New Poll Tax on the Unemployed.
Universal Credit will be introduced over the next few years.
As part of the change Council Tax Benefit (CTB) will be abolished.
Local Council Tax Support will be introduced in April 2013.
Catherine West (Labour, Islington Council) writes,l
Next April, when high income earners start to benefit from the Tory–led government’s cut to the 50p tax rate, millions of people with the lowest incomes in the country will receive council tax bills they cannot afford to pay because of the government’s changes to Council tax benefit.
5.9 million low-income households benefit from council tax benefit – more than any other means-tested benefit in the United Kingdom. It was brought in after the Poll Tax as a government subsidy to councils so they would not collect council tax from people who simply could not afford to pay it.
The Tory–led government announced plans to scrap council tax benefit earlier this year. Their plan is simply to cut the funding councils receive by 10% and ask local Councils to develop their own local scheme to collect the Council tax required to make up the difference.
People of ‘working age’ on Job Seeker’s Allowance will no longer get the present 100% reduction. Others at present exempt will also be affected.
Instead out of their weekly £71 (over 25s), £71 (under 25s) and £11.45 (couples) they will have to pay a percentage of the local Council Tax.
Each local council is being told to introduce its own tax rates to deal with a 10% cut in their national funding. This will mean councils having to choose between giving people Council Tax benefits or cutting public services.
Each Council has to ‘consult’ about their plans. This is ‘localism’, part of the ‘Big Society’ agenda.
Local politics will play a big part.
Well-off Councils will be able to off-load the cuts; poor areas will be under intense pressure.
Tory Croydon plans to introduce a Poll tax on students and the unemployed.
Conservative Bromley Council proposes that everybody pays at least 25% of the bill. For those on benefits this could mean at least £250 a year.
Labour Manchester says everybody will have to pay something, but the charges will be made “as fairly as possible.”
Ipswich plans to use every means possible to keep the charge low, perhaps down below 3% of the total.
Other parts of Suffolk are more likely to follow Bromley’s example.
It is probable that nobody who is on allowances for disabled will have to pay.
Pensioners will be protected. The Government states, ‘the elderly cannot go back to work. They have saved and worked hard all their lives: they deserve dignity and security.”
Tony Benson (The New Poll Tax. Labour Briefing October 2012), says, “This is a back-handed acknowledgment that proposals for working age people do not give people dignity of security.”
It’s the out-of-work who will be the principal target.
The new Poll Tax will be hard to collect. But no doubt As will the private companies used by many councils will do well out of this.
People on JSA have little money as it is.
They will have less in real terms in coming years as the Government intends to freeze benefits. Another Bill will push many into arrears.
We will see Bailiffs in action against the poor and vulnerable.
Pawn-brokers and loan-sharks, legal or illegal, will do good business.
The new Poll Tax is a recipe for misery.
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“We will see Bailiffs in action against the poor and vulnerable.
Pawn-brokers and loan-sharks, legal or illegal, will do good business.
The new Poll Tax is a recipe for misery”.
Yes, and the modern day slave traders will also do good business:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theobserver/2012/sep/30/slavery-homeless-trafficking-gangs
It’s a great pity The Guardian report didn’t include a mention of those other slave traders behind the forthcoming Community Action Programme!
Expecting people to pay what they cannot (and you can bet councils won’t listen) will be a recipe for disaster.
Are tenants liable for council tax or is it only the landlord/homeowner?
How to Beat the Bailiffs!
What a piss take the unemployed to pay poll tax . It stated when I first got my first letter off Dwp saying that I was entitled to unemployment benefits this is what the LAW SAYS YOU NEED TO LIVE ON NO WHERE DOSE IT STATE THat WILL USE MY FOOD MONEY TO PAY POLL TAX IT DOSE NOT SAY I WILL USE MY FOOD MONEY TO PAY TOWARDS RENT IT’S A DAM PISS TAKE THE UNEMPLOYED AND WHEN DAVID CAMERON TAKES AWAY A PERSONS BENEFITS FOR 3 Years THEY WILL HAVE TO. TURN TO CRIME AND WHEN GET CAUGHT IT’S GOING TO COST MORE TO DEAL WITH THAN IT WOULD OF TO OF GAVE THEM THERE BENEFIT AS WHAT DOSE HE THINK THEY GOING TO DO FOR THREE YEARS THICK C–T
This goverment really havent a bloody clue,everytime something goes wrong its kick the vulnerable.It will cause total misery and backfire into anarchy as people will not be in a position to pay out of their already rice grain jsa when they cant find work inline with the cost of living,i guess it must be all the unemployeds fault and not the piss taking companies out there who want all working for nothing as do the posh boys.The cab say its already costing millions from the tax payers purse to deal with thousands of jsa sanction tribunal cases,wait til this little bright idea gets going.Nice one dave and george.
