The 'Nasty Party' is well and truly back

[DanaC]

In the run up to the last general election, David Cameron went out of his way to shed the 'Nasty Party' tag. A new Conservative government wouldn't attack the poor, they were the ones who'd do something to end poverty. They wouldn't victimise the unemployed, they would offer them real and concrete assistance. They wouldn't strip the NHS to its bones, it was 'safe in [their] hands'.

Then they ... well actually no, they didn't 'win' the election, as such. No party won enough seats to form a government. As the largest party they were able to form a coalition government with the Liberal Democrat party.

With this not-quite-a-mandate, they have launched an all out assault on the poor, the vulnerable, the elderly, the sick, the young, the homeless, the unemployed, the low paid...

They have accelerated the privatisation of health, and they are busy 'reforming' the benefits system.

When they came into power, they inherited high but falling youth unemployment. One reason it was falling was a scheme put in place by the previous government which was genuinely helping young people find their feet in the world of work. Cameron scrapped the scheme wholsale claiming it was an expensive failure. His own government's report now shows that it was a net gain for the treasury and had a high success rate compared to most such schemes.

It was replaced with new schemes, administered under contract, which have been beset by scandal, fraud and overspending and produced very little of value. Instead of young people finding themselves in a subsidised post for a month with a high chance of a permanent role, they now find themselves stacking shelves in supermarkets and only getting their benefits, not wages.

A Labour-backed scheme to get unemployed people into work, which was scrapped by David Cameron for being too expensive, produced a net gain for Britain, according to a government report.

The future jobs fund, introduced in 2009 to get 35,000 long-term unemployed people back into work, was dismissed by the prime minister last year for being a badly targeted failure.

But an impact analysis for the Department for Work and Pensions has found that society gained £7,750 per participant through wages, increased tax receipts and reduced benefit payments.

Participants were calculated to have gained £4,000 and employers to have gained £6,850, with the cost to the exchequer calculated to be £3,100 per job.

Two years after the start of their time with the fund, former jobseekers were 16% less likely to be in receipt of welfare support than non-participants. This amounted to eight fewer days spent on benefits. They were 27% more likely to be in unsubsidised employment than if they had not participated.

The fund reduced the amount of time young people spent on benefits and increased the amount of time they were in unsubsidised employment, the report said.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/20...rk-scheme-gain


Meanwhile the decision to close Remploy factories, which provided supported and assisted employment for people with serious disabilities, in whch they actually produced real things for a real wage (they used to make army uniforms and other stuff for the public sector) was accompanied by assurances that help would be given to the 1000s sacked workers to find other work. The Remploy system has been criticised for 'ghettoising' disabled people.

Labour has called for a halt to the closure of Remploy factories, which provide employment for disabled people, after it emerged that, despite ministerial promises to help sacked workers back into work, only 3% of those made redundant have found new jobs.

The government argued it could no longer bear the £68m annual losses racked up by the factories and instead would use the money saved to fund schemes to help disabled people into work.

However, following a series of parliamentary questions, Labour said 31 factories had closed with the loss of 1,021 jobs, and 35 disabled workers had found new work.

[snip]

Labour pointed out that the then disability minister Maria Miller had promised: "Any disabled member of [Remploy] staff who is made redundant will receive an offer of individualised support for up to 18 months to help with the transition from government-funded sheltered employment to mainstream employment."

Miller's successor, Esther McVey, has admitted only 35 former Remploy workers have found new jobs. Economists had warned that those made redundant would find it very difficult to find another job given the economic situation. According to the OECD, the likelihood of a disabled person in the UK being unemployed is twice that of someone without a disability. Official figures show that in the three months to June 2012, there were 554,000 unemployed disabled people, a 10.7% rise on the previous year and an 11,000 increase on the quarter.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/20...our?intcmp=239

Alongside this the 'Work Capability Assessment' system which now assesses what if any work a benefits claimant is capable of has run into awful problems. Run by a private company (Atos) very badly, it has been beset with allegations of incompetence and mismanagement. Many disabled and/or sick people have been arbitrarily declared fit for work when they patently are not. Cancer patients have been given short shrift.

Recently a scandal broke when it came to light that a veteran of the Afghan conflict who lost a limb and is still suffering serious pain and mental distress was declared fit for work and awarded 'zero points' meaning he was not entitled to any disability benefits but was instead placed on jobfinder benefits (very harsh system, very open to abuse).

More here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/20...nt-reform-slow

And now this. Here we have it, the 'Nasty Party' is back and it's proud.

