Those lovely folks over at Daily Express TV have hit on a relatively untapped vein of hate. Marry together your idea of the undeserving poor sponging off the hardworking tax payer with fat people and you have the perfect scapegoat: someone who cannot work because they are obese. Channel 5’s Benefits: Too Fat to Work is an exercise in demonology dressed up as concern porn, and befitting the quality publications of the station’s proprietor the facts of the matter – such as only 12,000 people out of a population of 60m plus are officially deemed “too fat to work” – cannot be allowed to get in the way of an hour long exhortation to mock, condemn, and hate so we can feel better about ourselves. Continue reading
Tagged with Benefits
Welfare for Gideon’s corporate chums, but forget about it if you’re poor
Last year, the “big four” banks – HSBC, Barclays, RBS and Lloyds – enjoyed a ‘too big to fail’ taxpayer subsidy of no less than £38bn, the New Economics Foundation thinktank (NEF) have revealed. This is in an economy where the budget deficit is still £111bn, and where money is so tight that Osborne has already announced benefit cuts for the most needy by another £12bn in the next parliament. That’s in addition to the £20bn cut from the same benefits in this one.
At the same time the City of London Corporation, the traditional redoubt of financial capitalism, has just announced that corporation tax paid by the financial sector has halved since 2007 – to just £6.5bn. And an LSE study recently estimated that the ten top banks, so far from supporting the interests of the real economy (even government bribes to get them to lend to industry having had little effect), engaged in an orgy of scandals that cost a staggering £100bn over the 5 years to 2012. Continue reading
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Aspiration Nation: where the young don’t even have a safety net
There are 1.09 million people between the ages of 16 to 24 who are neither earning nor learning. They can’t find jobs, but are unwilling to retrain. There are some who have, since leaving school, actively refused to improve themselves through the dignifying act of work and plan to live, forever, on jobseekers’ allowance. This is a terrible, expensive state of affairs. But there is no need to worry, because as was made clear at The Conservative party conference, the Tories are planning to swoop in and give them what for.
In plans that I, perhaps naively, found shocking in their sweeping severity, the Conservatives have announced the potential reduction and removal of benefits for the under 25s. All at a time when there are at least three applicants chasing every job vacancy. Continue reading
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Lentils and lager: why we forgive tax evaders but not benefit claimants
Please note that there is now a supplement to this article including reaction to the response by Jack Monroe. Comments are now closed here but may be made on the new article.
You don’t need me to tell you that everyone on benefits is a money-grasping sponger. Or that every asylum seeker is parachuted directly into the warm atrium of a North London mansion, and not into the hell of hells that is our disgusting excuse for an asylum system. Benefit claimants steal all our money, and we, the good ordinary people, are sick of it. We’re sick of scrounging, sick of stealing and sick of the arrogance of buying trainers and takeaways with our hard-earned tax. We know to be sick of them because the Daily Mail tells us to be. David Cameron tells us to be. And David Cameron, with his beautiful home, ‘staycation’ and Oxbridge education is just like us – or just like the “us” that we want to be.
There is something more insidious than simply bad journalism or party politics at work here. This is nowhere clearer than in the rise to fame of Jack Monroe, whose cause célèbre is catering for herself and her young son on £10 a week. Yet Jack Monroe is only an acceptable benefits claimant because she reminds the middle classes of themselves.
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Benefits, an increasing deficit and the obsession with cuts
Pace Andrew Mitchell, Osborne’s proposed £10bn benefit cut for poor families looks set to become the litmus test for the party conference season.
It is almost incredible that Osborne should be demanding this when (i) £18bn is already being sliced from benefits, (ii) no increase in taxes at all is being proposed to fill the gap, (iii) the very rich have made virtually no contribution whatever to meeting the bail-out costs, and (iv) extracting another £10bn from taxpayers is the wrong policy anyway, wherever the money comes from, and will be counter-productive. Clegg is now trying to claw back, in vain one suspects, a bit of the credibility he has so recklessly squandered by demanding new taxes on the rich, in particular targeting the top 10%.