well from what i can see it will be 3yrs of hardship payments at 40 quid a week then after that have to pay it back so 6yrs on 40 quid a week -poll tax i guess.
how do they think that this will help anyone find work it will make them unemployable for the rest of there lives and on the street with no home.
It’s an outrage – I just spent time yesterday getting my water bill fixed at the correct rate, and now we’ve got this to look forward to!
Watch out, Mr Coates, you won’t be available for work under the new rules!
Cornwall County Council are planning to charge 30% Council Tax- 30%!!!! on the most poor vulnerable people in the county. This in a county with the highest water charges, the lowest wages and the highest house prices.
Councils around the country are consulting what they should do, at the moment. I suggest you make your voice heard. They probably wont listen but its worth a try.
I predict a riot.
F*ucking outrageous!! And it wont stop at 30%, it will be 100% before you can say Iain Duncan Smith is a c*unt!!
A rightwing insurrection is usurping our democracy
For 30 years big business, neoliberal thinktanks and the media have colluded to capture our political system. They’re winning
George Monbiot
The Guardian, Monday 1 October 2012 20.30 BST
To subvert means to turn from below. We need a new word, which means to turn from above. The primary threat to the democratic state and its functions comes not from mob rule or leftwing insurrection, but from the very rich and the corporations they run.
These forces have refined their assault on democratic governance. There is no need – as Sir James Goldsmith, John Aspinall, Lord Lucan and others did in the 1970s – to discuss the possibility of launching a military coup against the British government: the plutocrats have other means of turning it.
Over the last few years I have been trying better to understand how the demands of big business and the very rich are projected into policymaking, and I have come to see the neoliberal thinktanks as central to this process. These are the groups which claim to champion the free market but whose proposals often look like a prescription for corporate power.
David Frum, formerly a fellow of one of these thinktanks – the American Enterprise Institute – argues that they “increasingly function as public relations agencies”. But in this case, we don’t know who the clients are. As the corporate lobbyist Jeff Judson enthuses, they are “virtually immune to retribution … the identity of donors to thinktanks is protected from involuntary disclosure”. A consultant who worked for the billionaire Koch brothers claims that they see the funding of thinktanks “as a way to get things done without getting dirty themselves”.
This much I knew, but over recent days I’ve learned a lot more. In Think Tank: the story of the Adam Smith Institute, the institute’s founder, Madsen Pirie, provides an unintentional but invaluable guide to how power in Britain really works.
Soon after it was founded (in 1977), the institute approached “all the top companies”. About 20 of them responded by sending cheques. Its most enthusiastic supporter was the coup plotter James Goldsmith, one of the most unscrupulous asset strippers of that time. Before making one of his donations, Pirie writes, “he listened carefully as we outlined the project, his eyes twinkling at the audacity and scale of it. Then he had his secretary hand us a cheque for £12,000 as we left”.
From the beginning, senior journalists on the Telegraph, the Times and the Daily Mail volunteered their services. Every Saturday, in a wine bar called the Cork and Bottle, Margaret Thatcher’s researchers and leader writers and columnists from the Times and Telegraph met staff from the Adam Smith Institute and the Institute of Economic Affairs. Over lunch, they “planned strategy for the week ahead”. These meetings would “co-ordinate our activities to make us more effective collectively”. The journalists would then turn the institute’s proposals into leader columns while the researchers buttonholed shadow ministers.
Soon, Pirie says, the Mail began running a supportive article on the leader page every time the Adam Smith Institute published something. The paper’s then editor, David English, oversaw these articles himself, and helped the institute to refine its arguments.
