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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.
Whole person care: disability still remains an exciting context for this policy
Of all the issues facing society, there is possibly not one medical issue which affects more systems in the body more? Alcohol misuse or abuse is a risk factor for various pathologies of the gut (e.g. liver cirrhosis, pancreatic cancer), for the mind and brain (e.g. alcoholic dementia, depression), the nerves (e.g. peripheral neuropathy), and it can exacerbate skin conditions (e.g. porphyria cutanea carda). It is also a massive societal issue as the work of Prof David Nutt on harm has shown. Alcohol abuse is also a risk factor for disability, as referred to in this description on the WHO website:
The harmful use of alcohol is a global problem which compromises both individual and social development.
It results in 2.5 million deaths each year. Alcohol is the world’s third largest risk factor for premature mortality, disability and loss of health; it is the leading risk factor in the Western Pacific and the Americas and the second largest in Europe. Alcohol is associated with many serious social and developmental issues, including violence, child neglect and abuse, and absenteeism in the workplace. It also causes harm far beyond the physical and psychological health of the drinker. It harms the well-being and health of people around the drinker. An intoxicated person can harm others or put them at risk of traffic accidents or violent behaviour, or negatively affect co-workers, relatives, friends or strangers. Thus, the impact of the harmful use of alcohol reaches deep into society.
In many ways, the various effects of alcohol on the health and social care service is an interesting policy consideration to seeing how ‘whole person care’ might work in future for the NHS. The problems with the ‘health maintance organisation’ and an approach driven by privatisation are well known across the pond, for other multi-system conditions such as diabetes and rheumatoid disease. If a future health system is ‘fit for the future’, it will need to overcome these problems, and “whole person care” possibly could not have come at a more helpful time for policy here in England and Wales.
Much heat has gone into the ‘pressures’ facing the NHS, with the limelight having been hogged by Sir David Nicholson and his ‘efficiency challenges’ and the “the funding gap”. While such discussions, mainly centred around the ageing society and the increased costs of privatisation can become rather repetitive and definitely tiring, the NHS is arguably facing its most challenging period since it was created in 1948. While much of the focus has been on the government’s reforms in England, there are a host of other factors that make the coming years crucial. Demands on the national service, ideally comprehensive and universal and free at the point of need, are rising, as are costs. The McKinsey analysis unhelpfully does not factor in all the sources of income of a national economy; it seems almost to assume that appreciable growth will not be an issue for the UK economy, and there is an absolute veto on voters wishing to fund a NHS adequately. This of course is a fault of the analysis of the current government, but “living within our means” has been a worthy factor of all political parties here in England and Wales. One of the great success stories of the past century has been the almost continuous rise in life expectancy. Since the NHS was set up life spans have increased by a dozen years for both men and women – and this trend is predicted to continue. This also means that people with medical conditions are living longer, and it possibly has been striking how disability and ageing have become ‘medicalised’ in recent years in policy strands driven by non-medics.
A massively tiring slogan has been ‘the need to think differently’, misused by some to justify ‘cutbacks’ in the name of ‘sustainability’. Liam Byrne and Jenny Macklin recently wrote a very powerful article on how best to empower disabled citizens ‘to fulfil their potential’. There is undoubtedly a need for “assessments that work”, but it is a simple fact at the moment, hundreds of thousands of the assessments are wrong. Years are wasted in court, where eventually 40% of appeals around employment and support assessments are won, and some disabled citizens have experienced huge mental distress and anguish (thus indirectly adding to the ‘demands’ on the NHS). Like the bedroom tax, the ideological onslaught perceived by disabled citizens, as per the “bedroom tax” (or more correctly described as “the spare room subsidy”), it is a “false economy”. As Bryne and Macklin describe, “it is a monumental waste of money – £74m, according to evidence provided to the public accounts committee by Disability Rights UK. We spend £900m on Atos. We’re about to spend £540m on Atos and Capita.”
In their very helpful article, they further describe:
It’s time to end the labyrinth. We’ll be looking at how we take the radical ideas of “whole person care”, developed by Andy Burnham, to bring services and benefits together to support disabled people in a new way. And we’re delighted that in Britain, Sir Bert Massie, a great pioneer of disability rights, will be working alongside us to make sure ideas are co produced with disabled people every step of the way. Labour will be publishing a green paper on the idea next summer. It’ll be far stronger for the advice from down under.
According to a news report from Australia, on 3 July 2013, Minister for Ageing and Disability Services Andrew Constance released the “Living Life My Way Framework” which will guide the expansion of opportunities for people to exercise choice and control over their supports as NSW transitions to the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS). People with disability currently receiving disability services who are interested in moving into an individualised funding arrangement in a policy strand mirroring the drive towards personal health budgets I have recently discussed elsewhere. The framework is based on the findings from the extensive Living Life My Way consultations held across NSW during 2011 and 2012. The NSW Government is committed to a service system that increases choice and control for people with disability. For this reason, NSW became the first Australian state to agree to a fully funded NDIS in which we’ll contribute $3.1 billion a year from 2018/19, with the Commonwealth to invest $3.3 billion. As in Australia, here in England and Wales a common cause of disability is stroke, and therefore thinking about how all the services ‘link up’ with each other is going to be essential. For many needs of a patient who has suffered a stroke, there may be care needs, such as speech and language, physiotherapy, social care and dietary, which may not be in the direct specialist knowledge and experience of the hospital physician (or General Practitioner).
Dementia and disability will be considerable policy planks in the NHS in the forthcoming decades, and of course they impact on other important policy considerations for England and Wales such as frailty. In Chapter 7, “Bringing the person back” by Richard Massie in “Together: A vision for whole person care for a 21st century health and care service“, a policy discussion document for the Fabian Society published earlier this year, Massie writes as follows:
“A third of people using care services are working- age disabled adults, and in many areas they take up half of the local budget. With whole person care, Labour could be on the cusp of creating a care system fit for disabled people in the 21st century. But only if some big questions are answered, not least how a health system free at the point of access can be merged with a care system so dependent on eligibility and assessment.
