George Osborne has said a further £25bn spending cut will be coming after the next election, much of which will hit disabled people
Over the past five years, we have been forced to watch the systematic slashing of our welfare state. The coalition says ‘we are all in this together.’ The reality has been an austerity agenda where the disabled, the lowest-wage earners, and the chronically ill have taken the biggest hits.
Policy after policy has put the burden on the people who can least afford it. Cuts to council tax support have seen what’s effectively a new poll tax on millions of the poorest working households. The abolition of Disability Living Allowance and the Independent Living Fund are seeing basic dignity dubbed as too costly. Employment and Support Allowance has been riddled with conditionality, delays and outright failing, as thousands die after private companies find them ‘fit for work’. The bedroom tax has pushed thousands of the poorest people into rent arrears, penalising the disabled for needing a box room to store oxygen cylinders.
Worse, a climate has been built that says this is entirely right. The coalition has orchestrated a demonisation of need, where someone struggling on Jobseeker’s Allowance (JSA) has been recast as the feckless workshy and a person too sick to work is a scrounger worthy of suspicion.
Right-wing media and ‘poverty porn’ television have simply fed a fear that our own government has started. Benefit fraud is less than one per cent. The biggest part of social security spending – 53 per cent – actually goes to pensioners. Listen to Ian Duncan Smith and you would think the disabled were living in gold houses and the unemployed bathing in diamonds.
The sanction regime is characteristic of the distortion of a compassionate, fair safety-net. Jobcentre staff report being given targets for stopping people’s benefits, whether that’s a claimant who’s five minutes late for an appointment or someone with chronic illness who’s too sick to get out of bed. Meanwhile, workfare schemes force people on JSA to work for free or be sanctioned. This is not only about removing benefits but the principle behind them. Social security as a universal entitlement is being attacked.
A major tool in this has been the stigmatisation of people needing benefits – part of a wider attempt to make the public see things in terms of workers versus claimants. But the facts show this is an entirely false division. A job market characterised by unstable hours and low wages has pushed working people towards benefits. Housing benefit figures alone show the number of people in work needing help to pay the rent has increased by almost 60 per cent under the coalition.
Britain is getting poorer. This government’s choices – both benefit cuts and tax changes – have made more workers, more children, more disabled people struggle. 13 million people now live in poverty in this country.
It is charity that has been left to pick up the pieces. Half a million people have had to go to food banks to feed themselves over the past six months – most because of benefit delays and sanctions, others due to low wages. This is part of a disturbing retreat of the state, where private companies and local volunteers fill the gaps left by failing government.
Taking back the welfare state is a fundamental issue of this election. The stakes could not be higher: the right to a life without poverty and a system where we help each other. As Class set out in their election guide, we must restore social security as a permanent, humane part of British society.
Judgement and punishment must be cast out for solidarity and compassion. Workfare, low wages, a gender pay gap, and propped up high rents, need to be replaced by a living wage, stable jobs, gender equality, and affordable homes. The people unable to work due to ill health or disability, currently enduring nominal income and arbitrary testing, must get bespoke assessment and support to live comfortably.
We know what’s already been done in the name of austerity is just the beginning. George Osborne has said a further £25bn spending cuts – much of it from the welfare budget – will be coming after the next election. If the Conservatives keep hold of power, Britain will find itself halfway through a near-decade of cuts. The disabled, people struggling to find work or living hand-to-mouth on low wages are easy targets. The welfare state cannot afford another five years of this.
Frances Ryan writes for the Guardian and New Statesman, covering austerity, disability and feminism. Follow her on Twitter
49 Responses to “The coalition has stigmatised welfare users – we need a return to compassion and solidarity”
littleoddsandpieces
The unemployed, albeit only 3 per cent of the entire benefits bill, include the chronic sick and disabled dumped off such benefits onto the work components of Employment and Support Allowance or onto Jobseekers Allowances and suffering sanctions for many months so nil food money, for all ages.