As Pirie’s history progresses, all references to funding cease. Apart from tickets donated by British Airways, no sponsors are named beyond the early 1980s. While the institute claims to campaign on behalf of “the open society”, it is secretive and unaccountable. Today it flatly refuses to say who funds it.
Pirie describes how his group devised and refined many of the headline policies implemented by Thatcher and John Major. He claims (and produces plenty of evidence to support it) either full or partial credit for the privatisation of the railways and other industries, for the contracting-out of public services to private companies, for the poll tax, the sale of council houses, the internal markets in education and health, the establishment of private prisons, GP fundholding and commissioning and, later, for George Osborne’s tax policies.
Pirie also wrote the manifesto of the neoliberal wing of Thatcher’s government, No Turning Back. Officially, the authors of the document – which was published by the party – were MPs such as Michael Forsyth, Peter Lilley and Michael Portillo. “Nowhere was there any mention of, or connection to, myself or the Adam Smith Institute. They paid me my £1,000 and we were all happy.” Pirie’s report became the central charter of the doctrine we now call Thatcherism, whose praetorian guard called itself the No Turning Back group.
Today’s parliamentary equivalent is the Free Enterprise Group. Five of its members have just published a similar manifesto, Britannia Unchained. Echoing the narrative developed by the neoliberal thinktanks, they blame welfare payments and the mindset of the poor for the UK’s appalling record on social mobility, suggest the need for much greater cuts and hint that the answer is the comprehensive demolition of the welfare system. It is subtler than No Turning Back. There are fewer of the direct demands and terrifying plans: these movements have learned something in the past 30 years.
It is hard to think how their manifesto could have been better tailored to corporate interests. As if to reinforce the point, the cover carries a quote from Sir Terry Leahy, until recently the chief executive of Tesco: “The path is clear. We have to be brave enough to take it.”
Once more the press has taken up the call. In the approach to publication, the Telegraph commissioned a series of articles called Britain Unleashed, promoting the same dreary agenda of less tax for the rich, less help for the poor and less regulation for business. Another article in the same paper, published a fortnight ago by its head of personal finance Ian Cowie, proposes that there be no representation without taxation. People who don’t pay enough income tax shouldn’t be allowed to vote.
I see these people as rightwing vanguardists, mobilising first to break and then to capture a political system that is meant to belong to all of us. Like Marxist insurrectionaries, they often talk about smashing things, about “creative destruction”, about the breaking of chains and the slipping of leashes. But in this case they appear to be trying to free the rich from the constraints of democracy. And at the moment they are winning.
Article + comments here .
For over 30 years, the British people have been the victims of a giant swindle, a swindle supported by all the major parties, a swindle based upon a lie. The lie that if we encouraged the rich to create wealth, then the whole country would benefit. Since 1980, our governments have done all they could to help them. They privatised every state industry, they lowered the top rates of tax, they allowed tax avoidance/evasion, they encouraged non-dom residency, they lowered corporate tax rates, they de-regulated, they crippled the unions, they subsidised low pay via the welfare system and they even bailed out the banks.
The result? All they have achieved is a vast transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich.
We fell for this fraud because they deluded us into believing that we’d never had it so good. It was bullshit. Peoples lifestyles were fuelled by easy credit and an unsustainable housing bubble. Credit, twinned with inflating house prices, funded the illusion of prosperity for decades. However, with the collapse of the giant Ponzi scheme that was the financial markets, this façade has now been shattered. Nearly all of us are deep in shit. Average household debt now stands at nearly £60,000. Total personal debt stands at over £1.5 Trillion, a figure which will only increase as a whole generation leaves University/college already heavily in debt.
Through debt, they have allowed us to own homes, they have allowed us to own cars, they have allowed us to go on holiday.
This myth of prosperity is illustrated by the sobering fact that If the Government enacted a law today, that all personnel debt, all mortgages, car loans etc. had to be paid off within the next month, millions would be homeless, millions would lose their cars, millions would be penniless. 90% of us would be bankrupt.
Let that sink in, amid the realisation of how badly we have been shafted..