The government's welfare reform minister has suggested lone parents, sickness claimants and other people on benefits are too comfortable not having to work for their income, saying they are able to "have a lifestyle" on the state.

In an interview with House Magazine, Lord Freud is reported to have said the benefits system is "dreadful" and discourages poor people from taking the risks he implied they should be willing to bear to change their circumstances.

"The incapacity benefits, the lone parents, the people who are self-employed for year after year and only earn hundreds of pounds or a few thousand pounds, the people waiting for their work ability assessment then not going to it – all kinds of areas where people are able to have a lifestyle off benefits and actually off conditionality," the Conservative peer said.

[snip]

Freud, a former journalist and investment banker, told the magazine that his background did not make him unable to understand the reality of living on benefits. "You don't have to be the corpse to go to the funeral, which is the implied criticism there," he said.

And the lies, oh the lies that justify the cruelty:

A report by the University of Kent this week calculated that hundreds of thousands of people were put off claiming benefits because of perceived stigma, a problem the researchers also blamed on the media.

The report dismissed government claims that there were families receiving as much as £100,000 a year in housing benefit – it later emerged there were just five such families – and that people had been off work for more than a year with diarrhoea – it turned out they had serious bowel diseases

[DanaC]

This is a nice little piece in response to Lord Freud's latest vocal assault on the poor:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisf...isk?intcmp=239

Every once in a while, politicians take the time to remind us of the duties of the poor. The latest to take the pulpit is the Tory peer Lord Freud, a former city banker who has since advised both New Labour and the Tories on "welfare reform". This time, the poor are told they must take more risks, abandoning the "lifestyle" of welfare for the adventure of enterprise.

Before assessing this claim, it is worth asking who it is that is taking risks with the livelihoods of the poor. Freud began his work on welfare reform knowing, by his own admission, nothing about welfare. In fact, it seems fairly safe to say that he continued in this vein, as he continued to make utterly ignorant claims about the system in order to justify government cuts.

Freud's lament about the risk-averse poor has two layers. The first is simply a rationalisation for a government policy of deep welfare cuts. The government maintains that the welfare system, rather than supporting the victims of market failure, is simply holding people back in various ways by incentivising unemployment. After all, Freud avers, "people who are poorer should be prepared to take the biggest risks" as they have "the least to lose": only their attachment to welfare holds them back.

The second layer is implicit in every Tory homily about risk. It is a commonplace of conservative political philosophy that people, barring a restless few touched with genius, are essentially stagnant and unproductive without the threat of privation acting as a whip. Government ministers are apt to talk about "making work pay" but, as they are busy attempting to suppress wage claims, this translates as making benefits so inadequate that even a poverty wage is an improvement. The implication is that by reducing benefits, and thus making life on welfare more difficult and stressful for many, one will goad the poor into becoming petty entrepreneurs.

Yet, whenever a Conservative politician gushes about risk, one is reminded of Nye Bevan's retort: "The assertion of anti-socialists that private economic adventure is a desirable condition stamps them out as profoundly unscientific. You can make your home the base for your adventures, but it is absurd to make the base itself an adventure."

This is precisely the point. It is true that the poor have the least to lose in purely financial terms. It is just that this little they have to lose is what is keeping them fed and warm, is not the sort of thing one gambles with and at any rate it yields poor returns. The rich, being more endowed with resources and more secure in their position, are far better placed to take risks. Bankers of Freud's ilk have an even greater advantage in this respect, as they take risks with the money and livelihoods of others.

[Trilby]

I know it's wrong and i know i shouldn't be but I'm so glad my country isn't the only one demonizing the poor, the weak and the disabled. I KNOW that sounds wrong. What I mean to say, I guess, is that the wealthy and powerful are pretty much all the same no matter where you go.

[DanaC]

Hahaha. That's partly why I posted about it actually. I was going to call the thread 'It isn't just the US...'

[SamIam]

Thanks for a well researched and interesting post, Dana. Here in the US, most news reports ignore what is going on in other countries unless we're at war with them or likely to go to war with them. Now and then CNN or someone will have a 30 second clip on the problems of the EU and that's about it.

The arrogance of the powerful and the wealthy when it comes to the less fortunate members of society is incredible. I don't know if these people are just ignorant (I doubt it) or whether their goal is to eliminate poverty by eliminating the impoverished. It sounds to me like the UK's Tory party has joined Republicans in the US with the motto, "Let 'em die in the streets."

[sexobon]

But you've still got the Queen to hand out Maundy Money don't you? There, all better.