Disabled people across the country were smiling to themselves as Andy Burnham took the stage and spoke of his vision for ‘whole person care’. Smiling because his vision was strong, positive and put disabled people at the heart of health and social care reform. But also because they know how difficult it will be to turn this sentiment into practice.
Burnham’s vision is of active people in control of their health and support, collaborating with the state to achieve better outcomes. Seeing people in the round and increas- ing choice and control are core tenets of the disability and independent living movements. Needing to manage a health condition like MS or diabetes, needing support to wash because you lack manual dexterity, or needing specialist support to communicate with people in your community because you are deafblind should not be limiting, but be the cornerstone of independence. Providing good care and support can enable people to take part in family life, get involved in their local community and go to work.”
You’d be forgiven for thinking that the reform of health and social care was only about our ageing society, so fre- quently are debates only framed as a crisis facing older people. It’s true that there are examples of older people being shockingly treated in our NHS, left undignified in care homes and kept in hospital too long because support isn’t available in their community. Their care crisis rightly needs to be a national priority, but so does the care crisis facing disabled adults. The care crisis is as real for them as older people, and cases like the neglect and abuse of patients by staff at Winterbourne View need to be a wake-up call to decision makers on the need to focus on disability too.
A third of people using care services are working-age disabled adults, and in many areas they take up half of the local budget. Furthermore, the number of disabled adults needing care and support is increasing. In 2010/2011, 1.1 million disabled people relied on the social care system, but by 2020 we anticipate that the number of people in need of care will have risen to 1.3 million. Traditionally this group may not be regarded with as much electoral attraction as the ‘grey vote’, but social care reform that does not have the needs of disabled people at its heart is sure to fail.”
There have been endless discussions about what “integrated care” might mean, further to simply “joined up” or “more co-ordinated care”. A minority still remain convinced that “integrated care”, and in particular individualised personal health budgets is the ‘Trojan horse’ for privatisation of the NHS, akin to the shared care hospital models which are currently active in the US. However, thinking about the needs of two groups of society, people with dementia and people with disability, presents a formidable challenge for how a caring society can look after an individual and perhaps recognise the beliefs, concerns and expectations of that individual. It also poses fundamental questions of what our NHS is there to do. It has long been argued that the emphasis of the NHS should be wrenched away politically and economically from the NHS Foundation Trusts for more shared clinical decision-making in the community. Individuals with dementia or disability do not particularly wish themselves to be considered as a ‘burden on society’, however that debate is framed by society. They do not wish to be seen as ‘ill’ either, although some individuals will succumb to illnesses, on account of their dementia or disability. This is all about a society which is inclusive, and may be in keeping with Labour’s “One Nation” more than people might currently realise.
The work of Burnham and Kendall will be futile if Reeves carries on like this
The contrast with the content and style of Liz Kendall’s talk to the Fabian Society, at the headquarters of Scope in Islington last week, could not be more striking. For many citizens, hardworking or not, Ed Miliband was finally beginning to show ‘green shoots’ in his leadership. His conference speech in Brighton was professionally executed, and it largely made sense given what we know about his general approach to the markets and State. Amazing then it took fewer than a few weeks for his reshuffle to ruin all that.
Parking aside how Tristram Hunt MP had changed his mind about ‘free schools’ such that they were no longer for ‘yummy mummies’ in West London, Rachel Reeves MP decided to come out as a macho on welfare. She boasted on Twitter that she was both ‘tough and fair on social security’.
Rachel Reeves’ article was immediately received by a torrent of abuse, and virtually all of it was well reasoned and fair. Yes, that’s right. In one foul swoop, we managed to conflate at one the ‘benefit scroungers’ rhetoric with an onslaught on ‘social security’.
Being ‘tough and fair’ on the “disability living allowance”, in the process of becoming the ‘personal independence payment’ is of course an abhorrent concept. I only managed to be awarded my DLA after a gap of one year, after it had been taken away by this Government without them telling me. At first, it was refused through a pen-and-paper exercise from the DWP. Then, it was successfully restored after I turned up in person at a tribunal in Gray’s Inn Road. This living allowance meets my mobility needs. My walking is much impaired, following my two months in a coma. It also meets my living requirements, allowing me to lead an independent life.
I don’t want to hear Reeves talking like a banker, as if she doesn’t give “a flying fig” about real people in the real world.
For once, the outrage on Twitter, and the concomitant mobbing, was entirely justified. I had to look up again what her precise rôle was – yes it was the shadow secretary for work and pensions, not employment. Many members of Labour were sickened.
However hard Liz Kendall and Andy Burnham manage to convince battle-weary voters that Labour is “the” party of the NHS, certain voters will not wish to touch Labour with a bargepole.
The sentiment is accurately encapsulated by Laurie Penny here:
A spattering of people, would-be Councillors in the large part unfortunately, didn’t see what the fuss was about. They reconciled that ‘the sooner we face up to this problem, the better’. The media played it as ‘the hard left of the Labour Party are upset’. The “Conservative Home” website played it as a sign that the Labour Party were belatedly adopting the Conservatives’ narrative, but it was too little and too late. Like Ed Miliband being booed at conference, a backlash against Reeves’ article can euphemistically be indicative of Labour’s success at ‘sounding tough’.
At yet, this is ‘short term’ politics from a national political party. The social value of this policy by Labour is not sustainable. In the quest for instant profit for headlines, it will actually find itself with no income stream in the long term. For all the analysis with Labour marketing must have done through their ‘think tanks’ and ‘focus groups’, it is striking how Labour have missed one fundamental point. That disabled bashing in the media is not populism from the Left, actually. Conversely, it could LOSE them votes from their core membership. If they learn to love disabled people, they could WIN votes.
Simples.
So what’s the fuss about? She didn’t mention disability. Well – precisely. Disabled citizens of working age are known to form a large part of the population, as Scope reminded us this week in their session on ‘whole person care’ with Liz Kendall MP, so why did Reeves ignore them altogether?
