THE ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL CRISIS | THE CRIMINALISATION OF POVERTY

Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?

Iain Duncan Smith isn’t acting as a champion for the unemployed but gang master for the sweatshop employer

g BY LAURA FRIEL

NORTH AND SOUTH, jobless and waged, the ordinary people of Ireland are under attack.
In the North. Britain’s Tory-led coalition is attempting to lower wage levels by criminalising unemployment.
Meanwhile, the South is facing wholesale pauperisation as the bankrupt Fianna Fáil administration capitulates to international pressure and cuts wages and social provision.
And as we approach Christmas and an uncertain financial New Year, many of the season’s traditional fables hold uncanny significance. Take ‘A Christmas Carol’ and the scene where Scrooge, a wealthy businessman, declines an invitation to contribute towards provision for the poor.
“Are there no prisons? And the union workhouses, are they still in operation?”
More than 150 years since it was penned, this fictional response still resonates as the most damning indictment of the criminalisation of poverty ever written.
To be ‘radical’ in Charles Dickens’s day was to join in the call for state intervention on behalf of the poor, sick and elderly. Today in the hands of Tory toffs and their coalition cheerleaders, ‘radical’ is simply a euphemism to confirm the ascendency of the New Right.
Last month, British Secretary for Work and Pensions Iain Duncan Smith announced the “biggest shake up” of welfare entitlement since the 1940s. Describing the changes as “radical”, he said he is determined to tackle “the culture of welfare dependency by making work pay”.
Making work pay is an honourable objective, one which would make any trade unionist or seeker of social justice proud. But we’re talking about a former leader of a party that is vehemently opposed to the minimum wage, let alone the aspiration of a ‘living wage’. (No one is foolish enough to claim the current minimum wage actually provides an adequate living.)
In the lexicon of the New Right, “making work pay” is code for cutting benefits and imposing sanctions that will reduce families to out-of-work destitution as a means of making ordinary people accept greater in-work poverty.
This is not just a welfare cutting exercise. This is also a wage cutting exercise and no amount of crocodile tears about the plight of those “abandoned” to welfare dependency is going to hide that.
The British Government plans to cut welfare by reducing payments and restricting entitlement. Under the new system, claimants must undertake unpaid work if required, accept any job offered regardless of pay and conditions or risk the loss of all benefit entitlement for up to three years.
Families with ‘too many children’ may be penalised and the detrimental impact on children will not be a consideration when benefit is withdrawn.
The sick and disabled also face cuts and withdrawal of their benefit if they are reassessed as fit to work.
Ironically, Duncan Smith has been acclaimed as some sort of champion of the poor.
The introduction of a single, universal benefit will ‘free’ applicants from an “absurdly complex system in which claimants are presently mired,” claimed the British Daily Telegraph.
But at its core, it is “nothing less than an attempt to restore the work ethic to a nation in which the culture of worklessness is spreading like a lethal virus”,
For those already ‘infected’, the New Right has the answer: fear and coercion. In the words of Duncan Smith: “The message will go across, play ball or it will be difficult.”
Duncan Smith claims his objective is to alleviate poverty. It is a lie.
People aren’t claiming benefit because they lack the necessary ‘work ethic’. They’re jobless because there are too few jobs. People don’t refuse work because they’re too lazy to get out of bed in the morning, they refuse jobs because the pay offered is too low and the conditions unacceptable.
Duncan Smith isn’t stupid. He knows low-paid work will not reduce poverty but he argues that “work is bigger than the idea of earning money”. Perhaps someone should tell that to the bankers and the rest of the over-paid and bonus-driven financial elite.
Defending ordinary people’s right to a living wage and a safe working environment would enable people to move into employment because it was in their best interest to do so. Isn’t “enlightened self-interest” the core of Adam Smith’s discourse ‘The Wealth of Nations’ so beloved of Thatcherite economists?
But the New Right has no intention of doing any such thing.
Duncan Smith isn’t acting as a champion for the unemployed but gang master for the sweatshop employer. Coercing the jobless into working for their benefits or taking poorly-paid work will do nothing to tackle poverty and it is pure hypocrisy to pretend otherwise.
