DAVID CAMERON’S ’BIG SOCIETY’ | British Prime Minister declared benefits system changes to be ‘tough, radical and fair’

The only things Big about Cameron’s Society are the lies that underpin it

BY LAURA FRIEL

David Cameron: Benefit changes are ‘tough’ but hardly fair

BY LAURA FRIEL

DO YOU REMEMBER the slogan “No war but class war”? It was very popular amongst anarchist and other Left groups in Britain during times of industrial disputes.
As a consequence, the notion of ‘class war’ has a whiff of coal dust about it. It evokes images of street, factory and pithead confrontations, of workers challenging the status quo and riot police defending the indefensible.
But now there is a very different kind of class war, a covert war, currently being waged by Tory ‘toffs’ and their powerful class allies.
There’s a photograph of Iain Duncan Smith when, as Tory leader in 2002, he had visited homes in Glasgow’s Easterhouse Estate. Confronted with appalling poverty, ‘IDS’ had “almost wept” and left “a changed man”.
In the image, the Tory politician stands alone amid dereliction with an expression torn between sorrow and evangelical opportunity. The only thing missing is the gloria of epiphany and accompanying Hollywood soundtrack.
“I saw poverty among a swathe of forgotten people,” IDS told the media at the time. “I felt I had to do something.” A decade later, as Minister for Work and Pensions, IDS finally had the opportunity he claimed he had yearned years ago.
Last November, IDS announced his plans for changing the benefits system. The new Tory minister estimated that his ‘reforms’ would result in an annual saving for the British Treasury of around £9billion but this was not simply an exercise in cost cutting. “No one would lose out,” as a result of the changes, IDS had claimed.
Better still, the new universal credit would liberate claimants from the mire of complexity and tackle poverty by challenging “the culture of welfare dependency by making work pay”. British Prime Minister David Cameron declared the changes to be “tough, radical and fair”.
The reality of Tory ‘reforms’ have begun to emerge with reports that job-seekers were being ‘tricked’ into losing benefits amid pressure to meet Government financial targets.
According to a whistleblower, advice workers are being instructed to target three claimants every week and remove their benefit on the basis of trumped-up misdemeanours.
The process is being driven by competition between job centres and other agencies for lucrative Government contracts awarded by IDS’s department.
Job centres are currently Government agencies, in the North of Ireland filtered through Assembly departments but policy-driven by the British Department of Work and Pensions.
As part of the Tory drive to “make public services more efficient”, job centres are required to compete with private providers for Government contracts awarded on the basis of ‘results’.
The result being that agencies, supposedly involved in reducing the number of unemployed by finding the jobless jobs, are now involved in securing their own jobs by leaving the jobless without benefit under the guise of sanctions for the work-shy.
This suggests that the criteria of excellence in awarding contracts deployed by Britain’s Department of Work and Pensions is solely concerned with cutting the welfare budget, even where it means driving the poor into further destitution.
To meet these ‘sanctions’ targets advisers are being driven into ‘tricking’ claimants, setting up unachievable targets and imposing unreasonable criteria to ensure people ‘fail’ in their obligation to seek work.
This has included targeting people with special needs, mental health issues, or any other criteria that rendered them more vulnerable to making mistakes.
One tactic deployed by ‘advisers’ is to repeatedly issue complicated forms to fill in to people with dyslexia in the hopes that eventually they will fail. One claimant was sanctioned because forms sent by the jobcentre arrived by post too late to meet the application deadline.
Other targets have included claimants with poor English or English as a second language, adding a racist element to the practice. One adviser admitted it was ‘easier’ to sanction an African claimant because “he didn’t know what was going on”.
Being late for a job centre interview is now sufficient to result in a sanction and a loss of benefit. Many of those ‘sanctioned’ were unaware they had lost their benefit until it wasn’t paid into their bank or Post Office account.
Statistics from the British Government’s own department show that the number of people who have lost their benefit has soared since the beginning of 2010. The number of claimants with registered disabilities being cut off has more than doubled.
