Cumulative effect of welfare reform revealed – deprived areas hit much harder than the rich

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allowance, austerity, BBC, business, Centre, close, commission, communities, community, cost, cumulative impact assessment, David Cameron, demonstration, deprivation, deprived, disability, Disability Living Allowance, disability news service, disabled, DLA, DNS, economic, EHRC, employment, equalities, ESA, esther mcvey, financial loss, human rights, IB, Incapacity, Landman Economics, mark hoban, Mike Penning, National Institute, NIESR, Personal Independence Payment, PIP, Reform, Regional Economic, report, Revenue, rich, Sheffield Hallam University, shop, Social Research, social security, spending, support, tax, transparent, travel, viability, welfare

Deprived parts of Glasgow were worst-affected by ‘welfare reform’ according to The Courier [Image: thecourier.co.uk].

The headline should not come as a surprise – of course changes that cut benefits for the poor are going to harm them more than rich people.

But do you remember David Cameron’s claim that his government would be the most transparent ever?

Isn’t it interesting, then, that the independent Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) has found a way to compile information on the effects of tax, social security and other spending changes on disabled people, after the government repeatedly claimed it could not be done?

It seems Mr Cameron has something to hide, after all.

We already have a taste of what we can expect, courtesy of our friends in Scotland, who commissioned the Centre for Regional Economic and Social Research at Sheffield Hallam University to study the relationship between deprivation and financial loss caused by “welfare reform”.

The study shows that more than £1.6 billion a year will be removed from the Scottish economy, with the biggest losses based in changes to incapacity benefits. The Scottish average loss, per adult of working age, is £460 per year (compared with a British average of £470) but the hardest hit area was impoverished Glasgow Carlton, where adults lost an average of £880 per year.

In affluent St Andrews, the average hit was just £180 per year.

Of course, the cumulative effect will hit the poorest communities much harder – with an average of £460 being taken out of these communities it is not only households that will struggle to make ends meet; as families make cutbacks, local shops and businesses will lose revenue and viability. If they close, then residents will have to travel further for groceries and to find work, meaning extra travel costs will remove even more much-needed cash from their budget.

For a nationwide picture, the EHRC commissioned the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) and the consultancy Landman Economics to develop a way of assessing the cumulative impact of “welfare reform”.

The report will be published in the summer, but Landman Economics has already told Disability News Service that the work was “not actually that difficult”.

Why, then have Mark Hoban, Esther McVey and Mike Penning, the current minister for the disabled, all claimed that a cumulative assessment is impossible?

Some might say they have a vested interest in keeping the public ignorant of the true devastation being wreaked on Britain’s most vulnerable people by Coalition austerity policies that will ultimately harm everybody except the very rich.

Some might say this is why the BBC – under the influence of a Conservative chairman – failed to report a mass demonstration against austerity by at least 50,000 people that started on its very doorstep.

Misguided conspiracy theorists, all!

Or are they?

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Government’s ‘troubled families’ programme is failing; we knew it would

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2011, authorities, authority, benefit, betray, big, broken, business, Coalition, commodities, commodity, company, Conservative, corporation, council, crime, criminal, David Cameron, disposable, drug, employment, exploit, firm, FOI, Freedom of Information, government, Hilary Benn, Interest, job, local, Louise Casey, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, money, MP, people, politics, power, private, privilege, re-balance, responsibility, rich, riot, school, social security, society, summer, Tories, Tory, troubled families, truant, unemployment, unequal, Vox Political, wealth, welfare, work, Work Programme

[Image: historyextra.com]

Remember back in April last year, when Vox Political said the Coalition government’s plan to stop children in ‘troubled’ families from playing truant, while finding work for the adults and stopping both from committing crime, was doomed to failure?

If you don’t, it’s not surprising (our readership back then was around a quarter of its current level) – and you haven’t missed much, because the scheme is back in the news as it is (again, unsurprisingly) failing.

The VP article pointed out that the government had been fiddling the figures in its bid to make it seem that 120,000 such families exist in the UK; in fact, “the number came from Labour research on disadvantaged families with multiple and complex needs, rather than families that caused problems,” according to ‘trouble families tsar’ Louise Casey at the time.

