UKIP Don't Hate Elephants, They Hate People

UKIP have got a freepost address so, if you want to send their leaflets back at their expense, it's easily done. It's been noted that, as they pay by weight received, adding a few extra items helps them spend the millions of pounds they've fiddled from the EU. Handful of gravel from your path? Out of date jar of gherkins? Every little helps. But few things are as heavy and handily sized as the household brick, which UKIP will surely have good use for.

It's easy to cast them as a party who hate foreigners - not least because it's true - but it misses the point and also misses a lot of the people on their hate list.

HATING WOMEN

On 12 September 2013, the European Parliament voted on equal pay for male and female workers. It was carried with an overwhelming 546 votes in favour. Among the 50 abstentions were UKIP MEPs John Bufton and William, Earl of Dartmouth. For the same party, John Agnew and Roger Helmer were two of the 34 (that also included several Tories) who voted against.

This is, of course, the same UKIP who have a major funder called Demetri Marchessini, author of a whole book called Women In Trousers explaining that such people are deliberately making themselves unattractive to men and that public trouser-wearing by women is 'hostile behaviour'.

HATING ACCOUNTABILITY

If being on the wrong side of gender discrimination is unpopular, UKIP went further. A month ago there was a European Parliament vote on transparency in clinical trials that was carried by an even greater margin than the equal pay vote. Fully 95%, some 594 MEPS, were in favour. Who were amidst the rump of 17 who opposed it? Stand up once again William, Earl of Dartmouth and his colleagues Roger Helmer and John Agnew, alongside fellow UKIPper Gerard Batten.

AND THE ELEPHANTS

Nigel Farage was absent from both those votes, presumably because he was on Question Time yet a-fucking-gain. However he was present on 15 January this year for a vote to combat wildlife crime, including the illegal ivory trade. This vote managed to be even more overwhelming. 647 MEPs - 96% - voted in favour. Six of the 14 who voted against came from one party. Once again William, Earl of Dartmouth took his place alongside John Agnew and Gerard Batten, along with Paul Nuttall, Derek Clark and their overseer Farage.

This one caught a big wave of meme-inspired public attention in the last couple of weeks. Why in God's name did Ukip vote against fighting the illegal ivory trade? asked an anti-EU rightwinger on the Telegraph's blog feed. It's a fair enough question in the face of what seem like baffling political positions.

REALLY THOUGH, WHY DO THEY DO IT?

However, our befuddlement is the product of our own failure to understand what we see. We imagine UKIP MEPs as political representatives. If instead we see UKIP as a corporatist sect masquerading as a political party then it all becomes clear. They despise anything that hinders profit, which includes many fundamental human needs. Now look again at everything they do. It all fits.

Their current billboard campaign shows a British builder* begging on the street because his job was undercut by unlimited cheap labour.

In their new election broadcast video, a British builder** says

Since the lads from Eastern Europe are prepared to work for a lot less than anybody else, I’ve found it a real struggle. It’s getting hard to provide for my family.

If this were really their concern, why do UKIP oppose the minimum wage? Why do they support the ultimate undercut of workfare, where waged workers are sacked to make way for the unpaid forced labour of unemployed people?


UKIP want the end of the Working Time Directive which gives us paid holiday, paid breaks, rest of at least 11 hours in 24 and the right to work no more than 48 hours a week. Those out of work would suffer under UKIP too, with benefits being further slashed and abolished.

These are the people for whom this most full-throttle Tory government doesn't go far or fast enough. Farage - who, like so many of the Tories he pits himself against, is a public school millionaire who had a City career before becoming an expenses fiddling politician - is using racism as a smokescreen for his party's drive for full corporatocracy.


- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

*The British builder in the poster, David O' Rourke, is actually an immigrant from Ireland. He's not a builder, but an actor. Last Wednesday Farage told the Telegraph's political editor that UKIP was the only party not to use actors in its advertising. Two days later UKIP said using actors was 'totally standard practice'.

**The British builder in the video, Andre Lampitt, is actually an immigrant from Zimbabwe, or Rhodesia as he prefers to call it. He is a UKIP member and a serious racist.

The Shocking Shock Doctrine

The difference between Labour and Tory governments is that you can keep up with the pace of neoliberal evil Labour inflict. The Tories blast such a blizzard that you miss a lot of it. The kind of stuff that cropped up every few weeks and made you eclaim that you can't believe Labour would try it now just zips past you in a sort of white noise of regression, a cacophony of coins clinking on their way into the overstuffed pockets of the already obscenely wealthy.

This morning alone I've found out:


- Having made a pre-election promise of no cuts to Sure Start centres then axed 500, government websites are having the list of closed ones removed.

- Having promised that the bedroom tax wouldn't affect families with carers, it's been shown to hit 60,000 of them. As predicted.

