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The Autumn Statement graphically demonstrates ‘the long term plan’ isn’t working
It’s the cost of living, stupid. The Autumn Statement graphically demonstrates ‘the long term plan’ isn’t working.
George Osborne is expected to provide good news as usual for millionaire pals, while the statement does nothing for a worsening cost-of-living crisis. Any benefits for disability allowances will be more than offset by disabled citizens being clobbered by the ‘bedroom tax’, annihilating the slogan of the Liberal Democrats of ‘a fair society, stronger economy’. Any recovery at all three years into this parliament is of course to be welcomed, especially since Labour had actually handed over the keys to government in May 2010 with an economy in growth. That’s right – the economy had been recovering in May 2010.
There is now a maximum number of people in employment with terrible employment rights. Zero-hour contracts have become an unsightly blot on the landscape of the Liberal Democrat’s fair society. The deficit rose due to throwing money at the banks in the last parliament as an emergency last-resort. Barack Obama had even thanked Gordon Brown personally for his leadership in the global fiscal crisis. Since then, come tomorrow, we are expecting another sharp cut of £1 bn in budgets. But this is a Government which is addicted to austerity for simply ideological fetish.
However, the intellectually bereft Coalition will churn out yet again that Labour has no ideas, and sticking to their spend their way out of trouble, in dreary sad repetition. This is clearly laughable as the government has just unveiled its infrastructure spending plan for the next two decades, describing it as “a blueprint for Britain”. About £375bn of investment in energy, transport, communications, and water projects is planned, although no new money will be forthcoming. So that claim about Labour being the only one with the cheque book is an obscene joke. Most of this Government’s borrowing has been to make up for the disasters of their economic policy. Labour had wanted infrastructure spending a long time ago, to give the economy the desperate boost it needed. That boost came eventually, but it was too little too late. The Autumn Statement graphically demonstrates ‘the long term plan’ isn’t working: infrastructure spending was an after thought.
And this is a Government which has lost any freedom. It is in the pockets of the corporates. The ‘cost of living crisis’ is deepening, and the recovery is not guaranteed. If the recovery is founded on a flaky London-based “property bubble”, and exports don’t pick up, this recovery might not be sustained after all. But will most ‘normal people’ feel any prosperity? Real wages have fallen significantly, and most people will feel poorer than 2008. This is because the economy is fundamentally is in a shoddy state, benefiting the rich but not the less well off. The Autumn Statement graphically will demonstrate ‘the long term plan’ isn’t working. The economy has been fundamentally moribund since Thatcher took over. Labour looked after the super rich, as Mandelson explained in a moment of being intensely relaxed.
And what about the claims to be “the greenest government” ever? This has been the most incompetent government ever, quite simply. The Government has already announced that it will loosen the ‘green’ obligations faced by energy providers, subject to approval. Those providers have promised to pass on any benefits, thought to be around £50 per dual fuel bill, to the general public. Of course they won’t. They will threaten us with blackouts instead. Pensioners are having to decide between food and fuel.
The Coalition also is sending out rather odd messages consistent with social engineering through the tax system. They are giving the impression of discrimination against unmarried couples. One expected measure tomorrow is designed to make couples better off by £200 when it is introduced in 2015. But even the private bank Coutts has argued that given the value of the proposed tax break and the number of individuals who would be eligible, this historic pledge might ultimately have little impact on people’s living standards.
And are the Coalition actually competent at running the economy? It’s been leaked that the Department for Education even complained that the extra money could require ministers to raid its basic needs budget, the fund used to deal with the rise in the number of primary schoolchildren caused by a baby boom. However, instead it was agreed that unspent money from the Department of Education’s maintenance budget would have to be deployed. It’s widely reported that the LibDems had to concede on environmental issues. Will the Coalition admit the truth of this ‘in the national interest’? Even a Department for Education source has said: “There is no spare money in either the basic needs or maintenance budget to pay for Clegg’s kitchens.” It’s simply a gimmick. Gimmicks don’t constitute a long term plan.
And as usual the Conservatives are desperate to look after their chums. In it together. It of course isn’t ‘in it together’. That would show true solidarity – or even socialism. Senior tax advisers have called for the Government to reduce stamp duty on homes worth between £250,000 and £300,000 – a move that would cost the Treasury about £150m.
But this is Tory Britain, where to pay for this you have to clobber the disabled. This is a significant moment in welfare policy affecting millions of people, as previously benefits had increased in line with the rising cost of living. Some of us are still having to pay for three lost years in the Government’s economic policy. It’s expected that many benefits will rise by 1% in April 2014 include income support, jobseeker’s allowance and housing benefit. But top CEOs or bankers are doing just fine with sky-rocketing bonuses.
