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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Does Cameron really think Scotland will stay in the UK because he wants it?

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British Isles, community, Conservative, Culture, David Cameron, diminish, economic, emotional blackmail, England, feral, global, ground, independence, influence, international, leave, memory, Northern Ireland, philosophic, policies, policy, Poll Tax, referendum, Scotland, secede, share, short, shrink, society, speech, state, stay, test, Tories, Tory, United Kingdom, unstatesmanlike, Wales

Why Cameron is on a hiding to nothing: Many Scottish people have not forgotten how British governments have mistreated them. [Image: Ceasefire Magazine]

David Cameron gave a speech today in which he made an impassioned plea for Scottish people to vote for staying in the United Kingdom – and if any of them needed an excuse to do the exact opposite, there it is.

He made his comments from the Olympic Park in London – which says everything you need to know about his relationship with Scotland. Was he afraid of the jeers if he travelled up to Edinburgh?

“I passionately believe it is in their interests to stay in the UK – that way Scotland has the space to take decisions while still having the security that comes with being part of something bigger,” Cameron wittered. But he has been shrinking the state. The UK as a whole is much smaller – economically and philosophically – than it was four years ago and that’s his fault.

“In the UK, Scotland is part of a major global player,” he burbled. But the rest of the world now looks down on the UK because of his unstatesmanlike behaviour when dealing with foreign powers. He has diminished the UK in the international community and the Scottish people are well able to see that.

Appealing for those of us in the other UK countries – England, Wales and NI – to apply emotional blackmail on our friends in Scotland, he gibbered: “From us to the people of Scotland, let the message be this: We want you to stay.”

Cameron must think we all have memories so short we could qualify as brain-damaged. Conservatives have historically used Scotland as the testing ground for every rotten little policy they wanted to try out – remember the Poll Tax? – because of no special quality other than the fact that there are no Conservative MPs there.

I don’t want Scotland to vote for independence because I think Scottish people have contributed hugely towards the culture shared by everybody living on the British Isles – it is possible they have added more to our society than the English who dominate our political lives.

In return, they have been treated abominably – most particularly by English Conservatives – and that is why I can’t see Scotland staying in the Union while an English Conservative is in charge in Westminster.

If Scotland does go, you should all know what will happen next: Wales will become the testing ground for rubbish Tory policies. They won’t try it on Northern Ireland because that province’s history tells them exactly what they’d get in return – and if that isn’t a good enough reason for the Welsh people to go feral and start causing havoc, I don’t know what is!

So well done, David – you have considerably worsened our chances of remaining united.

My only hope is that, if Scotland does secede from the union, its leaders keep the door open, so that there always remains the possibility of some form of reunification on terms that strengthen both countries – when (or if) a reasonable government is returned to office in the UK.

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Public and private debt reach record levels under ConDem Coalition

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bank, bankrupt, BBC, benefit, benefits, borrow, breadline, building, cap, claim, Coalition, ConDem, Conservative, Dawn Capital, debt, Democrat, economy, George, George Osborne, Gideon, government, household, insolvent, job, landlord, Lib Dem, Liberal, loan, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, mortgage, off, order, Osborne, people, politics, possession, private, public, rate, repossess, social security, societies, society, tax, tax haven, taxation, The Money Charity, Tories, Tory, unemploy, unemployment, welfare, Wonga, work, write, wrote

Household debt in the UK has reached a record £1.43 trillion, according to the BBC. What a marvellous achievement for Gideon George Osborne to put next to his already-record public net debt of £1.212 trillion (excluding interventions) or £2.184 trillion (including them).

If you’re surprised at that, don’t be – he needs to pretend that there isn’t any money so he can cut any services that are still left in the public domain after the fire sale of the last few years.

The Tory plan was always to increase private debt. Of course it was – if you cut public spending for people on the breadline, then they go into debt. Why do you think Wonga.com’s owner Dawn Capital is such a prolific contributor to Tory Party funds, with £537,000 in known donations this time last year?

