Hunting the Poor - Tory Bloodsport of Choice

[Whitehall_Bin_Men]

Hunting the Poor - The Tory Bloodsport of Choice
John Wight
http://www.huffpost.com/uk/entry/2022127
28/10/12 21:31
Well, now we know... the search for a new blood sport by the Tories and their supporters since foxhunting was banned in 2004 is over. Instead of hunting foxes, the Tories' new favourite blood sport is hunting the poor.

The recent announcement of a cap on child-related benefits reveals that even the children of the poor are fair game now. After all, babies grow up to become adults, don't they? So if we're serious about eradicating the b******, let's get them sooner rather than later. Or so the logic goes.

It's the naked brutality of this reform of the benefits system that leaves you in awe, packaged with the kind of semantic audacity that Orwell himself would have balked at including in his novels for fear of being accused of over embellishment. The deployment of the word 'fairness' to justify this latest stage in the Tory's all out assault on the poor is the semantic version of a smoke grenade, designed to occlude the purpose behind it - namely increasing the share of society's surplus for the rich at the expense of the poor under cover of an economic recession brought to us courtesy of those very same rich, doing so by pitting the working poor against the unemployed and benefit claimants.

When it comes to housing benefit, which the government has exerted great effort in painting as evidence of societal moral decay, the inconvenient truth is that the vast majority of claimants are in work. A recent report by the National Housing Federation (NHF), Home Truths 2012, reveals that the number of working people claiming housing benefit in England and Wales has risen by 417,830 since 2009. At the same time rental costs have risen 37% over the past five years, with the NHF predicting they could rise by a further 35% over the next six. The situation in Scotland is comparable.

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David Orr, chief executive of the National Housing Federation, said:

"We now have millions of families struggling to keep on top of their rents, priced out of the housing market and nearly 10,000 more working families every month are now reliant on housing benefit to help pay their private rent. These people are the 'strivers' the Government wants to help, yet their future is looking bleak. This cannot continue; we need action now to address the causes of rising housing costs, not just the symptoms. Only by addressing the chronic undersupply of new homes can we stem the financial pressure on families and Government."
This unmasks the perfidious shift in emphasis on the part of the Tories and their cohorts in the pages of the right wing press away from the causes of the nation's soaring housing benefit bill, which currently sits at £20 billion each year. Those causes are a housing crisis defined by a crippling lack of social housing, married to private rents that have spiralled out of control as demand has increased in line with the sharp downturn in mortgage lending. Add to this a concomitant spike in unemployment as a result of the recession and the impact of austerity, combined with the downward pressure being exerted on wages for those in work, and you have yourself the economic equivalent of a terminal disease.

For all the fanfare which has heralded the latest GDP figures this week, figures that have registered a 1% growth in the last quarter, the brutal reality in today's Britain is a low wage economy increasingly dominated by part time and temporary work.

If this can be described as success in a 21st Century developed economy, it's hard to imagine what failure would look like.

But even so, attacking children is surely a step beyond depravity even for a party whose stock in trade is a feral hatred of the poor. Even Thatcher balked at making children pay for the poverty of their parents to this extent. The furthest she was prepared to go came with her decision as secretary of state for education in Heath's Tory government of the early 1970s to cut free school milk.

This latest attack on recipients of housing benefit and the born and unborn children of the poor are merely the latest in a wider and continuing class war, unleashed when this coalition government came to power in 2010. In this regard, cynical moves to divide society into the deserving rich at one end of the spectrum and the undeserving poor, workshy scroungers and their progeny at the other, will only be as successful as the ability of the Tories to divide working class along sectional lines, which as previously mentioned means employed against unemployed, able bodied against disabled, non immigrant against immigrant, and so on.

Meanwhile, the misery of another winter descends on millions of households as people cling on to a semblance of existence, struggling to meet increasing fuel costs, food prices, rent, and other basic necessities.