The cap for the ISA will be falling for those not quite as rich. This means you can’t mend your roof as much even if the sun is shining, despite the Tories’ only claim to Keynesian economics. And the multibillionaires will still be able to avoid tax. Yes, it really is Tory business as usual.
However, benefits for disabled people and carers will increase in line with the rising cost of living as measured by CPI inflation in September, which was 2.7%. This might seem like ‘good news’ except they are being clobbered by the Bedroom Tax. The Labour Party is the only party which has promised to repeal this dangerously unfair Act of parliament in the next government. The Government have admitted that they know there are not enough smaller properties in the Bedroom Tax scheme to enable people to downsize. Despite fierce lobbying by all interested organisations for an exemption from the benefit cut for people in receipt of Employment and Support Allowance and/or DLA, the only current exemption is for a minority of tenants who can prove they require constant overnight care. For everyone else the ‘tax’ (benefit cut) takes immediate effect on 1 April 2013.
This is a tired Government, desperately out-of-touch.
Lynton Crosby wants to clear out some ‘barnacles’.
But this new autumn statement will do nothing to sort out the real ‘cost of living crisis’.
And will protect its friends and donors as usual.
The Autumn Statement graphically and tragically demonstrates ‘the long term plan’ isn’t working.
I won my disability living allowance appeal and it surprisingly was an incredibly rewarding experience
This is what you would call perhaps a ‘good news story’ about my disability benefits.
Last Monday, I was invited to Fox Court, Gray’s Inn Road, to go in front of a disability benefits tribunal. I had no idea what to expect. If you ‘Google’ what these tribunals are about, you are likely to draw a blank.
I turned up on time, although I was very nearly late. I think it’s worth treating the tribunal appointment like a job interview. Make sure you turn up with time to spare, so you can compose your thoughts. Where it isn’t like a job interview is that I appeared ‘smart casual’. This is because I have real difficulty in doing buttons and tying shoelaces, and I felt it might be appropriate for the tribunal members to see me how I actually am in my day-to-day life.
Actually, they were very nice to me. I had a panel of three, including a disability expert, and a medical expert. They weren’t overly friendly. There was a huge timer between us, so I know that the entire thing was over in 17 minutes flat.
In the end, it was quite a big deal for me. For me, I had put in an application, and then was not awarded any benefit. I had been on the highest rate of mobility allowance before. I took just in case my old medical notes, but did make it crystal clear to them the date of the reports. They found them useful. I asked for my original submissions to be reviewed, and they made an initial award. I discussed this award with a welfare benefits advisor in a law centre whom I know well. He recommended that it was, in fact, the wrong award, and thought I should appeal. The only voluminous paperwork was the original application form, which you must complete to the best of your ability. The point about the appeal notification is just to let them know you wish to appeal, with a clear reason.
I didn’t have to pay for the appeal. Always tell the truth. Also, only answer the question they ask. Don’t pontificate about anything else. They want to know how far you can walk in metres. They also want to know whether you need help with your living, so think carefully about washing, bathing, shaving, cooking, shopping, getting out of bed, showering, etc. If something doesn’t apply to you, e.g. night-time care, don’t shoehorn possible reasons why it might.
Think about what you’re saying. Make sure that what you’re saying is consistent all the way through. This will be a given if you are telling the truth. But if you say you never go out of the house don’t say you’ve just come back from a hill climbing trek in the Himalayas, etc. This is obviously a ridiculous example, but you know what you mean.
I learnt some basics from the advocacy course in my Legal Practice Course which helped. That is, it really helps if you keep eye contact with the people asking you the questions. I acknowedged that I had a weird squint beforehand, as I have a rare double vision problem. I didn’t use any notes, but I would strongly recommend that you don’t immerse your nose in a bulk of notes. Those notes will only confuse you, and slow you down enormously.
So, anyway it was an entirely constructive experience. Whether or not it is typical, I don’t know. However, I learnt how to trust them. I didn’t take in any tape recorders, as indeed some had advised. I won my appeal. I’m glad I put myself through it, though it can be exasperating and time-consuming as it goes along. As it happens, all the people I spoke to in the Department of Work and Pensions were extremely helpful, but this again could be simply “luck of the draw”. Good luck!
