Benefits

Putting the poor under pressure

On 16 February the government set out their welfare reforms. They promise to “revolutionise” and simplify the system and make sure people coming off benefits are always better off in work. But the details as they emerge are far from benign. The over-riding concern is to save money (£88 billion was spent on all welfare benefits in 2010). Simplifying the system by introducing a single benefit, Universal Credit, to cover many benefits is a key part of the package. But many allowances will simply be cut. The real sting will be a new barrage of “claimant responsibilities”. One of the most affected...

Big society has a big cost for women

The “Big Society” is central to the Tories’ election campaign and ConDem coalition government policy. Instead of services being provided by an “inhuman, monolithic” state, communities can run their own post offices, schools, libraries, transport services, and housing projects. This is a “big advance for people power”, they say. Individuals and communities will have greater control, rather than policy being dictated “from above”. A new era of community will be established as people work together to shape services and support each other. The transition to this “Big Society” will be supported by...

The other world of Iain Duncan Smith

Iain Duncan-Smith wants to drag British politics into a Dickensian dystopia where unemployment and poverty are seen as moral failings rather than social problems. In a recent interview he appeared to be describing the refusal of the unemployed to take up offers of work as “a sin”. But who exactly is this egregious scumbag who pronounces upon the moral fortitude of people who have faced hardships beyond his worst imagining? Duncan-Smith has personal wealth of over £1 million. That puts him towards the bottom of the Cabinet's rich-list (23 out of 29 Ministers are millionaires) but on a different...

Stop "work for your dole" scheme!

Iain Duncan Smith, Tory Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, has published a White Paper, “Universal credit: welfare that works”. Following on from the Comprehensive Spending Review’s cutting of pensions, child benefit and housing benefit, it is another major attack on working class people. Universal credit will replace means-tested benefits including Income Support, Jobseeker’s Allowance and Working Tax Credit with a single payment, made to unemployed and low-paid workers. It is to be introduced in 2013 alongside a new Work Programme. There will also be new benefit regime for the...

Action needed on welfare cuts

The announcement in last month’s Comprehensive Spending Review of cuts to social security benefits, together with planned job losses of fifteen thousand in the Department for Work and Pensions over the next two years, represents the clearest attack yet on the structure and principles of the modern welfare state created by the 1945 Labour government. The cut that has attracted most media attention – withdrawing Child Benefit from children with a parent earning enough to pay the top rate of income tax (currently just under £44,000 a year) – had already been trailed at the Tory party conference...

Cuts to "middle class" benefit hurt us all

It was always going to be a politically divisive cut among Tory supporters. That is why the Tories used their own conference to announce the cuts in Child Benefit for the better-off. They wanted to tackle this most tricky announcement before the much more devastating cuts due in the Comprehensive Spending Review (20 October). Patrick O’Brien of the Daily Express defied logic by denouncing it as “the worst proposal since the poll tax”… But I don’t remember the Express being a big supporter of the anti-poll tax protests. It was, he insisted, a “kick in the teeth” for middle-class people...

War on "benefit scroungers": stop Lib-Con attacks on the poor and powerless!

The Sun has gone into tabloid overdrive in support of a vicious government attack on claimants. Anyone on benefits — people they say “refuse to work”, people they say have had “too many children”, people they say are “robbing hardworking Sun readers of their cash”. The government is backing that campaign — they want the same things. The Sun says “scroungers” deserve to be “named and shamed”. So do the government. The Sun is stirring up a vigilante drive among its readers, asking them to file reports of cases of “benefit cheats”. This is just what Cameron means by a “big society”. This...

Tony Benn: the time to organise resistance to this government of millionaires is now!

We reject these cuts as simply malicious ideological vandalism, hitting the most vulnerable the hardest. Join us in the fight It is time to organise a broad movement of active resistance to the Con-Dem government's budget intentions. They plan the most savage spending cuts since the 1930s, which will wreck the lives of millions by devastating our jobs, pay, pensions, NHS, education, transport, postal and other services. The government claims the cuts are unavoidable because the welfare state has been too generous. This is nonsense. Ordinary people are being forced to pay for the bankers'...

Unemployment: no fairy tale endings

Out of work? Stuck on benefits? Not any more, thanks to Channel 4’s Fairy Job Mother . This latest contribution to the new TV genre of ‘’austerity chic’’ aims to get people off the dole and into a job. With the help of a spot of life-coaching and a new haircut. Yes, that’s what you need to beat unemployment in the world of Con-Dem cuts. This is, more or less, Supernanny for grown-ups, and sees loud Yorkshirewoman Hayley Taylor (previously on that other Channel 4 recession’s-topical-isn’t-it series Benefit Busters ) descend on a different household each week, for a three-week period. She even...

Government declares war on jobless and disabled

In 2002, then Tory party leader Iain Duncan Smith visited the deprived Easterhouse housing estate in Glasgow, an experience which he claimed led to a Damascus-like conversion from Thatcherite orthodoxy to “caring Conservatism”. Now Duncan Smith sits in the Tory/Lib-Dem coalition Cabinet as Work and Pensions Secretary and he is looking to cut at least 25% from the DWP’s budget as part of the government’s deficit reduction programme. Beyond cynical financial calculations (the government think it would be expedient to avoid potential cuts elsewhere by making deeper ones in welfare, because who...

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