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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Negative campaigning – the easiest way

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Act, austerity, BBC, campaign, Conservative, domestic, free protest, free speech, gagging law, Labour, message, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, negative, paid holiday, positive, prosperity, Question Time, scrap, soundbite, Tories, Tory, Transparency of Lobbying, UKIP, videobite, Vox Political

Take a look at the video above. Is it effective?

I think it is. A short message with a sting in its tail, coupled with a soundtrack that supports what’s being said by adding emotional connotations (‘Britishness’, turning to a harsh wind).

It’s a soundbite in video form – a videobite, if you like. Memorable, shareable – and easily debatable, because the message is so clear.

Conservatives are very good at putting out negative soundbites for their opponents. It would be useful to give them a taste of how it feels, so please share the video wherever you like.

Here’s another example of negative campaigning, found on the social media, on the subject of UKIP:

As effective?

Nobody seems to talk about UKIP’s domestic policies. This was mentioned, to great effect, on the BBC’s Question Time yesterday (Thursday).

The trouble with this one is it’s a ‘deep’ poster, meaning you have to scroll down to see the end of it – so the effect is less immediate.

The sad fact is that both of the above are more effective than so-called ‘positive’ campaigning, in which a political party or its representative promotes its policies as better for the country than anyone else’s.

Yesterday, the Labour Party announced it will repeal the so-called ‘Gagging Law’ – The Transparency of Lobbying (etc) Act – if elected into Parliament. At the time it was passed, Vox Political said this marked the end of free speech and free protest in the UK and the article had a huge audience of more than 100,000. So this announcement should have been greeted with joy, right? What response do you think it got?

It has been read just 128 times and of the three comments on the site, two are hugely negative – the first words being “I’ll believe it when I see it”.

It shows how far politicians have fallen in our trust.

That’s why negative campaigning is on the rise.

It seems those who want the public’s trust can only earn it by showing that the others don’t deserve it.

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Has the Coalition set Labour an impossible task – to rescue politics from corruption?

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all in it together, andy burnham, asset, banker, BBC, benefit, broken, business, cheat, children, Coalition, company, confidence, Conservative, corrupt, corruption, crisis, cuts, David Cameron, debt, Democrat, Department, disabled, draconian, DWP, economy, Ed Balls, Ed Miliband, elderly, eugenics, fail, firm, fraud, George Osborne, immigration, incompetent, kill, Labour, liar, Liberal, mark hoban, message, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, nose, Opposition, Paul O'Grady, Pensions, plastic tories, policy, politics, poor, PricewaterhouseCoopers, private, promise, public service, sick, slave, social security, strip, tax break, Tories, Tory, trough, untrustworthy, Vox Political, WCA, welfare, work, work capability assessment

Not a good egg: Ed Miliband was hit by an egg on his first campaign visit after returning from holiday abroad. The thrower, Dean Porter, said: “They do nothing. The government do nothing. The shadow government do nothing. I don’t believe him at all. If you are poor, you are considered a burden.”

Yesterday’s article, DWP denials: They would kill you and call it ‘help’ received an unprecedented reaction – considering it was only intended to prepare the way for a larger discussion.

In less than 12 hours the article went viral and galvanised many of you into vocal support, sharing your stories of government (and particularly DWP) ill-treatment and urging others to follow this blog – for which much gratitude is in order. Thanks to all concerned.

The aim was to show how low politics and politicians have fallen in public estimation. The general consensus is that our politicians aren’t interested in us. They make promise after promise before elections – and the party (or parties) in office often set up tax breaks for sections of society their focus groups have told them are needed to secure a win. After they’ve got what they want, they don’t give a damn.

Look at the Coalition. The consensus is that this is a failed government. That it has broken one promise after another. That its ministers are liars and its Prime Minister is the worst charlatan of the lot.

That its rallying-call, “We’re all in it together”, refers only to Conservative and Liberal Democrat Members of Parliament and their close friends in the most lucrative (and therefore richest) industries, along with the bankers (of course), and that they have all dug their noses deep into the trough and are (to mix metaphors) sucking us dry. Look at the way Mark Hoban employed his former employers to rubber-stamp the DWP’s new plans for the Work Capability Assessment.

In short: That the Coalition government is the most incompetent and corrupt administration to blight the United Kingdom in living memory, and possibly the worst that this land has ever endured.