Why George Osborne's parking spot is such a problem
George Osborne wished to approach this week, Master Tactician that he is, setting the news agenda away from ‘The Millionaire’s Tax Cut’, for a debate about welfare reform. However, George Osborne is stuck in a mental rut, as well as perhaps “gutter politics” as proposed by Ed Balls MP, that the welfare reform debate is about shirkers v strivers, not about the pensions of the elderly which in fact constitute the bulk of the budget currently. Osborne in Torytown Toryshire earlier this week used the same image of shirkers being in bed with their curtains closed (with some of the words interchanged) while strivers go to work in the morning. Osborne therefore fundamentally wants to articulate his welfare debate in the language of ‘fairness’. He doesn’t wish to talk about those Directors of HBOS which have been alleged to underperform and who had been holding ludrative positions elsewhere. Not that kind of fairness. He doesn’t particularly wish to talk about tax avoidance – even though he has a “crack squad” of a handful of people looking into the billions which disappear because of multinational tax avoidance. No, instead, Osborne is pathologically stuck in a mental mindset of pointing the finger “at those below you” who earn more by doing less, not “at those above you” who earn more by doing much less.
Enter Mick Philpott. Like Ed Miliband ‘wants to have a conversation with you’, George Osborne wants you to have a debate about shirker psychology. However, Osborne’s fundamental problem is that benefit fraud, even according to the DWPs’ own statistics, is a relatively minor problem compared to other problems in the welfare budget. Also, it is dangerous to construct policy on the basis of one extreme example, for the same reason you would not necessarily reconstruct the entire policy of inheritance tax based on the recent Seddon case. The Daily Mail and George Osborne have undoubtedly succeeded in their primary goal of having people “discuss” this issue; except the discussion is one of competing shrills, of blame and counterblame, and there is a lot of noise compared to a weak signal.
This morning, George Osborne is facing more criticism over welfare reforms after he was photographed getting into a car parked in a disabled space. The picture shows the Chancellor being picked up by his official car in a restricted bay, after he stopped for lunch at the Magor services on the M4 in Monmouthshire. Senior Conservative sources said he had been to buy food from McDonald’s and was not aware the Land Rover had been inappropriately parked. George Osborne’s parking spot, on the front cover of the Daily Mirror, is a problem for a number of reasons. The embarrassing incident comes as the chancellor stands accused of pushing through welfare reforms that will hurt the disabled, including housing benefit cuts for people with spare rooms. The disability charity Scope says 3.7 million people will be affected by the government’s welfare cuts, losing £28.3bn of support by 2018. The charity’s chief executive, Richard Hawkes, told the Mirror the incident “shows how wildly out of touch the chancellor is with disabled people in the UK”. He said: “They will see this as rubbing salt in their wounds.
The issue is that George Osborne’s “team” appears to be taking up a parking space which should be taken up by a “real” disabled citizen. This taps into the “hypocrisy” attack of voters which is a very potent one – and when it is combined with an attack on someone perceived as privileged, there is a lot of political capital in it. This argument is only tenable if it happens that George Osborne’s driver is not disabled; it is perfectly possible for him or her to be a person with an obvious disability or a “hidden” disability. If the criticism of Osborne’s “team” is correct, then the idea of someone claiming something fraudulent is exactly what Osborne has seemed to accuse disabled citizens of. Osborne’s defence is one of ignorance, and indeed it is perfectly possible that his “team” parked in this parking spot negligently or innocently rather than fraudulently. However, it is a fundamental tenet of the English law that ignorance is no defence, in other words “ignorantia non excusat juris”. Nobody is above the law, including George Osborne, even if it is possible for the Coalition to rewrite hurriedly the law if it does not suit their purposes with the help of Labour (such as happened recently with the Workfare vote over which a number of Labour MPs were forced to rebel.)
The starting point is, of course, that George Osborne is inherently unpopular with Labour voters (and some within the Conservative Party say that he is inherently unpopular with many within the Conservative Party as well.) A lot of this is “personality politics”, in part contributed to by Osborne himself who appears to revel in playing a ‘pantomime villain’. He was openly very hostile to Alistair Darling, but since May 2010 when the economy was in fact in a fragile recovery, he has driven the economy at high speed in the reverse gear, and, whether or not the service sector recovers, he has taken the UK economy through a “double dip”.