The rich are shielded from debt problems in the same way they are shielded from taxation, thanks to the way our tax laws have been rewritten in their favour – all their money is safely tucked away in tax havens and can’t be touched.

On average, each adult in the UK owes £28,489. Some owe much more than that, though. Yr obdt srvt doesn’t owe a bean to anyone, despite being very poor, so that’s already £28,489 to be spread among everyone else. Mrs Mike isn’t in debt either.

The BBC report cautiously suggests that the record debt level “might increase concerns that the UK’s economic recovery [you know, the one they keep talking about on the news and in Parliament as if it actually exists] is based on increased borrowing, rather than growth sustained by rising incomes” – which of course is correct.

According to The Money Charity, total net lending by UK banks and building societies rose by £1.9 billion in September 2013 – that’s just in one month.

Over the four quarters to Q2 2013, they wrote off £3.67 billion of loans to individuals. In Q2 2013, the daily write-off was £7.61 million.

Based on the latest available data, every day in the UK 285 people are declared insolvent or bankrupt – that’s one every five minutes; 84 properties are repossessed; 1,447 people lost their jobs and eight people became unemployed for more than 12 months; 141 mortgage possession claims are issued and 113 mortgage possession orders are made; and 431 landlord possession claims are issued and 319 landlord possession orders are made.

The benefit system helps nobody. It has been redesigned specifically to push people further into debt – the cap on benefit rate increases to one per cent per year means people are two per cent worse-off for every year it continues, while inflation remains at current levels.

It is in this atmosphere that words written in this blog more than a year ago come back to haunt us all: “What do people do for money when the State fails them and they can’t get work? They fall into the debt trap.

“High-interest, doorstep lending to poor people is Britain’s latest – perhaps only – boom industry. In other words, the government’s sick benefits regime is forcing the poor into debt to organisations that will take away everything they have left, in order to make up payments on a loan whose interest rate they probably made up on the spot.

“And when they’ve taken everything, what do you do then?

“Do you really want your kids to starve?”

Who’s ashamed of the big bad ‘B’ word?

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benefit, benefits, burden, carers allowance, constructive dismissal, Daily Mail, debt, Department, Disability Living Allowance, Douglas Adams, DWP, employee, employer, fraud, health, Iain Duncan Smith, Incapacity Benefit, Lord Freud, Mehdi Hasan, mental, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, Pensions, Royal Mail, scrounger, shame, skiver, society, Vox Political, work

Who should be more ashamed that Peter Lumb (left) has been summonsed because he is unemployed and does not have the cash to pay his council tax bill? Mr Lumb himself? Or George Osborne (right) for creating a system in which people like Mr Lumb are thrown away by indifferent employers?

“Why are you ashamed of being on benefits?”

One of our commenters asked this of another after they admitted that being on benefits made them feel ashamed. It took me completely by surprise as at first I thought it was aimed at me. Then it occurred that it might have been a general question aimed at anybody on benefits. Only then did I see that it was a response to someone else who had said as much.

In the period between reading the comment and realising what it was about, my mind went through several different thought processes which, in the spirit of Douglas Adams, we may call the Why, How and Who phases. The first could be characterised by the question, ‘Why should I feel ashamed?’; the second by the question, ‘How could shame be an appropriate response?’; and the third by the question, ‘Who should feel ashamed?’

Let’s look at the first. I’m on a benefit; I receive Carers’ Allowance. I feel no shame whatsoever for being in receipt of it. Here’s why:

I quit my last (full-time) news reporting job in mid-2007 to become a full-time carer for Mrs Mike. As everyone reading this probably knows by now, Mrs M has been in a great deal of pain for a great deal of time, and her condition has been worsening. In 2007 the government of the day acknowledged this by putting her on Disability Living Allowance (she was already on Incapacity Benefit), and this meant that I could get the allowance if I was looking after her for more than 35 hours a week. I jumped at the opportunity.

