Next Thursday I have secured a debate on the floor of the House on the sanctioning of benefit recipients. The details about the sheer injustice of the practice, its inappropriate targeting and its devastating impacts, all of which are horrendous, I shall spell out in full, but I will also be making another comparison.
Why is it that those JSA recipients who are 5 minutes late for a job interview get deprived of their benefit (£71 a week) and hence their livelihood for 4 weeks for the first infringement (as it is called) of the rules, 3 months for the second, or 3 years for the third, while bankers or traders who have corruptly stolen hundreds of millions of pounds from the public suffer no punishment at all – their bank pays up for them? There could not be a more extreme example of one law for the rich and another for the poor. Continue reading