Of course, the issue is a “storm in a teacup”, compared to NHS management, the management of the economy, etc., and Conservatives will feel that it is ludicrous that Osborne is being harrassed into apologising for a relatively minor incident. It is impossible to locate somebody who has never made a mistake. However, in the political “rough-and-tumble” ‘every little bit helps’, and the incident is not an isolated one contributing to an overall ambience of perceived incompetence. The other famous incident is of course when Osborne claimed that “his team” was unable to upgrade his standard class ticket to First Class, while he was merrily sitting in First Class. After a while these incidents, while perhaps unfortunate, all blend into the “pantomime villain” persona of George Osborne as a man who simply doesn’t care. A man who doesn’t care is normally pretty unattractive to voters, even in “white van” (or “white suit”) Tatton.
The Left chooses sometimes the wrong battles to fight viscerally
John Maynard Keynes, an outstanding mathematician and economist from King’s College Cambridge, died on 21 April 1946. In the same year, William Beveridge, Master of University College Oxford, became a life peer. On On 1 December 1942, the government, also a coalition but this time in war-time, published a report entitled ‘Social Insurance and Allied Services’. It had been written by Sir William Beveridge, a highly regarded economist and expert on unemployment problems, and a rightly-celebrated Liberal. The Beveridge Report quickly became the blueprint for the modern British welfare state. Dr Jose Harris, fellow of St Catherine’s College and widow of the great Prof Jim Harris, Chair of Jurisprudence at Oxford, has written a brilliant biography of Beveridge if you wish to chart the development of Beveridge’s ideas.
The Labour Party eventually adopted the Beveridge proposals, and after their victory in the 1945 general election, proceeded to implement many social policies, which became known as the welfare state. These included: the National Insurance (Industrial Injuries) Act [1946], National Insurance Act [1946], National Health Service Act [1946] and the National Insurance Act [1949].
To answer the question whether these are “good” laws, perhaps one has to consider what is the purpose of law or jurisprudence. Today, Richard Dworkin is the Frank Henry Sommer Professor of Law and Philosophy at New York University and Emeritus Professor of Jurisprudence at UCL. Notably, Dworkin appears to argue that moral principles that people hold dear are often wrong, even to the extent that certain crimes are acceptable if one’s principles are skewed enough, being a vocal critic of Hart’s legal positivism.
Patrick O’Flynn (@oflynnexpress) in the Daily Express gives this account this morning:
The next day the Daily Express told the story of Stephanie Fennessy-Sharp and Ian Sharp and their combined brood of 10 children. Neither adult was in employment and yet the benefits system gave their household an income of more than £49,000 – the equivalent to a pre-tax salary of £72,000. “We’re taking advantage of the system but that’s the system’s fault,” said Mrs Fennessy-Sharp. Mr Sharp claimed: “If I work more than an hour I feel ill and get stressed.” Scanning the list of the family’s benefits to see how the £49,000 was arrived at, all the usual suspects were there: £20,400 in housing benefit for their five-bedroom home, £8,320 in incapacity benefit, £4,524 in child benefit, £1,200 in council tax benefit. But one item stopped me in my tracks: £14,456 child tax credits.
Later in the article, Patrick explains the following:
A spokesman confirmed that there is no rule stipulating that you have to work in order to get child tax credits. In fact the more children you have and the less work you do, the higher the amount you are entitled to tends to be. The Revenue simply pays regular large sums into your bank account.
The Working Tax Credit (WTC) is a state benefit to people who work on a low income. It is a part of the current system of refundable (or non-wastable) tax credits introduced in April 2003 and is a means-tested social security benefit. In addition, people may also be entitled to the Child Tax Credit (CTC) if they are responsible for any children. The idiotic thing is that despite their name, tax credits are not linked to a person’s tax bill. The WTC can be claimed by working individuals, childless couples and working families with dependent children. The WTC and CTC are assessed jointly and families remain eligible for CTC even if where no adult is working or they have too much income to receive the WTC.
The Left might validly ask where did this ludicrous system come from? And yes indeed they might. Dawn Primarolo was responsible for implementation for the tax credits, under Tony Blair’s tenure as PM with Gordon Brown as Chancellor. The Left do themselves a massive disservice by not upholding the principles of the Beveridge report which they enacted. This should be one of the things that the Left does apologise for; given that Ed Miliband has been apologising for virtually everything else, it seems ludicrous that he should not admit that this was a major failing of the Blair/Brown regime. Furthermore, at a time when there are genuine debates to be had about the chaos in welfare funding (for example for disabled citizens), rather than James Purnell and Liam Byrne pandering to a media agenda about how Labour supports ‘tough welfare’ whilst perhaps concentrating somewhat on their own careers, this is a tragedy. And yes it is a tragic legacy of a Blair Labour government.