We fear that these tin-pot tyrants are carrying out a eugenics programme to kill off people who have become sick or disabled; we fear that their economic policies are designed to put anyone less than upper-middle-class into the kind of debt that current wages will never permit them to pay off – a debt that can then be sold between fat-cat corporations who will hold the masses in actual – if not admitted – slavery; that they will dismantle this country’s institutions, handing over everything that is worth anything to their buddies in business, who will make us pay through the nose for services that our taxes ought to cover.

And yet a recent poll suggests that we would prefer this corrupt gang of asset-stripping bandits to run the economy of the country (into the ground) rather than give Her Majesty’s Opposition, the Labour Party, an opportunity to restore the country’s fortunes.

Are we all going schizoid? Are we really saying that, while we don’t believe the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats could organise a binge in a brewery without stealing the booze from us while we’re drinking it, we do believe them when they say the current economic nightmare was because Labour mismanaged the economy?

(In case anyone hasn’t really thought it through, the current lie is that the international credit crunch that has cost the world trillions of pounds was caused, not by bankers (who have never been punished for it) but by the UK Labour Party giving too much money away to scrounging benefit cheats. In fact, only 0.7 per cent of benefit claims are fraudulent and, while they cost the taxpayer £1.2 billion a year, that does not justify the £19 billion the Coalition has given to its private, for-profit friends to make a pretence of dealing with it.)

Are we really saying that even though we all now know that George Osborne’s economic policy is nonsense, based on a theory that has been comprehensively rubbished, we’re all happy to give him and his miserable boss David Cameron the credit for the slight improvement in the UK’s economic fortunes that we have seen in recent months? It was always going to improve at some point, and the current upturn is more likely to be part of that kind of cycle than anything Osborne has done.

If we really are saying that, then we all need to put in claims for Employment and Support Allowance, on grounds of mental instability!

That’s not what’s going on, though.

It seems far more likely that the general public is having a crisis of confidence. As a nation, we know what we’ve got is bad; we just don’t have confidence that we’ll get better if we put our support behind the Opposition.

This is the Coalition’s one great success: It has damaged the reputation of politics and politicians so badly that nobody involved in that occupation can escape being labelled as corrupt, or liars, or worse.

And Labour is doing far too little to fight that.

A BBC article on the problems facing Labour states that the Coalition has sharpened up its messages on, among other things, welfare and immigration. The message is still the usual hogwash; the problem is that Labour has made no meaningful response. Her Majesty’s Opposition appears to have given up Opposing.

Is this because the main political parties are now so similar that Labour is now supporting Coalition policies? That would make sense in the context of statements made before the summer recess by Ed Miliband and Ed Balls, in which Labour appeared to capitulate over welfare and the economy, even though the Coalition had lost all the major arguments.

When they did that damned stupid thing in that damned stupid way, Vox Political was the first to say “watch their poll lead disappear” – and it has more than halved from 11 percentage points to five, according to The Guardian.

This lackadaisical attitude from the Labour leadership has not gone unnoticed among the backbenchers and the grass roots, and the last few weeks has been notable for the rising chorus of dissent against Ed Miliband’s leadership. Some have described the Labour front bench as “Plastic Tories”.

Even Shadow Health Secretary Andy Burnham took a pop, saying Labour needed to “shout louder” and produce attention-grabbing policies by next spring – or lose any chance of winning the 2015 election.

Miliband’s response to that was to claim that Burnham was really saying the Labour Party was “setting out how we would change the country”. This is nonsense. He was saying that was what Labour needed to do, and Miliband rendered himself untrustworthy by suggesting otherwise.

It is very hard to put your support – and your vote – behind somebody you don’t trust, who seems completely unable (or unwilling) to fight your oppressor on your behalf; in short, someone who seems just as corrupt as the government in power. At the moment, Ed Miliband doesn’t stand for anything – so there’s no reason you should stand up for him.

What, then, should Labour do?

Easy. The party needs a clear, simple message that everybody can understand and get behind; one that members can support because it reflects Labour beliefs rather than whatever Coalition policy currently seems popular, and above all, one that comes from verifiable truth.

He could take a leaf from Paul O’Grady’s book. In a clip on YouTube, the entertainer says: “We should be vocal in our fight against oppression. We should let them know that we are not taking these draconian cuts lightly!