This is the story of Tory Britain in the year 2012.


http://www.huffpost.com/uk/entry/2022127

[Whitehall_Bin_Men]

Educated in a prep school favoured by royalty
before Eton then Hooray Henrying with the
Buller Club in Oxford, going on to secure his
first job after a word was put in from Buck
House, the second after mummy-in-law had a
chat with her wealthy chum, daring to claim
some people have it easy.
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/kevin-maguire-on-the-war-on-the-p oor-silver-940152

Chairman Dave with his Little Blue Book
lecturing low income families, Chinese-style,
on how many kids they can have is the
political eugenics of a desperate leader.
Cameron, the Prince of Privilege, has no idea
how ordinary people live and doesn’t care
two hoots.
That upwards of 10 people are on benefits for
every vacancy or most families on housing
benefit are the working poor, employed but
earning too little to afford Rachman rents, is
conveniently ignored by a PM who blames the
penniless for their hardship instead of the
curses of low wages and unemployment.
Bashing the unfortunate on benefits is
scapegoat tactics of a classic divide-and-
ruler, turning the low income households
against those even worse off.
Destroying the welfare state is one thrust in a
wider attack to create a country of drones to
toil cut-price in the interests of fatcats who
bankroll the Tories.
Abolishing payments which make life bearable
isn’t the start or the end of the assault on
Britain as a civilised nation.
The PM is stripping away employment rights
and impoverishing public services while the
return to O-levels and CSEs is to revive two-
tier exams to reinforce advantages of fee-
charging private schools.
Labour backbenchers know what’s happening
and increasingly speak out.
The party’s frontbench needs to find its spine
and rally support for the welfare state before
we slip back to the evils of Want, Disease, ­
Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness that the great
social reformer William Beveridge (incidentally
a Liberal) identified and Clement Attlee’s
brilliant post-war Labour Government from
1945 strove to eradicate.
Cameron is offering a terrifying glimpse of the
damage that a Tory regime, unfettered by
Liberal Democrat restraint, would wreak if it
secured a Commons majority.
Labour should acknowledge Lib Dems curb
Cameron’s wilder dreams because, come
2015, the party’s best prospect of returning
to power and ousting the Cons, still remains
in a Lab-Dem coalition.
Cameron’s speech yesterday revealed either
an astonishing lack of self-awareness or
brazen chutzpah.
Either way, his victims wouldn’t be bankers or
tax dodgers but low, middle income Britons
outside his wealthy Chipping Norton set.

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/kevin-maguire-on-the-war-on-the-p oor-silver-940152

[TonyGosling]

Starved & evicted: Britain’s poor now treated worse than animals

https://www.rt.com/op-edge/uk-poor-treated-animals-398/

Published time: 7 Mar, 2014 11:12

If someone had told me a decade ago that the British government would deliberately starve my fellow countrymen in an attempt to bully them into slave labor jobs that wouldn’t even pay the bills, I would have laughed in their face.

But now I know I would have been the fool. This is indeed the breathtaking strategy of David Cameron’s LibDem-Tory coalition.

A vast underclass of between 5 and 10 million people has been created in Britain of desperate, destitute and now-dying people. While government and media alike tell of “hopeful signs” that the nation’s getting better off, they are just 'talking it up' from their ivory towers.

Even Lord Rothschild, who invests over 2 billion pounds of his own dynasty’s and other depositors’ cash through RIT Capital Partners, is ringing alarm bells this week: “With the world recovery still fragile and reliant to a large extent on policy support [QE/money printing]", he warns, "it is not hard to envisage markets having to deal with shocks in the coming year.” Yes, “shocks.”

I remember the collective horror we felt in 1980 when homeless beggars appeared sleeping in London's shop doorways for the first time since the Second World War. Then again, it was the first term of a Tory government, taking their orders from the City of London, cutting off public assistance from the people that needed it most. The people least able to fight back.

The creation of misery, of third-world style divisions in British society is no 'accident'. It plays to The City and Downing Street's 'Lords of Misrule’s’ disarmingly simple, if taboo, 'higher purpose'. Yes, it makes the anti-democratic European Union 'look good'.