Yes – it was an opportunity. You see, conditions at work had been worsening of late. For the hours I was being asked to work, my pay packet had been decreasing, in real terms, year-on-year. Recently the company had decided to move the office where I worked to the far edge of the patch I covered, forcing me to drive 82 miles there and back, every day. I was tired, I felt misused, and I was starting to go into debt.  Swap this for benefits? For me, it wasn’t a decision at all.

Note carefully: My decision to go on benefits made me better-off (I’m not in debt any more) – not because benefits habitually pay more than wages, but because my (former) bosses had been pushing my wages down, in real terms, beyond the point at which I could make ends meet. It was their decision to do so that meant I could not balance my books; it was their decision to move the office that meant I was spending hours every day in transit when I could have been doing something else; it was the same decision that meant I knew I would not be able to cover the patch as well as I wanted to.

I could have made a case for constructive dismissal. This seemed a much more amicable way out.

I don’t think my situation is unusual. Across the UK, millions of employees are probably in the same situation now – or one that is worse. The problem does not lie with them but with their bosses. If any of them had to give up their job for similar reasons, there would be no cause for shame (in my opinion).

The other reason I don’t feel any shame about being on benefits is that I haven’t made that the sum total of my life. I carry out my caring duties diligently – and have gone head-to-head against the Department for Work and Pensions in the course of those duties, as has been reported here many times.

But I am allowed to do other things as well, provided that my earnings do not exceed a certain amount per week. That’s why I was able to work for an internet news service earlier this year (until their funding for me ran out). That’s why I’ve published one Vox Political book already*, with two more on the way.

These are all legitimate – and in fact if the books started bringing in a larger income – enough to support us – I would be overjoyed at the chance to get off-benefit and provide Mrs M with a better quality of life.

What I’m saying is that being on benefits should not put an end to anybody’s ambitions. You might be supported by the state’s (extremely threadbare and fragile, thanks to Lord Fraud’s and Iain Duncan Smith’s interference) safety net, but that doesn’t mean you can’t keep working for what you want to do.

This leads me to the answer I found for the second question, ‘How could shame be an appropriate response?’ The only reason a person on benefits should be ashamed of it is if they are not doing everything they can to get back on track – getting into the career they want and earning a living wage from it.

A wiser man once said that the way forward is dedication. If you are able-bodied and you have an ambition to be… I don’t know… a writer, it’s not going to happen straight away – so get a job frying fish down at the local chip shop if that’s what it takes to pay the bills, or go on benefits if there aren’t even menial jobs around, but make sure you spend all your spare time putting in the effort to get that first writing gig, whether it’s journalism, scripting comics, writing gags for radio or TV comedy shows, scripting full-length shows, staging plays on an amateur level with a view to progressing into professional theatre – whatever. The possibilities are endless and anyone who wants to make a living from pounding keyboards will need to try the lot.

And there’s no shame in working for employers who have different beliefs – political, moral, whatever – than yourself. If their dollar is good, then it’s all good experience and (if you are a writer) possible grist for the mill one day. That’s one reason I saw nothing badly wrong with Mehdi Hasan’s application to work for the Daily Mail.

The shame would lie in giving up; turning away from your ambitions and accepting society’s current label for a benefit claimant – being a scrounger. Being a skiver. Being a burden on society. Or never bothering to try in the first place.

So, finally, ‘Who should feel ashamed?’ Not me. Not anybody who has been dropped by their employer because of the downturn, nor anybody who has been trying hard to climb back onto the employment ladder. Especially not those who have been trying so hard, and for so long, that they have suffered mental health problems as a result.

Some people claiming benefits do have a legitimate reason to be ashamed of it. They are the people who are ‘playing’ the system; the benefit fraudsters, the ones who could do better but can’t be bothered, the ones who pretend they are ill when they aren’t.

They total seven people in every thousand benefit claimants. They are a tiny, tiny minority. But they’re not the only ones who should be ashamed.

It seems to me that a far larger portion of shame lies with employers who deliberately push workforce wages downwards, in order to improve their own salaries (and in some cases, shareholder profits – look out, Royal Mail employees). It lies with employers who treat their people as disposable commodities, rather than assets to be nurtured.