This is where Neo-liberalism, supported by every successive Government since Thatcher, has brought us. Massive debt and worsening living standards for the many, immense wealth for the few. But these greedy bastards still want more. They keep taking, and like fools, we keep giving. The ruling elite already have our land, gas, electricity, railways and water. They already own our politicians, our media and our Police. But it’s never enough. They are now coming for our pensions, our NHS, our roads, our schools and our green spaces. Under the pretext of ‘austerity’, they are making it easier to sack us, making us work longer hours for less pay, forcing our kids to work for nothing, raising the retirement age whilst cutting our pensions and weakening our health and safety laws.
They have begun a systematic assault on the sick, the poor and the disabled, slashing welfare budgets, forcing people off benefits and removing every support structure a civilised society should provide. But the rich? They avoid paying billions in taxes, and hide billions more away in tax havens, despite that we keep cutting their tax rates. Their pay is now hundreds of times more than their workers. Executive pay has increased by 49% in the last year alone. That one fact tells you all you need to know about who is in this ‘all together’. The very people who have gained the most from the last 30 years are immune to the mess they have created, the very people who have gained the least are paying the biggest price.
Frankly, it’s obscene.
For years, we have had to listen to their lies, the lies that we’d never had it so good, the lies that capitalism is the only way to create wealth, the lies that private sector is so efficient, the lies that we have to tax the rich less to encourage ‘entrepreneurs’ and the lies that we need these people to give us jobs. And now we have the lies about the country being bankrupt, the lies about ‘austerity’, the lies about ‘welfare scroungers’ and ‘benefit cheats’ and the lie that ‘we are all in this together’.
They keep telling us these lies because they believe we are all idiots, and will fall for any shit they feed us.
And most of the time, they are right. We do. But not always.
To paraphrase Lloyd George whilst talking about the Great War:
“If the people really knew the truth about what was happening, it would be ended tomorrow, but they must never know.”
Well, eventually, people will know, and when the truth dawns on them, that 99% of us are in this all together, whilst 1% are only in it for themselves, we can begin to put an end to this nightmare of a society that we have allowed them to create at our expense.
The OWNERS (the REAL OWNERS who don’t give a f*uck about you and me, they don’t give a f*uck) are now out in the open, they are so arrogant now, they are actually driving the f*ucking bus for all to see.
“…Nobody who is on allowances for disabled will have to pay”. Presumably because when ATOS have done their diabolical work, there won’t be anyone LEFT on sickness benefits.
And at the risk of sounding like a Daily Mail editorial, why should pensioners be protected? I live close to a large group of council bungalows; the inhabitants are not short of a bob or two judging by the copious amounts of booze and fags they purchase from the local shops – that’s when they can spare the time from inhabiting the bingo halls and bookies on a daily basis. But when you’re paying peppercorn rents and next to nowt in council tax that’s to be expected. Still, can’t upset the Mail/Express reading crinklies can we? Especially when the over 65s are the demographic most likely to vote at election time.
I agree people are either going to riot or turn to crime and I’m open to both if ever have my money stopped will turn to crime and people are going to rob those who work for dhss the very people who had a hand stopping there money after all its them that beliver they have. A right to kick us for being unemployed I say bring it on I would be with you all on dis matter as its a piss take of the unemployed and if we don’t make a fight against dis they will do even worse we got make a STAND PEOPLE TOGETHER B4 IT’S TO LATE ?
This is not a Government its a piss take. How do these politicians think unemployed people are going to live. The Crime rate will go up because individuals can not live on fresh air. But of course these political rich wankers will not understand that because they are totally out of touch with society. Jsa does not provide enough money to live on as it is without taking more money off people and therefore making them even more poor. This so called Government is a disgrace and the sonner they are out the better. This Government is causing a lot of social unease in this country.
Should claimants be paid vouchers to stop spending on ‘vices’?
Should benefit claimants be prevented from spending the money given to them by the state on alcohol, gambling, cigarettes and other “vices”?
A poll commissioned by think tank Demos suggests most people would support such a move.
But the findings have been met with horror by anti-poverty campaigners, who have questioned whether the British public really feel that way, or whether they have been denied the full facts on poverty by the government and certain newspapers.
Alison Garnham, director of the Child Poverty Action Group, said the poll, in which 59% agreed the government should control what people spend their benefits on, should be taken with a large pinch of salt.
