until we get that in the Labour Party, maybe we should agree that the ‘Tory Lite’ criticisms are accurate.

What are you going to do about it, Labour?

The BBC: helping the Tories force-feed falsehoods to the masses

Tags

benefit, benefits, Child Benefit, Coalition, Conservative, Department for Work and Pensions, disability, Disability Living Allowance, disabled, DLA, DWP, Employment and Support Allowance, ESA, George Osborne, Goebbels, government, Hitler, Iain Duncan Smith, Incapacity Benefit, Jobseeker's Allowance, Liberal, Liberal Democrat, maternity pay, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, Parliament, people, politics, sick, tax credit, Tories, Tory, unemployment, Vox Political, welfare, Winter fuel allowance

“Nation shall speak peace unto nation” according to the BBC’s motto. But it seems that same nation’s public service broadcaster shall speak lies unto its own people. Why?

I think we should all play a little game, based around the Parliamentary debate on the one per cent benefit cap. It’s called ‘Count the Tory lies’ and I’ve already spotted a few on the BBC website’s latest article: Iain Duncan Smith “said inaction would leave the UK ‘bankrupt’, and that ‘like Greece and like Spain… we’ll have huge borrowing costs’.”

Bankrupt, is it? The UK wasn’t bankrupt when its national debt was two and a half times its GDP, so there’s no chance of it now! This is clearly a lie, trotted out to scare people.

He went on to say that pensioner benefits like the winter fuel payment weren’t being capped because pensioners didn’t have the flexibility of being able to go to work – that’s actually untrue as well. I know of many people past pension age who still work. The reason it isn’t being capped is that pensioners are more likely to vote – and the Tories want those votes, so need to keep pensioners sweet. Young people don’t vote as much, therefore they get hammered.

“‘No-one is going to be demonised on my watch,’ he promised.” Except the sick, the disabled, the unemployed, people in work but on low pay…”

Mr Duncan Smith said welfare payments had risen by about a fifth over the past five or six years while incomes had increased by only a tenth over the same period.” Twisting the statistics. In fact benefits as a proportion of average incomes, have been kept at 1/6 of wages, which seems perfectly reasonable to me, especially since wages have been depressed severely over the last 20 or 30 years.

Just to hammer this misleading point home, the article restates it: “Mr Duncan Smith said welfare payments had risen by about a fifth over the past five or six years while incomes had increased by only a tenth over the same period.” Therefore I’m happy to re-state that benefits have remained at only one-sixth of average wages. The difference between the percentages has to do with the differences in amounts – a 20 per cent rise in benefits equals just £11.85, while a 12 per cent rise in average wages is £49. Perhaps that might make it seem a little less unfair to your readers.

“Legislation is needed to implement changes announced by Chancellor George Osborne in last month’s Autumn Statement.” Doubtful – and the BBC should not be pushing this as fact. Was it a Guardian article over the weekend that said the vote was being introduced to make Labour look like the party of slobs, shirkers and scroungers? Instead, Labour will come out as the party for strivers, as it is defending benefits that working people, and people who want to work, need in order to survive in these hard times.

People have been force-fed falsehoods by a government that is desperately trying to justify its unreasonable attacks on the poor and vulnerable.

The BBC should not be part of this. It should set the record straight where figures are available, otherwise its reports are misleading readers.

Let’s have a bit of factual accuracy in the run-up to this vote.

The benefit cap WILL happen – but we don’t need to believe the Tories’ Big Lie

Tags

benefit, benefits, Child Benefit, Coalition, Conservative, Department for Work and Pensions, disability, Disability Living Allowance, disabled, DLA, DWP, Employment and Support Allowance, ESA, George Osborne, Goebbels, government, Hitler, Iain Duncan Smith, Incapacity Benefit, Jobseeker's Allowance, Liberal, Liberal Democrat, maternity pay, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, Parliament, people, politics, sick, tax credit, Tories, Tory, unemployment, Vox Political, welfare, Winter fuel allowance

Big liar: Iain Duncan Smith, last week.

A little while ago, somebody said: “The English follow the principle that when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous.”

It’s a comment that could have been tailor-made for the Coalition government, in the run-up to tomorrow’s debate and vote on the plan to break the link between benefits and inflation, ensuring that those on benefits fall further into poverty as the years pass.

Why? Because ministers have been preparing the ground by demonising benefits claimants – getting the public to believe not only lies, but huge lies about the level of benefits and who gets them.

They’ll get what they want – the Coalition between Tories and Liberal Democrats creates a majority in the House of Commons. In theory they can do what they want. But they know that public opinion will swing against them – and stay against them – unless the people can be softened-up with a few juicy non-facts.

Vox Political has already uncovered some of these lies. More have been found by the Trades Union Congress in a recent poll which reveals some of the “myths” the public has been fed about those who rely on benefits.

So, as we go into the debate, let’s look at some of these myths. The people spreading them are the usual suspects – George Osborne gave us his story about “the shiftworker, leaving home in the dark hours of the early morning, who looks up at the closed blinds of their next-door neighbour sleeping off a life on benefits”; and Iain Duncan Smith has highlighted figures showing that, in percentage terms, benefits have risen by almost twice as much as earnings in the past five years. In fact, as demonstrated in this blog, this simply means that benefits as a proportion of earnings have remained at the same level. It’s a manipulation of statistics in order to mislead the unwary. Were you caught?

A YouGov poll found 42 per cent of people think benefits are too generous.

It discovered 59 per cent believe the system has created a culture of dependency.

But just give those people a few cast-iron facts and their beliefs change drastically.

