Tories Target Poorest and Sickest

We now have clear evidence of the outrageous immorality of Tory policy in its drive to protect the richest in society at the expense of the poorest and the most vulnerable, not just in the sense that the poor will be a bit poorer than they were before, but in the sense that the poor will be made to suffer, to cringe at the nastiness of modern living as the Tory government is shaping it. And the government is doing this with wilful intent, purposefully finding ways to make the poorest and most vulnerable suffer.

Instead of making the tax system more fair, and taxing the richest people a little more – a mere slither of a little extra considered as a proportion of their massive wealth – the government has reduced the rate of income tax for the richest and will cut deeply into the incomes and services needed desperately by the sick and disabled, the elderly, and other vulnerable groups.

And the cuts are going to slice deep. The government wants to ‘save’ £75.2 billion, and the areas being cut the most are social care and welfare.

In other words, the most vulnerable in society are being hunted down to pay the price for the failure of the capitalist system, for the incompetence of government, and the incompetence of the banks. And to satisfy the greed of the richest.

Using the government’s own figures, Dr Simon Duffy in his report A fair society? How the cuts target disabled people, published by the Campaign for a Fair Society, finds that:

Using the government’s own figures, it is clear that by 2015 ... benefits for disabled people and the poorest will ... have been cut by £18 billion, a cut of about 20%.

When we look at the combined impact of all the cuts we find:

• People in poverty (21% of the population) bear 39% of all cuts.

• Disabled people (8% of the population) bear 29% of all cuts.

• People with severest disabilities (2% of the whole population) bear 15% of all cuts.

Not only are the cuts in general being targeted at people in poverty, but there is a specific emphasis on targeting disabled people. You cannot argue against that sort of inhuman discrimination, because the person you are trying to argue with is plainly not open to, or not interested in rational argument.

The only explanation for this that makes any sense is to understand that Cameron, Osborne and the rest literally have something wrong with them. They are incapable of the normal sort of moral thinking that guides the daily lives of you and me. They display the psychology that we see in psychopaths, that is, people who literally do not have feelings for other people, but use them like insensible objects, as resources for their own self-serving schemes.


SOURCE

http://www.centreforwelfarereform.org/uploads/attachment/354/a-fair-society.pdf

Make the Children Suffer

What words should we use to describe the people who perpetrate this outrage? Are they callous, unfeeling, psychopathic, heartless, or just plain stupid? Maybe they just hate people – except themselves, of course, and their rich chums, and the corporations in whose pockets they are nestled down so comfortably.

The moral crime that any decent person must accuse Cameron and his posh boys of committing is that of pushing 200,000 more children into poverty. Their squeeze on tax credits and other social security benefits will push a population the size of Northampton – were everyone living there to be a child – into poverty. This will happen as the result of capping most benefits to 1% over the next three years.

Their reason? Get ready for one of the most stupid bits of ‘reasoning’ you are going to hear for a long time.

They are doing this because it would be unfair for working people to have their incomes rise at a lower annual rate than those of social security claimants.

Be careful you don’t fall into their devious trap. Let’s get clear on what that means.

They think it would be unfair for someone on an average income, say, of £26,500 to have that income rise by only 1.5% and a benefit claimant to have their income rise by a greater percentage of say 2%.

The hard-working striver grosses £509 per week, and a 1.5% increase would give them an extra £7.64. Let’s look at the ‘injustice’ of giving the JSA claimant a 2% increase. Well, with JSA at £71 per week, a 2% increase would be £1.42.

So there you have it. In the Einstein-sharp mind of a Tory posh boy, giving the working person £6.22 more than someone struggling on Jobseeker’s Allowance would be unfair.

This nasty, nasty cap of 1% has the sole purpose of dividing one group of people against another group, of trying to stir up hated in working people, who have the luxury of a job, against the unemployed. No doubt some people have fallen for the trick, and no doubt some people now have more hatred glaring from their hard-working eyes than they had before.

But much worse than that will be the effect that the Tories’ pathetically nasty policy has on children. Children are the innocents in all this. They know nothing of scrounging and striving. All they know is that the deeper their families are pushed into poverty, the worse their suffering.

To push through a policy whose chief effect is to hurt children takes some beating. To say that that is disgusting, immoral or cruel, rather misses the point that in one of the world’s richest economies, the multi-millionaire posh boys of Cameron’s cabinet have deliberately pursued a policy one of whose most tangible evils is the hurting of children.


SOURCES

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/jan/17/benefits-squeeze-200000-children-poverty

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-20442666

http://www.citypopulation.de/UK-Cities.html

British Government Lying Again?

The government claims to have created an additional half a million new jobs in the past year. At best, this is a gross exaggeration, at worst, a deliberate deception, because over 20% of those ‘jobs’ are being done by unemployed people still receiving jobseeker’s allowance on unpaid government ‘back-to-work-schemes’. Some are unpaid workers doing voluntary or mandatory ‘work experience’ in supermarkets and charity shops.

