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Social security IS our security

BERNADETTE HORTON examines just some of the effects of the coalition’s hated austerity agenda

Council housing has been reduced to ghettoes in many areas where we dump the unemployed and the poor and leave them to rot. 

People are often surrounded by a harsh environment, poor-quality housing, failing schools, and this government basically says: “That’s your lot in life — expect no more.”

Instead let’s plan for bold council housing schemes built for a variety of people side by side. 

In Norris Green in Liverpool, on one of the country’s toughest estates where I lived for 10 years, old concrete homes with outside toilets have been replaced with bungalows for the elderly and disabled which are joined to a small block of ground, first and second-floor flats, which are connected to a three-bed semi which faces a five-bed house. 

Young, old, disabled unemployed and employed and low-paid workers exist in a well-planned community with gardens and green spaces and play areas.

Decent council housing is no utopian dream. It can be done.

A mass council housebuilding scheme would provide a huge number of quality jobs in the construction industry, making new apprenticeships for young people, passing down building and construction skills to a new generation of workers, giving stable employment to skilled men and women.

Time and again experts have told Osborne to build his way out of austerity. He refuses to listen — even for private houses. The Labour Party must listen. It would be foolhardy not to.

 

The bedroom tax is one of the most pernicious, cruel policies this government has devised. 

It is intended to punish those who cannot afford to buy their own home — particularly the disabled.

It is a tax on couples where one is disabled and needs an extra bedroom for a carer or to store equipment.

And it is a tax on families with a disabled child who cannot share a room with other brothers and sisters.

As a result of the government’s ridiculous rules around the age limits and the sex of your children, you may find that one year you may not need three bedrooms, according to the DWP, but the following year as your children are older their age dictates the need for another bedroom.

Moving people out of council houses that may have been their homes for decades, where they have brought up families, tended gardens, perhaps even scattered the ashes of loved ones under rose bushes, is just an action of a cruel, uncaring, insensitive bully-boy government.

 

Iain Duncan Smith has enacted a savage retribution on the unemployed. 

No more is the jobcentre a place to seek advice and help back into work or to seek that first job. It is all about punishment — punishment for being unemployed or ill. 

People are made to feel guilty for claiming the mighty sum of £71 a week or £53 if you are young — one of the lowest rates of unemployment benefit in Europe.

If you have difficulty finding a job immediately the government will shove you onto workfare, which is an abomination on all fronts. 

These schemes, paraded by the Tories as “work experience,” have had companies leaping in to sign up, eager to exploit a huge untapped resource of free labour.

Thirty-plus hours a week of shelf-stacking when you are a university graduate, for example, in order to get your £71 a week isn’t going to get you a shelf-stacking job at the end of the “work experience” anyway. 

As your workfare stint ends, you are replaced with another readily available unemployed person while you revolve back to the jobcentre on Duncan Smith’s carousel.

If employers want the unemployed to do work experience to gain more knowledge and expertise then they should pay the going rate for a probationary period of no more than 12 weeks. But there must be an offer of a job on the table at the end of the probationary time if the potential employee matches up to the job. This was standard practice back in the ’70s and ’80s.

The sanctions regime is nothing but a DWP excuse to massage unemployment figures and cut benefits. 

The DWP will use any excuse to sanction claimants. Where I live in north Wales the nearest job centre is five miles away in the next town. 

One of my son’s friends was sanctioned for being five minutes late for his appointment as the train was not on time. Public transport such as buses is priced out of the reach of the unemployed and even the trains are very costly for short journeys. People in rural and coastal areas are being doubly punished.

Plenty of jobcentre workers have recognised this injustice. Whistleblowers who have left jobcentres have frequently cited stressful working conditions for staff who know that by sanctioning clients, some very vulnerable with mental health problems, they are leaving them destitute and at the mercy of loan sharks, payday loan companies or begging for help at their local foodbank.

Some jobcentres have now even started employing security staff. It beggars belief. When my son was unemployed a few years ago he was passing the jobcentre one afternoon and wanted to pop in and look for work. One of the security guards asked him if he had an appointment. When he replied no, he was refused entry. Really.

Jobcentres that bar you coming in and looking for work? Welcome to Duncan Smith’s world.

 

Since announcing its benefit cap of £26,000, the government has been masterful in getting out the message that families are literally receiving such sums in cash handouts. 