The article pointed out that local councils, offered a £4,000 bonus for each ‘troubled’ family they identified and helped (for want of a better word) were shoehorning families into the scheme – whether they qualified or not – just to make up the numbers.

It was doomed from the start.

So today we have figures obtained by Labour’s Hilary Benn, showing that around 106,500 families have been identified for the scheme (according to averages worked out from councils that responded to a Freedom of Information request). Of these, only around 35,500 were engaged by the scheme, which then failed in three-quarters of cases (around 26,600 families).

That leaves 8,878 families who actually came back to the straight-and-narrow – less than one-thirteenth of the target figure.

A success rate this low could have been achieved if the government had done nothing.

(That seems to be a running theme with the Coalition. What else does it remind us of? Ah, yes… The Work Programme. In this context it is extremely interesting that Mr Benn said the biggest obstruction to the scheme was the Work Programme’s failure “to deliver jobs to the poorest people in society”.)

According to The Guardian, “Data from 133 councils out of the 152 participating in the scheme found that almost one in seven families that had been “turned around” were either still on drugs, had children missing from school or involved in criminal acts.

“Another 60 per cent of households deemed to have been successfully helped by the scheme in March still had adults on unemployment benefits after leaving the programme.”

Bearing in mind the £4,000 ‘carrot’ that was waved in front of councils as encouragement for them to take part, you’ll enjoy the revelation that each local authority claimed to have found an average of 812 troubled families – 20 per cent more than central government had estimated.

Again, this is hardly surprising. Government-imposed council tax freezes have starved local authorities of money and £4,000, multiplied by 812, brings an average of £3,250,000 into each local authority that they would not, otherwise, have had.

So much for David Cameron’s plan to “heal the scars of the broken society”.

The Guardian also tells us that the ‘troubled families’ programme was launched by Cameron as a Big Society (remember that?) response to the riots of summer 2011.

In fact it doesn’t matter what the Coalition government does – or, indeed, what Labour plans to do if that party comes into office in 2015; schemes that are imposed on people from above will never succeed.

The problem is that the United Kingdom has become an increasingly unequal society, with money and privilege bled out of the majority of the population (who do most of the work for it) and into the hands of a very small number who have power and – it seems – no responsibility at all.

The vast majority of us are seen as disposable commodities by these exploiters – whose number includes a large proportion of MPs with interests in private business; they use us to make their huge profits and then throw us into unemployment.

Is it any wonder that such betrayal breeds families that turn away from the system and take to crime instead?

When David Cameron slithered into Downing Street he said he wanted to “re-balance” society. In fact, he over-balanced it even more in favour of privilege and wealth.

Now we need a proper re-balancing of society. The only way to solve the problem of ‘troubled families’ – a problem said to cost us £9 billion every year, by the way – is for people to be born into a society where everybody is valued and receives a fair (in the dictionary sense of the term, rather than the Conservative Party definition) reward for their contribution.

That will mean a fundamental shift in attitudes that should be taught to everybody from the cradle upwards.

You won’t get it under the Conservatives or any other right-wing government because they are exploiters by definition.

Will you get it under Labour?

Possibly. But a lot of right-wing Blairite dead wood will have to be cleared out first, and Hilary Benn is not the man his father was.

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Britain’s richest are even better-off – but how did they get that way?

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austerity, avoidance, avoiding, Briton, Conservative, David Cameron, government, list, living, low, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, minimum, parasite, people, rich, selfish, Sunday Times, tax, Tories, Tory, Vox Political, wage, wealth

The Sunday Times Rich List has confirmed what some of us have been saying for years – that Austerity has funnelled Britain’s money into the hands of a very few, very selfish people.

The 1,000 richest Britons now own one-third of the nation’s gross domestic product, with their combined wealth rising from last year’s total of £449,654,000,000 to £518,975,000,000.

That’s an increase of 15.4 per cent, an average rise of £69,321,000 each and an average income of 518,975,000.

Average wages in the UK are stagnant at around £26,500, with average pay for the lowest earners having fallen by 14 per cent since David Cameron’s Tory government got its nose in the trough in 2010.