The plan to cap benefit rises at one per cent was supported by 48 per cent and opposed by 32 per cent – but only because three out of every four people asked believed the “myth” that it was the unemployed that would take the hit. When told that 60 per cent of those affected will be low-paid workers receiving tax credits (fact), the move is opposed by a margin of 40 per cent to 30 per cent.

Only one in four believe benefits should rise be less than wages or prices, and 63 per cent want to see them linked to wages, prices or both (in other words, keep them as they are – precisely the opposite of what Herrs Osborne and Smith are pursuing).

The TUC poll found:

People think 41 per cent of the entire welfare budget goes on benefits to unemployed people, while the true figure is just three per cent.

They think 27 per cent of the welfare budget is claimed fraudulently, while the government’s own figure is 0.7 per cent.

They think that almost half the people (48 per cent) who claim Jobseeker’s Allowance go on to claim it for more than a year, while the true figure is just under 30 per cent (27.8 per cent).

They think an unemployed couple with two school-age children would get £147 in Jobseeker’s Allowance – more than 30 per cent higher than the £111.45 they would actually receive – a £35 over-calculation.

Only 21 per cent of people think that this family with two school-age children would be better off if one of the unemployed parents got a 30 hour a week minimum wage job. They would actually end up £138 a week better off – in other words, they’d have more than twice as much money. Even those who thought they would be better off only thought on average they would gain by £59.

Yes, you’ve been told lies.

Yes, they’re big lies.

What might surprise you is the amount of time the Tories, in particular, have been telling these lies.

I am indebted to skwalker1964, who pointed me towards the pro-Tory ‘research trust’ Reform. This organisation published a press release as far back as 2009, claiming that Britain had a welfare “dependency problem”.

It said benefit “gimmicks” – among which it numbered child benefit, winter fuel allowance, maternity pay and tax credits – were “benefiting nobody”.

And it called for an end to universal benefits (such as child benefit, which stopped being a universal benefit today) and the localisation of welfare (as demanded in a ‘blueprint for the next Conservative manifesto’ being promoted by 70 Tories including Michael Gove and David Willetts).

In 2009.

So you see, the person who made the comment at the top of this piece really knew what he was talking about. Who was he, again?

Oh, yes.

He was Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels.

And he was paraphrasing his own boss, Adolf Hitler.

Plus Ca Change (or: The More Times Change, The More Tories Stay The Same)

Tags

Atos, Barry Took, benefits, Benito Mussolini, Blackshirt, British Union of Fascists, Christopher Grayling, Coalition, Conservative, Conservative Party Conference, DLA, DSS, ESA, Eva Braun, Goebbels, government, health, Hitler, Ian Hislop, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, News Quiz, Oswald Mosley, Parliament, people, Peter Lilley, PIP, Plus Ca Change, politics, responsible reform, scroungers, single mothers, Tories, Tory, Unity Mitford, work capability assessment

I’ve just found the following fascinating snippet in a recording of the BBC’s News Quiz, c 1993. It’s a reference to a cock-up by then Social Security secretary Peter Lilley, that was revealed right around the time of the Conservative Party Conference that year.

“Peter Lilley had a very successful Blackshirt Rally- Blackpool Rally – in which he made one of those caring, sensitive speeches about how the loss of money and the budget deficit was all the fault of three single mothers in Cardiff,” said Private Eye editor Ian Hislop.

“But then it transpired rather amusingly that his own department had managed to lose, entirely by incompetence, about £331 million, which is more money than all his stupid measures would have saved anyway.”

The legendary Barry Took, chairing the show, explained: “It is Peter Lilley and his team at the DSS. They’ve managed to overspend a massive sum from the welfare benefits, so would the person who received the Giro for £331 million and 48p please send it back to Mr Lilley or to any of his immediate staff: Eva, Unity or Benito.

“It was of course Mr Lilley who attacked scroungers of all sorts, and especially the growth in claims from single mothers, so any young woman thinking of getting into that condition should think again, and stay away from cabinet ministers.”

Now we have Chris Grayling at the Department for Work and Pensions – a man dubbed ‘Goebbels’ by the media, after Nazi Germany’s propoganda minister, in an apt (and entirely coincidental) follow-up to the News Quiz reference to Hitler (Barry Took’s comment namechecked Hitler’s wife Eva Braun, along with Unity Mitford and Benito Mussolini; and Ian Hislop’s reference to Blackshirts was a comparison with Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists before World war Two).

Grayling’s department awarded a contract to Atos Origin that was worth £801 million over a 10-year period, to carry out ‘work capability assessments’ on claimants of sickness and disability benefits, at which people with terminal illnesses or severe medical conditions have been declared fit for work and had their benefits cut.

The cost of appeals against Atos decisions is running at £50 million per year, and the number of successful appeals is currently around 40 per cent, according to The Guardian.

So, this time, we’re already up to nearly £1 billion (£801 million plus around two years of appeals against decisions) wasted on the latest attempt to demonise “scroungers”.  The language is exactly the same as in 1993, although it is now being used to attack the sick and disabled, rather than single mums.

And the situation is exactly the same. The Coalition wants to cut £9.2 billion from sickness and disability payments but is already on course to spend far more in the attempt, due to – in my opinion, and I’m sure I’m not alone – incompetence.

The more times change, the more Tories stay the same. It would be pathetic if it wasn’t so dangerous.

Vox Political is funded entirely by donations and book sales.
You can make a one-off donation here:

Alternatively, you can buy the first Vox Political book,
Strong Words and Hard Times
in either print or eBook format here: