Five years ago, responding to a letter from one of his constituents about food banks, MP John Whittingdale wrote that he thought food banks ‘provided an incredibly valuable service beyond the support provided by government’ and he ‘paid tribute to the hardworking volunteers involved.’ He added in conclusion that ‘work was the best way to lift outcomes’ and that ‘Universal Credit would ensure that it always pays to work.’
Five years on, the Secretary of State for the DWP, Therese Coffey, made it clear this week that nothing had changed. When she was challenged by a Labour MP who said it was a ‘gross injustice that nurses are forced to use food banks while fat-cat bosses receive obscene pay-outs, her response was that food banks were ‘the perfect way’ to meet the challenges posed by poverty. She, too, praised the volunteers saying that ‘Marrying the two is a perfect way to try to address the challenges that people face at difficult times in their lives. She also referred to those using foodbanks as ‘customers’. Yes, you read that right. People who are hungry as a result of deliberately forged government policies, cuts to public spending, low wages and insecure employment are now ‘customers’ as if they were simply off to the supermarket to do a weekly shop!
In her first speech at the Conservative Party Conference, Coffey also said of the increasingly discredited Universal Credit that it: ‘provides a safeguard for the most vulnerable in our society. It supports strivers, who are not content living a life on welfare…We know that work is the best route out of poverty.’
These are government ministers who show complete indifference to the reality of people’s lives and deny that their austerity policies have created poverty and inequality. These are government ministers who spout platitudes about making work pay when the evidence is to the contrary. These are ministers who sincerely believe that charitable donations are to be commended and that volunteers are doing valuable and selfless work supporting the needy. Ultimately these are people blinded by a cruel ideology; perfectly happy to consign the poorest and most vulnerable in our society to miserable lives with their inhumane policies in the belief that this is the normal order of things and that people, not government, are responsible for their fate however much government policies are skewed against them
They also achieve this public acceptance by reducing the health and wellbeing of the nation to whether we can afford it monetarily, promoting the idea that public services depend on a strong economy which in turn increases tax revenue and allows the government to spend on public services. It disseminates the lie that a strong economy depends on wealthy entrepreneurs who are benefiting from low taxes and are not hamstrung by regulations and in order that wealth will trickle down by default. And, regrettably, with the constant repetition of such messages, many people have been seduced by such arguments.
The evidence of the last 10 years in terms of cuts to public spending and reforms to the social security system belies the reality as distressing reports in the media portray this week. Aside from the huge rise in the numbers of food banks across the country and the increasing numbers of people using them, which GIMMS has covered in previous blogs, almost on a weekly basis we read the harrowing stories of people who have died as a result of government policies related to cuts to public sector spending.
Just this week Errol Graham who was 57 and suffered from severe social anxiety starved to death just months after the DWP stopped his out of work and housing benefits. Barry Balderstone who was suffering from advanced Parkinson’s disease and was deemed not ill enough to qualify for free, full-time social care died the day after he received the news that his claim had been rejected. He weighed just 7 stone. According to a media report, health bosses said that the decisions were made following ‘faithful application of nationally-set criteria’. Helen Boughen, who has a rare genetic disease which has left her barely able to speak, eat or breathe had her benefits cancelled after assessors deemed her fit to work. A spokesperson for the DWP said ‘We are committed to ensuring that people get the support they are entitled to.’ Such statements ring hollow in the light of the indignities heaped upon disabled and sick people.
How would any of us feel if our care, or the care of our loved ones, were reduced to obeying a set of rules to meet financial tests or financial affordability? The deaths of Errol Graham and Barry Balderstone are just two cases in a long line of deaths which have occurred, to put it bluntly, at the hands of the State as a result of government policy decisions forged in line with discredited market-led economic orthodoxy and combined with the untrue claim that such public spending is down to financial affordability or the health of the economy.
Having to undergo gruelling work capability assessments to determine whether one is eligible for support causes indignity and fear. The indignity of being rejected and having to appeal and in the meantime lose one’s benefits. The humiliation of having to rely on food banks to feed oneself or one’s family as a result of a cruel and dysfunctional Universal Credit, a system being rolled out across the country. And the nation shaming poverty, hunger and starvation in one of the richest countries in the world. Clearly, work does not make you free.
So, when government officials express their sympathies at such deaths referring to them as tragic or complex as they did in the case of Errol Graham, the reality is that it is sham sorrow; words chosen from their box of suitable ready-made responses in a cold-hearted, cynical attempt to gloss over the human realities.
And yet, whilst it continues its brutal assault on some of the weakest and most vulnerable in our society it has no problem finding tax cuts for the wealthy, serving the interest of big corporations, pouring vast sums of public money into vanity projects like HS2 or saving a failing company like Flybe.