- Senior Tory Liam Fox says the ringfencing of the NHS budget should be stopped. He uses the phrase "can't be fixed by throwing money at it"; try that on any spending, it sounds convincing even when it's untrue. "You can't sort out a debt problem by throwing money at it". Dr Fox trained as a doctor at public expense before giving up medicine to be a Tory MP.

- They plan to let landowners remove public rights of way centuries old. Bonus points to the Telegraph for characterising walkers as "trampling through gardens" and rights of way that go "straight through houses". Not vast estates of dozens, hundreds or even thousands of acres of open land, then.

And I keep finding I'm the only person in the room who's spotted their 2015 manifesto pledge to repeal the Human Rights Act, with Cameron giving serious consideration being given to complete withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights, something that was reiterated by the Justice Secretary only last week.

We've just entered the last full year of this government. At this rate, that's more than enough time to push us back to the 1830s.

21st century slavery in the uk

None of us like to think of ourselves as slave owners. It has become unsavoury to have house slaves so we squirrel them away out of sight in places like East Asian sweatshops. With the advent of workfare, it has come a step closer to home.

Unemployed people are forced to work for private companies to get work experience. Except that they are given the most basic unskilled work with no chance of an actual job. When their placement is up they are simply replaced.

Major retailers like Argos and Tesco didn't need to take on Christmas staff, the government simply sent them free workers. In return, the government gets to lower the unemployment figures as these jobless people do not count as unemployed. On many of the schemes, benefit claimants who refuse to participate get 'sanctioned' -  they have their benefits stopped for months, even years.

Whilst many of the deprivations that the government are subjecting its electorate to are Tory inventions, others are not. Workfare is a Labour initiative, and if you're one of the 90%+ of people who voted Tory, Labour, LibDem or UKIP, you gave it the mandate.

The negative connotations on the words 'forced labour' are shied away from. When it was announced in 2008 the Telegraph reported

the unemployed will be forced to undertake voluntary work including picking up litter and cleaning graffiti

Quite how anyone can be compelled to do a voluntary activity is not so much a matter for journalists and politicians, it's more a koan for zen masters. But this idea is persisting.

The government petitions website has produced several interesting results. The 100,000 signature threshold that triggers parliamentary debate has helped advance justice for Hillsborough. At 10,000 signatures the government has to respond. Their comments on the petition to end workfare are perplexing, yet illuminating.

We do not have Work for Your Benefit or Workfare schemes in this country. Workfare is an American term used to describe employment programmes which force all jobseekers to work at a certain point of their claim in order to continue to receive benefit...

Mandatory Work Activity gives extra support to a small number of Jobseeker’s Allowance claimants who would benefit from a short period of activity.

The minimum sanction period for someone refusing Mandatory Work Activity is three months, a 'third offence' gets three years. They hold your family hostage threatening to starve them if you don't comply.

The clue is in the name. If it is not forced labour, how is it Mandatory Work Activity? In denying what we are doing to the impoverished we signal our inner squeamishness. If we don't think forced labour is tolerable as an idea, we shouldn't try to mask it with a false name. Instead we should exclaim the outrage that our consciences know it to be.

new lang syne

The MPs expenses scandal is still with us. George Osborne is a Chelsea fan (who else?). He just happens to have a meeting arranged with German official that lets him be in Munich to see Chelsea win the Champions League and witness John Terry's thuggish racist little hands hoist the trophy. That way Osborne had the trip paid for by the taxpayer instead of out of his inherited millions.

He also flogged his second home that we paid for and made a personal profit of £450,000. Items on expenses must be 'wholly, necessarily and exclusively' used in the job. Why is it 'necessary' to have a house worth a million pounds? With a fucking paddock for horses?

If the Tories really want to end the 'something for nothing culture' then let's have a 100% Inheritance Tax and administer it retroactively so it removes the fortunes that Osborne, Cameron, and Iain Duncan Smith are living off.

They aggressively portray benefit claimants as scroungers who get that 'something for nothing' at the expense of 'hard working families'. Iain Duncan Smith said that benefits have risen faster than private sector wages. Well yes, they have as long as you do some nimble footwork and only start measuring wages from where they slump in the credit crunch and recession.

But more to the point, it's not about competing with private sector wages. It's about ensuring that nobody goes hungry, cold or homeless. With food prices rising faster than either benefits or wages, and fuel costs rising faster still, the level of benefits has effectively plummeted. Families are choosing between food and warmth. People are, entirely predictably, being made homeless.

The millionaire government and the millionaire-owned media have flooded us with stories of the feckless poor. And it has worked. A YouGov poll found this week that on average people think that 41 per cent of the entire welfare budget goes on benefits to unemployed people, while the true figure is 3 per cent. They also found that, on average, people think that 27 per cent of the welfare budget is claimed fraudulently, while the government's own figure is 0.7 per cent.

Of the people polled, those with the least accurate picture of what the benefit regime is actually like were the ones with the most anti-claimant view.

