Cartoon: The Dead Thatchers – Kill the Poor

And now for another of my cartoons, in which I try to express my outrage, anger and disgust at the Conservative party and their murderous, destructive policies. This one takes the form yet again of a CD cover or promotional poster for the totally imaginary band, the Dead Thatchers. I was inspired to invent them by the American punk band, the Dead Kennedys. Their angry songs bitterly attacked the economic and social conditions of Reagan’s America. One of their songs, which I’ve based this cartoon on, was ‘Kill the Poor’.

As you can see, the cartoon shows a firing squad shooting dead a representative selection of poor folks, that the Tories despise and have been killing for years, while all the while claiming to help them. Looking on are David Cameron, Theresa May and Boris Johnson, their eyes blood red. The people shot represent the disabled, the unemployed, single mothers, low paid workers and asylum seekers.

And as left-wing bloggers and activists like Mike, Another Angry Voice, Zelo Street, The Poor Side of Life, Diary of a Food Bank Helper and so many, many others have shown for the past decade and more, Tory and Thatcherite policies are killing the poor. The harsh regime of fitness to work tests and benefit sanctions imposed by the DWP, as well as cuts in the amount paid and a waiting time of five weeks from making the claim to first payment for Universal Credit, have resulted in an estimated 120,000 people dying from austerity. Over a quarter of a million people a few years ago were forced to use food banks to keep body and soul together. Millions of children and adults were living in poverty. And thanks to Boris’ incompetent, bungled and penny-pinching handling of the Coronavirus crisis, that’s all got worse. Much worse. Firms have sacked their workers, rather than apply for the government help to pay 80 per cent of their wages. The government has promised to pay 80 per cent of the earnings of the self-employed and small businesses, but this is calculated on whether they pay business rates. Not all businesses do. Some, which share a building, leave it to their landlord. Those firms won’t get anything. And the small businessmen who will qualify won’t get it until June. For many of them, this will be too late.

And don’t be misled. The Tories do hate the poor. They despise and revile anyone on benefits as a scrounger. They see them as biologically inferior, people who should ideally be discouraged from claiming benefits or even allowed to die, rather than become a burden to the rich. Boris Johnson, Dominic Cummings and their brief hireling, Andrew Sabisky, all have this eugenicist view. As does the wretched, loathsome Toby Young, who attended a eugenics conference alongside real anti-Semites, racists and Nazis. And then there are all the Tory and other right-wing hacks, like Brendan O’Neil of Spiked, Trevor Kavanagh of the Scum and others, who complain bitterly about the lockdown, because, like BoJob and Cummings, they believe old people, the disabled and the weak should be left to die rather than the economy be damaged. Thanks to this attitude and the decades-long campaign of vilification in the press, the British public thinks that 27 per cent of all benefit claims are fraudulent, whereas the true figure is something like 0.2 per cent. This hatred also extends to single mothers, of course. Tory minister Peter Lilley had them on his little list of people he despised, who he sang about as a pranced about the stage in a parody of the song from Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado at a Tory party conference back in the ’90s. And nearly two decades before then, in the mid-70s, Thatcher’s mentor Sir Keith Joseph declared they were a threat to our stock, provoking mass outrage at such a Nazi comment.

And of course the victims include asylum seekers because of the very long tradition of Tory racism, a racism that has led to their brutalisation by profiteering and incompetent government outsourcing companies like Serco in the detention centres. Not that the racism is just confined to asylum centres. A large section of the Tories is deeply racist, and particularly towards Muslims. They are also far more genuinely anti-Semitic than Labour. A few days ago David Rosenberg of the Jewish Socialist Group put up a piece detailing some instances of their anti-Semitism. This included an incident remembered by the former speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow. He was told by an unnamed Tory MP that if he had his way, ‘people like you’ would not be allowed in the chamber. Bercow asked him what he meant – lower class people, or Jews. The man replied ‘Both’.  But never mind, Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis heartily loves the Tories and warmly welcomed Tweezer entry to 10 Downing Street. Mirvis seems to consider anti-Semitism as synonymous with anti-Zionism or hostility to Israel, so he and the rest of the Jewish establishment have precious little interest in combating real anti-Semitism when it comes from genuine Nazis or the right. Comfy little Tory supporters, they’re only interested in manufacturing spurious claims and smears against the left.

