Jobseekers allowance – Single unemployed under 25 – £57.90, over 25 – £73.10 – a week
In the following I make no attempt to be impartial. not to the system. the government, its officials and especially the Department for Work and Pensions all of which act with extreme prejudice against the lives and well being of ordinary people.
It’s 2018 and Britain no longer has an effective universal safety net, not in health, social security, education, public services, housing, foreign policy, you name it.
The Jobseekers allowance figures above will change under Universal Credit (UC), which is guaranteed to see no one in any kind of credit and will certainly penalise poor people further, which was the whole intent and purpose of UC from day one.
One of Universal Credits chief architects, David Freud, said in 2012, “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.” He meant, of course, economic risks, for which driving people into poverty was the obvious solution. Since then millions have been driven into poverty on their way to becoming millionaires like Freud.
Benefits are often described as the minimum the law requires for people to live on, whatever that may have once meant, it is now utterly meaningless.
With the help of Charlotte Hughes, prominent protector in the war on the poor, I decided to make a little list of minimal costs of living in the UK today, with added scorn. Feel free to add your own epithets as you see fit.
£2 a meal 3 times a day = £42 (as if…)
elec – £10. Gas – £15 = £25 (you wish)
Household goods inc. sanitary products – forget it – at the most a couple of quid.
Bus fares walk if local of not at least a fiver.
Clothing – forget it. Clothes have to last. If essential a fiver
Drink, drugs, tobacco – don’t even think about it!
Television – get you, over privileged scrounger!
Phone – if lucky a Pay As You Go from £5 a month because the DWP demand you are online, that’s if you haven’t pawned your phone
Internet access – only on phone. Maybe a cheap deal of £30 a month or less.
Social life – forget it.
Any kind of household emergency or domestic appliance failure – tear your hair out.
Printer and stationary (CVs and suicide notes) – Back of a brown envelope.
Support for depression, suicidal thoughts, despair – None unless you go on a long waiting list. You have to phone helplines which isn’t going to happen with no money or phone.
Having to move out of your family area, sofa surfing, homeless.
And then – sanctions – denied even the most basic means of survival.
In 2012 David Cameron accused people on long term benefits of having a ‘culture of entitlement’, in a fact free rant to escalate the culture of hatred he was promoting. What the Conservatives never talk about is quality of life for ordinary people. Quality of life and the copious benefits which protect it is exclusive to people like him, for whom austerity was an opportunity for personal enrichment and has seen a massive transfer of wealth from the poorest to the richest people on earth.
To treat poor people in such an obscene way as to expect people under 25 to attempt to subsist on £57.90 a week and people over 25 on £73.10 a week should be classed as a crime of class discrimination. Quite simply, Conservatives would never consider for a moment imposing such punishments on their own kind, nor deprive them of the means of survival, and certainly no court in the land would ever impose such a punishment. The benefits system imposed by the Conservatives is a crime against a specific, targeted, section of humanity, the poorest and least able and the least supported to make any headway in the world. Worse still, those in poverty are blamed for the very existence of poverty and then penalised further for having the temerity to be poor in the first place.
Just look at the state of those two figures, it’s writ large that poverty is maintained by the rich, to benefit the rich, it’s right there in black and white as government policy.
Keith Ordinary Guy
DPAC are holding a national day of action calling for Universal Credit to be scrapped, April 18th. Links just below.
https://dpac.uk.net/2018/03/national-day-of-action-to-stopandscrap-universal-credit-march-1st/
https://dpac.uk.net/2018/03/18-april-universal-credit-national-day-of-action-sheffield-demo/
https://anotherangryvoice.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/lord-freud-risks-corpses-and-slums.html
https://www.politicshome.com/news/uk/economy/house/67295/freudian-analysis
https://www.theguardian.com/society/datablog/2017/feb/17/millions-of-people-fall-below-the-uks-minimum-income-standard-in-data
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2012/jun/25/cameron-tories-slash-benefits
https://www.opendemocracy.net/neweconomics/time-call-housing-crisis-really-largest-transfer-wealth-living-memory/