The unemployed and working poor also include people late 50s / early 60s denied state pension payout
at 60 for women and 65 for men from 2013, and
the men and women older than those retiring from next year, on and from 6 April, 2016,
who face massively reduced or
nil state pension
even if worked all their lives.
See why, under my petitition, in my
WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT seciton, at:
https://you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/state-pension-at-60-now
Universal Credit from 2016-2017 will include those eligible for Pension Credit, who are younger than the retirement age, denying them that benefit.
Universal Credit means permanent sanctions because the replacement of less benefit from the Hardship Payments
becomes a recoverable loan
from any future benefit or earned income.
This includes, under the coming Universal Credit, the working poor sanctioned for not being able to move from part time to full time hours (waged or self employed).
So people face nil disability, nil chronic sick, nil UC and nil state pension, all in the same parliament from 2016.
And the Tories intend to sit in power, even if MPs lose their seats, in a caretaker government, due to the most severe hung parliament predicted by all the expert pundits.
To give Labour the 323 MP at least group of parties to rule as a left wing government, there needs to be further parties in the mix than just the SNP and Plaid Cymru.
The poor have never had so much power in Tory and Lib Dem marginals to bring in new left wing anti-austerity parties that are natural allies to Labour.
– Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC)
– Class War (mostly in London)
– Mebyon Kernow of Cornwall
(Cornwall has the most slim marginals of Tory and Lib Dem MP seats)
The disabled on benefit, pensioners in benefit poverty and new pensioners in and out of work facing the end of the welfare state and the state pension, would vote for these parties, if they realised this would put the Tories and Lib Dems out of government and into the opposition.
Labour would do better to end all its funding of running in Scotland, as they will get the SNP anyway as allies.
Labour could help to bring the party into government by funding the advertisement ads and media coverage of those above parties in Tory and Lib Dem marginals in England.
Or Labour could encourage trade unions to do so direct?
This is a Vote or Starve election.
Because a Tory caretaker government would be the ultimate nightmare for another 5 years.
James
I`m getting pretty sick of this Tory government denigrating the poorest in our society as benefit cheats & scroungers while their ministers like Rifkind have their noses in the trough taking cash for questions.
Have these Tory toffs & other politicians forgotten the MP expenses scandal ? Where I’d suggest it was them cheating & taking money off the tax-payer & not disabled people or benefit claimants & if they`ve forgotten who caused the crash & recession in 2028 .. I’ll remind them again … it was their friends the “bankers” who crashed the economy & bankrupted the country. which by the way not a single one went to jail for !
If David Cameron & his friends in the Tory party were as quick to go after bankers, tax evaders, dodgy MP`s with their noses in the trough as quick as go after benefit scroungers the treasury`s coffers would be full !
Leon Wolfeson
Exactly – they’d lose all the excuses for their ideologically and not fiscally based austerity.
And they can’t have that now.
Leon Wolfeson
Sure – we could look at principles like a Basic Income.
I know I go on about it, but it fixes SO much!
And of course the welfare state is being systematically demolished, that’s the entire point of the Tory policy. Thing is, Labour is little different – they’re also committed to the cap and to lowering welfare dramatically, thus.
AlanGiles
Sadly it was Blair’s New Labour that started the demonisation of welfare claimants, starting out with the belicose noise of the likes of Blunkett, Alan Johnson (the “geezer” who wanted to put DWP officials in GPs surgeries to be advised which patients were on benefit, thus contravening the rules on confidentiality) and Darling and continuing in Browns time when David Freud was annointed a “welfare expert” by James Purnell, ex minister and expenses fiddler now back with the BBC. Freud admitted that he “knew nothing about welfare” and proved he was at least telling the truth on that occassion by suggesting that it was the patients own GP who “put” the patient on I.B. Purnell was ably assisted by Tony McNulty (another ex politician/expenses fiddler) and Yvette Cooper-Balls. In very recent times the ghastly Rachel Reeves has said she will be “tougher than the Tories” on welfare.
Are we to take it Reeves was just saying that, and that if Labour manage to win the election they have executed a 180 degree turn, or are they just being their usual hypocritical themselves?