All national administrations in Europe are being subsumed, by trickery, foul means or loans, into Brussels' unelected 'United States of Europe' whether they like it or not. Britain's destitute, dying and dead are just what they now call 'collateral damage' in a 'noble cause'.
Should ‘parasitic poor’ be left to fend for themselves?

When government 'Job Centers' or privatized ‘Work Program providers’ consider a UK welfare claimant has not done everything possible to find work that person and their family is ‘sanctioned’. For a period of several weeks, or months, that person has to survive on no money at all, which usually means borrowing or not eating. Some are tempted into the black economy, or to throw their lot in with organized criminal gangs, where those 'jobs' haven't already been taken by economic migrants.


Right leaning London think tank Policy Exchange this week published a report revealing the number of Britons incorrectly sanctioned. One hundred and forty-five thousand people have been placed on 'starvation row', often with an entire family to support, though they had done nothing wrong.

To make matters worse the Lord Freud and his Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is trying to introduce a system of welfare payments called ‘Universal Credit’ which bundles housing payments in together with money for electricity and food. When individuals are ‘sanctioned’ in future they will not just be starved but cast out into the street, to lose the roof over their head too.

For those facing short-term crises such as being flooded out of their homes, suffering severe illness or being forced to flee a violent partner, government had a 350-million-pound 'Local Welfare Assistance Fund' to pay for emergency food and shelter. Last week Tory Chancellor George Osborne scrapped that too. The timing of this cut will not be lost on the hundreds of Brits flooded out of their homes in recent weeks, including the disabled, who were simply left to fend for themselves.
London media look the other way

When introduced in the 1940s, Britain’s flagship Social Security system was the envy of the civilized world, but as it begins its painful descent to the ocean depths, Fleet Street made a politically-charged decision to leave human interest stories of death and horror to Britain’s local media. Not being ‘celebrities’ those dead or ruined by ‘austerity’ have, like the victims of tyranny before them, become 'Untermensch' in the London newsrooms.

There is the case of former Bristol nurse, Jacqueline Harris, who spent the best years of her life caring for National Health Service (NHS) patients. Half-blind, arthritic with a disabled arm and crippled with back pain in her 50s she suffered daily agony which even strong pain relief could not ease. Told by privatized Work Capability Assessment firm ATOS for the DWP that she was 'fit to work', Jacqueline quickly had her benefits cut and - according to her sister - finding it impossible to cope, 'killed herself' by taking an overdose.

For the starving, churches across the country have been a 'Godsend' collecting much of the food distributed to the staggering half a million Britons now dependent on food banks, but even this was not enough to save 'vulnerable and fragile' Oxford man Mark Wood who was found last week to have died of starvation, again ATOS had decided for the DWP he was 'fit to work'.


In Brighton this week we learned of 48 severely disabled people, including several who are terminally ill with brain tumors or cancer, that have been waiting many months for welfare payments the law says they are due.

A diabolical pattern is emerging: that deliberate cruelty is 'good' to those Tory and LibDem politicians sitting around the Downing Street cabinet table. And Cameron gave the game away last week by holding his cabinet meeting round BP's Aberdeen board room table. It is up the pecking order of NATO's transatlantic Bilderberg elite, up the corporate greed and EU appointees' food chain that he aspires and while he'll say what his PR people tell him, the lives of ordinary people mean nothing whatever to the man.
Housing: Essentials of life are costing more than ever

As Britain hits the top of the league this month, proudly beating Germany by importing more Ferrari sports cars than any other country, millions of unemployed have already lost in the clamor for low paid jobs. Many disabled and infirm too will never earn a living and the British government is forgetting at its peril that these people are human beings who deserve the minimum: food, warmth and shelter.

As these basic needs are withdrawn the obsession with ‘equality’ in gender, race and sexuality consistently ignores the chasm that has opened up of income inequality. Having taken the food from over half a million mouths and made it impossible for people to heat their homes the Cameron government now threatens them with homelessness too and it's here that his cruelty hits his economic ineptitude head on.