“We should fight for the rights of the elderly! Of the poor! Of the sick! And of the children!”

Rapturous applause.

Labour needs more than that – but a commitment to protect those who have been most harmed by the Conservative and Liberal Democrat doomsday spree would at least be a start.

Is the algorithm method stopping my messages from multiplying?

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alert, algorithm, blog, captcha, Coalition, Conservative, conspiracy, defamation, Facebook, filter, government, libel, Lords, mark mcgowan, message, NHS, privatisation, privatise, regulations, snout, spam, theory, Tories, Tory, toy pig, trough, wordpress

What is going wrong with the social media giant Facebook?

By now, we all know that Facebook took it upon itself to target and attack bloggers – primarily with WordPress, as I understand it – who use the site to publicise their articles, last week. Vox Political was one of those sites.

The censorship took the form of an alert message that appeared on readers’ screens when they clicked through from Facebook to an article by the writers who had been targeted. This message stated: “Facebook thinks this site may be unsafe. If you’re not familiar with it, please provide feedback by marking it as spam (you’ll be brought back to Facebook).”

Anyone trying to ‘share’ a link with other Facebook users was subjected to the infamous and annoying ‘Captcha’ box – this is the time-consuming and difficult method of proving you are a human being by reading a series of letters or numbers, that have been stretched or bent on the screen in a way that we are told prevents automated ‘spam’ systems from understanding it, and then typing the sequence correctly into a box. This is off-putting as it takes time and effort, and many users may have decided not to bother.

All this took place around the time the House of Lords was voting on the regulations that will allow private firms to compete to run NHS services – the privatisation of the NHS; and it also coincided with bowel cancer sufferer Mark McGowan’s crawl from King’s College Hospital to 10 Downing Street, pushing a toy pig with his nose to highlight his view that the privatisation marked out the Conservative-led government as pigs with their snouts in the money trough.

I can’t comment on how this affected anybody else, but my own site certainly suffered as a result, and I complained to Facebook about this treatment, pointing out that the alert message clearly lowered me in the estimation of right-thinking members of the public generally, and caused me to be shunned and avoided – fulfilling not just one but two criteria necessary for an act to constitute defamation – otherwise known as libel.

The problem appeared to resolve itself just before the weekend. Facebook said that it was all a mistake, made by its automated spam-filter algorithms. It seems that WordPress sites all over the world were affected, and there was discussion of it on the WordPress user forums, ending with a post from a staff member saying that “the problem seems to have been fixed on Facebook‘s end on or around April 26th.”

And that should have been the end of it, right?

Well… were these automated systems malfunctioning again on Sunday and Monday? That would seem very strange behaviour, so soon after an initial ‘mistake’ that was so widely discovered, reported and discussed.

Still, I posted an article yesterday and, when I checked this morning, found that – according to Facebook statistics – it had reached a total of 16 people. The previous article, a link to a reblog that I also posted yesterday, had amassed more than 1,700 readers (according to the stats). The article before that – more than 2,000.

That was seriously odd, I thought. Nobody loses 2,000 readers in a day.

Still, I had another article to promote, so I posted the link to “Tory department of dirty deeds swings into pre-election action”. Half an hour later – by which time I would normally have expected to see a ‘total reach’ in the hundreds, that number had stalled on two.

That’s right – two.

“Yes,” said one of my readers in response to a (Facebook) status report asking what the devil was going on, “the government is putting pressure on Facebook to delete some posts and groups which contain political themes, and to slow the process of certain posts being sent for others to see.  Guess Cameron is feeling the heat.”

Conspiracy-theory nonsense? Or a rational response to the evidence? I thought about this for a while. Then I decided to put it to the test.

If Facebook is using spam-filtering algorithms to censor certain messages, then it must be programmed to detect particular words, or combinations of words, I reasoned. Maybe my use of “Tory” alongside “dirty deeds” was what got the article kicked into touch?

So what would happen if I posted a link to the very same article, but this time with an innocuous – if unlikely – headline such as “Peace and harmony breaks out between the British political parties”?

I’ll tell you what happened: ‘Total reach’ of 542 people within half an hour – that’s what! More than the original link – to the same article – had achieved all day. More than it has achieved as I type this, in fact.

