The Tories’ Cruelty Is Laid Bare as Multiple Welfare Cuts Bite

[image error]Ever since the Tories came to power in May 2010, aided by the Liberal Democrats, who, sadly, demonstrated that everything they professed to believe in could be discarded if it meant being in government, the very fabric of civil society in the UK has been faced with extinction. This is a country that has developed a welfare safety net to protect the most vulnerable members of society and those who have fallen on hard times, and one that has guaranteed healthcare for its entire population, through the NHS, paid for through general taxation, but the Tories are determined to destroy it, and far too many people have been fooled by their poisonous persecution of the poor and disabled, and their ideologically motivated “age of austerity,” which continues to ruin any chance of economic recovery, while plunging millions of people further into serious poverty.

On Monday, April 1, multiple welfare cuts hit hundreds of thousands of the poorest and most vulnerable members of society, and although two newspapers led with the news on their front pages — the Guardian (“The day Britain changed”) and the Daily Mirror (“D-Day for Savage Con-Dem Cuts”) — there is no sign that the British people, in general, have woken up to the full ramifications of what is being done in their name.

From the beginning of the Tories’ attack on the state, the government and large parts of the media have successfully lied about the unemployed and the disabled being scroungers and shirkers, creating a climate of mean-spiritedness and hatred amongst my fellow citizens that I have found to be both shocking and disgraceful, because the blunt truth, which anyone could find out if they could be bothered, is that there are around 2,500,000 people unemployed but only 500,000 job vacancies.

That fact should be imprinted on everyone’s foreheads before the blame game begins, but what is also hugely important to realise, but which is almost entirely ignored, is that the benefit system is not primarily supporting the unemployed, but is  propping up a corrupt system in which low-paid workers are not paid enough to live on, and the cost of living — including housing more than any other component — is one in which the government does nothing to check rampant profiteering by individuals and corporations.

From the beginning, it was apparent to me that punishing people for not having jobs, while actively creating unemployment, as the Tories did with public sector job cuts after they took office, was cruel, in a way that, in the only other period comparable to this one — the 1980s — Margaret Thatcher at least recognised that kicking people for being unemployed at a time when the government was actively creating unemployment was a step too far, and largely allowed those on the dole to scrape by unmolested.

Now, however, there appear to be no lines that the Tories will not cross. Having been caught out by a judge regarding their workfare scam — forcing the unemployed to work for their benefits, for corporations that can afford to pay them, or charities that should know better — the Tories quickly passed an emergency law preventing them from having to recompense the victims of their policy to savagely undermine the minimum wage — and, disgracefully, were backed by the Labour Party, who abstained in the crucial vote.

Even that, however, is exceeded in the cruelty stakes by the Tories’ disgusting treatment of the disabled, in which, having established targets for the amount of money they wanted to save, they hired the corporate butchers of Atos Healthcare to conduct fundamentally unfair reviews aimed at establishing that those who are mentally and/or physically disabled — however severely — are in fact fit for work, so that the financial support that has made life tolerable for hundreds of thousands of disabled people can be withdrawn. I have sporadically covered the government’s callous treatment of the disabled in a number of articles, most recently in “Call Time on This Wretched Government and Its Assault on the Disabled,” “The End of Decency: Tories to Make Disabled People Work Unpaid for Their Benefits.” “The Death of Empathy in Cruel, Heartless Britain” and “End the Tory Butchers’ Assault on the Disabled: For New Year, Please Sign the War on Welfare Petition.”

As noted above, the assault on the poor, the weak, the unemployed and the disabled reached an important stage on April 1, when a number of disturbing welfare cuts came into effect, in addition to the legislation intended to privatise the majority of NHS services, which is still being resisted in the House of Lords, as well as savage cuts to legal aid, and the scrapping of the 50p tax rate for the highest earners, introduced by Gordon Brown. According to Labour, this cut will mean that 13,000 millionaires will get a £100,000 tax cut, just as the poorest people in society are having money taken away from them.

In a rundown of these changes, the Guardian, in one of a refreshingly large series of articles about welfare reform (or, as we should be calling it, the war on welfare), highlighted the introduction of the welfare benefit cap, the introduction of the bedroom tax, changes to the way in which benefits are calculated, changes to council tax benefit, and the end of Disability Living Allowance.

The welfare benefit cap

On the welfare benefit cap, the Guardian wrote, “The most popular of the welfare reforms will begin on 15 April in the London boroughs of Bromley, Croydon, Enfield and Haringey. The intention is that no welfare claimants will receive in total more than the average annual household income after tax and national insurance — estimated at £26,000. Other councils will start to introduce it from 15 July and it will be fully up and running by the end of September. Some estimate 80,000 households will be made homeless.”