The fact is that the jobless outnumber vacancies by more than 5:1. There are over two million people for whom there is no job. The demonisation of the jobless is a problem in itself. But having successfully done that, the government then turns on the same 'hard working families' with swingeing cuts to Housing Benefit (where 93% of new claimants are in work) and Tax Credits (100% in work). That time Iain Duncan Smith didn't even cherry pick his figures, he simply made them up.

The pared down Housing Benefit comes into effect in April on the same day that there's a tax cut for those earning over £150,000 a year. We can't afford housing for the poor and disabled they say, whilst ruling out a Mansion Tax. The Daily Mail hailed that as helping 'hard-pressed middle-class families'. Owning a property worth over £2,000,000? What the fuck is that the 'middle' of? The Tory front bench?

THERE IS ANOTHER WAY

In Scotland, they consistently vote against the Tories. As the UK suffers an accelerating runaway Tory train of devastation, forcing people into poverty and on to the streets, in Scotland they've extended the rights of homeless people to be housed.

Whilst the Tories strip the NHS, in Scotland - like Wales and Northern Ireland - they extend it with free prescriptions for all.

As the Tories hand out UK public services to corrupt profiteers and slash workers rights, in Scotland there's a law on the table to ban construction firms from getting public contracts if they've been involved in blacklisting workers (a widespread illegal practice to keep unions out).

As the increasing spectre of student debt forces young people from poorer families to opt out of university, in Scotland they have reinstated free higher education. Labour have criticised the move as 'regressive'. Mind you, Labour's response to attacks on the unemployed is to propose their own punitive regime. That's unsurprising given that the comprehensively derided workfare scheme was actually designed by the last Labour government.

Whilst the Tories resurrect zombie road schemes triggering a new rash of 90s-style road protests, and start a new generation of fossil burning that will shatter our carbon reduction targets, the Scots generate 35% of their electricity renewably, well ahead of their target to get them to the equivalent of 100% renewable by 2020.

Come independence, I think I'll be seeking political asylum there.

war on the poor

Last Sunday the Mail headlined the Tory declaration that there will be no Mansion Tax. The – and I use the term in its broadest sense – newspaper said that this would 'help hard-pressed middle-class families'.

A tax on properties worth £2,000,000 or more? What is that the middle of? The Tory front bench?

On the same day’s Andrew Marr show David Cameron heralded further billions of pounds in cuts to welfare (that’s ‘cuts’, BBC, not ‘savings’). Amongst these is the removal of Housing Benefit for people under 25.

They already get a lower level of Housing Benefit and the under 21s get a lower minimum wage. This is presumably because landlords give them cheaper rent and supermarkets charge them less for food.

There is a straight contradiction between the idea that those without work should move to get work and that unemployed under 25s should live with their parents. The only thing that ties these diametrically opposed thoughts together is that they punish the person without work.

Given that there are more than five times as many unemployed people as vacancies, it clearly cannot be the fault of over 80% of them. You can’t find jobs that don’t exist. Yet we punish them with workfare in which they do the same tasks handed out as sentences to minor criminals for no pay.

Cameron said it is unfair that someone can leave school and be unemployed and get Housing Benefit that is unavailable to their classmates who become students or find work. It's not half as unfair as a man who inherited £3,000,000 on his 18th birthday taking away the pittance that stands between impoverished under 25s and destitution.

Also, he's simply wrong. Those in work can get housing benefit if they’re on a low wage. Indeed, many of them do - over 90% of new Housing Benefit claimants have jobs. And students did get Housing Benefit until the last Tory government took it away from them. First they came for the students.

You can’t go up to people eating their dinner, steal a plate, then say ‘it’s not fair that only some of you have got food so I’m taking the rest too’.

But, and most importantly, it is not unfair that the poorer receive more welfare, any more than it is unfair that kidney patients get more dialysis machines than the rest of us.

I work and pay tax not because it’s a personal savings bank but because it’s fair. And actually I do actually get a personal reward. I get a society that is less grim and less dangerous for me personally. I get to live in a place where people don’t starve, where people aren’t forced to live on the streets, where the only question between someone and health care is ‘how much do you need it?’. At least, I used get to live in that place.

The majority of people hit by changes to Housing Benefit for ‘under-occupancy’ are disabled. Many of them need a spare room for equipment. Many have had expensive adaptations to their homes that will be ripped out once they move out, and then be paid for again to refurbish their new homes (if they can find them).

The genuine likelihood of this and other changes to the welfare system costing as much as they save show that it’s not about saving money. Just like the contradictions within the reasoning for the new attack on Housing Benefit payments to young people, it proves that this is ideological. It is War On The Poor.

class war comes round to your house

In the last days of that runaway train of Tory evil before the 1997 general election the man seen as their next leader, Michael Portillo, was still in full twitchy right-armed Thatcherite flow.