Maybe I’m being paranoid – Johnny Void thinks so; he’s been trying to convince me that this really was an innocent glitch, and I’d like to believe him.

But I also want some solid answers. Wouldn’t you?

I’ve written to Facebook; let’s see what happens.

And, while we’re waiting, I might create a new page on Facebook: BASTARDS for CONSERVATISM! The description will read: “We may be illegitimate, but we know our own when we see them!”

That ought to confuse this dodgy algorithm!

Local election campaigns begin – but where are the NEW contenders?

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Baroness, benefit, bookmaker, borrower, campaign, ceremonial, Conservative, council, create, creation, cut, debt, Ed Miliband, Enterprise, expensive, funeral, gambling, Iain Duncan Smith, inferior, Interest, job, jobseeker, Jobseekers (back to work schemes) Bill, Ken Loach, Labour, lender, Liberal Democrat, local election, low, Mandatory Work Activity, Margaret, message, Mrs, National Health Action Party, No Party, Parliament, Party of the Left, pay, payday, People of the British Political and Lawful Rebellion Party, private, project, repayment, sanction, script, service, smear, Thatcher, Tories, Tory, Treasury, vanity, wage, work programme provider, Workfare

Get your votes out: But who will you support, if your local council is holding elections this year? The mid-term poll is always carefully watched, so your vote could sway predictions for the 2015 general election!

Hard though it may be to believe, in the midst of all the ‘Mrs T’ drivel, but life goes on and there are elections on the way.

The Liberal Democrats have launched their bid for seats on 34 councils in England and one in Wales, predictably, with a smear campaign.

Apparently, both their Coalition partners the Conservatives, and Labour, are inefficient and waste money on “vanity projects”.

This will be a hard criticism for the Tories to counter, considering they are about to waste up to £10 million of taxpayers’ – our – money on a ceremonial funeral for Baroness Thatcher that the majority of the people in the UK simply don’t want.

Apparently, MPs can claim £3,750 each, from the taxpayer, because Parliament has been recalled to pay tribute to her. If they all take advantage of it, that alone will cost us £2,437,500!

Praise is due to Labour’s John Mann, who the BBC placed among those calling the debate a waste of money. He said tributes could have been made next week, when Parliament is due to return.

But then, what is the Liberal Democrat plan to increase the Personal Allowance, that we are all allowed to earn before we start paying Income Tax, if it isn’t a vanity project?

Nick Clegg says the Liberal Democrats will spread “the burden of austerity fairly”, but if this policy really has made 24 million families in the UK £600 better-off than they were in 2010, that means the Treasury has received £14,400,000,000 less than it otherwise would have. Nearly 14-and-a-half BILLION pounds!

This is money that could have eased the severity of the benefit cuts on the poorest in society, or the government could have invested it in projects that would have created jobs, increasing the tax take and lessening the burden of debt repayments and benefits for the poor.

Noticeably absent from Mr Clegg’s speech, at the Eden Project in Cornwall, was any mention of what his party would do with any new council seats it picks up. Instead, he went back to the Liberal Democrat ‘message script’ that was thrust upon his party back between Christmas and the New Year. “Only the Liberal Democrats will build a stronger economy and a fairer society, enabling everyone to get on in life” he droned.

Here in Radnorshire, Wales, people hearing that will be thinking those words are familiar, and asking themselves when they were aired before. Oh yes – it was last week, when our MP Roger Williams and AM Kirsty Williams were talking up the increases in the Personal Allowance.

So there’s no offer from the Liberal Democrats.

At least Labour’s Ed Miliband launched his party’s campaign with a solid commitment – he wants councils to be allowed to prevent payday lenders from operating in their areas, and to stop bookmakers from opening as well.

In hard times, it makes sense for gambling to be curbed – although it is a shame that the last Labour government allowed it to become commonplace before the financial crash hit. And payday lenders must be brought to heel – the huge interest rates they charge mean borrowers – who need the money because they receive such a poor pay packet from their fatcat bosses, don’t forget – fall even further into debt.

But Labour’s recent behaviour in Parliament has created deep mistrust of the party among its core voters. Labour betrayed the poorest workers in the UK, and everybody who is looking for a job, by supporting Iain Duncan Smith’s retroactive law to legalise his illegal sanctions against jobseekers who would not take part in his slave-labour ‘mandatory work activity’ schemes to raise cash for ‘work programme provider’ companies and commercial enterprises that took part.