Is it because she has only been in a brief only a few days? Some of us in life have taken the bullet for incidents in life which have lasted barely a few minutes.
What will it take for Labour to ‘get it’ on disability and welfare? Possibly, the final denouement will be when Labour finally realises it can’t ‘out Tory’ the Tories.
The Twitter defenders of the indefensible cite that ATOS are being ‘sacked’ – well, yippedeeeday. ATOS, who were appointed by Labour, are finally being sacked. When negotiating a contract in English law, the usual procedure is to ensure that there are feedback mechanisms in place to ensure the contract is being performed adequately? You can bet your bottom dollar that Labour wishes to do a ‘Pontius Pilate’ on that, in the same way PFI contracts were poorly monitored at first.
This is a disastrous start by Reeves, but ‘things can only get better’. It’s not so much that Rachel Reeves is Liam Byrne in a frock that hurts. It’s the issue that shooting the messenger won’t be the final solution in changing Labour’s mindset on this.
It is all too easy to blame the ‘subeditor’, but the subeditor didn’t write the whole piece. Any positive meme from Reeves, in a ‘well crafted speech’ to “out-Tory the Tories” (such as scrapping the ‘Bedroom Tax’), has been instantaneously toxified by the idea of people ‘lingering on benefits’. The most positive thing to do was to explain how people might not be so reliant on benefits, such as work credits, if we had a strong economy. Reeves chose not even to mention pensions, which is a large part of her budget. Because the article was hopeless from the outset, it could not even get as far as how to get the long-term unemployed (or the long-term sick) safely back to work. It was an epic fail.
It is, in fact, an epic fail on all three planks of Ed Miliband’s personal mission of ‘One Nation': the economy, not recognising the value of disabled citizens of working age to the economy; society, not recognising disabled citizens as valued members of society; and the political process, totally disenfranchising disabled citizens from being included in society.
Somebody better stop Reeves triangulating (but to the Right), before she brings the whole Labour Party down with her before May 7th 2015.
The article by Rachel Reeves MP is a 'two fingers' at disabled citizens, and will lose Miliband the election
It is actually massively upsetting.
For many citizens, hardworking or not, Ed Miliband was finally beginning to show ‘green shoots’ in his leadership. His conference speech in Brighton was professionally executed, and it largely made sense given what we know about his general approach to the markets and State.
Amazing then it took fewer than a few weeks for his reshuffle to ruin all that.
Parking aside how Tristram Hunt MP had changed his mind about ‘free schools’ such that they were no longer for ‘yummy mummies’ in West London, Rachel Reeves MP decided to come out as a macho on welfare. She boasted on Twitter that she was both ‘tough and fair on social security’.
Rachel Reeves’ article was immediately received by a torrent of abuse, and virtually all of it was well reasoned and fair.
Yes, that’s right. In one foul swoop, we managed to conflate at one the ‘benefit scroungers’ rhetoric with an onslaught on ‘social security’.
Being ‘tough and fair’ on the “disability living allowance”, in the process of becoming the ‘personal independence payment’ is of course an abhorrent concept. I only managed to be awarded my DLA after a gap of one year, after it had been taken away by this Government without them telling me. At first, it was refused through a pen-and-paper exercise from the DWP. Then, it was successfully restored after I turned up in person at a tribunal in Gray’s Inn Road.
This living allowance meets my mobility needs. My walking is much impaired, following my two months in a coma. It also meets my living requirements, allowing me to lead an independent life.
I don’t want to hear Reeves talking like a banker but as if she doesn’t give a flying fig about real people in the real world.
For once, the outrage on Twitter, and the concomitant mobbing, was entirely justified. I had to look up again what her precise rôle was – yes it was the shadow secretary for work and pensions, not employment.
Many members of Labour were sickened. A spattering of people, would-be Councillors in the large part unfortunately, didn’t see what the fuss was about. They reconciled that ‘the sooner we face up to this problem, the better’.
The media played it as ‘the hard left of the Labour Party are upset’.
The “Conservative Home” website played it as a sign that the Labour Party were belatedly adopting the Conservatives’ narrative, but it was too little and too late.
Like Ed Miliband being booed at conference, a backlash against Reeves’ article can euphemistically be indicative of Labour’s success at ‘sounding tough’.
At yet, this is ‘short term’ politics from a national political party. The social value of this policy by Labour is not sustainable. In the quest for instant profit for headlines, it will actually find itself with no income stream in the long term.
For all the analysis with Labour marketing must have done through their ‘think tanks’ and ‘focus groups’, it is striking how Labour have missed one fundamental point. That disabled bashing in the media is not populism from the Left, actually.
Conversely, it could LOSE them votes from their core membership.
If they learn to love disabled people, they could WIN votes.
Simples.
So what’s the fuss about? She didn’t mention disability. Well – precisely. Disabled citizens of working age are known to form a large part of the population, as Scope reminded us this week in their session on ‘whole person care’ with Liz Kendall MP, so why did Reeves ignore them altogether?
Is it because she has only been in a brief only a few days? Some of us in life have taken the bullet for incidents in life which have lasted barely a few minutes.
What will it take for Labour to ‘get it’ on disability and welfare? Possibly, the final denouement will be when Labour finally realises it can’t ‘out Tory’ the Tories.
The Twitter defenders of the indefensible cite that ATOS are being ‘sacked’ – well, yippedeeeday. ATOS, who were appointed by Labour, are finally being sacked. When negotiating a contract in English law, the usual procedure is to ensure that there are feedback mechanisms in place to ensure the contract is being performed adequately? You can bet your bottom dollar that Labour wishes to do a ‘Pontius Pilate’ on that, like it does on all its crippling PFI contracts it set up for the NHS.
This is a disastrous start by Reeves, but ‘things can only get better’. It’s not so much that Rachel Reeves is Liam Byrne in a frock that hurts. It’s the issue that shooting the messenger won’t be the final solution in changing Labour’s mindset on this.
