By Peter Mills.
The BBC, with unerring accuracy, has referred to the policies of Chancellor George Osborne as representing a ‘manifesto plank’ (1). One cannot disagree with the BBC in this instance. Mr. Osborne’s policies have ‘plank’ written all over them!
The Tory Party is spreading misery and – yes – mass death in its wake! Mass death? Oh yes – as reported in The Guardian as long ago as June 2012 – senior management of Jobcentre offices have had to brief staff that suicides are likely to occur as a direct result of government cuts to benefits (2).
The callous and ill-informed may perhaps think: “Well, that only applies to scroungers and cheats! Serves them right!” However, the poor victims who are taking their own lives as a direct result of unconscionable and draconian DWP decisions are mainly the genuinely poor and disabled.
The statistics are difficult to find in the ordinary newspapers, but an alarming set of facts and figures was published in the respected medical journal The Lancet as long ago as 2011. Even in that year, the Lancet report contains the horrific statistic that between 2009 and 2011 every country in the EU has experienced a massive increase in poverty-related suicides in people below 64! (3).
The Lancet article includes a significant graph based on the suicide figures. The whole world has recently been aghast at the climate change graph, which shows what is called a ‘hockey-stick’ temperature increase in the last few decades. Whether or not you believe in climate change, the EU poverty-related suicide graph shows a similar ‘hockey-stick’ rise which is based on actual unarguable figures.
The University of Salford, in its website magazine ‘The Conversation’, published facts in June 2013 (4) which illustrate the effect upon society brought about by the current Tory Government, and Iain Duncan Smith, Secretary of State of Work and Pensions. The university magazine article is headed: ‘The link between benefit cuts and suicide cannot be ignored’.
It makes heartbreaking reading for anyone who retains a grain of decency and humanity – which rules out the “I’m All Right Jack” brigade, including many Tory voters.
In an announcement, Mr. Osborne has stated that another £25 billion in spending cuts will be needed after the next election.
If the incompetents who now dictate UK finances want to cut expenditure, why won’t they abandon the absurd HS2 rail link, now estimated to cost a minimum £80 billion? (5) (6) The cancellation of this entirely unnecessary nation-crippling project would provide his extra £25 billion, while the rest of the saving (at least £55 billion and probably more) would repair the catastrophic damage the government has inflicted on Britain’s once world-class social security system, transforming the DWP from being its current ghoulish spectre! After all, ‘benefits’ are supposed to benefit people, not destroy them.
Put simply, the next British government needs to get its priorities right – support the genuinely poor and crippled not just the wealthy and privileged. It is consistently demonstrated by those who now sit in parliament that the Tory-Labour-LibDem tripartite system has outlived its relevance and usefulness to British society.
More desperately than ever before, we need a Nationalist government! Please God…!
References:-
1 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-25617844
2 http://www.theguardian.com/society/2012/jun/20/jobcentre-supervisors-suicide-risk-benefit-claimants
3 http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(11)61079-9/fulltext
4. http://theconversation.com/the-link-between-benefit-cuts-and-suicide-cant-be-ignored-14651
5. http://www.channel4.com/news/high-speed-rail-hs2-cost-england-train-birmingham
6. http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/hs2-rail-link-cost-doubles-2180356
3
The Tory attitude towards our poor is much as Scrooge put it: “Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?” Curiously their enthusiasm to cut benefits for the British needy stands in sharp contrast to their enthusiasm in respect of foreign aid (and banks)!
Hi does greed, deceit and selling out their own native kind for their own selfish rewards and personal gains as they get richer and we get poorer.
prices go up in the shops all the time so they give us less, what is next cyanide tablets or just genocide and let the Muslims take over or have they already ?
Indeed so, Jim and this is one very important reason why I can never vote Tory ever again. I foolishly did so once in 1992 when John Major was the Tory leader and PM. Cameron, Osbourne and especially IDS are utterly despicable characters who have no empathy for the poor or vulnerable. Whatever happened to one nation conservatism? I don’t think even previous privately-educated Tory PMs like Macmillan or Anthony Eden would have acted in the way that trio have done so.