There are only two points to make from this.

Firstly, bearing in mind Gary Barlow’s recent appearances in the news for taking part in a tax avoidance scheme: How many of these 1,000 very rich people are participants in the same or similar – legal – procedures for avoiding tax? How many of them pay the full 45 per cent and how many only throw one per cent into the national pot (from which they get as many public services as the rest of us)?

Secondly, bearing in mind that many of these people take their money from very large corporations who employ very many people, how many of them pay very low wages to their employees?

The answers should provide enlightenment – not only on these people and their reasons for living in Britain, but on the policies of a government that intentionally impoverishes the defenceless in order to make this country more attractive to these fellow parasites.

David Cameron: “A bull with no cock”

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broadcast, Conservative, David Cameron, deficit, economy, education, election, employment, Europe, gap, Gogglebox, government, health, home affairs, Justice, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, NHS, Parliament, people, politics, poor, rich, Tories, Tory, UKIP, Vox Political

David Cameron: “Like an ox… a stupid animal.” [Image: BBC]

Gogglebox, the recursive Channel 4 programme – in which, while watching TV, we watch people watching TV – has become a highlight of the Vox Political viewing week; especially when there’s a political item.

This week’s show featured responses to the Conservative Party’s election broadcast. One can only conclude that the Conservatives will have been panicked by the response.

None of the viewers featured on the show had a single good word to say for the Tories. They were unanimous in their condemnation – not only of the Tories’ election plea but also of their record in government over the past four years.

In the broadcast, reading between the lines, the Tories begged us to let them keep their seats in the European Parliament and not to vote for UKIP instead.

They did this – apparently – by stealing UKIP policies and by harping back to events they have claimed as achievements, whether they were or not, such as cutting the deficit (by one-third, according to the broadcast; in fact they’ve cut it by around 1/17), reforming the NHS and education.

“[They’ve] made our NHS weaker and our education poorer, and the gap between rich and poor has never been so big,” said the Reverend Kate.

Claims that a record number of people are in work met this response from German-born Ralph: “I can’t feel that I have more money in my pocket.”

His partner Viv added: “We’re worse-off, since the Conservatives came into power, than we were before.”

Another commenter said: “This is the ‘I Will Ruin your National Health party’, and then make out and pretend that they’re doing a wonderful job.”

The voiceover – by an unnamed Welsh woman – came in for particular scrutiny: “Where have they got this voiceover? Why haven’t they got him speaking?” (“Him” being David Cameron.)

“A lot of people don’t like his voice.”

Rev Kate’s husband Graham made it clear that this ploy wasn’t fooling anybody: “I can’t believe they’re trying to use a Welsh person to voice over it! They’re trying to say, ‘Look – Welsh people can vote Tory as well!’ I bet she don’t even vote Tory!”

The broadcast moved on to tick off a list of all the things the Tories say they would do in the European Parliament, starting with “taking back control of justice and home affairs”.

The responses: “Who gave it away in the first place?”

“It’s ridiculous! They’re talking about taking back all these things…”

“… That they gave away!”

“Every single one of those… has been stolen from UKIP, because they’re terrified they’re going to be outflanked by UKIP at the general election.”

Finally, Conservative leader (and comedy Prime Minister) David Cameron was wheeled out to tell us what we should and shouldn’t do.

“I believe that you have the right blah blah blah…” jabbered the Face of Modern Conservatism.

Response: “Oh, he just makes me want to punch him.”

Let’s leave the last word to Ralph – he is, after all, a European gentleman who has come to live in the UK. His opinion? “[Cameron is] like an oxen, you know?… Ox is a stupid animal in Germany.

“A bull with no cock.”

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Expenses row ‘devastated’ Miller – so what? Miller devastated the disabled

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apology, Atos, Baroness, benefit, benefits, Betty, Boothroyd, Conservative, contempt, David Cameron, disability, disabled, educated, education, expenses, female, fraud, government, honour, loyal, Maria Miller, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, minister, Parliament, politics, resign, rich, shame, social security, state, thief, thieves, Tories, Tory, Vox Political, welfare, work capability assessment

According to the BBC, Maria Miller reckons she is “‘devastated’ that she has let her constituents down”.

Oh really?

Is that why her apology to Parliament – which was for behaving badly towards the inquiry into her fraudulent expenses claims, not for making the claims themselves – was so short and contemptuous? She trying to cope with the shame of letting everybody down?

I should bleedin’ cocoa.

Miller should try to bear in mind that we weren’t all born yesterday and most of us have a decent IQ; we don’t have time for these flimsy efforts at self-justification.

She committed a crime.

Let’s remember as well that this is a woman who, as minister for the disabled, co-presided over a benefit assessment system that has led to thousands upon thousands of deaths: the hated Work Capability Assessment.

Shall we list the devastation caused by that little policy?

Well, too bad. We can’t because the government is too lily-livered and cowardly to release the figures. There is no more obvious way of telling the public that these people are trying to hide serious – by which I mean grave – crimes.

So Miller can take her talk of “devastation” and blow it out her ear.

The BBC report adds that David Cameron, Britain’s weakest Prime Minister, has continued to support his culture secretary. Cynics have said this is because she is both female and state-educated, and he needs examples of both in his primarily male, privately-educated and extremely, obscenely rich, Cabinet.

It has also been suggested that she is extremely loyal to Cameron and, for a weak leader, this must be handy too.

The Beeb also says former Commons Speaker Baroness Boothroyd has claimed Miller should resign as a matter of “honour”. Fat chance.

There’s no honour amongst thieves.

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‘The Budget that confirms Britain is worse-off under the Tories’

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alistair darling, banker, bedroom tax, benefit, benefit cap, benefits, budget, business, Coalition, Conservative, Corporation Tax, cost of living, council tax, cut, debt, deficit, Democrat, economy, Ed Miliband, employment, energy, environment, food bank, George Osborne, government, green, high speed rail, ISA, Labour, Lib Dem, Liberal, living standard, medical research, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, North Sea oil, nurse, Parliament, pay, Pensioner Bond, people, personal tax allowance, politics, public sector, referendum, restraint, rich, rise, saver, saving, Scotland, self, senior citizen, service, shale gas, social security, special advisor, spending, tax credit, Tories, Tory, Treasury, unemployment, Vox Political, welfare, work

Mr Os-bean: As Ed Miliband gave his response to the Budget, George Osborne had a gormless smile on his face that made him look like Mr Bean. This is not him – but it’s the closest image I could find at short notice. [Image as credited]

If a Conservative government is returned to office after the 2015 election, there will be yet more spending cuts and service cuts afflicting hard-working, low-paid families.

That was the message for most people in George Osborne’s latest attempt at a Budget speech today.

There were plenty of groan-worthy moments as the part-time chancellor trotted out the Coalition’s catchphrases: “We will fix the roof while the sun is shining” (groan. The job is taking so long, one has to question whether the contractor is Con-ning the client). “We are all in this together” (groan). Oh really?

Benefit spending is to be capped at £119 billion per year, albeit rising with inflation; public sector pay “restraint” will continue for the foreseeable future. This is from the government whose Prime Minister was confirmed, only minutes previously, as having approved 40 per cent pay rises for his special advisors!

Most significant is the fact that Osborne avoided mentioning ordinary working people for most of his speech; this was a budget for businesses, with the benefits reserved for fatcat bosses.

No major advanced economy in the World is growing faster than the UK, said Mr Osborne; more people are in work. This appears to be borne out by current employment figures (although it should be noted that this is due to a vast and questionable boom in self-employment – the number of employees has dropped by 60,000).

Where is the benefit to the British economy? Why has the deficit not been eliminated? Osborne said it stood at £157 billion in the year he came to office, and would be £108 billion this year, but in fact £39 billion was removed due to measures brought in by the previous Labour chancellor, Alistair Darling. He has cut government spending by something like £80 billion so far, but the deficit has dropped by – possibly – £10 billion. Not a good start to his speech.

There will be further investment in high-speed rail, even though there is no way of predicting whether this hugely costly investment in making train journeys 20 minutes faster will create any economic improvement.

There will be money to fund new centres for medical research – but will these be absorbed by private health firms after the public purse has paid for them?