He made a speech saying that poor people should not be allowed to live where they choose but instead should be made to live in 'housing befitting their station'.

His choice of phrasing was almost as telling as the idea itself. The vision of robust class boundaries, ensuring the lower orders were punished for their poverty, and his own sense of snobbish entitlement.

But more than a decade into Labour rule - Tory-imitating Labour rule that disavowed its belief in public ownership and hooked itself to the freemarket bandwagon, saddling us with the PFI public finance ticking timebomb - we forgot what real full-throttle Tories were like.

THE LATEST INSTALMENT OF CRUELTY

Despite being twice rejected by the House of Lords, the government got its way with the 'spare bedroom tax' in the Welfare Reform Act which got Royal Assent earlier this year.

The new rules for Housing Benefit will take money away from people whose homes are underoccupied. Anyone with a spare bedroom loses 14%, anyone with two spare bedrooms loses 25%.

The rules have been drawn up to make some horrifying exclusions. They are not merely harsh. They will knowingly cause real suffering and - here's the proof that it is ideologically punitive rather than drastically cash-strapped - much if not all of the savings made will be swallowed up by the costs of the knock-on effects.

STOP BEING DISABLED

The majority of those affected by the change - almost half a million people - are disabled.  Someone who has a disability that requires a carer to stay overnight retains their spare room as long as it's used every night. But someone whose medical condition fluctuates - as a great many do - cannot keep a room for a carer, even if it means they will be housebound alone for half their life. This will lead to medical conditions being exacerbated and more hospital treatment.

As Shelter noted, the National Housing Federation estimates that 100,000 tenants set to be affected live in homes specially adapted to their needs. Encouraging these tenants to move would not be cost-effective as new properties would need to be adapted while aids and adaptations would be stripped out of vacated homes.

STOP CARING FOR CHILDREN

Foster families cannot keep a room for the children they care for. Just as the Tories want to restrict marrying a foreigner to the rich, so poor people are effectively deemed unworthy to foster. This will lead to more children in care, and more people growing up without the self-esteem and social connections brought about by family life.

Children under 16 of the same gender must share a bedroom. Children under ten must share a bedroom regardless of gender. Children under three get no room at all and are expected to sleep in their parents' room. This means that a couple with three or four young children must live in a two bedroom household, with all the stress on family life and impediment to academic work it will bring.

A separated parent who does not have custody of their child cannot keep a bedroom for them. The government has already changed the rules so that someone under 35 cannot have a self-contained flat, only a room in a shared house. Clearly, a vast proportion of parents with children under 16 are below the age of 35.

So, a separated parent would have to have their child sleep in the parent's room, sharing a toilet, bathroom and kitchen with a house full of un-CRB checked strangers. Many courts will see this as a 'safeguarding' situation and prevent custody or even visits in order to protect the child. This will lead to loss of contact and reliance on sole parents. This, in turn, will lead to more single parents claiming benefits and a further increase in the number of children in care and those needing foster homes, even as the supply diminishes.

SAVINGS COST MORE

Those living in 'underoccupied' households will run up arrears and then be homeless and in debt. This will mean an explosion in the need for debt advice, more people homeless, more vulnerable people in short-stay bed and breakfast accommodation, more mental health treatment required, and more people saddled with long term debt repayments taken out of their benefits, pushing their heads further below the waterline.

The knock-on financial costs of these changes, especially to the penal, health and benefits systems, are obvious to anyone who thinks about them for more than four seconds. It proves that this, like so much of the cuts agenda, is not about reducing spending. It is straightforward cruelty and open class warfare.

spongers

As the government introduced the Welfare Reform Bill, complaining of spongers getting easy money off the state for doing nothing, I saw nineteen police officers milling about Leeds station with an airport-style metal detector asking - with no powers to compel - random people to go through to see if they were carrying a knife.

westminster council attack the jobless (slight return)

Further to the last post, not only are Westminster Council punishing the unemployed wanting council houses, they're attacking the poor who rent privately too.

In June last year, Westminster Council's - her again - Philippa Roe defended the forthcoming cuts to Housing Benefit. Lambasting its currently huge cost she said

we have no issue with the families who have been claiming these high levels of benefit, as it is the system itself that is at fault and not them.

The system she speaks of is one the Tories instigated, where few new council houses are built and huge quantities of them are sold off, making the remaining number available spiral down the plughole. So, almost everyone poor has to rent from a private landlord, which is far more expensive than council housing.

Private rent funds two things: money to cover the landlord's mortgage on a property, and extra money to give the landlord a profit for being the owner.

As George Orwell said,

the ground-landlord in a town area has no function and no excuse for existence. He is merely a person who has found out a way of milking the public while giving nothing in return. He causes rents to be higher, he makes town planning more difficult, and he excludes children from green spaces: that is literally all that he does, except to draw his income.