As for the low paid, they hate them because not only do they claim benefits, but, like the unemployed, the believe it’s their fault they’re poor. In their idea of capitalism, a version that has never existed apart from their imaginations, the free market rewards merit. If a worker is low-paid, then it’s their fault. They should either work harder, or actively find a better paid job. Even if, thanks to the low-wage policies they’ve imposed since Thatcher, there are none about. In that case, it’s just tough. The free market is somehow sacrosanct and inviolable.

Here’s the cartoon. I hope you like it, and, as always, please don’t have nightmares.

 

Cartoon: Borice KKKooper – Dead Babies

Hi, and welcome to another of my cartoons expressing my outrage and disgust at the Tory party and the clown, who currently leads it and, unfortunately, our great nation. I’ve used as the basis for these drawings SF/Horror films and pop songs. This one’s based on another pop star, the Rock legend Alice Cooper. And it is to express my utter disgust at the scandalously high infant mortality rate in Britain.

Cooper became notorious in the ’70s for his weird and disturbing stage act, in which he’d behead dolls and even hang himself. He said in an interview on British television some time ago that some people tried to psychoanalyse his attack, and read a bit too much into it. It was claimed that his destruction of the dolls were a metaphorical attack on babies. Cooper denied that it was any such thing. He just hated dolls. It was, he said, possibly something to do with his sister.

But one of his songs at the time was ‘Dead Babies’, about a mother, who neglects her child so that it dies. It has the line ‘Dead babies don’t need looking after’, and includes the sound of a baby crying. It’s a really disturbing track and I’m really not surprised that Cooper drew criticism. He’s a major figure in Rock, of course, but it has also been claimed that he has also been one of the influences on Goth music through his horrific stage act and equally horrific and bleak songs.

And so it seems to me entirely appropriate to attack BoJob and his wretched party for their part in giving Britain one of the highest infant mortality rates in Europe by showing him as an Alice Cooper figure, with a hanged doll and the title of Cooper’s song. As always, I want to point out that I’m not sneering at Cooper, his music or his fans. Certainly not! But I am sneering and mocking BoJob and the Tories. And the idea of Boris as any kind of pop fan, whether Rock or Punk, as I portrayed him in my last cartoon, is pretty ridiculous. Boris definitely comes across as a classical music fan. Nothing wrong with that, but I suspect that when it came to pop music he would be very much like the judge, who had to ask who the Beatles were.

And unfortunately I can very much see our infant mortality rate getting worse under Johnson. Despite the poverty and hardship inflicted on the economy and Britain’s working people by the Coronavirus and the subsequent lockdown, he’s still pushing ahead with his programme of A and E closures. There has been a mass sacking of workers on zero hours contracts, despite claims that this wouldn’t happen. The government has promised to pay workers 80 per cent of their wages if they are unable to work because of the lockdown. But that’s only if their employer agrees. And some of them, like Tim Martin, the head of Wetherspoons, don’t seem to have done. Martin’s apparently told his staff that they can go off and seek work at McDonald’s, if they like. For those made unemployed, there’s still a five-week wait for the money after they claim Universal Credit. Boris has also promised to pay the self-employed 80 per cent of their earnings. But they’ll have to wait until June to get it. For many, that’s going to be too long. As a result, Mike’s reported that people are getting into debt for food just one week into the lockdown.

Tory cuts to the NHS are destroying people’s health, and so is the mass poverty caused by austerity and now the Coronavirus crisis. This will make child poverty and poor health worse, and probably push the infant mortality rate up further, despite the best efforts of our overworked and under-resourced doctors, nurses and other medical professionals.