There will be investment in faster extraction of oil from the North Sea – aiming to get as much as possible out before the Scottish referendum, in order to impoverish the Scots if they decide to go for independence?

And there will be investment in low-cost energy (finally killing the highly questionable green agenda) – meaning money for shale gas companies, and to hell with the environmental cost.

All this investment will go into businesses whose main contribution to the Treasury – Corporation Tax – has already dropped by a quarter (from 28 per cent to 21 per cent) and will go down to 20 per cent this year. This is less than the lowest level of Income Tax.

Up go the profits – down go the tax payments. Who benefits?

Council tax in England remains frozen, meaning fewer public services.

The personal tax allowance is to rise, so people may earn £10,500 before paying tax. This is nowhere near enough to offset the massive drop in living standards that has been caused by the Tory-led Coalition. The cost of living has risen for 44 out of the 45 months of this Parliament – for the whole period, if the earnings of high-paid bankers are removed from the calculation.

The threshold for payment of the 40p tax rate is to rise, so fewer people will pay the higher rate.

Savers are to be helped but – again – this is not a boost for the poor. Most working and unemployed families don’t have any spare money to put into the banks. How does it help them to know they would not pay any tax on savings up to £15,000 in an ISA, when they cannot afford to open one?

And there is a new Pensioner Bond for rich senior citizens (poorer pensioners don’t live long enough to benefit).

As Ed Miliband said in his scathing response, the Coalition can afford to give a tax cut of £200,000 per year to bankers who earn £5 million – but can’t afford £250 per year extra for nurses.

Mr Miliband said the Budget speech was more significant in what it hid than in what it actually said.

Working people are suffering under the Bedroom Tax, under cuts to their tax credits, and they are having to visit food banks if they want to eat.

This is a government that gives with one hand, but takes back much more with the other.

And the Conservatives have the bare-faced cheek to call themselves “The Workers’ Party”.

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More mistakes in the script? Correcting Cameron’s New Year speech

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Conservative, David Cameron, death, deficit, Department, DWP, economy, education, employer, Free School, fuel duty, genocide, immigration, Income Tax, jobs tax, Labour, migrant, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, minimum wage, national insurance, New Year message, part-time, pension, Pensions, phantom, politics, poor, problem, prole, referendum, responsibility, rich, scandal, Scotland, self-employed, social security, solution, special measures, Tories, Tory, Vox Political, welfare, work, zero hours

David Cameron’s New Year message – what a disgrace!

Standing uncomfortably in an empty factory (one presumes the workers were all on part-time contracts to save bosses money in holiday pay and national insurance), the comedy Prime Minister looked nervous as he reeled off a list of statements the Conservative Party wants the proles to believe, going into 2014.

What a shame his words were so easy to debunk.

If you can bear to hear it, play the video (above). I did, and wrote the following response in real time – as his speech was taking place. Then I sent it to his Facebook page. Here are my words:

“Mr Cameron,

“When you weren’t elected into office, the economy was on the up – and your policies killed it stone dead for three years. You haven’t cut the deficit significantly for years (it’s been stuck at £120 billion or thereabouts). You have cut income tax for the super-rich; raising the tax allowance for the poor (which you claim is a cut) means they don’t pay National Insurance (if anybody hadn’t noticed) and it will take them longer to qualify for retirement pension.

“You only decided to cut fuel duty because Labour came out with a better policy – and nobody was fooled by your choice.

“The jobs created under your government are part-time, zero-hours, or fake ‘self-employed’ in which the worker is contracted to larger companies and receives lower-than-minimum-wages for the amount of time spent. Stop talking nonsense about ‘jobs taxes’ – all this does is show that you do not understand the principles behind National Insurance.

“How many people did your ‘welfare’ work kill last year? We don’t know because your Department for Work and Pensions is terrified that releasing the figures will cause a national scandal.

“As for your immigration policy – apart from the tangential tightening of monitoring around the minimum wage, all your new measures are already enshrined in law; you have created phantom solutions to a phantom problem.

“Building an economy for people who work hard and “play by the rules”, is it? There’s a new condition in there, and people should be warned that your rules are not intended to benefit hard-working people but to free their employers from any responsibility towards those who generate their bloated salaries for them.