It is all too easy to blame the ‘subeditor’, but the subeditor didn’t write the whole piece. Any positive meme from Reeves, in a ‘well crafted speech’ to “out-Tory the Tories” (such as scrapping the ‘Bedroom Tax’), has been instantaneously toxified by the idea of people ‘lingering on benefits’.
The most positive thing to do was to explain how people might not be so reliant on benefits, such as work credits, if we had a strong economy.
Reeves chose not even to mention pensions, which is a large part of her budget.
Because the article was hopeless from the outset, it could not even get as far as how to get the long-term unemployed (or the long-term sick) safely back to work.
It was an epic fail.
It is, in fact, an epic fail on all three planks of Ed Miliband’s personal mission of ‘One Nation': the economy, not recognising the value of disabled citizens of working age to the economy; society, not recognising disabled citizens as valued members of society; and the political process, totally disenfranchising disabled citizens from being included in society.
It is no small thing to wish the Labour Party to fail as well as a result. But this may now be necessary, and Reeves should take the bullet for that if she doesn’t improve.
The man who coined the term 'Bedroom tax' is an expert in housing, and a Crossbench peer
There are reasons why the “bedroom tax” is so unpopular. It has all the right ingredients. It affects families that garner popular sympathy: foster parents, military families, and people caring for their disabled or terminally ill husbands and wives. This is not “un-deserving poor” material. Furthermore, losing a bedroom is a highly visible, concrete sacrifice with is relatively easy for the media to understand, compared to, for example, the NHS reforms; and certainly much easier than trying to illustrate the impact of benefits uprating. It even has a snappy name – the ‘bedroom tax’ – perfect for a twitter hashtag and one which resonates with connotations of the poll tax, granny tax and pasty tax.
Virtually every week, David Cameron makes fun of Ed Miliband and Labour for arguing that the “bedroom tax” is not in fact a tax. Yesterday’s pre-scripted jibe was typical of so many feeble attempts to discuss this important societal issue coherently, as follows:
“Let us be absolutely clear that this is not a tax. Let me explain to the Labour party that a tax is when someone earns some money and the Government take some of that money away from them—that is a tax. Only Labour could call a benefit reform a tax increase. Let me be clear to the hon. Gentleman: pensioners are exempt, people with severely disabled children are exempt and people who need round-the-clock care are exempt. Those categories of people are all exempt, but there is a basic issue of fairness. How can it be fair that people on housing benefit in private rented accommodation do not get a spare room subsidy, whereas people in social housing do? That is not fair and we are putting that right.”
Lord Richard Best was one of the first high profile figures to use the phrase when the Welfare Reform Bill was going through parliament towards the end of 2011. However, Lord Best, speaking yesterday at the Chartered Institute of Housing south east conference in Brighton, said: ‘I coined this phrase bedroom tax because this is a tax.
‘I have been much criticised for using this phrase, but if you have to pay a sum of money and you cant escape from doing so, and that sum of money goes to the government – it looks to me all very much like having a tax.’
Lord Best said housing associations need to make the point to government that the bedroom tax will reduce their income. He said:
‘The thing that will chime with government is that it will lessen your ability to build more homes and the government really does believe we need to do that.’
And here’s the rub. Lord Best is actually an expert in housing, and a Crossbench peer. His Wikipedia entry is as follows:
David Cameron made a couple of glaring errors about the tax yesterday, summarised in C4 FactCheck:
““People with severely disabled children are exempt.”
No. There’s no automatic exemption for disabled children. In fact, not only is the government not making this blanket exception, it is actually fighting a legal challenge on the point from 10 disabled children who argue that the rule changes amount to discrimination. Under the new rules, the full benefit will only be paid if under-16s of the same sex share a room, and under-10s will have to share regardless of gender. And the expectation is that this will apply to disabled youngsters too. But local councils will have the discretion to waive the cut in regard to some disabled households. And there is a £30m hardship fund, the money targeted at preventing people whose homes have been adapted to help them cope with disability from being forced to move. We don’t have much more detail on exactly what guidance has been issued to local authorities on who they spare from the cut, or how many disabled children are likely to be affected. And the £30m has to be seen in the context of the total benefits cut disabled people are expected to take. According to government impact assessments, 420,000 of the 660,000 people affected by the changes are disabled, and they will lose an average of £14 a week. That’s just under £306m a year.
So there is some money available and councils are expected to use some discretion, perhaps mitigating the impact for the most severely disabled, but there is no “exemption” for disabled children overall.
“People who need round-the-clock care are exempt.”
Wrong again. DWP has said that an extra bedroom is allowed if a disabled person has a live-in or overnight carer. But that doesn’t apply if the carer is also your partner or spouse. If you are disabled and your wife is also your full-time carer, but needs to sleep in a different room, you will still face a benefit cut. Again, you could be eligible for money from the hardship fund, but that doesn’t amount to an exemption to everyone who needs 24-hour care.”
Indeed, a high court judge has given Iain Duncan-Smith days to show why there should not be a judicial review of the government’s “spare bedroom tax”, amid concerns that disabled people will be disproportionately affected by the change in benefit rules. This legal challenge against the benefit reduction had been launched against Iain Duncan Smith on behalf of ten disabled and vulnerable children. The claimants were hoping for a judicial review to take place before the tax comes into effect on 1 April but in the high court on Tuesday, Mr Justice Mitting said that was too short a timescale. However, he indicated that if, after hearing the Department for Work and Pensions’ grounds against the challenge, he was satisfied that the judicial review should go ahead, a full hearing could take place in early May.
Conclusion: the Government’s answers may fool some of the legislature, but, most importantly, they do not fool many in the public, and are unlikely to fool the judiciary.
The man who coined the term 'Bedroom tax' is an expert in housing, and a Crossbench peer
There are reasons why the “bedroom tax” is so unpopular. It has all the right ingredients. It affects families that garner popular sympathy: foster parents, military families, and people caring for their disabled or terminally ill husbands and wives. This is not “un-deserving poor” material. Furthermore, losing a bedroom is a highly visible, concrete sacrifice with is relatively easy for the media to understand, compared to, for example, the NHS reforms; and certainly much easier than trying to illustrate the impact of benefits uprating. It even has a snappy name – the ‘bedroom tax’ – perfect for a twitter hashtag and one which resonates with connotations of the poll tax, granny tax and pasty tax.