Missing in all the arguments about spongers and scroungers has been any mention at all of the fact that most of the benefit consists of housing benefit, all of which goes to the landlords and not to the benefit claimants. This makes up the lion’s share of the payments, in a market run on greed alone, and without any legislation to moderate what landlords can charge, or how they treat their properties, or their tenants, and it is depressing that so many people have failed to note who receives the housing benefit, and how greedy and exploitative they are. Personally, I am permanently shocked when I think about the numbers of people who may be obliged to move from where they live, uprooting their children from school, and leaving friends and family, through no fault of their own. In London, it is the first indication that the Tories are committed to a programme of social cleansing,  and I can only hope that other towns and cities around the country, who are supposed to take in those expelled from London, will refuse to accept their role as intended ghettoes.

The bedroom tax

Added to the housing benefit cap is the bedroom tax, a disgusting way of treating those in social housing as second-class citizens, without the right to regard their homes as homes, and of punishing those in receipt of benefits for the fact that, from Margaret Thatcher onwards, when social housing was first sold off to tenants, there has been chronic under-investment in the creation of new social housing.

Under the bedroom tax, those deemed to have a spare room “will lose 14% of their housing benefit and those with two or more spare bedrooms will lose 25%.” The fact that those implementing the policy are millionaires with an abundance of spare rooms is a cruel irony lost on the Tories, who are so marinaded in their class-based cruelty that they have no notion of how cruel they appear to those whose moral compasses are still functioning, and it is to be hoped that the bedroom tax will be a key component in the demise of this bunch of sadists, as the poll tax was for Margaret Thatcher.

The stated aim of the bedroom tax is to make people on benefits downsize, but in most cases there are no properties available for them to downsize to, and many of the one million households affected may well be obliged to give up their homes and either become homeless or become part of the far more costly private rental market. As the Guardian noted, “Critics say it is an inefficient policy as in the north of England, families with a spare room outnumber overcrowded families by three to one, so thousands will be hit with the tax when there is no local need for them to move.” The Guardian also noted, “Two-thirds of the people hit by the bedroom tax are disabled,” and stated that the intended savings will be £465m a year, and “as many as 660,000 people in social housing will lose an average of £728 a year.”

For some powerful articles about the ruinous impact of the bedroom tax, please see Amelia Gentleman’s Guardian article, “The human cost of the bedroom tax,” John Harris’ Guardian article, “The spare bedroom tax: a mess of contradiction and impossibility,” and this article by a Community Housing provider in Wales. All are very powerful, and a thorough indictment of both the individual cruelties involved in the tax (relating to those who use the “spare rooms,” like disabled people, and the visiting children of separated parents, for example), and the bigger picture of the government’s malevolence towards those in social housing, and in difficult circumstances.

Changes to the way benefit is calculated

“For the first time in history,” as the Guardian explained, “welfare benefits and tax credits will not rise in line with inflation and will instead for the next three years rise by 1%. Had there been no change benefits would have risen by 2.2%.” These changes are intended to “sav[e] £505m in the first year, rising to £2.3 bn in 2015-16. Nearly 9.5 million families will be affected, including 7 million in work, by £165 a year,” adding to the cuts that many families will also be experiencing though the bedroom tax and the overall welfare benefit cap.

Changes to council tax benefit

Adding further strain to the incomes of those in receipt of benefits — the low-paid as well as the unemployed, remember — council tax benefit, previously administered by the Department for Work and Pensions, has been transferred to local councils along with, crucially, a ten percent reduction in funding. As the Guardian noted, “Council tax benefit is claimed by 5.9 million low-income families in the UK,” adding, “The new onus on councils has come at a time when local government funding, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, has fallen by 26.8% in two years in real terms. A Guardian survey of 81 councils last week found many claiming they face difficult cuts, with almost half saying they were reducing spending on care services for adults. This also comes at a time when 2.4m households will see a council tax rise.”

Last month, in an article for the Guardian, Richard Vize analysed what will almost certainly happen at the council level if, as intended, the poorest members of society are expected to pay part of their council tax. Vize noted, “The prospect of a return to routine non-payment of local tax thanks to cuts in council tax benefit is a major reverse for councils. In the 1980s, the poll tax rebellion made it socially acceptable to avoid payment, whether through poverty or political conviction. Tax collection rates plummeted while collection costs soared, inflicting serious damage on councils’ finances. After the poll tax was abolished, it took many years for collection rates to recover. Now, the spectre of non-payment has returned.”

He added, “Local authorities believe that up to 84% of people on low incomes will refuse to pay council tax, with benefit changes meaning poor people face an average annual bill of £247 from April. If the government had conducted any intelligent analysis of the impact of this change, it would have realised that levying a tax of barely £5 a week on people who will struggle to pay it is a recipe for spending a lot of money to collect very little. No wonder councils are building up their reserves.”

