The Guardian – by Polly Toynbee
Not many know what is about to happen on Monday: neither those about
to be knocked down nor those sailing too high above them to notice. But
historians will see it as the day that defines the Cameron government.
An avalanche of benefit cuts will hit the same households over and over,
with no official assessment of how far this £18bn reduction will send
those who are already poor into beggary.
In his 2009
Hugo Young lecture,
David Cameron spoke with apparent passion of the damage done by
inequality: “We all know, in our hearts, that as long as there is deep
poverty living systematically side by side with great riches, we all
remain the poorer for it.” The wise saw the wolf beneath the
sheepskin:
sure enough, once in power, the language he and his ministers used to
blame the poor for their plight was cruder and fiercer than in
Thatcher’s day. You need to go back to Edwardian times to find ministers
and commentators so viciously dismissing all on low incomes as
cheats, idlers and drunks.
On BBC news, Iain Duncan Smith, confronted with irrefutable cases of
hardship, said: “It’s about trying to get as many people as possible out
of the welfare trap and into lives they can control themselves.” As the
economist JK Galbraith observed: “The modern conservative is engaged in
one of man’s oldest exercises in
moral philosophy: that is, the
search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”
So far, public opinion seems alarmingly content with these cuts – but
before we despair of human kindness, many can plead ignorance. The
government relies on destitution staying silent and unseen, isolated in
families with no collective voice. Dear Guardian reader, you know what’s
happening because we report on the social security calamity almost
daily, as you would expect.
Readers of the
Mirror have been briefed this week, and
the Independent
covered the bedroom tax on its front page. But look back through this
week’s Times, Telegraph, Mail and Sun to see how their readers are told
nothing. They know a lot about immigrants. Sun readers were told the
welfare bill is soaring out of control. They read a freak story of a
woman refusing to take well-paid jobs to keep her children’s free
university places.
Times readers learned at length of
Tanni Grey-Thompson‘s
ordeal of hauling herself up 12 floors when her lift broke down, but
only a very short story on her admirable campaign against cuts leaving
disabled people £4,600 poorer. Telegraph readers were told “benefit
claimants should be forced to seek extra work”, with a battery of
stories against unfair budget treatment of
stay-at-home mums suffering a “traditional families penalty”. The
Bishop of Exeter pleaded their cause for
tax relief, although surely he should be raising hell about the cuts?
People may read these papers to be protected from inconvenient facts
about growing inequality and the catastrophic falling behind of the
poor.
The Brookings Institution reports
that ever-worsening inequality will be “permanent” from now on. Most
people would be alarmed at a never-ending widening of the gulf, if they
knew. Most people want to believe the
equal opportunities
myth, but are easily comforted when told the poor are bad and the
well-off deserving, so social justice prevails in this best of all
possible worlds.
Here’s an interesting brief story in the Telegraph: a report that young children moving home three or more times
suffer serious behaviour problems.
Unfortunately, the Telegraph made no mention of the many families about
to be uprooted and sent far from relatives, jobs and schools, into
temporary accommodation and B&Bs, then moved on each time their
rents rise. With virtually no takers for
Cameron’s parenting class vouchers, it’s the government that needs lessons in child development.
No amount of IDS newspeak can turn the bedroom tax into a “spare
bedroom subsidy”. Frank Field calls for social landlords to knock down
walls or brick up rooms so people can keep their homes: it’s all a
fraud, since IDS knows that 660,000 tenants with a spare room can never
be found smaller properties, they will pay the extra or fall into debt
and arrears until they are evicted. From Monday, most of the poorest get
a new bill of an average £138 for council tax. Landlords expect mayhem
when tenants are paid rent directly every month: pilots show many fall
into debt.
Now add in these:
disability living allowance starts converting into
personal independence payment with a target to remove 500,000 people in new
Atos medical tests. The Guardian has revealed how
jobcentre staff are
under orders to find any sanction to knock people off benefits. New
obstacles are strewn in their path: people must apply for their benefits
online from computers they don’t possess; many of these claimants are
semi-literate. When in dire straits, there will be no more crisis loans,
only a
card for buying food, with not a penny for bus fares.
Trussell Trust food banks expect a great surge of the hungry, so they ask everyone to donate the price of an Easter egg.
Here is the final wicked twist: legal aid has been removed for advice
on benefits, housing, divorce, debt, education and employment. On
Monday the budget of
Citizens Advice for
such cases falls from £22m to £3m. The few emergency cases still
covered – families facing instant eviction – can only use a
phone service,
not face-to-face legal help. Law centres will close. There will be no
help on school exclusions, landlord or employer harassment, or failure
to pay wages.
Every new benefit system starts out with a high error rate: everyone
knows the complex universal credit will leave millions with incorrect or
no payments – and now, nowhere to go for help. Courts and tribunals
expect chaos as people try to make their own cases without any help. Try
to imagine the plight of people in debt because of the non-arrival of
payments, with no credit on their phones to call and inquire, no crisis
loan to buy
phone credit, no internet access – and now no advice service either.
I refuse to believe most people would not be shocked if they knew, if
they saw and if they understood. Even some of the 30% who always vote
Tory might be appalled if they weren’t so well deceived by their
ministers, MPs and
newspapers,
who lie knowingly and deliberately. People should know that historians
will record the earthquake of social destruction that happened in their
name, while they read of nothing but “scroungers” and the “soaring
benefit bill”.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/mar/28/benefit-cuts-monday-defines-government