Virtually every week, David Cameron makes fun of Ed Miliband and Labour for arguing that the “bedroom tax” is not in fact a tax. Yesterday’s pre-scripted jibe was typical of so many feeble attempts to discuss this important societal issue coherently, as follows:
“Let us be absolutely clear that this is not a tax. Let me explain to the Labour party that a tax is when someone earns some money and the Government take some of that money away from them—that is a tax. Only Labour could call a benefit reform a tax increase. Let me be clear to the hon. Gentleman: pensioners are exempt, people with severely disabled children are exempt and people who need round-the-clock care are exempt. Those categories of people are all exempt, but there is a basic issue of fairness. How can it be fair that people on housing benefit in private rented accommodation do not get a spare room subsidy, whereas people in social housing do? That is not fair and we are putting that right.”
Lord Richard Best was one of the first high profile figures to use the phrase when the Welfare Reform Bill was going through parliament towards the end of 2011. However, Lord Best, speaking yesterday at the Chartered Institute of Housing south east conference in Brighton, said: ‘I coined this phrase bedroom tax because this is a tax.
‘I have been much criticised for using this phrase, but if you have to pay a sum of money and you cant escape from doing so, and that sum of money goes to the government – it looks to me all very much like having a tax.’
Lord Best said housing associations need to make the point to government that the bedroom tax will reduce their income. He said:
‘The thing that will chime with government is that it will lessen your ability to build more homes and the government really does believe we need to do that.’
And here’s the rub. Lord Best is actually an expert in housing, and a Crossbench peer. His Wikipedia entry is as follows:
David Cameron made a couple of glaring errors about the tax yesterday, summarised in C4 FactCheck:
““People with severely disabled children are exempt.”
No. There’s no automatic exemption for disabled children. In fact, not only is the government not making this blanket exception, it is actually fighting a legal challenge on the point from 10 disabled children who argue that the rule changes amount to discrimination. Under the new rules, the full benefit will only be paid if under-16s of the same sex share a room, and under-10s will have to share regardless of gender. And the expectation is that this will apply to disabled youngsters too. But local councils will have the discretion to waive the cut in regard to some disabled households. And there is a £30m hardship fund, the money targeted at preventing people whose homes have been adapted to help them cope with disability from being forced to move. We don’t have much more detail on exactly what guidance has been issued to local authorities on who they spare from the cut, or how many disabled children are likely to be affected. And the £30m has to be seen in the context of the total benefits cut disabled people are expected to take. According to government impact assessments, 420,000 of the 660,000 people affected by the changes are disabled, and they will lose an average of £14 a week. That’s just under £306m a year.
So there is some money available and councils are expected to use some discretion, perhaps mitigating the impact for the most severely disabled, but there is no “exemption” for disabled children overall.
“People who need round-the-clock care are exempt.”
Wrong again. DWP has said that an extra bedroom is allowed if a disabled person has a live-in or overnight carer. But that doesn’t apply if the carer is also your partner or spouse. If you are disabled and your wife is also your full-time carer, but needs to sleep in a different room, you will still face a benefit cut. Again, you could be eligible for money from the hardship fund, but that doesn’t amount to an exemption to everyone who needs 24-hour care.”
Indeed, a high court judge has given Iain Duncan-Smith days to show why there should not be a judicial review of the government’s “spare bedroom tax”, amid concerns that disabled people will be disproportionately affected by the change in benefit rules. This legal challenge against the benefit reduction had been launched against Iain Duncan Smith on behalf of ten disabled and vulnerable children. The claimants were hoping for a judicial review to take place before the tax comes into effect on 1 April but in the high court on Tuesday, Mr Justice Mitting said that was too short a timescale. However, he indicated that if, after hearing the Department for Work and Pensions’ grounds against the challenge, he was satisfied that the judicial review should go ahead, a full hearing could take place in early May.
Conclusion: the Government’s answers may fool some of the legislature, but, most importantly, they do not fool many in the public, and are unlikely to fool the judiciary.
Spoonies: the demonization of the disabled class
A ‘spoonie’ is possibly as well known a term as ‘chav’. A spoonie is someone living with a chronic illness. The word is apparently derived from The Spoon Theory written by Christine Miserandino. And why demonisation? Well, whilst not in the terms of reference of the Leveson Report published tomorrow, we can all think of examples of how parts of the media have embraced the ‘scrounger’ rhetoric when referring to any disabled citizen, and the tragic spike in hate crimes in the UK. Owen Jones’ ‘Chavs: the demonization of the working class’, most agree, is a remarkable piece of work, and the treatment of people with chronic illnesses in UK society is for me an interesting one. I only became physically disabled in my adult life, due to acute bacterial meningitis, having spent six weeks in a coma on the ITU of a London Foundation Trust. I have therefore witnessed simple changes in attitudes to me as a person, having been both physically able and physically disabled in my early adult life. I was aghast last Friday that, despite satisfying the legal definition of disability in the UK, I was denied disability living allowance, having in fact received the highest rate for my visible mobility difficulties. I was more aghast, however, that the DWP summary of my disability bore absolutely no relation to my account of it, nor the independent account provided by my own General Practitioner.
There are, apparently, over 6.9 million disabled people of working age which represents 19% of the working population. There are over 10 million disabled people in Britain, of whom 5 million are over state pension age, and there are two million people with sight problems in the UK. The work capability assessment (WCA) tests for the DWP are not cheap – they cost more than £100m of public money each year. However, after several years with the test in place, it is clear that the experience of some of those tested is yet another example of an omnishambles. Most people agree that we need to focus not on what disabled people can’t do but what they can do. That’s why the idea of a WCA is one most people support, and it’s why Labour introduced it in Government. It is undoubtedly important that sickness benefit claimants be assessed to demonstrate whether or not they can work, and the benefits of work are clear too, not just to the individual’s health, social and family life, but for wider society as well.