And it also lies with governments, past and present, that allowed these practices to go on – and in fact failed to legislate against them; and with politicians who have worked for the advantage of Big Money, rather than that of the Little People who create it.

That’s where the real shame lies.

Not with folk like you and me who’ve got patches on every pair of trousers they own.

But with the people in the expensive suits.

* Vox Political: Strong Words and Hard Times may be bought here, here, here, here and here, costing £9.99 or £4 – depending on the format in which you wish to receive it.

Housing benefit cuts: Public opinion poisoned by “toxic” news stories and DWP babble

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accommodation, Alison Huggan, BBC, bedroom tax, benefit, benefits, Coalition, Coast and Country, Conservative, council, crime, Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph, David Orr, debt, Department for Work and Pensions, DWP, East Ayrshire, Ed Miliband, employed, employment, empty, Fabian, families, family, government, house, housing association, housing benefit, Iain Duncan Smith, Iain Sim, in-work, Margaret Thatcher, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, National Housing Federation, people, politics, poverty, Prime Minister's Questions, property, rent arrears, social security, society, spare room subsidy, tax, Tories, Tory, unemployment, vacant, Vox Political, welfare, working

The real cost of the Bedroom Tax: How many people are going to be thrown out of their homes after losing the arbitrary ‘spare-room subsidy’, that was invented by people like Lord David Freud, who lives in an eight-bedroomed mansion?

A report by the Fabian Society has revealed that the majority of the public wants the government to tackle unemployment, low wages and rising rents, rather than make further spending cuts in housing benefit – just as the National Housing Federation said the consequences of April’s bedroom tax (and other measures) have been worse than feared.

Rent arrears have soared, while larger houses are being left empty because people are refusing to move in and pay the arbitrary “spare room subsidy” that the Coalition government dreamed up last year as an excuse to steal housing benefit money from poor families.

Public feeling on the subject has been manipulated by the right-wing media such as the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail, according to the Fabian Society report. It showed that people were initially more convinced by arguments against spending on housing benefit, which costs £23 billion per year.

But this changed when astonished poll participants learned that 93 per cent of the increase in housing benefit claims between 2010-11 came from working people.

The survey found that 63 per cent of people felt poverty was “caused by forces beyond the control of the individual”.

Meanwhile David Orr, chief executive of the National Housing Federation, told the BBC the impact of the tax had been “at least as bad as we had anticipated, in many cases even worse”.

The government’s stated plan – that withdrawing benefit if people are living in a house with a “spare” bedroom, as defined by the Department for Work and Pensions, would encourage them to move to smaller properties – was never going to work as there are 582,000 more families who would need to move than there are suitable properties for them to move into. This is because successive governments have failed to build social accommodation – including the current Coalition.

But Mr Orr said larger homes, vacated by families that had found alternative accommodation, were now going empty because nobody else could afford to move into them.

Of course, this is a disaster for housing associations – the main operators in the social rented sector since Margaret Thatcher started selling council houses in the 1980s; as their homes go empty, they lose money.

“The numbers of empty homes we’ve got to let are increasing significantly,” said Iain Sim, chief executive of Coast and Country Housing, in the BBC website article. “People are now telling us that because of bedroom tax, they can no longer afford to move into the bigger family homes, and as a consequence of that we’re getting fewer lettings and more empty houses.”

You might feel unsympathetic about this – perhaps you think housing associations are part of the problem because they haven’t built smaller accommodation either. But then, they tend to expect to provide homes for families, so this strategy is understandable.

For those who are trapped in larger houses and forced to pay the bedroom tax, rent arrears are on the increase – East Ayrshire Council says its arrears are up by 340 per cent after the tax was introduced.

And those living near newly-empty houses say they expect an increase in crime as a result.

The BBC report also mentions the case of people like Alison Huggan, whose case was mentioned by Ed Miliband in Prime Minister’s Questions in February. The government told her that parents of children in the military who are deployed on operations would be exempt from the bedroom tax – but her local council has imposed it on her because her military sons’ main residences are deemed to be their barracks in Germany and Cyprus.