The Housing Benefit system will not buy a house for a family who are renting, yet it will happily pay that same mortgage plus a fat premium to buy that same house for someone who already owns fifty others.

It would clearly be cheaper if the landlord took less of a premium, as is the case with councils who own housing. But the private landlord's main aim is to maximise that premium, so the predictable and inevitable result of reducing council housing is that the Housing Benefit bill will increase. The expense Roe complains of is expense her party created.

The cuts in Housing Benefit will force people to move away, ghettoising them in wherever is cheapest. This will shred communities, with all the associated impacts on crime and mental health, and of course the places with the cheapest rents are the ones with no opportunities. Moving the jobless to unemployment blackspots is hardly going to increase their chances, yet the new benefits regime penalises those who don't find work within a few months.

Philippa Roe assured us last June

the new changes will not take hold until April 2011 and we have time to plan and forecast what the housing needs of Westminster will be.

By December, Westminster Council reportedly

admitted it plans to move 80 per cent of homeless housing benefit claimants needing temporary accommodation out of the borough.

When the Tories talk of 'forecasts' and 'rewards', they are speaking of whitewashes and penalties. Wherever you live, if you are unemployed it is your personal moral failing for which you must be punished.

punishing the poor. again.

With the massive demand for whatever council houses are left in the UK far outstripping supply, there has to be some method of prioritising those on the waiting lists.

Westminster Council is planning to shuffle unemployed people to the bottom of the deck and give first dibs to those with jobs. They say it is

designed to recognise positive contributions to society, reward those who are in jobs and to encourage those who are not currently employed to seek work

We've been here before on Bristling Badger, and I've no doubt we'll have to revisit it in future, but here we go again. The government's own figures show that unemployed people outnumber the available jobs 5:1.

Once we see the rise in unemployment that the government expects to be caused by George Osborne's first budget, and the ranks are futher swollen by the millions of people on Incapacity Benefit who the government has decided are suddenly magically fit to work, that ratio will be more like 11:1.

You cannot expect people to get jobs that don't exist. Penalising them for not getting these jobs is an exercise in cruelty.

Westminster cabinet member for housing, Councillor Philippa Roe, said: "We want to introduce a system which is fairer to local people and rewards those in employment."

This is an attack on the fundamental reasons for having social support such as council housing and the benefits system. It is not there as a set of incentives and penalties. It is there to ensure that, in our wealthy society, no person has to fear homelessness, destitution, hunger or illness simply because they have no money.

These are risks posed to us all, so it is a kind of insurance. Also, societies with the greater gaps between richest and poorest have the most crime, so a robust welfare system protects everyone, even those who will never be poor.

But more than that, it is organised compassion. Most of us - Tory councillors evidently excepted - do not want to live in a place where people suffer for lack of any simple and cheap remedy. This is why previous generations of workers agitated and voted for the welfare state to come into existence. It was working people actively saying they do not want the unemployed to be punished for their predicament.

creating an army of slaves

The Conservatives roll out plans to force benefit claimants to work for what was previously their right, but it is actually a scheme set in train by Labour. More, such coercion has existed in prisons for fifteen years.

To make people work for the minimum needed to survive with no hope of improvement or ability to leave is simply slavery. As has always been the case, it's a state of affairs that suits the slave owners very well.

It's the subject of my new Feature article for U-Know, Creating an Army of Slaves.

red ed

the coalition is losing the argument about its central programme of cuts, even before it has announced them, let alone started carrying them out. The latest Populus polling shows three-quarters of the public oppose both the scale and speed of the planned cuts.

So said Seumas Milne two weeks ago. A Leader of the Opposition who was interested in popular support might see an opportunity to place themselves as a determined, stoic, principled opposer of the cuts. But no, because garnering the support of the majority is not as important as ensuring the wealthy few don't become alienated.

The only red thing about Red Ed Miliband is his tongue, red raw from slurping the collective anii of capitalist scumpigs. He manages to pretend to have been anti-war just because he wasn't an MP when the Iraq vote took place. How we all remember his ceaseless tirades exhorting the prime minister to withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan that resounded through the Commons since he was elected in 2005, though. Oh, no, hang on a minute....

He boldly comes forth with his red agenda, replacing Trident and no plans to nationalise anything, not even the railways that 70% of us want renationalised. Instead he says he'll go along with many of the cuts, specifically including the attacks on benefit claimants.

The Tory press has made much of Miliband's support from union votes, implying that this is some sort of con, with additionally strong overtones that unions are something underhand, malevolent and dangerously extremist. Since when did union membership – something a quarter of British employees engage in – become something antisocial?

Mark Steel notes the anti-union element of Miliband's coverage

as if the unions aren’t made up of millions of people but are a pair of illegal bookies and a drug-dealer who, because of a quirk of history, make up 30 per cent of the electoral college. You might as well say the only reason the Tories won the election was they sneaked in with the votes of Tory voters.

