War on the poor

The Tories smash and grab raid on tax credits, benefits and the unemployed who are sick and disabled has been cheered on by its supporters. Families in desperate need of financial support to keep them afloat will see tax credits slashed costing them up to ÂŁ1,800 a year.

Iain Duncan Smith’s war on the disabled reaches new lows in his so called Welfare and Work Bill. Sick and disabled people on jobseekers allowance could lose up to £30 a week, despite having paid their national insurance contributions to assist when they are unemployed.

Having paid for their own safety net, paid for by ever increasing national insurance contributions, Duncan Smith has ripped it to shreds. He is attacking a central plank of the post war welfare state – that you pay contributions in work to help you through when you are out of work.

Cutting the benefit cap by ÂŁ6,000 will have the same impact as the previous cut to the cap. Thousands more families will be transported out of higher rent areas into lower rent areas, sometimes hundreds of miles away.

A report in the Independent last year showed that in one year alone over 50,000 families had been shipped out of London, their kids taken away from friends and schools where they had become established. That type of social cleansing will accelerate as the new cap bites.

The Tories won’t do the obvious – capping or controlling the rents of the private landlords who have been cashing in. Far better for the Tories to attack the poorest in need of housing benefit rather than the landlords who are actually pocketing the money.

Duncan Smith has now gone for social housing provided by housing associations. In stark contrast to the ‘hands off and fill your pockets’ approach to private landlords, housing associations will be forced to sell off properties at a discount.

Their rents won’t just be capped. They will be forced to cut rents by 1 per cent a year for four years. That could have a catastrophic impact on the house building carried out by housing associations.

The welfare bill also freezes benefits – there will be no increases for four years. In those four years, if we use the Retail Price Index inflation forecasts, it will probably mean a cut of between 8 and 10 per cent in the living standards of those on benefits.

But throughout this sustained attack on the poorest and most disadvantaged, apparently poverty will be abolished. The Tories don’t want any spotlight on, for example, the 500,000 more children forced into absolute poverty between 2010 and 2014.

Child poverty reduction targets will be abolished. Instead, they will look at the ‘life chances’ of children in ‘workless households’ while two out of three families in poverty are actually in working households. Poverty will be driven out. We know this because the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission will become the Social Mobility Commission.

Poverty

 
So don’t mention poverty. The Tories mentioned it once, but they think they’ve got away with it.

Steve Turner, Unite’s assistant general secretary called this “a sustained attack by the most advantaged on the most disadvantaged.”

He said, “It is an attack by those who have had the greatest opportunities and life chances on those who have the least opportunities and life chances. The war is not a war on poverty. It is a war against those in poverty, those on the edge, and on those who are closer to being poor than they think they are.

“We must not sit on our hands, we have a duty to stand up with those who can and for those who can’t. We have to see this for what it is: part of a sustained ideological onslaught on working people. It’s our responsibility to build the broadest possible coalition to fight this unwarranted and unacceptable attack on working people and our communities.

“We must continue to campaign, mobilise, protest and demonstrate our opposition, taking our fight to the streets of cities, towns and villages across our nations in a programme of civil disobedience and direct action to halt this gross abuse of power by a Tory government that may have a small majority but has no mandate to dismantle all we hold so dear.

“This is yet another part of the onslaught on working people and we must continue to build campaigns to oppose these measures some of which never appeared in the Tory manifesto.”