She said in the report that she felt “cheated, and lied to”.

Considering the situation, the reason for this is clear: She was.

The Department for Work and Pensions is unrepentant but, compared with what is actually happening, the spiel it trotted out for the BBC piece is incredibly ill-advised. A spokesman said the measure was returning fairness to housing: “In England alone there are nearly two million households on the social housing waiting list and over a quarter of a million tenants are living in overcrowded homes”.

… and the bedroom tax means that large homes that could be used to accommodate them are going empty and housing associations are feeling the pinch. How long will it be before they start to collapse?

“This is causing real misery,” Mr Orr told BBC Radio 5 Live.

Well, it would. It seems that was always the intention.

Why we’ll never have full employment – even though we need it

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austerity, banker, Beveridge, construction, consumer, contract, disability, disabled, disposable, economy, employment, full, income, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, multiplier effect, National Health Service, NHS, politician, poor, rich, sick, society, state, unemployment, Vox Political, welfare

Today Vox Political is offering a guest blog, for your edification and education. Graeme Beard wrote the following in response to ‘Millionaire’s government will make paupers of us all’. It’s far too long for me to put in the ‘Comment’ section of that article but far too interesting to let it go unpublished. Therefore I am reproducing it as an article in its own right. If anyone else has anything they want to get off their chests, I’ll happily consider other submissions as well.

Over to Graeme:

OK – well let’s get something rather nasty out of the way first. Austerity for the masses is an extremely efficient and effective macro-economic device. Absolutely counter-productive and even destructive to a consumer based economy it is the best way by far, (apart from slavery) on a macro-economic level to shift money from the pockets of the poor to the pockets of the rich.

Make no mistake, the austerity measures being introduced are moving £Billions ‘upward’. None will come ‘downward’. The national debt will be paid off by the poor and the poorer. It will not, and is not being paid off by the rich and affluent. They are untouched and seem to be untouchable. In fact the rich and affluent are seeing their personal wealth increase at an incredible rate.

The following is a global perspective but it applies just as strongly to the UK. The rich are enjoying a boom time and for this particular conspiracy theorist I am of the opinion that it is a deliberate measure. They want it all.

Secondly, let’s state the ‘bleedin obvious’: We live in a consumer society. Like it or not – want to change it or not – it’s what we got, playmates. To that end we have to play the ‘consumer game’ cards in hand. There is no choice. It is a given.

A consumer society (be it local, national or global) depends almost entirely on consumers having a disposable income. That is, money above and beyond that which they need purely to survive. If they do not have a disposable income over and above that needed to satisfy their basic needs such as food, clothing, utility bills, shelter etc then, in many ways, they become what economists call ‘non-consumers’.

For instance, they can’t spend money on what some would consider to be luxury goods like new or used motor cars, or books, or education, or to replace a cooker or fridge that’s on its way out. They make-do, make-shift and mend. Their ‘extra’ spending on consumer goods (the very goods we need to be purchased by consumers in order for the economy not only to grow, but survive) is dead in the water. If they haven’t got it they can’t spend it. The more that have no – or diminishing – disposable income, the more the economy will contract.

It’s happening now and there’s more to come. Far more. People thrown out of work, because of slowing demand or even a demand crash in consumer goods they make or services they provide, or those that become disabled and draw state benefits, are a prime example. They do little more than survive and become non-consumers above subsistence in double quick time. Ergo they are lost to the consumer society. It is a downward spiral and the Multiplier Effect takes over in negative form. See below.

Now this is not rocket science and can plainly be seen repeatedly with only a cursory glance at macro-economic history. Don’t believe me? Look for yourself! To introduce and pursue measures of austerity for the mass of the population in an attempt to ‘heal’ a consumer economy is like trying to catch hold of the world by the arse and pull it uphill.

These austerity measures are either being pursued in ignorance (which I find very hard to believe) or as a deliberate measure to engorge the rich and affluent at the expense of the poor.