But the Sheer Fucking Gall Of The Day Award goes to Baroness Warsi for saying

Ed Miliband wasn’t the choice of his MPs, wasn’t the choice of Labour party members but was put in to power by union votes.

Miliband was elected to leader of the Labour Party by many thousands of entitled voters. As opposed to Warsi, a failed parliamentary candidate who is nonetheless in Cabinet despite having been elected by nobody at all.

road to nowhere

'Reform' is a word that has shifted meaning in the last twenty years. Like 'modernise', in the mouth of a politician 'reform' now means 'privatise' or 'cut'.

George Osborne told us last week

We are going to reform out-of-work benefits so there's a strong incentive for people who can work to get work.

This ignores the central fact that there are many people who can work, but there is no work for them to get.

There are 2,467,000 people unemployed. There are 467,000 job vacancies. So there are exactly two million people for whom there is no work. And that's before we start kicking people off sickness benefits and out of public sector jobs.

Given the government's plan to cut Housing Benefit for people unemployed for more than a year - leading to debt and eviction for a great many of them - it's also pertinent to know that there are 797,000 people who have been unemployed for over 12 months. So even if every vacancy in the country went to long-term unemployed people, we'd still have 330,000 people long-term unemployed being punished with homelessness for not getting a job that doesn't exist.

Osborne continued;

People who think that it's a lifestyle choice just to stay on out-of-work benefits, that lifestyle choice is going to come to an end.

'Lifestyle choice' implies a preference. It baldly says unemployed people choose their situation. With the unemployed outnumbering vacancies 5:1, unless we start a jobs-for-six-months rota, the only way people will get out of unemployment and into work is by clambering over the heads of others and pushing them back down into the increasingly inhumane and threadbare benefits system.

Nick Clegg defended the cuts, saying

A fair society is not one in which money is simply transferred by the central state from one group to another

One word: bankers.

It also makes me wonder whether this means Clegg opposes taxation in all its forms. He goes on;

Welfare needs to become an engine of mobility, changing people's lives for the better, rather than a giant cheque written by the state to compensate the poor for their predicament.

£65 a week Job Seekers Allowance is hardly giant. But whatever the price, you can only be mobile if there is somewhere to move to. For the overwhelming majority of unemployed people, there is no road out. As they are poor by no fault of their own, it is barbaric and cruel to punish them. A fair society would indeed compensate such people for their predicament.

As unemployment is, if we're honest, a permanent feature of our society, we should see if anyone out there actually does want it as a lifestyle choice. If they can find a way to lead happy, fulfilled lives on £65 a week then good luck to them. Automating their payments would, as Child Benefit has proven, take down the cost of administration. This would free up the job-finding help for those who do want it. Same number of unemployed, lower cost, far greater happiness.

swapping health care for death threats

NHS Direct is the latest victim of the Tory cuts. The phone line was, itself, set up as a money-saver. People can ring up with minor ailments and speak to qualified nursing professionals so they don't use the more expensive 999 calls or A&E admissions. The plan is to replace it with a line staffed by people who've had 60 hours training. The opportunities for misdiagnosis - costing more money as well as misery - are vastly multiplied.

This is not like John Major's Cones Hotline that was trumpeted by government yet only handled a dozen calls a day (including pranks). NHS Direct receives nearly a million calls a month. Its abolition is just a further gratuitous dismantling of the NHS. The replacement system is still being piloted, yet they've decided to decided to roll it out nationally and permanently. Andrew Lansley has a novel definition of 'piloting'.

The new government's continual excuse for the cuts as essential cost-cuting is an outrageous decoy. Just as they're axing the Sustainable Development Commission even though it saves tens of times its cost, so they're claiming their NHS cuts all save money and improve efficiency.

They tell us they're cutting layers of NHS bureaucracy, such as abolishing Primary Care Trusts. Leaving aside the fact that the Tories invented the internal market of the NHS and fertilised the culture of outsourcing, the new government is actually bringing in a new layer of NHS bureaucracy in GP's fundholding. Indeed, it seems likely that the bureaucrats we sack from PCTs will be rehired by GPs (doctors are hardly going to do all their own accounting), but with all the added waste of bringing in a new system.

Beyond all these giant cogs and gears of Tory spending cuts, there is a simple test to apply to claims of necessary cuts. They cannot credibly talk of saving money by cutting waste and things that don't get used whilst they're planning to replace Trident.

These WMDs are so terrible that they cannot be used. Their effects would decimate populations and poison land far beyond the target, quite possibly affecting the UK.

Here's the deal; if your enemy knows you won't use a weapon, it is not any kind of a deterrent. Every penny of the tens of billions of pounds spent on them is a pointless waste. The cost of Trident replacement is commonly cited as £20bn - coincidentally the same amount the NHS has been ordered to cut between now and 2014 - though a Greenpeace report estimates £97bn over its 30 year lifespan.