“In the United States in the 1960s, welfare rights campaigners argued for food stamps for certain groups on the basis that some of them were alcohol abusers, but it’s not an argument that ever took traction in the UK because people would find that offensive.
“I think we have a very different culture. I just don’t think it would be acceptable in the same way,” she told a Demos fringe meeting at the Labour Party conference.
‘Cool card’
In the United States, people on “food stamps” are given a pre-payment card that they can use to buy food and other essentials – but not luxuries such as alcohol and tobacco.
The introduction of the Universal Credit next year, which will see six work-related benefits rolled up into a single payment, potentially opens the door to a similar system in the UK.
Prime Minister David Cameron has not ruled out exercising more control over how claimants spend their money, although there is no suggestion, so far, that food stamps will be introduced in the UK.
Some, including Mastercard, which sent along a representative to the Demos fringe meeting, are pushing for the combined payment to be loaded on to a pre-paid card.
If such a card were to be introduced, explained Matthew Mayo, Mastercard’s head of business development in the UK and Ireland, claimants could be blocked from using online gambling sites, for example, but not from buying booze at a supermarket.
Cards could also be used to incentivise healthy behaviour, he added, and some local authorities are already experimenting with such a policy.
In the London borough of Camden, primary school children on free school meals can apply for a “Cool card”, which entitles them to £15 a month worth of activities such as drama tuition, climbing wall and martial arts.
‘Feckless’ claimants
Labour MP Debbie Abrahams, an aide to shadow health secretary Andy Burnham, said she backed the idea, in principle, of using pre-paid benefit cards to encourage people to make healthy eating choices by offering discounts on fruit and vegetables, for example.
But she rejected the “obnoxious” suggestion that “feckless” benefit claimants blew all their money on “fags and booze”, instead of feeding their children.
Like Alison Garnham, she feared controlling what benefits are spent on would rob the poor of control over their lives and add to the stigma of being on benefits.
What alarms Labour politicians is that voters appear to have stopped thinking of benefits as social security – something they pay into for use in hard times – but rather as a charity handout to the poor, and that this will fatally undermine the welfare state.
One of the most striking findings of the Demos survey was that 18-24-year-olds were one of the most likely age groups to call for government controls on how benefits are spent.
Speaking on BBC Radio 4′s Today programme, Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary Liam Byrne agreed that a majority of people thought benefit recipients were lazy and did not really want to work.
Campaigners like Alison Garnham argue that the public attitudes have been influenced by tabloid caricatures of benefit scroungers when, in fact, the amount paid to out-of-work people had gone down, in real terms, over the past 40 years.
“Six out of ten poor children live with a parent who is working. The reason they are poor is because their parent is a cleaner or a care assistant not because they are a drug addict or an alcoholic,” she told the Demos meeting.
“It’s generally desirable for claimants to have control over their own money, not paid on their behalf to somebody else. So I find myself asking why would the state want to have more power to interfere with how this money is being spent?”
“There will be a small group of people who have trouble budgeting or who are alcoholics, for example, but there is some really good evidence that poor families are very good at budgeting their incomes.”
Demos deputy director Claudia Wood said the think tank would be staging a similar debate in Birmingham next week at the Conservative Party conference, which, she added, might produce a very different response.
Article + comments here.
And when will you “Benefit scrounger” hater’s realise, the majority of the benefits bill, is spent on pensions? People on JSA don’t get their bus passes paid for, nor do they get free TV licenses and cold weather payments. I’m on JSA at the moment and I can assure you, I’m lucky if I can afford a cup of tea, let alone a pack of smokes.
They should start with those silly “winter fuel payments” – pay those in vouchers, stop those well-to-do pensioners going on holiday to Spain and where have you with them!
I will come in the form of a plastic card (not paper vouchers) and will block “luxuries”; this way the DWP/Provider will have a full itemised record (what, where, and when) of ALL your purchases.
you mean like a debit card linked to a kind of clubcard? why should the perverts in the dwp n providers know how much i spend on fanny pads?? utter disgusting
I can see your point, sharon, how humiliating and embarrassing would that be – or is that he whole point of this scheme. As well as an itemised record of your purchases, more than likely any “unspent” balance (“capital in DWP speak) wont be able to be “carried forward”; also since Mastercard are so keen expect a “charge” (maybe a couple of £) every time the card is used; as well as limited purchases, limited outlets where it can be spent.