Given that Britain has been forced by the EU to open its doors to foreign labor we are seeing around 200,000 economic migrants a year, Britain's biggest wave of immigration ever. Anyone who questions the wisdom of this is simply branded ‘racist’. Along with the rich buying up houses as an investment, and a virtual halt in construction of affordable housing this is elevating the cost of British accommodation to dizzying heights.

Though it looks good to some on paper, Britain’s housing bubble results from a housing oligopoly controlled by just a handful of massive firms of whom Barratt, Taylor Wimpey, Persimmon, Berkeley, Bellway, Redrow, Galliford Try, Bovis, Crest Nicholson are the biggest. With an oligopoly on place you can be sure buying a house bears no relation whatsoever to the cost of building one.

The average three bedroom council house has two main ingredients in cost: materials, and labor. A rough estimate of the bricks, wood, tiles, plasterboard, windows, doors and other fittings that go into a house is 7,500 pounds and taking man hours of labor at 10 pounds an hour brings that up to a build cost of 15,000 pounds. Spread over the lifetime of a house of 200 years, this works out at around 2 pounds a week.

The difference between this and the average actual weekly rent or mortgage repayment for a two bedroom house in Southern England is 400 pounds, a profit margin of 20,000 percent. The house-building oligopoly and lazy ‘rentier’ classes are extorting almost the entire rent every week from the poor. From these figures it seems the entire UK economy is now based on nothing but the threat of eviction. So perhaps this is why Cameron has criminalized the squatting of residential properties in Britain, which has been a legal guarantee since the dawn of time.


Just this week we have seen what happens to people who, faced with trying to pay for housing which has been inflated 20,000 percent above the cost, try to buy land and do it themselves. Matthew Lepley and Jules Smith bought twenty acres of land in Beaworthy, Devon and have built a simple but beautiful eco-home on it, but now face an order from the local Torridge District Council to tear it all down.

Perhaps the government is worried that if the word gets about it would deflate their precious housing bubble? Thankfully there are many more who have built in secret and do not intend to reveal to the authorities where they are living.
Airbrushing ‘full employment’ & ‘social justice’ from the history books

Meanwhile in the towns, and for those that still do what they're told, the idea is to present Cameron's systematic cruelty toward the poor as ‘normal’. It is as though great post-war historians such as Asa Briggs, Edward ‘EP’ Thompson, Christopher Hill and Henry Brailsford never existed. Who needs to organize a public book burning when the EU and The City's corporate profit seekers now own the education system, academy schools, universities and the press too?

Karl Marx explained in Das Kapital back in 1867 that Plutocracy requires a 'Reserve Army of Labor', an industrial reserve of surplus population. This has been British government policy ever since the Callaghan’s Labour government gave up on the policy of Full Employment in the late 1970s.

But David Cameron’s Coalition government has sent the clearest sign possible, to what has been a permanent underclass for the last 35 years, that these 'surplus people' will no longer be fed or housed.

Abandoning a domesticated animal or withdrawing its supply of food can end in criminal convictions here in the UK, yet the duty of care and animal cruelty legislation does not, it seems, apply to human beings. This government has taken Britain over the line into barbarism, around 5 million Britons, if they get their way, are headed for the Tory party knacker’s yard.

Cameron seems fixated on trying to stop the unemployed or other victims of his money laundering fraudster City funders from eating and sleeping. The Britain he wants to see is a sadistic place where, as US writer Gore Vidal mockingly commented: “It is not enough to succeed, others must fail.” Only the selfish, the ignorant and the rich count as human in Cameron’s financial determinism.

If there is a political backlash, he doesn’t care, he knows he’ll walk straight into a multimillion job in the EU's corporate world when his political bolt is shot. So as far as ‘Call me Dave’ and his Eton Bullingdon Club chums are concerned, the poor can just go to hell.

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.