This is also the reason why I am wary of voting UKIP as there are strong indications that party has the same callous and vindictive attitudes in this regard. Indeed, UKIP seem to be a refuge for many of the Tory Party’s most loony characters most of whom have this ‘lets continually bash the poor and vulnerable and blame them for this country’s dire economic predicament’ attitude.
What seems to have happened is that the social security system – like so many other areas of life in Britain – has abandoned common sense in favour of box ticking dictated by a myriad of confusing regulations.
Work shy professional claimants make it their business to know the ropes while the genuinely sick get tripped up in the minefield of dealing with social security.
Those working in the system are given no discretion but to apply the rules to the letter and lose their jobs if they don’t. This is partly a reaction against years and years during which the system became out of control and offered benefits as an alternative career to working.
It’s truly shocking that part of the reason why benefits were promoted by politicians as a career path was to dispose of the British people and to replace us with a new workforce from abroad.
+10. Not only are they being replaced in the workforce, some have recently been evicted from their rented homes because the landlord prefers immigrants. If this happens on a large enough scale, where will our people live, and how will they live if their benefits are cut as well?
I think it is a mistake to say the system was out of control and offered benefits as an alternative career to working. The system has ALWAYS had sanctions in place to deal with the very small minority of people who genuinely ARE workshy but Labour and Tory have deliberately gone out of their way to make the conditions for claiming benefit more and more onerous so that people are deterred from claiming as more numbers doing so would be a reflection of the reality which is that Britain has around 6 MILLION unemployed. It is important that we as a party deal with this issue sensitively and don’t fall into the kind of kind of outright bigoted talk so redolent of the Daily Mail and the vile Duncan-Smith and UKIP.
We need to make a clear distinction between us and UKIP. It is mass immigration and chronic economic failure by both Tory and Labour that has put huge pressure on the benefits system and NOT a mythical army of ‘workshy’ layabouts.
It’s certainly the case that the welfare system became an alternative career but it’s also true that this was not a situation created by a work shy workforce.
Governnment itself encouraged people to go on ‘the sick’ to hide the mass unemployment which grew from the 1970s onwards. The Tories deliberately used ‘the sick’ from the 1980s onwards for that purpose. After a while it became a lifestyle which was seen as a right. Just look at the numbers on the sick and how they’ve multiplied over decades. The population is no sicker.
Up until the 1980s, there were always those who had no intention of working but they were few in comparison to the workforce so there was little enforcement. It was not worth the trouble. If people wanted dole they got it but it was very small.
So it’s certainly true that government is the biggest culprit.
My experience of all this goes back to the early 1960s.
This is an example of the box ticking way the system runs.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2540453/Familys-anger-bombarded-letters-crisis-loan-DWP-son-TEN-MONTHS-died.html
Yes, Mrs Thatcher used the benefits system to hide the real numbers of unemployed which her government helped to create. As you said, the main tactic of her (and Blair to some extent) was to put people on to sickness benefits when they should have been made to claim unemployment benefit/JSA. That way they could continually lie to the public and media about the true level of unemployment – disgracefully. Instead of calling her and Blair out on this and revealing the truth to the electorate the media colluded with them!
The TUC reckons there are actually around 6 million unemployed in Britain, and it could be even higher if you take the numbers of ‘economically inactive’ into account which measures up to 9 million.
Another point is that way back in ’68 people had to go to the labour exchange as it was called then and sign in to get their dole. They had to do it every week, and they had to accept the jobs that were available. Some time after that, they introduced the ‘Giro’, which came in the post, so people didn’t have to queue up any more.
Living at that time in an ‘enriched’ part of NW London, I always suspected it was because they didn’t want the queues of non-indigenous people to be there in plain view. They outnumbered the indigenous by 5 – 1, even then. So that was, in my view, another way of hiding the reality.