Sue Marsh – a well known disability campaigner who has severe Crohn’s disease – once received a letter confirming she was no longer eligible for Disability Living Allowance(DLA), a payment which enables her to meet the considerable costs of care and of getting around. The whole benefits system is not fit for purpose any more. Well documented storeies include one man who suffered from heart failure and died 39 days after being declared fit for work. Stephen Hill was sent to his first Work Capability Assessment in 2010 when he gave up his job as a sandwich delivery man after being referred for tests on his heart. His wife Denise, who was with him at the assessment, said: “She checked him out. She did his blood pressure and his heart and said to see a doctor as soon as possible.” Despite the assessor telling Mr Hill to seek urgent medical advice, he was still found fit for work. In the meantime doctors had diagnosed him with heart failure. He won his appeal but he was ordered to attend another assessment. “He got a letter for another medical and I couldn’t believe it,” said Mrs Hill. “He’d got to go for a medical when he was waiting for a heart operation.” Yet he was again declared fit for work, with the assessor declaring: “Significant disability due to cardiovascular problems seems unlikely.” Mr Hill died of a heart attack five weeks later.
So what has gone wrong in the UK? Whereas the narrative for ‘Chavs’ can turn to the sequelae of the Thatcher administration, it is hard to identify a Miners’ Strike (or Oregreave) moment in the 80s for the disabled community. Britain and America are actually two countries that, in recent years, have led the world in attempting to give disabled people rights and equality. During his presidency, George Bush Senior was proud to sign the Americans with Disabilities Act while the 1995 Disability Discrimination Act has gradually transformed the lives of disabled people in the UK. It may appear on the surface that the UK and USA have nothing in common with Nazi Germany, a regime that is estimated to have killed 200,000 disabled people and forcibly sterilised twice that number. And yet something has clearly gone very wrong indeed. Liam Byrne, Shadow for the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, indeed, after most concede has been a slow start for Labour, recently erupted to say:
“The nasty party is well and truly back. Lord Freud is a former investment banker and now a minister of the crown. For him of all people to compare people on benefits to corpses and likening their lives to a funeral is quite frankly disgusting. Before the summer his boss Iain Duncan Smith had the temerity to call Remploy workers idlers who did nothing better than sit around drinking coffee. He sacked over 1,000 of them and only 35 have managed to find work again. He is quite clearly a man in total denial about the pain his policies are about to cause. Shelter have begged the government to consider the ‘terrifying reality’ of the damage they are doing. Scope talk of disabled people facing a tipping point, risking poverty, debt and isolation. This government is next year about to take out billions from disability help and housing. All to pay for their catastrophic failure to get Britain back to work, and a 3 billion tax giveaway to Britain’s richest citizens. This government’s so-called welfare revolution is collapsing around its ears. The work programme isn’t working. Universal Credit has become universal chaos. Yet Lord Freud’s response is to kick people when they are down and not even pretend to offer a helping hand.
Byrne in fact mounted a passionate response to the demonisation of the disabled citizen community in the UK with Andrew Neil on ‘The Sunday Politics’, in a recent ‘Sunday interview’. When a country’s economy is not performing well, due to abject failures of that country’s economic policies, a right-wing government will tend to blame those people whom they perceive not to contribute to the wealth of this country. The fallacy of this argument is of course that bankers in the City of London are more to blame for the economic woes of the UK than working disabled citizens. (There is, of course, a minority of impressive citizens, who are disabled, working in the City in the finance and law sectors, for example.) There are currently 1.3 million disabled people in the UK who are available for and want to work. However, only half of disabled people of working age are in work (50%), compared with 80% of non disabled people, and 23% of disabled people have no qualifications compared to 9% of non disabled people. Nearly one in five people of working age (7 million, or 18.6%) in Great Britain have a disability.
Whatever the precise arguments are about the ‘economic power’ of spoonies are (and I am a spoonie), there is no doubt, strengthened in principle by the Equalities Act (2010), one of the last statutory instruments to be enacted by Labour, disabled citizens have a powerful role to play in society, even if they remain somewhat under-represented. For example, how many disabled GPs, doctors or lawyers do you know? The bitter pill which the Coalition has to swallow is, that despite all their efforts into espousing ‘happiness’, many disabled citizens are distinctly unhappy with their demonisation in recent yesars. They do have enormous political power, and even polling evidence suggests that while most individuals do not support welfare payments for people patently ‘freeloading’ off the State, they do simultaneously believe that disabled citizens should be supported for their mobility and living in a fair society. That is the problem David Cameron and Nick Clegg have to face in the short term. Iain Duncan-Smith is not a well liked person by many disabled citizens, and, if he is insistent on producing what is a complicated change in culture and functions of the benefits system, the project is definitely doomed to outright failure, due to the weakness in follower support. Whether the Coalition listen to this in the short term is a political choice, of course, but they will have absolutely no choice but to listen in June 2015. Labour has a powerful opportunity to reframe and rearticulate the debate concerning the Welfare State, and it is extremely likely that Beveridge would have been vehemently opposed to any demonisation of the disabled class.
Data-driven policy has its problems, but single issues are alive and well
Michael Green is not just the ‘alter ego’ of Grant Shapps, whose personal image continues on its ‘slow burn’ after a mass of ridiculous stories concerning his business activities. Michael Green is the name of a top Carlton Communications figure, known to be a personal friend of David Cameron, like Andrew Cooper, the founder and strategic director of the Populus voting initiative.
