When is a safety net not a safety net? When it is the Tories welfare reforms. The great public welfare pot, into which we all pay in excess of half our income through direct and indirect taxation, is there for the benefit of all. The range of services that affect us all is vast, from roads, pavements and street lighting, to waste disposal and health care. These services are always on, maintained and ready for use whether we make use of them in any one day or even, for those who enjoy a lifetime of rude health and are more fortunate than most, if we do not have to avail ourselves of some of them at all. The infrastructure of a nation is both vast and complex and, by and large, is simply taken for granted as we go about our daily lives and yet there is not a single person who does not benefit from its existence.
Like the myth of the ‘self made man’ no one, barring the extremely rare exception of a hermit living off the grid, lives without the benefits of the welfare pot. In general we tend to pay attention when things goes wrong, as, say, after a hard winter and the roads develop pot holes, and yet the structure is in place to report such things and, all being well, they are soon remedied.
Such a behemoth is not without its problems, over priced contracts, too much middle management, excessive bureaucracy and jobs worths are to be found everywhere but it remains that we would be a lot worse off without it.
However, since the banks crashed the global financial markets and we all contributed to bailing them out, with not a word of thanks may I say, something has gone terrible wrong. The least able, the poor, the sick and disabled have become the target of the most vicious and punitive welfare reforms in our history. The blame for the recession and austerity has been laid firmly at the door of welfare benefit recipients, working and non working alike. When George Osborne asked, “Where is the fairness, we ask, for the shift worker, leaving home in the dark hours of the early morning, who looks up at the closed blinds of their next door neighbour sleeping off a life on benefits?’ he was firing up resentment and, indeed, hatred, against those who for whatever reason are down on their luck.
Cameron and Osborne claim to speak for all those who want to work hard and get on and yet they have systematically stripped away workers right and the legal aid system andBritainis now the most unequal country in the western world.
What the government has done is to embark on a war on the poor and vulnerable which now includes those who have no say what so ever in the national issues that affect their daily lives, our children. This summer has seen a massive rise in the use of food banks as parents struggle to feed their children. That food banks exist at all in the seventh richest nation in the world is a monstrous injustice and yet the governments response to this is, ‘Not our fault, nothing to do with us, nothing to see, move on.’
This targeting of the vulnerable reached its nadir (it is to be hoped) recently with the now infamous racist vans, with their message, in English only, telling illegal immigrants to ‘Go home’, a scheme they hoped to roll out nationally. They also sent out squads of immigration officers to underground stations who, illegally, attempted to stop and question anyone they fancied might be suspect, almost exclusively targeting people because of the colour of their skin.
Not only are we now the most unequal country on the western world we are an increasingly divided country and this is being aggressively promoted by the government. There are no benefits in this situation to society at large, the only people benefiting are the government and corporations who are using this divisiveness to privatise the state and funnel the state pot, our money, into private hands. The situation is being widely misreported or not reported at all in the national media with notable exceptions and it is falling to the independent media, like the Dorset Eye and bloggers, to address the balance and to drive the message home that the greatest real and present danger to this country since WWII is its own government.
https://www.channel4.com/news/osborne-unveils-10bn-benefits-cut-package
https://think-left.org/2013/05/06/114-year-workers-rights-scrapped-by-coalition-government/
https://www.lawsociety.org.uk/advice/articles/the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it/
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk-most-unequal-country-in-the-west-1329614.html
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/go-home-immigration-vans-investigated-2145521
Keith Lindsay-Cameron