“I’m surprised you didn’t choke on your comments about education, after the fiasco that has led to the closure of one free school and special measures for several others.

“As far as the Scottish referendum is concerned, if any government, through its policies, could do more to push an entire country out of the United Kingdom, I don’t see how.

“I look forward to your response on the welfare deaths. In 2011 they stood at 73 per week, which was a scandal at the time. New figures will show whether you have been merely misguided or intentionally genocidal.

“Happy New Year? It will be a lot happier if you and your entire Parliamentary party resigned. How many of them know anything about struggling to make ends meet, in debt and in a place where there are no jobs to be had?

“You know nothing about hard work.”

Did anyone else notice he said nothing about the National Health Service, that his government has brought down from its most popular and efficient moment ever – slandering it and legislating to ensure private profit-driven firms could get into it, turning it away from healthcare and into money generation?

If ever there was a time to fight back for our cherished publicly-funded institutions, it is now.

That is the real message we should take from this soulless mouthpiece and his empty words.

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Bedroom tax condemns homes to demolition because they are too expensive for families

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accommodation, bedroom tax, benefit, benefits, build, Coalition, Conservative, corporate, corporation, cost, council tax, Danny Alexander, Democrat, demolish, Department, Department for Work and Pensions, developer, disability, disabled, DWP, energy, expensive, government, home, Homes and Communities Agency, house, housing association, housing benefit, Iain Duncan Smith, IDS, incompetent, Labour, Lib Dem, Liberal, living wage, luxury, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, MP, overcrowd, Parliament, payroll, Pensions, people, politics, private, property, Rachel Reeves, reduction, returned to unit, rich, RTU, salaries, salary, sick, social, social security, spare room subsidy, tax credit, taxpayer, Tories, Tory, unjust, unworkable, Vox Political, vulnerable, wage, welfare, Welfare Reform Act, work

The obvious solution: The government should be helping build new social housing – not forcing the demolition of what little there is.

If the government really wants to make larger social accommodation available to overcrowded families, why are housing associations knocking them down?

They have to go because the Bedroom Tax has made them too expensive, according to The Guardian.

The story, published yesterday, is another nail in the coffin of Iain Duncan Smith’s credibility. It doesn’t matter how many polls the Conservatives produce to support their claim that people agree with them; in practice, it simply doesn’t work.

Housing associations are finding three-bedroomed properties impossible to maintain. They cannot let them out, sell them or keep up with the costs of keeping them while they are empty.

All of this has serious implications for the Coalition government that voted the Bedroom Tax onto the statute books as part of Mr ‘Returned To Unit’ Smith’s hugely unpopular – and now proving to be unworkable – Welfare Reform Act last year.

On Tuesday, MPs will debate the future of the Tax, when Labour members are expected to vote for its immediate repeal. Senior Liberal Democrats are also believed to have doubts – The Guardian (again) has quoted Danny Alexander’s father as saying it is “particularly unfair”.

Labour’s Rachel Reeves has overcome a shaky start in her role as shadow Work and Pensions Secretary to get right on-message with this. According to The Guardian report, she said: “This incompetent and out of touch government seems oblivious to the perverse and costly consequences of this unjust and unworkable policy.

“Not only is it hitting 660,000 vulnerable households, including 440,000 disabled people; the costs to the taxpayer are mounting as people are pushed into more expensive private rented accommodation while existing social homes are left vacant.”

Of course, Dear Reader, she’s right. You read it here first – all the way back in October last year.

Surely it makes more sense to have someone living in these properties, rather than losing them altogether? Does the government have an answer for this?

Apparently not. A government spokes-robot trotted out the same tired nonsense we’ve all come to despise: “The removal of the spare room subsidy is a necessary reform that will return fairness to housing benefit. We’ve been clear that hardworking people should not be subsidising tenants living in properties that are too large for their requirements.”

Let’s all remember that there never was a spare room subsidy for the government to remove. It never existed. Therefore its removal is not a necessary reform; it can never be vital to remove something that is fictional. Also, the removal of a fictional thing cannot restore fairness anywhere.