The end of Disability Living Allowance

As well as still facing the callous reviews intended to find disabled people fit for work, whether they are or not, disabled people now face another blow — the scrapping of Disability Living Allowance, and its replacement with the Personal Independence Payment (PIP), which, according to the Department for Work and Pensions, is, in the Guardian‘s words, “not based on your condition, but on how your condition affects you, so narrowing the gateway to the PIP. It will contain two elements: a daily living component and a mobility component. If you score sufficient points, a claim can be made. Assessments will be face-to-face rather than based on written submissions, starting in Bootle benefits centre, handling claims across the north-west and north-east.”

For further information about the abolition of DLA and its replacement with PIP, see this Guardian article by Jane Young of the We Are Spartacus group of disabled activists, and the detailed We Are Spartacus report. “Emergency Stop,” which analyses “the economic and social impact of the Personal Independence Payment regulations.” In it, We Are Spartacus “call on the Government to ‘go back to the drawing board’ on proposals to replace disability living allowance (DLA), after it buried last-minute changes to criteria which will see thousands more disabled people with mobility difficulties lose out than expected.”

The changes on the ground: a report from Tottenham

In another Guardian article about the changes, political editor Patrick Wintour travelled to Tottenham, to attend a meeting convened by the Labour MP David Lammy for “about 900 families in Lammy’s north London constituency – one of the most deprived in the country – [who] will be hit by the household benefit cap, which limits the total weekly amount each unemployed household can receive in benefits to £500.” Only around 200 families turned up, showing, I believe, the shocking scale of ignorance about the changes. Although Wintour noted that many of them were “mothers with young children in tow,” and that there was “palpable anxiety, and an undercurrent of anger,” Lammy told Wintour, “The first some of them knew of the imminent cut to their income was when they opened his letter.”

As Wintour noted, “More than half such families will lose between £50 and £100 a week in housing benefit as a result of the benefit cap … Those who face smaller losses may be able to scrape together the shortfall and keep their tenancy, but at the cost of buying food or heating their home. Others will be unable to pay their rent, and will end up in arrears, then homeless or forced to move out of London to low-rent areas of the country.”

Wintour also explained, “Families can sidestep the cap if they find a job that offers 16 hours a week for single parents, or 24 hours for couples. But jobs are scarce in Tottenham, and as one mother points out, even if work is found, childcare is expensive.” Acknowledging “a ‘real fear’ about homelessness among his poorest constituents,” Lammy told Wintour, “The local authority will have to think very hard about its responsibilities. We cannot evict people on to the streets with no alternative: this is not America.”

Perhaps not, but we are not far away from it.

As Patrick Wintour also noted, providing exact figures of how much will be taken from those who only just have more than nothing at present:

The household benefit cap is just one of nine changes coming in this month, laying bare the sheer enormity and complexity of the coalition’s welfare reforms. Others include the bedroom tax (typical weekly loss per household, £14), the abolition in many areas of the country of council tax benefit (£3 a week), and the 1% cap on benefit increases (£3 a week). Six of these changes will take £2.3bn from the pockets of the poorest households in 2013-14, according to the charity Child Poverty Action group (CPAG).

He added:

That figure does not include the replacement of disability living allowance with personal independence payments, to be phased in over three years from April. By 2016, an estimated 500,000 will lose this benefit, squeezing an estimated £1bn a year out of the incomes of disabled people. Disabled people will be disproportionately affected by the wider changes, with tens of thousands being hit simultaneously by up to six different welfare cuts.

Also to come, of course, is the introduction in October of universal credit, Iain Duncan Smith’s attempt to “merge a string of unemployment benefits and tax credits into a single payment for working-age people,” as the Guardian put it. Although Duncan Smith claims that “universal credit will simplify the system, making it easier for people on benefits to make the leap into work” — even though the jobs don’t exist — “about 450,000 disabled people will lose financially, according to Disability Rights UK, while 400,000 of the poorest households — such as single parent households with children — will be worse off by 2015, according to the Chartered Institute of Housing.”

As Patrick Wintour also noted:

Social analysts are concerned that deprivation levels are going back to those of 30 years ago, with the poorest families worse off than they were under Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. Debt and food poverty are growing, homelessness is increasing, and demand on food banks is soaring — a sign of more people falling through the welfare net. The social impact of this impoverishment of Britain’s poorest families — with more than 60% of such households in work — will unravel recent achievements in tackling poverty, say campaigners. According to Alison Garnham, chief executive of the CPAG, the coalition “is on course to leave behind the worst child poverty record of any government for a generation.”

With Labour ignoring, or spurning, on a daily basis, the opportunity to stand up for the poorest and weakest members of society, and for the importance of the state provision of services, leaving that job to the churches, I wonder when — or even if — there will be a massive revulsion against the Tories’ cruelty to make people wake up, take to the streets and demand change.

I hope so, or this will increasingly become a country in which it is difficult for decent people to live.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed — and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr (my photos) and YouTube. Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in April 2012, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and please also consider joining the new “Close Guantánamo campaign”, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.