There are many problems with polling as a way to make policy. Not least, it can produce results which are at odds with domestic and European law, such as repeal of the Human Rights Act, encouraging a swop for fundamental employment right in share ownership, or ‘bash a burglar’. The further problem is that the results themselves can be intrinsically unreliable on public policy grounds; such as the vast majority of survey respondents in the Sun who believe that the death penalty should be re-introduced. Furthermore, it is generally acknowledged that in politics the whole is more than the sum of its constituent parts; therefore the ‘gestalt’ of the policy must overall make sense. However, data-driven policy is attractive from an ‘efficiency’ aspect of the operations management of politics; money can be spent in producing data, which can be number-crunched, to act as the input for a speech-writer. The impact of the delivery of the speech written by Clare Foges and colleagues can then be ascertained through further polling, in a ‘feedforward’ mechanism of feedback control.
The idea of ‘strivers’, as Isabel Oakeshott points out, sounds like the product of a computer cluster analysis of polling data (though she did not phrase it in such statistical words.) The concept of strivers does not make sense if you consider that members of the Conservative Party also wish to cut non-employment benefits, the economy has been imploding under the direction of George Osborne since May 2010, parts of the government wishes to take away basic legal rights (such as human rights or employment) which would protect and enhance the wellbeing of a ‘striver’. Oh – that’s another aspect of data-driven policy which doesn’t make sense; how can you pursue an agenda of happiness and wellbeing, when you wish to impose austerity and swingeing cuts that is doing much short-term damage to the economy and much long-term damage to society?
It has been interesting to watch how the mainstream and blogosphere have responded to ‘single issue’ politics. It is perhaps true that general polling data do not give a helpful picture of the value of disability issues to non-disability voters, but Sonia Poulton’s articles have had a genuine captive audience. On welfare, Kaliya Franklin was even shortlisted for this year’s coveted Orwell Prize, and her friend and fellow campaigner for disability issues, Sue Marsh, has had a remarkable impact in breaking the ‘glass ceiling’ of this topic which previously had barely been addressed. Likewise, Dr Eoin Clarke, in the blogosphere, has been addressing with considerable bravery previously taboo issues of potential conflicts of interest and the implementation of the NHS Act, which would be felt by most reasonable people to be issues of public interest. Mainstream media may of course be frightened to tackle the complex issues of the Health and Social Care Act, or simply do not understand them, but it is noteworthy that the Daily Mail has recently, and successfully, embarked on a campaign against A&E closures.
That Hunt has decided to frame the argument as ‘modernisation’ of the NHS, which Andy Burnham MP, had started is indeed interesting. David Cameron hardly mentioned the NHS in his speech, which perhaps does reflect the polling data. Recent estimates have provided that the Labour Party is indeed around 30% ahead on the NHS, ‘can be trusted with the NHS’ and so forth. On the other hand, there has always been ambivalence about Labour’s record in public spending, despite the fact that this double-dip recession was directly caused by the policy of the Conservatives, and that George Osborne MP in opposition had promised to meet the spending commitments of Labour, a fact which has conveniently forgotten with his Liberal Democrat accomplices.
Danny Finkelstein has previously warned that the Conservatives should not put all their eggs in the austerity basket. The austerity plan has of course been utterly discredited, with the economy going into reverse under the Conservative-led government, and the Financial Times recently warned that due to the ongoing problems austerity would have to continue until 2018 at least. The austerity agenda could be another ‘single issue’ which might cause pain for Ed Balls and Ed Miliband, if members of the public sector continue to ‘feel the pain’ in the relative absence of a Labour government wishing to tax heavily the top 1% of earners.
Voters are likely to produce a decision on a combination of factors, and certainly predicting this less than three years ahead of a general election is not easy. Whilst ‘Bigotgate’ probably did not lose Gordon Brown the 2010 election, though it might have been representative of a confusion on Labour’s part in understanding the aspiration of voters in an immigration context, certain issues can seem to prove fatal. It is perhaps significant that the poll tax debacle was necessary and sufficient in toppling Thatcher, but it is also significant perhaps that the Conservatives went on to win the 1992 general election. That was the last election they actually won, as many members of Labour will remind you.
Out of the BBC or Daily Mail, please give me the Daily Mail any day!
Graphic from the Max Farquhar blog.
I’m surrounded by lefties – I’d say virtually all of my 3000 friends on Facebook are Labour voters, and possibly the vast majority of my nearly 6000 followers on Twitter are Labour voters too. Therefore, I am well aware how everyone has loved to mock the Daily Mail, as almost a ‘rite of passage’ for my party. However, I must say I really like the Daily Mail. I certainly feel that it now offers a more interesting and open discussion of policy matters than the BBC. There is no doubt that the BBC abuses its dominant position in subtle ways – it has a dominant presence on the internet, and in TV and radio; and it has such enormous reputation that it gets away with a lot. It gets away with rampant imbalance and bias against the Labour Party, and often makes basic accuracy mistakes.
The BBC has been implicit in furthering the lie that the Labour Party increased the deficit due to rampant recklessness. The fact is that a major cash injection had to be produced in 2009 to resuscitate a dying economy due to the global financial crash; without this injection virtually all senior economists concede that the UK economy would have entered a deep depression. As it was, the Conservatives, with the Liberal Democrats under Nick Clegg, withdrew investment and embarked on a policy of austerity, thus guaranteeing the slide into depression of the UK economy earlier this year. Sir Mervyn King does not like to emphasise this, which is odd given that he is supposed to be independent. Nick Clegg even this morning used his Andrew Marr to further the lie that Labour had ‘made a mistake’ akin to his fraudulent lie of making a pledge which the Liberal Democrats could not afford. Even Danny Alexander, according to James Forsyth’s article in the Spectator this morning, conceded that he warned against making this promise which the Liberal Democrats could not afford on The Sunday Politics show.
Apart from live interviews which the BBC uses to maintain balance, the reporting of the BBC of domestic news has been staggeringly misleading, either innocently, negligently or fraudulently. There has been no coverage of the welfare benefit reforms to the point that the public understands what is going on, the public have little comprehension that the NHS has been privatised and this had not been the policy prior to the 2010 general election, and the public do not know that many sectors have been taken out of scope in legal aid and that many law centres have shut down. This is in sharp contrast to the Daily Mail, curiously enough. For example, the Daily Mail “broke” the story last week that doctors are to be offered cash ‘bribes’ to slash the number of patients they send to hospital.