Thanks, I have transferred this to a post.
The council wouldn’t like a direct debit set up to ease costs too?.
how can u pay bills ect with a food card haha?? ill pay the ct with 100 cans of baked beans then and catch the bus with a multi pack of crisps in to town.
A multi-pack of crisps? That would be a luxury, Ha Ha.
This plan is total wank.
I have 4 bank accounts (nowt in ‘em), and need to transfer cash from one to the other each time I make extra payments, and each month for paying the bills. As I am a ‘NonStatus’, with a ‘Basic Bank Account’ only, this has to be in cash, electronic transfer of anything (in particular ‘small amounts’ as they put it) is not allowed. Because of not passing credit scoring, and not having a paid job, I have to keep 3 main accounts and as follows:
Halifax has a cheque book but no card and no automatic payments or overdraft. I use this one for charity fundraising, savings, and any payments involving cheques.
LloydsTSB has a debit card, does direct debits, but will not accept benefits payments and does not provide cheques. I use this one for paying my monthly bills and any extra payments, like ones you can’t do with a cheque and things that need doing as fast as possible.
HSBC has no cheque, no proper card except a card for withdrawals at ATM’s, no direct debit facility, but can receive benefits payments.
My rent has to be paid in cash.
The food stamps concept is BS. I need special food so this would not really be available under such a scheme. Also what about choice and circumstances? I was saying to a guy last night (we had to walk home because they cut buses after 9pm) after college, I can’t afford to buy organic stuff, though would if it was cheaper/if I could afford it. And that I can’t afford non-organic fruit and veg either. If I bought some it would feed me for maybe one meal, but the cost would mean I could get no main/other food that would be my food for a week. Plus before training or competitions I have to eat extra, the stodgy/fatty ‘unhealthy’ food that most people are told NOT to eat. Sometimes I’m supposed to eat 5,000 calories a day – but can’t, on a GOOD day I’m lucky to get 500 calories! Athletes and people doing physical work obviously need to eat more, not less. And in my case I’m also meant to eat extra cheese (due to calcium problems) and extra salt (due to circulation problems). For cheese, I can’t get the very cheapest as it isn’t vegetarian, I have to get the standard type of cheese. Some weeks I have a little extra and have to decide what ‘luxury’ I will get, for example it might be the choice of getting ONE fruit-juice OR a small piece of Brie. Last week it was between a pizza and an apple dessert, unfortunately (thinking it healthier, and having had it before they changed it) I chose the wrong thing. The new recipe of the apple dessert includes ‘FISH AND CRUSTACEANS’! So now the thing is in my freezer waiting for a dry enough day so I can take it back. Most weeks there are no extras. I eat one meal every 2 days and it is 250g plain pasta (economy) with 33% of a block of cheese. Even with such crap rations, I’m actually putting myself further in debt each time I buy this most basic food, as my JSA has to be used for rent and bills.
“No, you can’t breathe…. oxygen is a luxury and has to be earned” E. Scrooge,
Department of Workhouses and Prisons
Every so often, I save up some money for….. SHOCK HORROR…. the evil, luxurious, unnecessary, subversive, deviant, ……books.
This term I have to buy a textbook for college, so that is an essential cost. (Oh by the way, if not at college, I lose my home for ‘not being a student’). I’m paying my own costs for most of my college courses as well. And it makes you more employable, which is what the government say they want – but equally obvious that they really DON’T want.
After hours of work programme, jobcentre, jobseeking activity, voluntary/unpaid work, cleaning, college, fixing things, troubleshooting… I normally just pass out where I fall, until I wake up and it starts all over again. If still awake and if there is a suitable break, I like to sit down and READ A BOOK. (No, I’m not allowed in the library unfortunately)
There is a local homeless guy I know. He reads books even while living on the street. Or maybe the government thinks that is a luxury too?
College last night was actually about welfare and one person on it used to work for the jobcentre, but disputed some of the things I reported that happen there. Another wants to work in basically kicking out immigrants, meanwhile I tried to stick up for people on the dole saying we should not be stereotyped. For example people think the unemployed are thick, lazy and rubbish. I said you can be on the dole and studying, at college or on your own; you can do voluntary work, etc.
