The poorest people in Britain are being subjected to a state imposed apartheid as welfare rights, workers protections and legal aid, are stripped away, and through the persistent and malicious government and media demonisation of the poor, the imposition of the Bedroom Tax and the increasing use of welfare sanctions of up to three years loss of welfare income and ever more draconian state control.
This is social exclusion on a grand scale accompanied by the outright denial by government that their policies of attrition have anything to do with growing poverty and hardship. Lord Freud has said of the rising number of food banks, ‘It is difficult to know which came first – supply or demand.’ as if food bank usage was some kind of lifestyle choice. It is worth bearing in mind that it was also Freud who said, ‘We’ve got the circumstances now where… people who are poorer should be prepared to take the biggest risks – they’ve got least to lose.’ Quite how that kind of twisted logic works is hard to understand when the bottom line of poverty is the risk to life itself, but then, it is clear that any intrinsic value of life has no part to play in government policy.
In our modern technological nation and ever since the industrial revolution with the loss of traditional cottage/home produce, money is the means of our survival. As with gas and electricity, industrial monopoly has done away with localised, home, initiatives, to create a dependence that is entirely based on monetary exchange for goods and services. Money, therefore, has become a necessity and yet is maintained as a reward for labour, yet which is in no way linked to the actual cost of living. So today inBritainwe have a virtually meaningless minimum wage and are as far away from a legislated living wage as ever.
The greater tragedy is that hate crime is on the increase including disability hate crime which is at its highest level since records began. It’s hardly surprising when the DWP and Iain Duncan Smith treat all disability as malingering and, as David Cameron puts it,Britainis for people who want to get on. This is no longer a country in which the poor are welcome and the disabled least of all. Government cuts continue to target the poorest members of society and with yet more cuts on the way, this apartheid against the poor is still, tragically, in its infancy. With the ever increasing privatisation of the state, including the NHS, it is predicted that the NHS could start charging for services within ten years with devastating consequences for the poor who will be least able afford them. July the 5th marked the 65 birthday of the NHS of which Aneurin (Nye) Bevan said, ‘The NHS will survive as long as there are folk with the faith to fight for it.’
Sad to say that not even the far sighted Nye Bevan could have foreseen the rise of the corporate state and the systematic robbery of the poor to pay for an austerity entirely imposed on us by the banks, stock markets and huge corporate interests. People of good faith are necessary as never before to fight this malicious growing apartheid.
Keith Lindsay-Cameron
