Tagged with Social Security Cuts

Good riddance IDS: long may this internal warfare continue

IDSWhen you’re the head of a department that has meted out cruel and inhumane treatment to disabled people, when you’ve sat in the Commons and nodded through cut after sanction regime after tightened eligibility criteria, at what point do you say enough and call time over your complicity in these proceedings? Does one draw a veil over the old ministerial career by claiming principle and love for the charges you’ve spent six years abusing, or stick the boot in to cause maximum political damage?

Iain Duncan Smith, the so-called quiet man who’s done catastrophic harm to the position of disabled people in this country, has elected to do both. Uncharacteristically, an attempt to fund tax cuts for the well off by taking monies from payments to disabled people has gone down like a cup of cold sick. Which is interesting, considering their previous attacks have gone by with nary a murmur from outside the ranks of disability campaigners, the left, and the labour movement. Continue reading →

Parliament tomorrow debates the impact of Tory welfare reforms on poverty

foodbank-map-orangeTwo events in this last week point up both the savagery and mindlessness of the Tories’ continuing and relentless assault on benefits. One was Osborne’s declaration that, after lopping off £25bn from the social security system in this parliament, he will make additional £25bn cuts in the next parliament half of which will be severed from working-age benefits (with scarcely a cheep of protest from Labour). The other was the revelation that up to 40,000 people have been wrongly identified as liable for the bedroom tax, and therefore either facing eviction or forced to move to one-bedroom properties, as a result of DWP error.

These are just the latest items in the catalogue of the sheer nastiness of Tory Britain which seems aimed ultimately at the disposal of the entire welfare system with the exception of benefits for pensioners (whose votes are needed), even though nearly all of it has been earned by 40 years of payments of national insurance contributions to which those who have subsequently fallen on hard times are therefore fully entitled. Continue reading →

Sinn Féin opposed to austerity, North and South

protest against tory cuts white horse inn derryMike Penning, former Tory Northern Ireland Office minister, and now Work and Pensions Minister flew briefly into Belfast last week on a mission. He threatened that unless his government’s cuts agenda is implemented here, penalties will be imposed on the Executive.

Incredibly he said welfare cuts was a matter of fairness. He arrogantly accused those of us who oppose welfare cuts of ‘burying our heads in sand’.  He trumpeted his working class background; as if that made more acceptable the Conservatives’ strategy to undermine the welfare rights of the most vulnerable. Continue reading →

It’s not just austerity, it’s deliberately punitive

coshIt’s called ‘sanctioning’, and it’s part of the Tory armoury designed to brutalise the poor. DWP figures, just released after being withheld for months, show that in the last year, after the Tories introduced a new tougher benefit regime last October, benefit payments have been suspended in the case of the unemployed no less than 580,000 times on the grounds that, according to the government, they either failed to look for work or turned down a job offer or missed a jobcentre appointment. This of course fits the stereotype vigorously propagated by the government and the Tory tabloids that unemployed people are shirkers or benefit scroungers, but it is a gross misrepresentation of reality on several grounds. Continue reading →