“GPs have been promised financial incentives of up to £26,000 for their surgery if they take certain measures to reduce referrals. Every time a doctor sends a patient to hospital for a scan, consultation or operation, the local NHS trust is charged for the cost of their treatment.”
The Daily Mail has also led through the journalism of Sonia Poulton on the trauma experienced by disabled citizens like me through this coalition government. Sonia recently reported on the Paralympics thus:
“This year, despite widespread revulsion and opposition, David Cameron’s Coalition has forced through some of the most punishing and harsh measures – via the Welfare Reform Bill – that disabled people have experienced in my lifetime. Financial life-lines have been severed and state-assistance stripped back, and in some cases completely withdrawn, as disabled people are forced into a system that will lessen personal independence and increase state dependence. This will almost certainly result in ‘disabled homes’ up and down the country.”
Sonia has even written to Ed Miliband about the disaster of the injustice of the work capability assessments, reproduced in this article:
“Dear Mr. Miliband,
I am prompted to write to you having just watched these two programmes on the subject of ‘fit to work’ testing for sick and disabled people: Channel 4?s Dispatches (‘Britain On The Sick’) and BBC2?s Panorama (‘Disabled or Faking it?’).
This year, as a writer, I have been made painfully aware of how distressing, unreliable and costly – both physically and emotionally – the Work Capability Assessment is for those undertaking it. The financial cost to the country is another concern altogether.”
It is worth looking at this quite carefully. Only this week, Michael Gove heaped praise on the Daily Mail in arguing the case for the E-Bacc in replacing the GCSE examination. The Conservatives are therefore very mindful of what the Daily Mail writes for its reasons, much more than it cares about the Labour Party Press Office says (stating the blindingly obvious). The BBC is playing an altogether deceitful game in furthering the political agenda of the Conservative Party, and knows that it has a massive outreach. However, it has a guaranteed source of income through the licence fee. Many people I know resent that the licence fee is being used to give such a distorted view of political thinking on BBC domestic news. However, the Daily Mail really does a golden market opportunity here. Whilst the death of newspapers has perhaps been somewhat exaggerated, the circulation of the Daily Mail remains good. It will benefit from a greater number of people who wish to read its papers, and it is very likely that the declining popularity of the Sun has been for a fundamental mistrust by the majority of reasonable voters in its output, accelerated by Kelvin Mackenzie and the propagation of smears over Hillsborough. The Daily Mail instead has a golden opportunity to make a lot of money, if many disenfranchised voters, who do not particularly like any of the political parties, wish to engage with resentment of the incompetence of ATOS in delivering assessments or the resentment of the privatisation of the NHS which they did not vote for.
I believe that Labour members, like me, should not underestimate the enormous value that the Daily Mail has been in recent times in discussing real issues involving domestic policies in a way that the BBC never would. This is an important thing for Labour to realise, and to get more people in the general public to engage with these important issues. I personally believe that, whilst much prominence has been given to the ‘it’s the economy stupid’ school of thinking, both main parties are in fact mistrusted on economic incompetence, and there is a new model army of armchair protestors against NHS privatisation and the way this government has treated disabled citizens.
Owen Jones and the case for engagement at #NetrootsUK
Pervasive in yesterday’s successful #NetrootsUK day at Congress House here in London was how people could feel part of Society. Not a Big Society, just Society. Nick Clegg and David Cameron have given ‘divide-and-rule’ a whole new dimension instead, by pitting the public sector workers against the private sector, by pitting indigenous people against immigrants, by pitting younger people against older people, and by pitting the disabled population against the non-disabled population; they have not supported the unemployment and disabled, but actively sought to stigmatise them through their policies.
For Nick Clegg and David Cameron, this is particularly deceitful as they have senior experience in public relations. As Nick Cohen writes this morning in the Guardian, any Keynesian policy to reverse now the shocking decline of Britain would take years to implement, and indeed Lord Skidelsky, who is the official biographer of John Maynard Keynes, feels that Vince Cable is not a Keynesian (George Osborne is clearly not).
The case for engagement is even more compelling, when many people feel utterly disenfranchised by the Tory-led BBC. The routine news coverage of the BBC borders on a Pravda-esque approach to journalism (an image I thank James Macintyre for). Without the social media, it would have been impossible for disabled campaigners Sue Marsh (@suey2y) and Kaliya Franklin (@bendygirl) to get their messages across about the lies which the government, with the assistance of the BBC, have been spreading about disabled people, as evidenced in the Spartacus Report.
That is what made Owen Jones’ speech at the #Netroots conference so special, in my view. But it was very special for another reason. Ed Miliband, in his final hustings at Haverstock Hill Comprehensive School, poignantly warned us that we must not view the Unions as the evil uncle of Labour. What truly appalled me was to see an army of young ‘activists’ in their 20s, armed with their iPhones and Blackberries, saying that the Unions are ‘irrelevant’ to them. The Unions are in fact the largest democratic movement in the UK with over 3.5 million members. Union membership is not closed to Labour. Crucially, the Unions campaign very actively for the enforcement of rights of citizens, particularly in employment. The fact that Thompsons Solicitors, an eminent law firm, is on the ground floor of the building #Netroots was hosted in for the second year-in-a-row is a testament to that. John, who helped to organise yesterday’s event superbly in my mind, took time to explain his ‘Stop employment wrongs‘ project which he had been working on. This is incredibly relevant to members of the Society I wish to live in.
That Society, symbolised by allegations of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice and a fine to banks for the #LIBOR scandal, at worst is a society driven by shareholders with only thing in mind – their shareholder dividend – is utterly galling. Yes, maybe I’d like a stop to the ‘something for nothing society’ – maybe the Tory-led BBC would like to launch a campaign on millionaires in the cabinet paying more tax on their dividends, as strictly speaking that is income rather than wealth for the economic moral-purists.
Owen’s talk in full which I recorded from the front row yesterday afternoon