I am also aware that BoJob’s partner is pregnant. I wish her and her baby all the best for a safe, healthy pregnancy and delivery, and that both baby and mother enjoy good health. But I want every mother and their children to have this. And that is one of the reasons why I’ve drawn this cartoon – because they aren’t, thanks to Boris and his vile crew.

Here’s the cartoon. I hope you enjoy it, and don’t have nightmares!

 

Iain Duncan Smith Denounces Plan to Introduce Universal Basic Income

Universal Basic Income, the scheme by which governments give a specified guaranteed income to all their citizens regardless of personal wealth or employment, has been widely discussed in recent years. I think some countries may already have such schemes in place, and there might be a programme about it this week on Radio 4. It was also one of the ideas mooted to help people out of their financial difficulties caused by the Coronavirus lockdown. Ten days ago, on Friday, 20th of March 2020, Mike put up a piece reporting that Boris Johnson was then considering the idea. And not only that, the idea had the support of some British industrialists, like Liam Kelly, the chair of the Baltic Triangle group of companies. Kelly said that the scheme wasn’t quite as radical as dropping money from a helicopter, but was a plausible solution to the problem of the present crisis. He said “It will help stave off the unprecedented economic challenges we face and protect us from another. This is a sensible fiscal stimulus and it’s time it went directly to the people, not just to the banks.” This might be a reference to one of the criticisms of the government’s financial bailout of the 2008 banking crash. The money went to the banks, who have carried on as before. Some critics have said that what Brown should have done instead is given the money to the public, so that their spending would solve the crisis the bankers had created. Who would have to face the consequences of the massive financial bubble they had created, rather than expect everyone else to bear the costs imposed through austerity while they continued to enrich themselves.

One voice, however, spoke against this scheme: Iain Duncan Smith. The pandemic has had a profound personal effect on some people. It’s brought out the best in them, as friends and relatives rally round to look after those, who are too vulnerable to do things for themselves like go shopping. IDS, however, has remained untouched by this. He still remains a shabby, deplorable excuse for a human being. In an article in the Torygraph stuck behind a paywall – because the Tories don’t let the proles getting anything for free – IDS issued his criticisms of the scheme. He blandly stated that the scheme would make no difference to the financial problems of low-income households and would not alleviate poverty. For which he provided no evidence whatsoever. He also said that it would disincentive work, and cost an astronomic amount of money. This is despite the scheme being budgeted at £260 billion, which is £70 billion less than the £330 billion Rishi Sunak has already imposed.

Mike says of … Smith’s appalling attitudes that they come from a man, who seems to believe that the solution to poverty is killing the poor themselves. Why else, Mike asks, would he have imposed policies that have pushed the vulnerable so deeply into poverty that many have died.

Mike also makes the point that he’s also trying to protect his own political vanity projects, like the Bedroom Tax, Universal Credit, PIP and ESA assessments, which would all become redundant with the introduction of UBI. Mike concludes

And he wants to ensure that we do not get to see the beneficial effects of UBI, even if it is only brought in for a brief, experimental period.

It seems clear that, while the Tories are claiming to be doing what they can in the face of the crisis, the evil that motivates them remains as strong as it ever was.

See: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2020/03/20/coronavirus-trust-iain-duncan-smith-to-try-to-wreck-our-chances-of-survival/

This is absolutely correct, though it can be added that the Gentleman Ranker isn’t afraid of seeing his own political legacy discarded, but the whole Tory attitude to poverty and the question of wealth redistribution. The Republicans in America and the Tories over here hate redistributive welfare policies. The rich, they believe, should be left to enjoy their wealth, ’cause they created it and its all theirs, and the poor should have to work for their money. If they can’t work, or are poor, it’s because of some fault of their own – they’re idle, or simply don’t have the qualities to prosper in the meritocratic society created by unfettered market capitalism. And since Maggie Thatcher, Tory and Blairite welfare policy is based on the assumption that a large percentage of people claiming disability or unemployment benefit are workshy scroungers. Hence the fitness to work tests, in which it has been claimed that the assessors are instructed to find a certain percentage fit, because Tory ideology demands that they do. Even if in reality they are severely disabled, terminally ill, or in some cases actually dead. This also applies to Jobseeker’s Allowance and Universal Credit, and the system of sanctions attached to them. It’s all the principle of less eligibility, by which the process of claiming benefit is meant to be as harsh, difficult and degrading as possible in order to deter people from doing it. It is designed to make them desperate for any job, no matter how low paid or degrading. Or if they cannot work, then they are expected to find some other way to support themselves or die. The death toll from benefit sanctions runs into hundreds, and the total death toll from Tory austerity is 120,000, or thereabouts. And many of these deaths are directly attributable to IDS’ wretched, murderous policies.