You expect Tory papers like the Mail and Telegraph to toe the government line, but the supposedly impartial BBC and the lefty Guardian use the phrase 'nuclear deterrent' too. That is not neutral descriptive language, it is the militaristic opinion that nucelar weapons deter. Trident is not a nuclear deterrent, it is a nuclear weapons system.

Frankly, I can't see any defensive element to the British military. If we abolished our armed forces, who exactly would invade us? But certainly, long before we reach such issues, there is no credible argument for nuclear weapons. Those who say we should keep them talk of being 'left defenceless'. Take a look at what we've done in Serbia, Iraq and Afghanistan lately, all without nukes. See how many mighty non-nuclear states around the world go about their business unattacked.

Farting around making what are, financially speaking, comparatively tiny cuts to services people actually use and rely on in order to have the cash to spend on something that will never be used would be laughable if it were just an idea. It means we take away quality of life for our citizens in order to pretend to threaten ugly death to citizens of other places.

The fact that such ideas are at the forefront of the minds of the people running the country is frankly terrifying, and makes you wonder with dread what they'll do next.

poor people, poor health

As the new government continues to shift the blame for poor health on to the unhealthy people - arguing that we should further stigmatise obese people as a matter of policy -  a new report in the British Medical Journal studies the disparity in life expectancy between rich and poor.

By the year 2007 for every 100 people under the age of 65 dying in the best-off areas, 199 were dying in the poorest tenth of areas. This is the highest relative inequality recorded since at least 1921.

Elsewhere, Ben Goldacre says male life expectancy in Kentish Town is 70, whereas two miles away in rich Hampstead it's 80.

I know this because I have the Annual Public Health Report for Camden open on the table right now.

This phenomenal disparity in life expectancy – the difference between a lengthy and rich retirement, and a very truncated one indeed – is not because the people in Hampstead are careful to eat a handful of Brazil nuts every day, to make sure they’re not deficient in selenium, as per nutritionists’ advice.

And that’s the most sinister feature of the whole nutritionist project, graphically exemplified by [Gillian] McKeith: it’s a manifesto of rightwing individualism – you are what you eat, and people die young because they deserve it. They choose death, through ignorance and laziness, but you choose life, fresh fish, olive oil, and that’s why you’re healthy. You’re going to see 78. You deserve it. Not like them.

How can I be sure that this phenomenal difference in life expectancy between rich and poor isn’t due to the difference in diet? Because I’ve read the dietary intervention studies: when you intervene and make a huge effort to change people’s diets, and get them eating more fruit and veg, you find the benefits, where they are positive at all, are actually very modest. Nothing like 10 years.

It's worth pointing out that life expectancy is a good tool for measuring public health, but also something of a blunt one. The poor don't just die younger, they fall into ongoing disability much younger.

Fair Society, Healthy Lives was a government report into this issue, published in February.

people in England living in the poorest neighbourhoods will, on average, die seven years earlier than others living in the richest parts of Britain, the study finds.

Not only is life expectancy linked to social standing, but so is the time spent in good health: the average difference in "disability-free life expectancy" is now 17 years between those at the top and those at the bottom of the economic ladder, the report says.

Goldacre continues, attacking the unqualified media nutritionists like Gillian McKeith for focusing on freakshows rather than confronting the underlying causes of poor diet and poor health.

What prime-time TV series looks at food deserts created by giant supermarket chains, the very companies with which stellar media nutritionists so often have lucrative commercial contracts?

What show deals with social inequality driving health inequality? Where’s the human interest in prohibiting the promotion of bad foods; facilitating access to nutrient-rich foods with taxation; or maintaining a clear labelling system?

Where is the spectacle in “enabling environments” that naturally promote exercise, or urban planning that prioritises cyclists, pedestrians and public transport over the car? Or reducing the ever-increasing inequality between senior executive and shop-floor pay?

However, whilst he says it's a matter of asking 'where's the TV audience ratings?', we can also see Health Secretary Andrew Lansley sweeping free health care and food labelling aside as he and the other Tory ministers ask 'where's the shareholder dividends?'

cutting responsibility, not costs

We can learn a lot about the range and meaning of the colossal government spending cuts from the simple fact (as noted by Johann Hari) that the 'cuts tsar' is a total cloaca called John Browne, the man who was head of BP until he was forced to resign after lying in court.

These cuts are supposed to save money. Yet they're abolishing the Sustainable Development Commission, whose advice to government on issues like reducing carbon emissions saves several times what it costs.

Meanwhile, having reduced government income by giving oil companies tax breaks in the Budget, they're unleashing deep-water drilling off Shetland. What could possibly go wrong with that? I'm sure John Browne can tell you.

Cutting the SDC doesn't save money. It costs money, promotes oil and undermines the alternatives.