In the meantime I’ve been told by landlord/council I am not allowed to own any Books. Sorry but that is mental… When you are disabled you spend more time indoors at home, so you have a right to a) have stuff to do and b) improve your knowledge. As for the miraculous jobs they keep promising; there are only 2 big recruitment campaigns here at the moment. One is for a supermarket THAT ISN’T EVEN BUILT YET (if you ‘get the job’ they stop your dole from now on, not from when the place is actually built or from when you would start work). There is a medical I’d certainly fail; you must stand all day; you must be able to reach shelves; etc. They even told me I couldn’t go to the recruitment days as I’d be taking away a place from somebody with better health who would have a chance of being considered for employment. Then the Jobcentre hassled me because the store didn’t select me for the recruitment days. The other job was for construction workers and Workfare slaves, with no experience, to remove asbestos by hand. Luckily as their funding was cut work has stalled. In the meantime I had another go at the ATOS test online and still scored 45 points, so it seems ATOS testers are a bunch of liars. The points put me straight into the ‘unfit for work’ group.
Everybody has a right to read books.
The other thing they want to stop is what they call ‘holidays’. According to DWP this is any break from your town/city even if only a day. Regardless of the reason. We are told not to lie on government forms. So to be truthful I used to amend the forms to point out it wasn’t a holiday, in order not to lie or to sign a lie. Now they stopped me doing this and threatened to sanction me if I did it again. But on many questions on the forms, you can’t answer truthfully to either/any available answer, as the answer is not available on the form. I have to travel several times a year to sports events and pay my own costs, as there is no funding for disability athletes outside of the UK top team. Also I go to an annual conference in London (this year combining it with a race in London). I get the cheapest possible room and train ticket, and often spend a whole weekend without food, in order to be there. Buying essential sports kit etc. is not a ‘luxury’, it’s part of being an athlete. Everyone with no sponsor, must self-fund. This month is the conference again, and part of the conference is actually a JOBS FAIR! The DWP know and don’t care. They’ve stopped me going to a local jobs fair because I have to go to Work Programme (at which there is no work and no programme). Does anyone recall a sketch about the Job Club woman who refuses a participant time off to go to a job interview? It was meant to be comedy but is more like a documentary! (I think it was ‘Pauline’ on ‘The League of Gentlemen’)
What other luxuries do they not want me to have? TV licence? Despite having the lowest income of everyone in the house, I’m the only one who pays for a TV licence. Um – it’s ILLEGAL to not pay?! Do they want me to break the law? I can’t go to jail but can’t pay a fine either. Sell the TV? It is ancient, nobody would buy it. Throw it away? It is illegal to put it in the bin. Our council want £50 from you if they remove it themselves, or they say take it to the electrical recycling. You need a car, which I can’t drive. I obviously can’t carry it and walk. If I could even reach the bus stop, the bus drivers don’t let you take that sort of stuff on a bus. (Though I have a bus pass for disability).
People on the dole are being told they need a computer for writing letters and CVs.
So if we got even an old computer, is that then a ‘luxury’? My room in any case can’t get broadband and if I managed to find a way of getting a signal into a blind spot, to get it installed requires permission and costs an extra £30 per month rent. Also one of my least favourite housemates has the central device and would be able to find out all the sites everyone else has been on. And he is a bigoted git…
Yesterday I found some cheap computers for sale but the cheapest was far beyond my ability to pay.
As soon as my benefits come in (late) they go straight out, on essential things. In fact food is at or close to the bottom of priorities, bills need paying first. As this is the first full week of college, some more college fees need paying. And that textbook needs buying (new not old, as it has to be a specific edition and with a functioning CD). Whatever is left over after everything else, has to go towards food. If there are extra travel expenses that comes out of what would have gone on food. As for stationery/consumables, I now wait until I’ve completely run out before buying more.
That time Michael Portillo had a go at being a single mother, he didn’t know how much milk cost, and he also spent the whole week’s benefits in one day. What that would buy him in his regular life I don’t know, perhaps a small salad or a handkerchief?
The amount of state pensions is dire, so are a lot of private pensions. They might think the person who is 65 can live on 10% of what is allowed to the person of 64?!