If Universal Basic Income were to be introduced and shown to be a success, it would effectively discredit Tory welfare policy. The idea that state welfare stops people from looking for work has been a Tory nostrum since before Thatcher. But with Thatcher came the belief that conditions for the poor should be made harder in order to make them try to do well for themselves. I can remember one Tory, or Tory supporter, actually saying that on the Beeb during Thatcher’s tenure of No. 10. But these ideas would be seriously damaged if UBI were successfully implemented. It would also help undermine the class system the Tories are so keen to preserve by closing the gap between rich and poor through state action, rather than market forces. Which, indeed, have never done anything of the sort and have only created glaring inequalities in wealth.

Iain Duncan Smith couldn’t bear to see this all discredited. And so to stop this, he blocked UBI, even though it offered a plausible solution to some of the financial difficulties people are suffering.

Which shows you exactly how despicable he is, and how devoted to the maintenance of a welfare system that has done nothing but push people into poverty, starvation and death.

 

 

Imnmigration Rights Organisations Write Letter of Protest Against Patel’s Deportations

This comes from last Friday’s I for 21st February 2020, and reports that two organisations dealing with immigrants and detainees have written a letter of protest against the Tories latest deportation of ex-convicts. They complain that the deportees may not have had access to proper legal advice. The article, by Chloe Chaplain, runs

The Home Office has been warned a planeload of people due to be deported from the UK contains “asylum seekers and vulnerable victims of trafficking” who might not have had access to proper legal support.

In a joint letter, Detention Action and the Immigration Law Practitioners’ Association have written to the Home Secretary, Priti Patel, claiming that those on board a flight scheduled to leave the UK yesterday might not have been given “adequate access to justice”. 

The Home Office said that all cases had been properly considered and that all detainees were “given simple opportunities to seek any legal advice they require” while in the centres.

But Ms Lenegan said her concerns stemmed from the quality of advice available to these people.

“What I imagine the Home Office is referring to is the detained duty advice scheme – and that is what we are concerned about,” she said. “All the detention centres have this scheme where lawyers will sit in the removal centre for a day, and there will be 10 half-hour slots to speak to people.”

I think I’ve come across this story before, or something like it. These questions were being raised when the deportations first occurred. Now it seems that the organisations involved have raised an official complaint.

It also looks like they’re trying to refute the Tories’ claim that the legal advice they’ve received is adequate. To my, admittedly inexpert eyes, a half-hour slot is nowhere near adequate for someone in an immigration detention centre to get propler legal advice. However, it does fit the Tories’ and Blairite’s strategy of presenting a bare minimum of support and then claiming that it was somehow full or adequate. From personal experience, I know that people writing letters of complaint to the authorities are warned how they phrase these letters, so that the Tories do not subsequently misrepresent them as a kind of public discussion when no such thing has occurred.

As for Patel herself, Mike yesterday raised the question whether she was ‘self-hating’. Is she a member of an ethnic minority who hates their own race? Patel had made a statement denying that Boris Johnson was racist after the rapper Dave changed his lyrics to attack BoJob at the Brit awards. But Johnson certainly looks like one, with his racist caricatures of Blacks, Muslims and Jews in his execrable novel, 72 Virgins. Not to mention his remarks about ‘grinning picanninies’ and not shaking the hands of the Black people attending the Tory party conference.

