Mike over at Vox Political has put up a piece reporting that Zac Goldsmith has appeared in the pages of the Richmond and Twickenham Times, defending his voting for the £30 cut in ESA. He was the patron of a local charity for the disabled, Richmond AID, which stands for Richmond Advice and Information on Disability. After he voted for the cuts, however, he resigned after he was criticised by the charity’s chief executive, Lucy Byrne, for the severe and detrimental effect the cuts would have on disabled people’s lives. Now he’s got into the pages of his local paper to try and justify himself.
He states that the government believes that people are best helped by being ‘enabled’ to get back into work. He states that it isn’t just a cut, and that there is a £100 million fund for disabled people. And then goes on to the make the populist argument that people are coming to him, concerned that people, who aren’t fit for work, are being seen as fit for work. It is his job as an MP to use his judgement to make sure this doesn’t happen.
It’s the usual rubbish, uttered by someone, who really hasn’t a clue how the other half live. His father was the millionaire James Goldsmith, or as Private Eye used to call him, Sir Jammy Fishpaste the Referendumfuhrer (he was head of the Referendum Party, UKIP’s rivals at the time for the Eurosceptic vote). He has no more idea of the lives of the poor than Matthew Freud did when he declared that poor people should be more flexible, as they have less to lose than the rich during economic depression.
Now let’s critique what he actually says. First of all, he states that he’s somehow against getting the genuinely ill thrown off benefits. But that is exactly what the benefit cut threatens to do. He’s right that there is subjective judgement involved, but his subjective judgement seems very firmly in the New Labour and Tory camp that essentially most of it is just malingering.
As for ‘enabling’ people to get back into work, this is pretty much a shorthand for ‘less eligibility’ – the idea that you make state support difficult and degrading to force people to get jobs. Which is all right, coming from an extremely rich ex-public schoolboy, who will probably never have to worry about joining the dole queue in the morning, thanks to the old school tie.
The statement about ‘enabling’ people back into work can be taken in a variety of ways. You could enable people back into work by offering a range of state benefits to help people with special needs get appropriate jobs or training. For example, paying for taxis or other transport if there are mobility issues. Or actually setting up workshops for the disabled where they can have genuine productive careers, like, oh, I don’t know, perhaps Remploy before they closed it down. Or even setting up schemes within firms to encourage them to take on disabled staff, perhaps helping with the costs through grants or tax cuts. I used to work in an office a long time ago with someone who had severe back problems. The firm had arranged for her to have an orthopaedic chair. Now that would also enable those with medical problems to get back into work. But all this has been cut, to save the government money and give lots of money back to people of Zac’s class in tax cuts.
As for the £100 million fund, I have no idea what he’s talking about here. PIP perhaps? Probably, not even that. It’s the usual Tory flannel of, yes, we’re cutting benefits, but look, we’re setting up this brave, new benefit system, which will target benefits to where it’s really need. The implication being that nobody will lose out, when the whole point of the system’s reform is to make sure that many more will do just that.
In short, it’s the usual specious Tory double-talk to hide the disgraceful actions of a spoilt, over-privileged public school brat, who clearly believes in punishing the disabled simply for being the disabled, and not rich like him or his dad.
Tags: 'less eligibility', 'Richmond and Twickenham Times', Benefit Cuts, Conservatives, ESA, Grants, James Goldsmith, Lucy Byrne, Matthew Freud, New Labour, PIP, Private Eye, Public Schools, Referendum Party, Remploy, Richmond AID, Tax Cuts, UKIP, Vox Political, Zac Goldsmith
Beastrabban\'s Weblog 
March 31, 2016 at 2:20 pm |
Exactly how poisonous the goldsmith/aspinall/sterling clermont club crowd were.
In 1980’s I visited one of Aspers’ zoos where I heard an old etonian accent say at least AIDS in Africa would mean more room would be available for the animals.
March 31, 2016 at 2:55 pm |
Shocking, but I’m not surprised, Ctesias. Private Eye back in the 1990s reviewed the Brian Masters’ biography of Aspinall, ‘The Passion of John Aspinall’, or some such title. Without exaggeration, Aspinall was a genuine Fascist. He stated that we needed a counter-revolution that was ‘Francoist in determination and spirit’, and believed that Britain’s population should be cut from its current level to eight million. And if that’s how he regarded the people of his own country, it really doesn’t surprise me that moneyed savages in his circle would have such vicious attitudes towards the mass death of Africans.