Hard-working people probably shouldn’t be subsidising tenants who are under-occupying, but then hard-working people were never the only ones paying for this to happen. Everybody in the UK pays taxes one way or another – even children.

And while we’re on the subject of what hard-working people subsidise, why is it bad for them to help people stay in the social housing that was originally allocated to them, but good for them to help massive corporations keep their payroll costs down by paying tax credits, housing benefit and council tax reduction costs for people earning less than the Living Wage? Why is it good for them to pay the cost of MPs’ energy bills as well as their own?

“Consent from the Homes and Communities Agency is required before any social housing provider can dispose of a site on which social housing stood and will ensure that public investment and the needs of tenants are protected,” the robot continued, but we should all know that this will be no obstacle.

Demolition of social housing means land becomes available for private developers to build new, luxury homes for the very rich.

That’s where the big money is.

Let’s make abuse of power a crime and Lord Freud the first to be prosecuted

Tags

abuse, authorities, authority, avoidance, bedroom, benefit, bully, classify, Coalition, Conservative, council, Customs, Department for Work and Pensions, designated, DWP, government, haven, hm, hmrc, housing, inconsistency, inspector, local, Lord Freud, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, non, office, offshore, people, politics, power, re, rent, Revenue, rich, robbery, social security, subsidy, tax, Tories, Tory, Treasury, UK, Vox Political, welfare

Face of evil: Because of creatures like Lord Freud, Parliament should legislate against a new crime – abuse of power. (Picture by Black Triangle)

Lord David Fraud – sorry, Freud. That was a Freudian slip – the man who said “People who are poorer should be prepared to take the biggest risks; they’ve got least to lose”, has been at it again.

According to Inside Housing this man, whose principles allowed him to take Labour’s money and provide that government with his duff advice before running off to join the Tories as soon as it looked as though they would be in office after the 2010 election, wants to bully councils out of an entirely legal way to help their tenants avoid paying the punitive and unfair bedroom tax.

The tax, as we all should know by now, affects people living in social rented accommodation with more bedrooms – as defined by the rent agreement (if I recall correctly) – than the government last year arbitarily decided they need. The options are to give up 14 per cent of your housing benefit if you have one ‘extra’ bedroom, 25 per cent if you’ve got two – or move to smaller accommodation which does not, in the vast majority of cases, exist.

Out of 600,000 affected families, 582,000 have nowhere else to go. So this is a thinly-veiled robbery, from people who can do nothing to prevent it.

It is a tax that has offended many councillors in local authorities across the UK, and some came up with the novel idea that rooms within the properties they own may be reclassified as offices or ‘non-designated’ rooms, thereby avoiding the need to pay the tax. After all, a room is just an enclosed space within a building, right? If it doesn’t have a bed in it, why should it be classified as a bedroom?

Lord Fraud – sorry! Freud – doesn’t see it that way. He wants that cash and couldn’t care less that people in social housing need it to keep a roof over their heads. He has been spending the last month or so (since the councils started re-classifying) trying to put a stop to it and now, it seems, he thinks he has found a way.

In a letter to council chief executives yesterday (Thursday), he has said redesignating properties without reducing their rent to reflect the loss of a bedroom creates an inconsistency for housing benefit and rent purposes.

“Blanket redesignations without a clear and justifiable reason and without reductions in rent, are inappropriate and do not fall within the spirit of the policy,” his letter states [italics mine].

“If it is shown properties are being redesignated inappropriately this will be viewed very seriously.” Meaning: The DWP will commission an independent audit to “ascertain whether correct and appropriate procedures have been followed”. Redesignation without reducing rent would lead to incorrect housing benefit subsidy claims being submitted to the DWP, he stated, adding, “Where it is found that a local authority has redesignated properties without reasonable grounds and without reducing rents, my department would consider either restricting or not paying their housing benefit subsidy.”

The flaw, of course, is this: The size of these properties will have remained the same, therefore so should the rent. But a room without a bed in it is not a bedroom.

Let’s move on to another tax avoidance issue. Since we’re discussing actions that are “inappropriate and do not fall within the spirit of the policy“, what about tax avoidance schemes that are used by very rich individuals, in order to avoid paying the full amount they owe to the UK Treasury?