Patel claims that her parents arrived in this family in 1972 as part of the Ugandan Asian community expelled by Idi Amin. They were given sanctuary by Ted Heath when every other country, including India, refused them. But her parents actually arrived before that, in the 1960s, meaning that they may not have been allowed into this country as asylum seekers as she claims. Under her rules then, she’d have had her own mother deported.

See: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2020/02/22/patels-policies-would-deport-her-own-mother-why-believe-her-when-she-says-johnson-isnt-racist/

Mike’s article is also worth reading as he demolishes the Tories’ simple equation of low-paid with low-skilled. The Tories want to refuse entry to migrants unless they’re going to a job that pays £25,600 plus. But Mike states that when he was working as a journalist and editor, he was never paid anywhere near that amount.

And I’m absolutely sure Mike’s experience is common. There is now a wave of graduates seeking low-paid jobs for which they are ridiculously overqualified, because the graduate-level opportunities simply aren’t there. And I heard from academic friends over a decade ago that even academics may be on extraordinarily low wages due to the way the profession’s been restructured so that the upper management are vastly overpaid. The people, who do the actual teaching work, on the other hand, may be on part-time contracts and other devices, which would keep their salaries under that £25,600 amount.

This is more toxic, racist exploitative nonsense from a toxic, racist and exploitative government seeking to capitalise and inflame hatred against immigrants.

 

Keir Starmer’s 10 Pledges for the Labour Party

I’ve just received a pamphlet from Keir Starmer’s campaign team, promoting him as the future of leader of the Labour Party. It begins with this quote

“I’ve spent my life fighting injustice. I’m standing to be leader of our Labour Party because I’m determined to unite our movement, take on the Tories and build a better future. If all parts of our movement come together, we can achieve anything.”

There’s a brief biography that runs

A Life Devoted to Fighting Injustice

Keir is the son of an NHS nurse and a toolmaker. As a former human rights lawyer, Keir is dedicated to Labour’s core principles of fairness and justice.

He has devoted his whole life to fighting injustice and defending the powerless against the powerful, as his ten-year unpaid battle over the McLibel case goes to show. he has fought against the death penalty abroad, defended mining communities against pit closures, and taken up hundreds of employment rights and trade union cases. After being the Director of Public Prosecutions, he was elected MP for Holborn & St Pancras in 2015, later becoming Shadow Brexit Secretary. Defeating Boris Johnson is a huge task but Keir knows that if we bring our movement together and stay true to our values, we can win, and change Britain for the better.

As leader of the Labour Party, Keir will contine to fight for justice in all its forms: social justice, climate justice, economic justice.

There’s then three columns of endorsement from people such as Dawn French, Rokhsana Fiaz, the elected mayor of Lewisham, Laura Parker, the former National Coordinator of Momentum, Emma Hardy, the MP for Hull West and Hessle, Aneira Thomas, the first baby born on the NHS, Sarah Sackman, a public and environmental lawyer, Alf Dubs, the refugee campaigner, Paul Sweeney, the former MP for Glasgow North East, Ricky Tomlinson, David Lammy, the MP for Tottenham, Doreen Lawrence, Konnie Huq, the TV presenter and writer, Mick Antoniw, the member of the Welsh Assembly for Pontypridd, Ross Millard of the Sunderland band, the Futureheads, Lucio Buffone, a member of ASLEF and LGBT+ Labour national committee member, and the Unison General Secretary, Dave Prentis.

The back page contains his ‘My Pledges To You’. He says

My  promise is that I will maintain our radical values and work tirelessly to get Labour in to power – so that we can advance the interests of the people our party was created to serve. Based on the moral case for socialism, here is where I stand.

His pledges are as follows

1. Economic Justice.

Increase income tax for the top 5% of earners, reverse the Tories’ cuts in corporation tax and clamp down on tax avoidance, particularly of large corporations. No stepping back from our core principles.

2. Social Justice.

Abolish Universal Credit and end the Tories’ cruel sanctions regime. Set a national goal for wellbeing to make health as important as GDP; invest in services that help shift to a preventive approach. Stand up for universal services and defend our NHS. Support the abolition of tuition fees and invest in lifelong learning.