If there are payment cards or food stamps, a whole lot of retailers would put signs saying benefits people are not allowed in, or would limit what you can buy to certain products only. Whole streets/malls could become off-limits to the poor. Why don’t they just give us yellow stars (or black triangles) and be done with it. This is exactly what they are doing. It may not be a black triangle, but it IS a black triangle.
People who are hungry would start mugging poorer, older, smaller, weaker people for their food stamps or cards. In parts of the USA there are people holding tramp fights. They put it on the internet. Sometimes they make homeless people fight for food.
What if you have tried so hard to avoid committing a crime, and then they turn round and make poverty a crime?
The criminals are not the poor. They are the ones trying to criminalise people for being poor. Their 2nd, 3rd, 4th cars are not luxuries. They do no real useful job, yet can get multiple incomes. They think a big dinner is part of their entitlement and they are a superior species allowed to have holidays all over the world. Their first class train ticket is a Necessity. They have tailored suits (and demand the people on the dole get a suit for job interviews – but then, if they don’t buy it they are scruffy and not trying, if they buy it they are wasting money on a luxury…). Their kids can go to private schools; but the poor don’t get to choose how to educate their kids (certainly not home schooling! Working class parents must get jobs! – then presumably get their kids taken away, for neglecting or abandoning them). Rich people can have umpteen bedrooms; but if a poor person has an office or broom cupboard the council calls it a bedroom and orders the person’s eviction ‘for living in too much space’. People on the dole are told to have a phone, but phones cost money so are a ‘luxury’?
It might be more honest at least if all the Cam-Morons proposing this plan, had to FIRST live 3 years (the length of the longest Sanction, let’s say), with no resources/help, on benefits, with the sort of cards/stamps they are proposing. The first time they tried to get a meal, they would be reminded that it was a week’s worth of dole and they’d go hungry, and none of their favourite restaurants or shops would be allowed to serve them. They could not go to friends’ dinner parties or have someone (even a spouse) cook for them, as that would come under ‘payment in kind’, which DWP small print says is not permitted.
They could try eating out of bins, but then they could be arrested for vagrancy, begging, criminal damage. And if they broke a rule, it could be argued they were therefore in receipt of housing benefit illegally, so were committing the new crime of Squatting, and could be evicted and jailed. Or fined, but it is tricky fining people with no money. (The government do this all the time though). They could not afford petrol so would have to do a SORN for their cars, their cars would be ‘assets’ so they’d be told to sell them. Then we should send round somebody to say: you are being sanctioned for deliberately disposing of your means of transport! Cheer up DAVE, there is a way out. If you participate in a Tramp Fight, get beaten up for your food stamps, run into somebody whose benefit you stopped, or get kneecapped by a Loan Shark, you MIGHT be then just disabled enough to qualify for disability benefits, which are now.. A half-eaten pork pie once a month. Thanks to the welfare reforms of compassionate conservatism. Long live Thatcherism!
Or you might just get arrested for the new crime of Breathing While Poor.
(From the same people who brought you the arrestable offence of ‘Driving While Black’)
Sorry but this government are idiots. A week of nappies, pads, baby food etc is actually really expensive. So is coffee (to stay awake doing all the pointless Jobsearches). Or if you pay for water and heat, how are you meant to afford washing body and clothes and dishes, to keep as clean/hygienic as they say you should be? Our launderette is £5 and if you are too disabled to carry the stuff there and back, forget it. You need pens and paper to write letters about jobs. Pens can be £2 per packet, paper £5.99 per pack. Instead of the pens you could have bought a cheap frozen pizza, instead of the paper you could buy a week of cheese. No idea how people with cars cope, it is expensive for people WITH a job to run a car.
They’d better not bring in these changes. It is against human rights legislation and just wrong.
(I just picked litter for 5 hours, unpaid – if a council worker on minimum wage did it, the government would have had to pay the person a big chunk of what people get each week on the dole.)
my wife is a 72 year old ensioner im a carer for 2 downs syndrome boys and essex county council has stated we have to pay the full amount so someone is telling fibs or essex county council have got it wrong, we cant afford to pay it so if they put me and my wife in prison it will cost them over £3,000 to look after the boys