This has been going on for more years than any of us can remember and the total currently parked offshore, where the tax inspector can’t get at it, is estimated at £21 trillion (it might actually be dollars, but either way it’s a heckuva lot of money).

If the turncoat Lord Freud’s new Conservative friends had been quick off the mark in dealing with this aspect of tax avoidance, he might have been justified in his own hasty behaviour, but they haven’t. Even now, there is no guarantee that the Treasury will get anything back from the tax havens, despite all its posturing and sabre-rattling. There’s just no interest. And by the time anyone gets around to actually taking action, the offenders will have had plenty of opportunity to move their capital elsewhere.

But the actions of the individual taxpayers who have chosen to put their money out of HMRC’s reach is no closer to the spirit of UK tax policy than the actions of the councils who have chosen to protect their tenants.

The difference is that one set of individuals is acting in selfish self-interest, while the other is taking action to help others.

Freud, by his own actions, has shown us all exactly where his loyalties lie. He’s not against tax avoidance, as long as it’s his kind of people doing it. And he loves to bully the little people. He really gets a kick out of threatening them, and he’s not above bending – or changing – the law to do it.

That’s why I say any new government coming into office after 2015 needs to enact a law that criminalises abuse of power – being any legislation or act by a government member that unfairly punishes any named individual or group within British society.

So for example here, it could be applied because Freud wants to penalise hundreds of thousands of people with a tax they can’t pay, when there is no alternative because they have nowhere else to go (except to be thrown out onto the streets, and then the question to be asked is, who takes over the properties after they have gone?) – and is now threatening to punish any attempt legally to avoid paying that unfair tax with another unfair punishment, because others who also legally avoid paying a – fair – tax are being allowed to do so.

As a criminal offence it should involve the sternest penalties possible – stripping the guilty of any titles and privileges, and all property, alongside a lengthy prison sentence involving the hardest labour to which prisoners may be put. Anyone who is willing to deprive the defenceless of everything they own should be made to lose everything as well.

So Lord Freud, for example, would have to kiss goodbye to his luxury mansion in Kent, and everything in it. When he finally came out of clink, he’d be living in council accommodation – and if nowhere could be found that didn’t have more bedrooms than he needed, he’d have to pay his own bedroom tax which would be poetic justice.

I know. It will never happen. Politicians look after their own.

But it should – and you know it.

The hellish legacy of Thatcher

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Martin Rowson’s Guardian cartoon of April 13 satirises the spectacle of Baroness Thatcher’s funeral, calling it as he sees it: A primitive tribal ritual.

“This is Hell, nor am I out of it.” – Mephistopheles, Doctor Faustus.

As I write these words, the funeral of Margaret Thatcher is taking place at St Paul’s Cathedral in London.

Unemployment stands at 2.56 million (7.9 per cent of the workforce).

The banks are not lending money.

More small firms are going out of business every day.

The economy is stagnant and the outlook for growth is bleak, according to the International Monetary Fund.

The rich elite prey on the poor – Britain’s highest-earners are billions better-off than in 2010, while wages for the lowest-earners are increased by so little that most of them are on benefit and sliding into debt (0.8 per cent rise in the year to February).

The cost of living has risen by around three per cent.

900,000 people have been out of work for more than a year.

The number of unemployed people aged 16-24 is up to 979,000 (21.6 per cent of all those in that age group).

Politicians lie to us, in order to win our support by deceit.

Assessment for disability benefits is on a model devised by an insurance company to avoid paying money to those who need it most.

Health services are being privatised, to make money for corporate shareholders rather than heal the sick.

Government policies have reinstated the ‘Poll Tax’ principle that everybody must pay taxation, no matter how poor they are.

Government policies mean child poverty will rise by 100,000 this year. It will not achieve the target of ending child poverty in the UK by 2020.

Government policies are ensuring that many thousands of people will soon be homeless, while social housing is being sold into the private sector.

And Legal Aid is being cut back, to ensure that the only people with access to justice are those who can pay for it.

This is Thatcher’s Britain, nor are we out of it.

She died; we went to hell.