For 35 years, post-Second World War, the UK had full employment. Bankrupted by the conflict and in massive national debt, the population was fully employed; the NHS was introduced; the welfare system proposed by ‘The Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee on Social Insurance and Allied Services.’ (The Beveridge Report) was adopted and applied with vigour. People had jobs with disposable income; they consumed (and in quantity – demand for consumer goods went through the roof); tax incomes to the government went up enormously; numbers of people on benefits were minuscule (they had jobs); the construction industry went off ‘bang!’; etc etc. I’m sure you get the drift. John Maynard Keynes’ ‘Multiplier Effect’ in motion and this time in positive mode.

Bit of a problem though! Full employment came with a terrible cost. It gave those in employment power – mainly the power to withdraw their labour and expertise.

And that’s the reason we will never have full employment in the UK ever again.

It gives people at the bottom power and those at the top really don’t want that. They need the sticks of unemployment and poverty for them to sustain their lifestyles.   People on the breadline and/or in debt or under threat keep their heads down, live smaller and smaller, and consume less and less in the hope it will eventually, by some kind of magic, get better. It rarely does.

In concert with that, and at the very same time, those who feel insecure and threatened but are in decently-paid jobs and who could shut down their spending too and save more and more for their (maybe) ‘rainy day’ are also removed, if only in part, from the consumer society that we all depend on.

So, actually impoverishing consumers – the very consumers who could – and, history shows, would – drag this economy out of the faecal mess that the cretinous politicians and bankers put us in in the first place, means they are unable to do so – because they are struggling with ‘austerity measures’ and seeing their disposable income decrease alarmingly.

Full employment, as dangerous to those ‘above’ as it may be, is good for a consumer society. Taxes are paid alongside National Insurance contributions; welfare payments reduce exponentially because people have jobs; demand for consumer goods increases and, via the ‘multiplier effect’, more jobs come online and more money is made available to spend. It is an upward spiral.

If you want to heal a consumer economy, don’t introduce more disease. Austerity for the masses is exactly that – a disease – to a consumer society. Don’t believe me though – gawd forbid! Look around you, because it’s happening now, and happening just about everywhere apart from the more affluent areas of the UK.

And that, in part, is why our towns as a working example are full of charity shops, pawnbrokers, and people wanting to buy your surplus gold for two and a half buttons so they can get rich and you can eat or heat next week.

As an addendum: http://www.ted.com/talks/richard_wilkinson.html?utm_source=newsletter_weekly_2011-10-25&utm_campaign=newsletter_weekly&utm_medium=email

Iain Duncan Smith’s shirkers and scroungers: Soldiers, teachers and nurses

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David Cameron, pictured in the Telegraph article: “I want to go on,” he says, neglecting to add, “harming the honest, the hard-working, the strivers and the tryers of the UK. I want to go on rewarding the tax-dodgers, the bankers, the exploiters and Parliamentary scroungers. I want to go on deceiving the easily-led into believing that my way is the only way, and duping my Coalition partners into supporting my extreme right-wing policies until I can sling them into the gutter in 2015”. Does that seem about right to you?

Apparently ‘Compassionate Conservatism’ doesn’t extend to people in certain professions.

According to a new analysis by The Children’s Society published in The Observer, almost half a million soldiers, teachers and nurses will lose hundreds of pounds every year when the Coalition’s latest benefit cut comes into force.

The cap of one per cent on benefit and tax credits upratings over the next three years means up to 40,000 soldiers will be worse-off: A second lieutenant in the army with three children, earning £470 a week and whose wife does not work will lose £552 per year.

Around 150,000 primary and nursery school teachers will lose out: A couple with two children where the sole earner is a primary school teacher earning £600 per week will lose £424.

But the majority of losers in the professions will be nurses – 300,000 of them. A lone-parent nurse with two children, earning the profession’s average of £530 per week, will lose £424 per year.