The reality is that probably £20k of that amount goes to landlords in rent via housing benefit.

We must urgently campaign to change that narrative by informing people at work, in our communities, our parties, our unions and through social media that the benefit cap is not money coming into a household but money being used to subsidise wealthy landlords who can charge whatever they want.

In London we are seeing the poor being socially cleansed from the capital. The benefit cap has forced people to move to other areas, often hundreds of miles from the city and communities they have grown up in and the schools, relatives and support networks they need. 

The benefit cap is another policy designed purely to punish. It needs to be abolished.

 

Women have been left to bear the brunt of austerity during the last four years of this government. 

Take a look at its front bench in Parliament. There are just three women in Cabinet. That’s what the Con-Dems think of women.

With child benefit and tax credits being cut in real terms, food costs soaring, older teenagers struggling to afford university tuition fees, children unable to leave home due to housing costs, and elderly relatives needing more care, mums are bearing the burden sandwiching their time between work, family and caring roles.

Women’s public-sector jobs have been slashed to the bone. For every 100 jobs created in the private sector 63 go to men.

The innovative and helpful Sure Start centres that were created under Labour to change the lives of young parents and their children are being closed down in an act of sheer wilful vandalism and the Lib Dems allowed the Tories to do it.

Domestic abuse help services and refuges are being cut and closed down simultaneously. 

The bedroom tax has had a terrible effect on single mothers who are being forced to move continuously between tenancies.

From childcare to social care, from public sector to private sector, women have never had it so bad. 

The Labour Party is putting policies together but it needs to go further in its efforts to provide a just welfare state for women. 

We desperately need a social security system that understands, reflects and acts in women’s favour, particularly when they give up paid employment to have children or take on a caring role. 

 

A new army of people is fighting to survive austerity. We working class certainly are all in this together. 

Recent mutterings from the DWP indicate a much tougher stance on parents claiming working tax credits under the multibillion-pound flop that is Duncan Smith’s universal credit plan.

Already to qualify for working tax credits hours for couples have risen from 16 to 24 hours a week, at a time of unemployment, austerity and zero-hours contracts. 

For the self-employed Duncan Smith has devised the minimum income floor whereby self-employed people have to earn a minimum of £11k per year or be forced off the working tax credit part of universal credit, be put on jobseeker’s allowance and forced to seek employment. 

For those self-employed getting £11k per year there will be a new monthly reporting session carried out at the local jobcentre where you will present your accounts for scrutiny in order to claim universal credit and be “urged” to look for more work to boost your earnings. The austerity agenda of punishment has now been extended even to those in work.

Until a universal living wage is adopted, the working poor have to be supported by tax credits. End of. 

A fair liveable basic income of benefit acts as a safety net to stop the more costly scandal of destitution. A civilised society recognises this. We must campaign for it.

It seems absolutely incredible that in the 21st century we are having to fight for the right to a fair level of pay and a right to a full or part-time job, clearly contracted and directly employed by the company that hires you.

How have we fallen to this? How have we accepted this as normal working practice? How have we let this unmandated government get away with sinking so low and supporting companies who treat workers like animals? 

 

Within our workplaces and certainly within our communities we are the ambassadors for change — ordinary people, working-class people.

Movements like the People’s Assembly Against Austerity are demonstrating in London today. This is a mass movement and a great way to get involved in campaigning against the pain inflicted on us by the Con-Dems.

Until this government sees ordinary people fighting back in numbers in unity it will continue to demonise us, demoralised as many of us are by fear.

I am a member of Unite the Union — a community member. Unite saw that by harnessing the traditional workplace members plus carers, the disabled, the self-employed, the retired and unemployed in our communities it could seek to combine both into an incredible working-class campaign against austerity. 

From small acorns bigger trees are starting to grow of a mass trade union movement that can campaign on all levels to create the pressure for the change we seek. So do yourself a favour — join a union today.

On a personal level tweeting, Facebooking and spreading the word are equally powerful tools to get the message out on austerity and a just welfare state. Even writing a good old-fashioned letter to your local paper makes you a committed activist. This all raises awareness of what matters to working-class people.

But unity is the most powerful campaign tool of all.

I urge you to campaign within your parties, campaign within your unions, your workplaces, your communities and use your vote, your precious vote in 2015, not as a protest but to defeat this out-of-touch, posh-boy, banker-loving government and seek to effect real change to restore our social security system.

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