The majority of children living in poverty live in working households. The majority of adults living in poverty live in working households. They are poor because they are poorly paid.
Poverty is not a ‘lifestyle choice’ but a consequence of the difficulties faced by ordinary people in challenging job losses and defending wage levels.
Duncan Smith isn’t a champion for the ordinary taxpayer either. His welfare proposals have nothing to do with addressing the financial deficit.
In fact, his proposals will cost a great deal of money but what the hell - at least those work-shy, scrounging, skiving and conniving lead- swingers will be made to sweep the streets for no wage at all.
But - regardless of the media and their fairy stories of claimants housed in luxury accommodation, breeding like rabbits and living like lords - it’s isn’t the unemployed, sick or disabled who are living the high life by ripping-off the ordinary taxpayer.
The simple truth is ordinary taxpayers could pay less if the highest earners were made to pay their share. According to the British Treasury’s own figures, the annual loss of revenue due to tax fraud is £40billion a year. Independent estimates put the figure closer to £70billion. But the New Right has no interest in tackling the tax evasion of the really rich.
Tory Treasury Minister David Gauke recently signed an agreement with Switzerland which will allow thousands of wealthy British tax evaders to keep an estimated £125billion currently owed to the Exchequer as well as retaining their secret accounts in Zurich and Geneva.
According to an online ‘pay-your-tax’ petition, British Chancellor George Osborne is currently using a legal loophole to avoid paying £1.6million in tax. Other members of the British Government are also avoiding tax.
Meanwhile, in the South of Ireland, rather than engaging in real economic development, successive administrations have used tax avoidance as a source of easy revenue.
Instead of investing in real jobs for real people, the state facilitated, for a modest fee, tax avoidance by some of the world’s largest businesses.
Many simply opened an office in Dublin as a base from which to file their tax returns or as a stepping stone to shifting money to jurisdictions where they would pay no tax at all.
It is estimated that Google avoided paying $3.1billion over the last three years by availing of the ‘Irish arrangement’. No wonder wealthy Britons, most notably George Osborne, labelled Ireland “a shining example”.
Osborne’s ‘generous’ offer of lending £7billion to “a friend in need” appeared less of a gift after it emerged that the British Exchequer was borrowing money at 1% and lending it to Ireland at 5%.
The ink was barely dry on Brian Cowen’s formal request for international intervention before IMF regulators called for cuts in benefit payments and a reduction in the level of the minimum wage.
In a formal position paper, the IMF urged “a gradual decrease of benefits over time of unemployment and stricter job search requirements”. It went on to call for a review of the minimum wage “to make it consistent with the general fall in wages”.
Fianna Fáil complied, cutting the minimum wage by 10%, slashing social welfare by €2.8billion and throwing 25,000 public sector workers out of work.
The ordinary people of Ireland, North or South, had no hand in the making of the current fiscal crisis. The responsibility lies with reckless bankers, their business cronies and the politicians who refused to regulate them.
Ordinary people aren’t being targeted because they are to blame but because they are the least able to defend themselves. Bankers still have their bonuses, Big Business its tax loopholes.
Ireland isn’t being targeted because they owe the most or work the least but because, as a peripheral member of the EU with a legacy of colonial under-development, it is less able to defend itself. As the current crisis in the financial markets plays itself out, Ireland is at risk of becoming the workhouse of Europe.
Along with ‘A Christmas Carol’ another festive favourite will be viewed this year with knowing irony.
‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ has all the elements: private property pitched against social housing, individual greed set against mutual aid. There’s even a banking crisis.
In a famous scene, the selfless George Bailey berates Mr Potter, a pernicious property developer, for describing working people as feckless rabble.

“Just remember this, Mr Potter, that this rabble you’re talking about, they do most of the working and paying and living and dying in this community,” declares the Hollywood hero.
On screen, with a little angelic guidance, the collective power of ordinary people prevails. In life, too, the collective power of ordinary people can also prevail.