Two years ago Health Secretary Andrew Lansley was already saying that there was 'no excuse' for individuals being obese, yet traffic light labelling of food that made it easy to make informed choices should be abolished as it was 'nannying' people.

Now he's in power he's wielding the axe with wild abandon. Last week he waved his hand and abolished the Food Standards Agency (a body set up after the BSE crisis showed that government and the food industry were too close).

He's been forced to backtrack a bit on that one, but he continues to cut swathes of regulation that would improve public health. Martin Hickman lists a bunch of them, including this:

the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence published a plan to prevent 40,000 deaths from heart disease, calling for a ban on trans fats, no TV junk-food advertising before 9pm and restrictions on takeaways close to schools.

The British Heart Foundation, the Faculty of Public Health and the Royal College of Physicians supported those proposals. Yet the Department of Health rejected them outright on the day of publication, saying that people should just eat better and exercise more.

Britain has the highest rates of obesity in Europe. Apart from the quality of life issues, it costs the NHS a huge amount of money. So many of Lansley's cuts, as with abolishing the Sustainable Development Commission, will increase the cost to the public. So, again like the SDC, it's not cutting costs so much as cutting corporate regulation.

As Billy Bragg said, anyone who's ever found themselves in the fridge at midnight can tell you that self-regulation doesn't work. It's the failure of banking self-regulation that made the financial crisis that all the cuts are supposedly a response to.

George Monbiot's recent article talks about Lansley, and about the new self-regulation of farming overseen by a task force of farmers and corporate execs, whilst there is

no-one on the task force representing rural workers, and no-one outside the industry seeking to defend the landscape or the wider environment, water quality or animal welfare.

He goes on

Private Eye reveals this week that the government may scrap property developers’ obligations to provide social housing. This won’t save money or streamline the state, but it will allow developers to create enclaves for the rich and ghettos for the poor, ensuring that the UK becomes an even more divided society.

The plans to slash Housing Benefit thresholds from October 2011 mean that poor people will have to move to wherever's cheapest. As Polly Toynbee says,

What will be the net effect? A mass exodus of the poor, those in work as well as the unemployed, the disabled along with pensioners who form 20% of those on housing benefit – all abruptly ejected from their homes, forced to move to the lowest rent, poorest zones all over the country. This is social cleansing on an epic scale.

If the government expects private landlords to cut rents in response, a recent conference of landlords said demand is so high in the south-east – and anywhere with jobs – that they will re-let vacated properties easily.

Not only will ghettos of the poor grow, segregating society and local schools yet more sharply – but the poor will live in places that are cheap because there are no jobs, cementing in joblessness. The homeless will spill on to every city's streets

The financial cost - of emergency housing, poor health, increased crime - will be vast. The social cost, the impact on lives and wellbeing, will be incalculably huge.

The cuts have no sense of their real results and costs. This is not a measured brace of cutting waste, it is not even an array of money-saving schemes. It is a transfer of wealth and security away from the poor and the removal of responsibility from the corporate drive for ever expanding profit.

It is surely all too familiar to John Browne whose cutting of corners and ideological commitment to unregulated corporate activity led to the Gulf disaster.

Polly Toynbee again:

The whole fiendishly complex NHS has been wired for demolition without Lansley having answers to basic questions about where the debris falls. It's an experiment, a game, a folly on a grand scale.

He and his fellow ministers had years in opposition with a fortune for specialist advice – yet they arrive in office with last-minute sketchy plans to reorganise everything at a time of deeper cuts than ever tried in any western nation. Expect multiple train crashes.

more cruelty from the millionaires

The government says:

- There are 2.47 million people unemployed.

- The recent budget will cause the loss of a further 1.3 million jobs.

- There are 2.6 million people on Incapacity Benefit. The government's new stringent tests are recategorising 68% of them as fit to work. This will add 1.77 million to the unemployed.

Add these three groups together and we're looking at 5.54 million people unemployed.

There are less than half a million job vacancies.

That's more than eleven people per job available.

Also included in the budget is a 10% cut in Housing Benefit for people who have been on Job Seekers Allowance for a year.

This will lead to evictions, which means moving people into temporary accommodation. The other reforms to benefits may well save money, but this one is likely to be far more expensive for the state than the 10% of housing benefit saved. It is simply punitive.

That's just the money side, before we consider the effects on people's families and mental health as they're made homeless because they can't find jobs that don't exist.

punish the poor

Cutmeister General David Laws got shoved out of office after being caught fraudulently claiming £40,000 in expenses, but there is far more hypocrisy and cruelty involved in the plans of those who plan public finances.

The coalition intends to extend and expand Labour's punitive approach to benefit claimant. It is largely an exercise in blaming the victim, meanwhile tax evaders - who cost the exchequer far, far more - are left relatively unhindered.

I've written a new Feature article about it for U-Know called Punish The Poor.