If Labour wants to win that trust back, it needs to field prospective councillors who genuinely want to represent the interests of the people in their wards, with good Labour values – ensuring they get the best value for their council tax money, rather than turning services over to private enterprises who then make councils pay through the nose for inferior work, for example.

And what about all the new contenders that have sprung up since the Coalition came to power and started reversing all the good work the previous Labour government did, justifying it by saying the new austerity made it necessary (it isn’t)?

The National Health Action Party can be ruled out, I think. That organisation is a single-issue party created solely to attack Coalition members of Parliament, and anyone else who voted in support of the Health and Social Care Act, that allows private, for-profit companies to run NHS services.

What about the ‘No’ Party? This group claims the UK needs a fresh start, and wants to contend the next general election “on a massive scale”. In that case, they should start at local level. Political organisations of any kind won’t be trusted with Parliamentary seats until their members have proved themselves in the local arena and the May elections are a perfect opportunity to get started. Where are the ‘No’ candidates?

What about the People of the British Political and Lawful Rebellion Party, which says it aims “to put the People back into politics”.

This organisation’s Facebook page says: “It is time this country came together and started the mass political and legal upheavel required for a legitimate, lawful, peaceful and successful rebellion. As a newly founded political party, we take one-step at at time while learning to utilise our skills as individuals and collectively.”

Okay, then why not start now – in local councils? Then the ordinary people will be able to find out what they’re all about.

It seems too early for any wide-based, mainstream ‘Party of the Left’, of the kind Ken Loach has been pushing, to come together in time for these elections – which is a shame.

In the light of Labour’s actions on the Jobseekers (Back to the Workhouse) Bill, it is possible that there does need to be another mainstream, national left-wing political organisation – if only to remind Labour of what it ought to be.

One of the most telling comments about the late Baroness Thatcher was that she changed not only the Conservatives, but other political parties, meaning that Labour followed a similar course to the Conservatives when it came to office in 1997.

It’s time Labour remembered that there are other, real and workable alternatives – and started working on them.

Lib Dems’ new message for the New Year: Don’t laugh – they mean it.

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Coalition, Conservative, Lib Dem, Liberal Democrat, message, New Year, Nick Clegg, script, Tories, Tory

Yellow man speak with forked tongue: Nick Clegg’s new Liberal Democrat message script is ridiculous nonsense. If you don’t believe me, read it for yourself.

Nick Clegg, that standard-bearer for sticking to your principles and refusing to let short-term expediency change your mind, has released his Liberal Democrat New Year message. It would be hilarious if the implications weren’t so serious.

You’ll remember Clegg dropped a flagship policy not to raise student tuition fees, just as soon as he could after going into coalition with the Conservative Party, and recently apologised for it as though he thought that would make everything better.

His party has been propping up some of the most poisonous policies the UK has ever seen, including the dismantling of the English NHS, starvation of the education system to prop up ‘free schools’, and the hate campaign and genetic cleansing programme against the sick and disabled that masquerades under the heading ‘welfare reform’ as run by the odious Iain Duncan Smith.

Still, let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and see what he had to say.

“We will hold firm to our key purpose in this Government – the Liberal Democrats are building a stronger economy, in a fairer society, enabling every person to get on in life.” I told you it was funny. Just try not to laugh; there is a serious point to all this.

“We will stay the course on the deficit. We will cut income tax bills and help with childcare bills.

“We will invest in boosting jobs and we’ll reform welfare to get people into work.

“A stronger economy. A fairer society. Where everyone can get on.” He mentioned this twice because it’s their keystone.

It’s also utter, utter nonsense.

All of the above is taken direct from the Lib Dems’ new ‘party message script’, which I intend to elaborate in full below. I am grateful to Liberator’s blog for making the information publicly available.

Lib Dems are advised to “make it the basis for every communication we make” and “communicate from this script at every opportunity” so you’re going to hear this stuff a lot from now on. In fact, you’re going to get bored stiff with it. And remember: It’s nonsense.