Many, therefore, are working for businesses and corporations who exploit their workers for the profit they produce, and pay them nothing!

Some of that half million include tens of thousands with no jobs and no training, who simply attend regular job-hunting workshops for nothing more than the benefit payments they are entitled to – and the government counts them as having a job! You couldn’t make it up, it’s so daft!

But apparently this is the right way to do it, because under International Labour Organisation guidelines, people are counted as being employed if they are contributing to the nation's economic output, regardless of whether or not they get paid.

They work. Someone else benefits.

Let’s call that what it is. It’s a sort of slavery. It’s bullies pushing around the weak and vulnerable for as much profit they can extract.

Then when the placements end, the poor slaves are pushed back into the ranks of the scroungers and maligned benefit cheats, ready for another kicking by the government and the right-wing press.

Well, we have put posh-boy millionaire bullies in charge, and top-class bullying is what we get.


SOURCES

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/jan/15/statistics-doubt-coalition-500000-jobs

Austerity — the Biggest Con Ever

The gap between rich and poor has grown faster in Britain than in any other developed country over recent decades. Taxes for the rich have been cut, whilst social security benefits for the poor are being scaled back. Public services, including the National Health Service, and virtually all services provided by local authorities are being cut. All in the name of austerity. All with the ludicrously false claim that our country is too poor to provide these services at former levels, that we simply do not have the money, and that we must cut public expenditure or face some dire calamity that will bring ruin to us all.

These claims are not just false. They are intended to deceive us, to bully us into accepting the need for so-called austerity.

The need for austerity is a myth. A total lie, designed to make the richest 1% richer still, and to keep the rest of us, the 99%, in our place, ready to serve our masters as slaves in all but name.

THESE ARE THE FACTS

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the National Debt stood at about 30 percent of GDP. It rose above 150 percent in World War I and stayed relatively high until dropping below 100 percent in the early 1960s. By the 1970s, debt declined to 50 percent of GDP, and dropped to 25 percent by 1990. The National Debt began to increase again in the aftermath of the worldwide financial crisis of 2008, and today is the same as it was in the late 1960s.

But this does not mean that there is a ‘debt crisis’. It means that the UK government owes £1,526,000,000,000 — which is approximately 59% of the total UK economy for one year.

In fact, the only time since the early 1700s when the national debt has been lower than it is now was during the period between the latter decades of the 19th century and the start of World War I. The level of debt we have now is completely normal. It is a feature of the economic system. It is nothing more than an aspect of how it works.

THE LIE

That today’s debt constitutes a problem is a complete and utter fiction, conconcted and spread by the richest 1% and their friends in government so as to keep the rest of us under their heel, and to ‘justify’ the government’s ‘difficult’ decision to slam the most vulnerable, the sick, the disabled, the unemployed, with cuts to their entitlements within the Welfare State.

The government is lying to you. It is lying to all of us. It distorts facts and figures to suit its purpose. And it’s purpose? To make themselves and their millionaire friends richer, and to do that by making the rest of us poorer. And it’s method is to demonise the poor, lie about the sick and disabled. Drip, drip, drip the deceit to a compliant press that little by little deceives people into thinking that most disabled people are frauds, deliberately merging the criminal with the disabled person.

It is time to fight back.


SOURCES

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/8935943/Gap-between-rich-and-poor-growing-fastest-in-Britain.html
www.ukpublicspending.co.uk
http://www.ukpublicspending.co.uk/downchart_ukgs.php?chart=G0-total&year=1692_2011&units=p&state=UK

The Welfare State

The creation of the Welfare State in the UK in the twentieth century represents the most significant advance of social justice in human history.

At every stage of life, from the months before you were born, through your infancy, childhood and education, through your working life, then on to retirement in old age, the Welfare State ensures a minimum standard of support for all your essential needs. However well you fare in life, or however dismal events turn out for you, the institutions of the Welfare State will be on hand to provide you with the help that is appropriate for you to make the best life that is possible under your own unique circumstances.

And this is exactly as it should be. It marks out the society that embraces the principle of universal welfare entitlements as one that is more civilised than it was before, and the extent to which the Welfare State is expanded and better resourced marks the extent to which our society takes seriously its collective moral responsibilities.

Any reduction in provision is a failure of civilisation, planned by those with plenty, with money, with power, with connections, perpetrated on those without such advantages, the result of which will be pain, suffering, and the manifestation of cruelty on a truly massive scale.

This issue divides decent, caring, moral people from those who are devious, heartless, uncaring and selfish, who lack the spirit of common human decency.

We are human beings, and our lives have value, and we demand to be treated with the moral consideration we are entitled to.