We seem to be regressing into another era. An updated version of the Dickensian novel Oliver Twist in which a starving Oliver pulls the short straw to put his empty bowl out and ask the well-fed Beadle for more. The era of the workhouse where the Poor Law Boards, believing that they were doing their Christian duty, sat in judgement; dishing out charity to the deserving poor whilst leaving the rest to rot. The system perpetuated misery, poverty, malnutrition, starvation and not to mention untimely death as in the case of Oliver Twist’s mother who died alone in the workhouse. Those very same situations are being repeated daily in many thousands of homes across the country.
We have come a long way from the Beveridge Report published in 1942 which eventually shaped the Britain we know today and created a system of social insurance to protect people from ‘cradle to grave’.
Today that welfare system is being dismantled piece by piece. We have been told by politicians that we can no longer afford this comprehensive system of support and protection which shields us from the raw realities of naked capitalism and provides security and safety when we need it most. We are now living in a time where we are being conditioned to believe that such systems are no longer affordable, that the private sector is the only option left and that the future lies in public charitable donations or volunteering to deliver those services that are not profitable to big business. These things are being normalised in society. From food and clothing banks to food collection points in supermarkets whose bosses shamelessly promote their good works and collude in the big lie. Our goodwill and empathy are appealed to and being abused to serve the market and cut costs.
The State is dissociating itself from its role as an institution serving the public purpose by providing the public and social infrastructure to create a healthy nation and by association a healthy economy. It is instead creating an environment of fear as it chips away at our system of social security through instigating punishment, tightening criteria for eligibility and stigmatising people with accusations that they are lazy scrounging shirkers hiding behind the curtains. It is also pushing ahead ever faster with the fragmentation and privatisation of our public services in the belief that the markets can deliver public services better, even though the evidence is clear that they do not.
We don’t have a government in denial; we have a government pursuing policies designed to hurt people and create misery all wrapped up in the ideological cloak of ‘there is no alternative’. Whilst Boris Johnson promised a post Brexit ‘golden age ‘and his Chancellor declared that the government had ‘turned the page on austerity’ those pledges in a post-election period are now beginning to unravel.
That promised golden age and abandonment of austerity apparently doesn’t apply to northern cities. Over the last 10 years, the poorest areas in the north have borne the brunt of Conservative austerity. And now, just this week, the Local Government Association has predicted that the new government formula will impose further cuts to already battered northern cities from 2021 onwards as government reallocates council funding to Conservative-controlled, mainly southern shire councils.
Also, this week in the biggest turnaround, the Chancellor announced that he had written to cabinet ministers asking them to draw up cuts of up to 5% of their spending plans saying that they had been elected with a clear fiscal mandate to control day to day spending. He went on to say that there will need to be savings made across government to free up money to invest in the government’s priorities. Austerity was framed as a necessity in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis, with government having emptied its coffers by bailing out banks, so the population had to take a knock, dig deep, “we’re all in it together”. Lies. A lie that has taken thousands of lives, vandalised our public services and communities
So yet again, as already mentioned by GIMMS a couple of weeks ago, we have government couching its spending plans in household budget terms, claiming they have to make difficult choices to release money to spend elsewhere as if there were a shortage of it when there isn’t. The commitment by government to implement a spending programme to revitalise the economy at a time of great upheaval are vanishing into thin air.
In effect, the Chancellor is leading the public down the garden path claiming, quite untruthfully, that he will have to rob Peter’s and Paul’s departments to fund the government’s promised capital spending or infrastructure projects. As the UK is a sovereign currency-issuer, he has no need to do this in order to spend. He could, assuming the resources to deliver the government’s policies exist, quite simply spend; vote the necessary funds into existence. One should ask oneself how the Chinese authorities could build a hospital in six days to deal with the coronavirus emergency playing out in China, whilst our Chancellor scrabbles around for departmental savings. The Chinese government certainly weren’t checking whether enough tax had been paid or worrying about where they could find the money, they just authorised their central bank to make the necessary transfer into the accounts of an appointed construction company via a few keystrokes on a computer.
Cutting day to day spending, on the other hand, will reinforce the last 10 years of austerity which has already caused so much damage to public services, welfare provision and staffing levels in public sector environments. Essentially, that means you can build a hospital, but you might not be able to pay for a nurse to work in it. At a time when the NHS, for example, needs more nurses this would be folly indeed. Our politicians, whilst telling us there is no money to spend on public sector service provision which is fundamental to the UK’s social and economic health, will continue to pour public money into private profit, funding large infrastructure projects like HS2 to serve the corporate purpose instead. The state as a cash cow for big business and a reinforcement of the capture of government by globalised forces.
The only way for such misrepresentations to be challenged is for a grassroots movement to get informed about the art of the possible by challenging the notion that there isn’t enough money to create a better, safer, more equable and sustainable world for those we love, our children and future generations.
As Howard Zinn, the great author and socialist thinker wrote:
‘Truth has a power of its own. Art has a power of its own. That age-old lesson – that everything we do matters – is the meaning of the people’s struggle in the United States and everywhere. [….] When we stand up and speak out together, we can create a power no government can supress. We live in a beautiful country. But people who have no respect for human life, freedom, or justice have taken it over. It is now up to all of us to take it back.’
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