So here we go. The message script runs as follows:

“Building a Stronger Economy in a Fairer Society

The Liberal Democrats are building a stronger economy in a fairer society, enabling every person to get on in life.” The same words used by Mr Clegg. But of course we know they’re not true. The economy is NOT strong; society is becoming more UNfair. FEWER people are now able to get on in life. It’s complete doublespeak and they need to be challenged on it at every turn.

“That’s why we have:

“1. Fixed the mess left by Labour. We have reduced the deficit by a quarter, kept interest rates down and created over a million private sector jobs.” What mess left by Labour? The one that would have been created if the Conservatives or the Liberal Democrats had been in power? The one caused by the bankers lending irresponsibly until they tipped the economy of the western world right over the edge? HOW have they reduced the deficit? By investing in industry and employment that will increase the nation’s tax take? Or by hacking away at public services and ensuring that the infrastructure is no longer available to make such investments, thereby ensuring the economy’s pain will continue for many years to come? (I’ll give you a clue – it’s the latter). Have they really KEPT interest rates down? Or is it in fact nothing at all to do with this government and its crazy schemes? (I’ll give you a clue – it’s the latter). Did they REALLY create more than a million private sector jobs? (I’ll give you a clue – no, they didn’t. Many of those jobs are public sector jobs that they sneakily reclassified in the hope that nobody would notice. Too bad. We did).

“2. Ensured that 24 million people will not pay any income tax on the first £9,440 of earnings, putting £600 back into their pockets from April 2013.” That’s fine by the Conservatives. You know why? It means less tax money coming in to the Treasury, ensuring that the deficit and the debt continue, meaning that they can carry on saying that they need to cut services in order to make ends meet – and blaming the previous Labour government in the process. Not Labour’s fault, then; clearly the Liberal Democrats wish to take responsibility. Don’t get me wrong – I’m all in favour of giving the lowest-paid in society a chance to keep the money they earn, but there are better ways of doing it.

“3. Put an extra £2.5 billion into schools targeted at the least well-off pupils, raising standards for everyone.” I have no idea what they’re on about here. If anyone can enlighten me about this – clearly vitally important – Liberal Democrat policy that has slipped under my news radar, I would be very grateful. In the meantime all I can say is that £2.5 billion, in terms of the education budget, isn’t very much. Isn’t it about £1 billion less than Lansley spent, ruining the English NHS?

“4. Created a Green Investment Bank that will unlock billions of pounds of private investment in renewable energy and create thousands more jobs in the green economy.” Would this be the “Non-bank needing to prove itself” that Damian Carrington has discussed in his Guardian blog? If it hasn’t done anything yet, it’s pointless to trumpet it as an achievement.

“5. Got young people off the dole and into work through apprenticeships, work placement or training with our £1 billion Youth Contract.” Ah yes, the Youth Contract. From memory – Average length of time a person stays in a job last year: four months. Effectiveness of work placements at getting people into jobs: less than if they had simply gone looking themselves. How many young people are on the dole? Is it around one million? The figures speak for themselves.

“6. Delivered the biggest ever cash rise in the state pension.” Because you can always rely on a pensioner to vote. Therefore you try to keep ’em sweet so they’ll vote for you.

“The Labour Party can’t be trusted to manage the economy. Labour borrowed and borrowed and nearly bankrupted Britain. In power they cared more about bankers, media bosses and union barons than they did about ordinary, working people.” Labour borrowing during the vast majority of its 13 years in power was LOWER – let me say that again, LOWER – than any Conservative government during the previous 40 years or so (Labour average: 39 per cent; Tory average: 41 per cent – you see, keeping lots of people unemployed in order to artificially depress wages is a poor arrangement). Overborrowing was NOT habitual for the Labour Party and so that part of the Liberal Democrat message is a LIE. Labour did borrow a huge amount of money to deal with a single issue – the banking crisis – and was supported in this by the other main political parties of the time, including the Liberal Democrats. So, a lie followed by hypocrisy. As for bankers and media bosses – I notice the Coalition has been chumming up to these since May 2010, so that’s also a matter of hypocrisy. Labour tried hard for ordinary working people with tax credits and social reforms but I don’t agree with much of what the party did. Better by far to ensure they get paid enough not to need benefits at all. I notice that is not part of any Liberal Democrat policy.