In the North of Ireland, welfare provision remains a reserved matter, which means the British Government controls both the policy determining the provision of benefit and the budget. This leaves areas of high welfare dependency particularly vulnerable to Tory policy. A recent conference hosted by the West Belfast Jobs Task Force spelt out just how vulnerable people in the Six Counties are.
Out of a total of 382 wards in the North, eight out of the eleven poorest are in the Greater West Belfast and Shankill area. This area accounts for 33% of those of working age within Belfast but 44% of those claiming Jobseekers’ Allowance, 45% of those on Incapacity Benefit, 58% of non-lone parents and 52% lone parents claiming Income Support.
Challenged by the media, Iain Duncan Smith initially denied there were specific targets to sanction the unemployed and dismissed reports as “claptrap”. Confronted with email evidence to the contrary, IDS reconsidered his response and declared it was simply a “misunderstanding”. But, as the media was quick to point out, an illegal ‘misunderstanding’.
However, publishing his welfare reform White Paper last November, IDS declared the introduction of his new ‘universal’ benefit would be underpinned by a tough new sanction system.
Reiterating the ‘toughness’ of the new regime, IDS announced that hardship payments, usually the refuge of last resort for those whose benefit payment is suddenly stopped, will be replaced by loans.  But even that wasn’t sufficiently harsh for the Tory-led Government at Westminster.
“We also want to consider ways of ensuring that those who persistently fail to meet the requirements imposed upon them cannot rely on these alternative sources of support for the entire duration of their sanction,” said the Department.
Families with children going hungry because of either loss of benefit or debt incurred by qualifying for hardship loans will be able to seek a food parcel from a Christian charity. IDS, the ‘changed’ man, facilitated this by allowing job centre staff to issue charity food vouchers.
Clearly, desperation and destitution are the only real Tory responses to poverty. We can only hope that this cynical exercise in cost cutting will never be cited by the minister, whose crocodile tears have had time to dry on his cheeks, as indicative of the ‘success’ of his ‘reforms’ in ‘reducing’ poverty.
Of course, underpinning all of this is the classic notion of the ‘undeserving poor’ or even worse the ‘clever pauper’ (someone who has learnt to work the system). For decades, notions of class as a relationship have been suppressed and replaced with notions of dysfunction.
In this discourse, the powerful and wealthy disappear as a class acting in their own interests. They become simply an ideal towards which we all should aspire, providing a highly convenient smokescreen to privilege and entrenched inequality.
Meanwhile, the least advantaged are branded as architects of their own misfortune, too lazy, too ignorant, too fat, too whatever and in dire need of discipline by those who know best. Long gone are the depictions of ordinary people heroically meeting the challenges of too few resources or challenging the conditions that underpin that experience.
Under Tony Blair’s ‘New Labour’ we got endless versions of Trinny and Suzannah marshalling their poorly-dressed victims into expensive makeovers or Jeremy Kyle berating families with problems or Kim and Aggie inspecting ‘How Clean Is Your House?’ or Gillian McKeith insisting ‘You Are What You Eat’.
Having located the problem of poverty and lack of opportunity with the poor, Westminster thinks it’s now time for Tory toffs to kick ass while all the time public money is being siphoned off by private corporations, firms like A4e, a multinational company currently providing employment services for the unemployed.
Go on to their website and it is all hippy-happy notice boards and brown paper packaging and reassurances from the corporation that contracting out services to them is tantamount to communities doing it for themselves.
“A4e is a social purpose company with the sole aim to improve people’s lives around the world,” says their About Us website.
But the experience of ordinary people, denied welfare payments so that jobcentres can meet targets and compete for Government contracts against corporations like A4e, is far from empowering. In fact, it’s an exercise in tyranny, the oppression of the most vulnerable at the behest of the most powerful.
The Department of Work and Pensions has recently announced who had won contracts for the work programme due to begin this summer. Out of 40 contracts worth between £3billion to £5billion, only two non-profit-making organisations were selected. An outcome (and we’re all going to be judged according to outcome apparently) completely at odds with Cameron’s Big Society.
Amongst the winners was A4e, whose founder, Emma Harrison, was named by David Cameron as the ‘workless families’ tsar’. The media recently revealed that she and her spouse enjoy a joint income of around £1.4million a year from their welfare-to-work empire.
Nice work, if you can get it.