I saw a video about this posted on YouTube by GB News, which could be described as the Heil’s televisual equivalent. Oswald Mosley’s favourite paper published a piece today railing about Britain’s ‘something for nothing’ culture because they’d done some kind of survey which found that some households received more from the state on benefits than they did from work. I didn’t watch it, as I knew exactly what it would be like. The Heil’s published stuff like this before. Anyone remember one they ran a few decade ago, in which they ranted about the people of Britain all being on benefits because they’d found a street where most of the people were receiving some kind of welfare support. Coincidentally that street seemed to be occupied mostly by members of ethnic minorities, though I’m sure that this wasn’t part of the reason it was chosen by the paper.
The article was so stereotypical of the wretched rag that you could guess what would follow: rubbish about how welfare payments were too generous and were acting as a disincentive to finding work and should therefore be cut. More drivel along the lines of the Tories’ ‘make work pay’ campaign, which simply cut benefits and increased sanctions and pressure on benefit claimants even further instead of really making work pay by abandoning the wage freeze policy and actually encouraging firms to pay workers proper wages. But that would violate one of the central tenets of Thatcherite Conservatism: the poor should be penalised for being poor, in order to make them compete against each other in a desperate struggle to improve themselves, while the rich benefit from their cheap labour. As for GB News, they’re a right-wing broadcaster and so I’m sure they have the same mentality. The article was a classic example of how the Tories, the Heil and GB News, whatever they may say to the contrary, want working people poor, desperate and turning on each other rather than the people who are really causing their misery.
Get the Tories out, and ignore the right-wing propaganda in the Mail and on TV.
Tags: Benefit Cuts, Benefit Sanctions, Conservatives, Daily Mail, Ethnic Minorities, GB News, Low Wages, Margaret Thatcher, Oswald Mosley, the Poor, the Rich
Beastrabban\'s Weblog 
January 24, 2023 at 9:51 am |
This attitude is perennial and isn’t limited to the Mail. Writing of mass unemployment in the thirties, in Wigan Pier, Orwell quotes a householder as saying: “These people don’t want to work. I offered a man a pound to dig my garden and he wasn’t interested.” Orwell then points out that if the man had taken up the offer, it wd seriously have imperilled his dole, had the then equivalent of the DWP found out.
January 24, 2023 at 11:46 am |
Thanks, Brian. I haven’t read the Road to Wigan Pier. I think Mike has though, and there’s clearly a lot in it which continues to resound across time to today.
January 24, 2023 at 9:54 am |
[…] The Heil Once Again Bashing Benefit Claimants with Story about ‘Something for Nothing’ Culture […]
January 24, 2023 at 4:40 pm |
It’s the least generous Social Security system in Western Europe. State Benefits have been cut every year for a decade, which is why the Government are having to top up inadequate Benefits with one off extra payments now that the economy is in crisis due to a number of issues reasons and factors such as the Ukraine war and Brexit right on top of the Covid pandemic.
January 25, 2023 at 11:29 am |
It wouldn’t be a right wing cesspit without blaming and punching down on the poor.
Beast, you’re absolutely right about the Tories utter failure in their ‘Make Work Pay’ campaign and them following Thatcherite economics. To be fair, New Labour was absolutely Thatcherite as well and I don’t think today’s Labour party is much better. Both parties get my scorn until proven otherwise.
January 25, 2023 at 12:07 pm |
New Labour introduced us to Benefit Sanctions, though they may have been buried somewhere in the statutes it was the first time that I and most others had ever heard of such a thing (and I used to watch Charlie Drake in ‘The Worker’!). Sanctions came attached to the terms and conditions of the New Deal scheme that Blair’s government introduced, a mandatory back – to-work scheme that was nothing more than a daytime prison for the unemployed, who were mandated to do 3 months sentences, ever since which the compulsory schemes (Conditionality) have continued and the Sanctions grown harsher. Starmer should abolish Sanctions, scrap useless mandatory back-to-work schemes (at least for the over 55s or over 60s) and increase unemployment benefits to £100 per week paid weekly not monthly. Scrap Universal Credit too. But will he? I doubt it very much.