“The Conservatives can’t be trusted to build a fair society. Until the Lib Dems got into government, no one could stop the Tories from looking after the super rich who fund their party, while ignoring the needs of normal people who struggle to make ends meet.” Until the Lib Dems got into government, the Tories were LOSING super-rich funders because they weren’t in power. The Lib Dems have shored up Tory funding by going into coalition with them. It’s true that they can’t be trusted to build a fair society, though. Since the Lib Dems accept that, why continue with the Coalition at all?

“That’s why we have blocked Tory plans to:

1. Allow bosses to fire staff at will.” But the notice period for mass redundancies is being cut from 90 days to 45, with help from the Liberal Democrats.

“2. Let local schools be run for profit.” But it’s all right to allow the creation of so-called ‘free schools’ at huge cost, run by amateurs and sucking funding away from the established education system?

“3. Cut inheritance tax for millionaires.” But allowed the forthcoming Income Tax cut that will put £107,000 per year back into the pockets of those who are paid more than £1 million per year.

“4. Introduce lower rates of pay for public sector workers outside of the South East.” But allowed the abolition of Council Tax Benefit, meaning those who are worst off will have to pay more, just to keep their homes.

“Now, with your support, we want to keep building a stronger economy in a fairer society.” Keep building? KEEP BUILDING? When will they START?

“Over the next two years we will:

“1. Increase our tax cut for low and middle earners to £700 for 24 million people.” Thereby forwarding the Tory ‘Starve the Beast’ policy of cutting the flow of tax money into public services. As I said before – pay people enough money in the first place and they won’t need this help.

“2. Dramatically increase parents’ access to child care so that it’s easier for parents to get back into jobs.” What jobs?

“3. Reform the welfare system to get people off benefits and into work.” What work? There are previous few jobs out here, a fact of which both Coalition parties continue appearing to be oblivious. Meanwhile, welfare cuts (I refuse to call them reforms) are driving hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people to despair, destitution, and in many cases death. Remember: the Liberal Democrats are swimming in blood, just like the Tories.

“4. Create tens of thousands of jobs across Britain in the new, green economy.” This is meaningless – a promise that cannot be supported at this time.

“Let’s never go back to the way things were, because Labour can’t be trusted with your money, and the Tories can’t be trusted to build a fair society.” I think I’ve already explained the reasons this is a stupid thing for Liberal Democrats to be saying.

“Only the Lib Dems can be trusted to build a stronger economy and a fairer society, enabling every person to get on in life.” See my response to the paragraph immediately above.

“STRONGER ECONOMY. FAIRER SOCIETY.” Vote ALL Liberal Democrats out of Parliament at the next election, then.

Queen’s Christmas betrayal of Jubilee Workfare forced-labourers

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BBC, benefit, benefits, Christmas, Coalition, Conservative, Department for Work and Pensions, DWP, government, Jubilee, Liberal, Liberal Democrat, message, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, people, politics, Queen, speech, Tories, Tory, unemployment, volunteer, Vox Political, welfare, Workfare

The truth of the Jubilee ‘volunteers’ – unemployed people on the disgraceful Workfare scheme, bussed into London under darkness and ordered to sleep in the filth under a bridge before working a 14-hour shift in the pouring rain, with no rest or toilet facilities. This is a cause for shame, not celebration.

Whoever wrote the Queen’s Christmas message this year should be hung as a traitor for making her appear to be another uncaring exploiter – like her current government.

Confused? Allow me to explain. The message might seem to be full of praise for the UK’s efforts to celebrate her Diamond Jubilee year – and it was – but it also contained this passage, referring to the Olympics and the Jubilee event on the Thames:

“The success of these great festivals depended to an enormous degree upon the dedication and effort of an army of volunteers. Those public-spirited people came forward in the great tradition of all those who devote themselves to keeping others safe, supported and comforted.”

In the case of the Olympics, her words might well ring true – people did come forward freely to take part in that great sporting event.

However, the regatta is a very different matter. We learned very shortly after the event that many – if not all – of the ‘volunteers’ were in fact nothing of the kind. They were unemployed people who had been coerced onto the government’s Workfare scheme and then misled into taking part, under the belief that they were being paid for it.

They were bussed into London at night, told to sleep under a dirty bridge before taking part in a work shift that lasted 14 hours, with no toilet facilities, and only a wet campsite awaiting them as rest facility afterwards.