I believe it was Mrs Thatcher’s government which changed weekly signing-on to having to do it once every two weeks so even she recognised what huge pressure she put the welfare system under having massively increased unemployment due mainly to her monetarist economic policies which effectively killed-off the manufacturing base of our economy.
As for the unemployed having to accept any suitable vacancy I believe that has always been the case but try telling that to the utter morons who believe the lies the vile Daily Mail churn-out on this issue!
It’s technically true that people are required to take any job. But it’s meaningless because employers are not conversely required to take on anyone sent to them by Job Centres.
Since there are plenty to choose from, the unwilling applicant can easily ensure he’s not taken on by the merest hint of doubt expressed about the job. In many cases the doubts are amply justified since so many Job Centre vacancies are essentially bogus. That is the other side of the coin you hear little about.
What do you mean by there are plenty to choose from? Britain has an utterly deplorable SHORTAGE of real vacancies.
There are plenty of applicants for employers to choose from.
Good article. This government embodies moral turpitude.
We must be at the beginning of the end of the welfare state now. All caused by IMMIGRATION and money over people.
There are hardly any jobs for the genuinely jobless. Tesco had 100s of application for only nine jobs in North Tyneside and 1000s for 60 jobs in Gateshead.
One of the many deceptions endlessly employed by ministers is to claim that the number of job vacancies is the number of extra workers required by employers.
Thus say 500,000 vacancies means that half-a-million people could be knocked off the unemployment registers if only people would work.
This is a fallacy so laughable that it beggars belief ministers dare to voice it. Most vacancies are created by what economists term ‘churning’. If one person leaves a job and moves to another one that’s two job advertisements without any more staff being required. If someone retires that’s another advertisement replacing him.
That is the explanation for why you can have a huge number of vacancies yet there are few jobs for the unemployed.
Precisely. There is NO problem of mass, wilful ‘workshyness’ as the ‘nasty party’ Tories and their vile cheerleaders of the Daily Express and Daily Mail continually claim. There IS a problem of a LACK OF DEMAND for labour caused by decades of grotesque economic mismanagement by Tory and Labour.
As a party, we must draw clear distinctions on this issue between us and the ‘nasty party’ and their B team otherwise known as UKIP. If we do, we can undermine UKIP’s bizarre support in Labour areas up North like North Tyneside and Gateshead.
We have what honest economists would term mass ‘structural’ unemployment and one of the causal factors would be a loss of our previous industrial base with insufficient jobs being created since to replace those lost industries.
I think you will find that HS2 rail is an EU Directive.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Speed_2
I speak from bitter personal experience in dealing with the affairs of a close relation when I say that the DWP is certainly not fit for its declared purpose. I do not think this is inefficiency but deliberate policy.
The DWP has a default policy of ‘sanctioning’ ie denying benefits wherever possible. It does not reply to correspondence and the correspondence it does send out is template based and often incomprehensible. However if you fail to reply to their correspondence within the time frame given (which is often impossible to meet) you will be sanctioned. Its ‘decision makers’ refuse to meet you face to face and the correspondence addresses it gives out turn out to be Royal Mail Sorting Offices.I have also found one that one part of the DWP does not talk to another, let alone other departments such as HMRC.
I have won two cases against the DWP at appeal and received a number of apologies from them but nothing changes. The vast majority of claimants are honest. That has been shown time and time again. But many just do not have the capacity or education to deal with this continual obfuscation. As I have said, in my view this is deliberate policy.
IDS and those behind him – Cameron etc – should be honest and admit to this policy and accept the electoral consequences that follow.
Yes, Richard Franklin, it IS a deliberate policy and whilst it has always been in place there is no doubt in my mind that the utterly vile likes of Duncan-Smith and Cameron have made it much worse. Simply put, people like Cameron and Osbourne are total snobs and frankly HATE the ‘lower orders’ and would much rather hand out foreign aid money to countries like India than to see government money go to vulnerable British people. After all, aren’t all lower-class people just ghastly oiks?