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
The recent focus on capping benefits to satisfy the Tory tabloid blood lust against all social security recipients is not only unfair and unreasonable, but according to recent evidence bad for the economy. Job seeker’s allowance at £71 a week is already almost the lowest level in the EU, and reducing it further would not only be grossly unjust (since with unfilled vacancies currently at 400,000, even if every single one were filled, it would still leave 2,200,000 unable to get a job because there weren’t any available), but also uneconomic.