They were originally told they would be paid for their efforts, but then the organisers revealed that the weekend was just a “trial” – no extra money would be forthcoming for what – let’s face it – was their suffering. The Duke of Edinburgh was hospitalised for days after this event, and he only had to endure four hours of it!

It’s doubly disappointing to see the BBC reporting Her Majesty’s speech in glowing terms. ‘Queen’s message praises 2012 “army of volunteers”‘ read the report on the corporation’s website.

“The Queen has praised the ‘army of volunteers’ at the Diamond Jubilee and the Olympic and Paralympic Games,” the story stated.

Was this the same BBC that reported ‘Jubilee stewards “humiliated” by the pageant experience’? This report stated “A group of unemployed workers at the Jubilee river pageant were left to shelter under a bridge in the middle of the night. The unpaid volunteers say they felt humiliated by the experience.”

Was this the same BBC that reported Lord Prescott’s fears that such cheap labour could be used at the Olympics? That report stated on June 7: “Volunteers bussed in from Bristol, Plymouth and Bath were reported to have spent part of Sunday night under London Bridge in cold and inhospitable conditions.”

“The appalling treatment of staff working for free over the Diamond Jubilee weekend highlights the damage that unpaid work experience risks causing people who are desperate to get back into proper employment, as well as the exploitative treatment that they can face,” said TUC general secretary Brendan Barber in the report.

So let’s have a bit of consistency in our news reports, please. What happened to those so-called “volunteers” can’t be a travesty in June and a triumph in December.

And let’s have an apology from whoever wrote the Queen’s Christmas message – not just to the nation, but also to the Queen.

Cameron and Brooks – the more we know, the less we like it

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"embarrassment", "working together", Andy Coulson, Atos, Coalition, Conservative, Culture, Culture Secretary, David Cameron, Department for Work and Pensions, disability, disabled, Downing Street, DWP, email, government, Jeremy Hunt, Liberal, Liberal Democrats, message, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, News International, News of the World, Parliament, phone hacking, politics, Prime Minister, Rebekah Brooks, Rupert Murdoch, scandal, sick, Sky TV, text, The Observer, Tories, Tory, Vox Political

What have they got to hide, and can it be any worse than what we’re all thinking?

There’s a bad smell surrounding the correspondence between David Cameron and Rebekah Brooks, and it has nothing to do with the horse she let him ride.

The Observer is today reporting details of “intimate” texts sent between the current UK Prime Minister and the former head of Rupert Murdoch’s News International. One of them, from Brooks, states that she felt so emotional listening to his (2009) conference speech she “cried twice”, and that she “will love ‘working together’.”

Working together?

In what way, exactly?

There are too many loose ends here for anyone to feel comfortable. Everywhere you turn, one of them whips you in the face (like a riding crop, perhaps).

Let’s bear in mind all the embarrassment fomer Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt (Con) had over the plans for Mr Murdoch’s firm to take over Sky TV, granting it an unprecedented dominance over the UK mass media. Working together?

Let’s remember that Andy Coulson, a former News International employee and editor of the News of the World, became Mr Cameron’s Downing Street press officer for a time, until he was implicated in the phone hacking scandal and stood down. Working together?

Let’s also consider the way the right-wing press – of which News International and Sky News form an uncomfortably large cohort – has suppressed stories about the harmful effects of Mr Cameron’s policies, such as the deaths of 73 sick or disabled people every week (on average) who had their benefits cut after reassessment by the Department for Work and Pensions and its contractor, Atos. Working together?

Cameron has refused to allow publication of any more of these texts – and it is understood that around 150 may exist. The Observer states that it understands many of them would prove to be “a considerable embarrassment” to the government.

We don’t know what is in those texts, and we are being told that we never will. The only possible conclusion is that they contain information that is damaging to Mr Cameron, and therefore to his Conservative-led government. Because of the identities of the correspondents, we can also conclude only that this damage relates to them working together.

It’s obvious he’s got something to hide.

He’s not going to come clean about it either.

So he’s being dishonest to us, the British public.

It is not in our interest for him to behave like this.

What else has he been doing that is not in our interest?

I think we have a right to know.

After all, he didn’t win the 2010 election; he’s only in Downing Street because of a dodgy deal with the Liberal Democrats.