For a government that likes to state “We love the NHS”, the Coalition seems to really enjoy attacking nurses and trying to cover it up. By December 13 last year, 7,134 nursing posts had been lost since the Coalition came into power, 943 in the previous month alone. But when the issue was raised in Parliamentary debate, Health Secretary and gynaecological slang-term Jeremy Hunt did his level best to avoid giving a straight response. “The nurse to bed ratio has gone up. The average bed is getting an extra two hours of nursing care, per week, than under Labour.” That didn’t tell us how many nurses had lost their jobs. So we got: “The number of clinical staff in the NHS has gone up and not down. I don’t want to micro-manage every hospital in the country and tell them how many doctors and how many nurses.”

Perhaps there’s some deep-seated childhood trauma affected all the members of the Coalition government, that makes them want to persecute nurses and then try to cover it up? Whatever the case, I’m sure the facts would form the skeleton of a terrific little crime thriller.

Don’t be fooled by the fact that the government will be debating an increase of one per cent in benefits this year. With inflation at 2.7 or 3.2 per cent, depending on which system you use, that’s a real-terms cut of two per cent every year for the next three years.

I’d like to draw your attention to the fact that these figures were compiled by The Children’s Society, meaning they relate only to working parents. The one per cent cap on benefit rises will hit single working people as well – we just don’t have the figures for them yet.

The figures make a nonsense of Iain Duncan Smith’s increasingly desperate claims that his policy of cuts and persecution to achieve lower take-up of welfare benefits is fair.

The Tories have now alienated working people and those on benefits. Who’s next, do you think? I reckon pensioners had better prepare for the worst!

Remember last week, when he trotted out a roll of fabricated figures to make it seem that the tax credit system had run out of control under Labour (tax credits are among the benefits to be capped at one per cent)? It turns out that all his figures were wrong, with his claims about fraud – which stands at less than one per cent of total claims – spectacularly inaccurate.

How about the very next day, when he was dribbling about the relative percentage rises in Jobseekers’ Allowance and private sector salaries, claiming that the unemployed were getting a far better deal than workers – only to be rebuffed when we all checked how much this was in real money, found out that workers were still making far more (although not enough – remember many employers pay so little that people working full-time still have to claim state benefits, so that’s a subsidy for private companies, being paid out of our taxes). The amount paid in benefits as a proportion of average wages has stayed the same, as it should. The Work and Pensions Secretary is hell-bent on breaking that link in order to inflict real harm on Britain’s poorest.

Does anybody remember the Tory slogan “Broken Britain”? What they didn’t tell us was that they were the ones who wanted to break us!

And now David Cameron has told the Telegraph he wants to be Prime Minister for another full term, from 2015 to 2020. If he manages that feat, he will no doubt face pressure from some of his own cabinet members to inflict further harm on those receiving benefits.

For example, a group of 70 Tory MPs including Michael Gove and David Willetts have published an agenda of policies that one minister has already – according to the Torygraph – described as a “blueprint” for the party’s next general election manifesto.

It includes plans to lengthen the school day “to help working parents” – how do you like that, all you teachers who are losing benefits this year? You can rest assured that your pay won’t increase to cover the extra hours!

And it calls for benefits to be cut for people who live in the North, and other parts of the country where the cost of living is lower. They love regional pay, don’t they? And they WILL drive it through, no matter how much of the population oppose it!

For a representative selection of citizens’ opinions about this, I suggest you visit the MSN news site’s version of this story where (when I looked last night) the Comment column was unanimously opposed to Cameron continuing. That’s something like 20-odd pages of people demanding that he be ousted at the first opportunity.

It did my heart good to see that.

The sad truth is that none of the above will change the result of the debate and vote on benefits uprating, due to take place in the House of Commons on Tuesday.

As long as the Tories have the support of Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrats, they have a majority and can vote through any ludicrous and harmful policies they please.

The only thing I can suggest is that you all email your MPs in advance of the debate and put pressure on them to do the right thing – or account for their decision if they vote with the government – especially if you live in the North, or in rural areas!

As ever, you can find your MP’s contact details here: http://www.parliament.uk/get-involved/contact-your-mp/

Follow me on Twitter: @MidWalesMike

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