3. Climate Justice

Put the Green New Deal at the heart of everything we do. There is no issue more important to our future than the climate emergency. A Clean Air Act to tackle pollution locally. Demand international action on climate rights.

4. Promote Peace and Human Rights.

No more illegal wars. Introduce a Prevention of Military Intervention Act and put human rights at the heart of foreign policy. Review all UK arms sales and make us a force for international  peace and justice.

5. Common Ownership.

Public services should be in public hands, not making profits for shareholders. Support common ownership of rail, mail, energy and water; end outsourcing in our NHS, local government and justice system.

6. Defend Migrant’s Rights.

Full voting rights for EU nationals. Defend free movement as we leave the EU. An immigration system based on compassion and dignity. End indefinite detention and call for the closure of centres such as Yarl’s Wood.

7. Strengthen Workers’ Rights and Trade Unions.

Work shoulder to should with trade unions to stand up for working people, tackle insecure work and low pay. Repeal the Trade Union Act. Oppose Tory attacks on the right to take industrial action and the weakening of workplace rights.

8. Radical Devolution of Power, Wealth and Opportunity.

Push power, wealth and opportunity away from Whitehall. A federal system to devolve powers – including through regional investment banks and control over regional industrial strategy. Abolish the House of Lords – replace it with an elected chamber of regions and nations.

9. Equality.

Pull down obstacles that limit opportunities and talent. we are the party of the Equal Pay Act, Sure Start, BAME representation and the abolition of Section 28 – we must build on that for a new decade.

10. Effective Opposition to the Tories.

Forensic, effective opposition to the Tories in Parliament – linked up to our mass membership and a professional election operation. Never lose sight of the votes ‘leant’ to the Tories in 2019. Unite our party, promote pluralism and improve our culture. Robust action to eradicate the scourge of antisemitism. Maintain our collective link with the unions.

This is all good, radical stuff, but there are problems. Firstly, his commitment to taking ‘robust action to eradicate the scourge of antisemitism’ and his decision, along with the rest of the Labour leadership contenders, to sign the Board of Deputies’ highly manipulative pledges, means that more people are going to be thrown out of the party without any opportunity to defend themselves, based only the allegations of anonymous accusers. We’ve seen innocents like Jackie Walker, Ken Livingstone, Marc Wadsworth, Mike Sivier, Tony Greenstein, Martin Odoni and so many others suspended and thrown out through the party’s kangaroo courts. One poor lady has died through the shock of being so expelled, even though she was a passionate anti-racist. This isn’t justice, it’s a pledge to renew the witch hunt.

As for promoting peace and human rights – how long will that last with the Board of Deputies demanding to supervise everything relating to Jews? Israel is a gross violator of human rights, but the Board has consistently defended it and its deplorable actions. Their demands that Labour adopt the IHRC definition of anti-Semitism was to stifle criticism of Israel by declaring them ‘anti-Semitic’. This pledge might be genuine, but the momentum anyone applies it to Israel the BoD will start howling ‘anti-Semitism!’ again and decent people will start getting expelled. Especially if they’re Jewish.

And his plan for giving Britain a federal constitution doesn’t seem to be a good one. From what I’ve read, it has been discussed before, and while it may solve some problems it creates others. It’s supposed to be no better than the current arrangement, which is why it hasn’t been implemented.

I also don’t back him on Europe. Oh, I’m a remainer at heart, but I think a large part of  the reason we lost the election was because, instead of accepting the results of referendum, Labour pledged itself to return to the EU. This was partly on Starmer’s insistence. He is right, however, that EU nationals in the UK should have voting rights.

But I have to say that I don’t trust Starmer. His campaign team were all supporters of Owen Smith, one of those who challenged Corbyn’s leadership. They include Luke Akehurst, one of the leading figures of the Israel lobby within the Labour Party. Tony Greenstein a few days ago put up a piece arguing that, whatever he claims to the contrary, as Director of Public Prosecutions he always sided with the authorities – the police, military and intelligence services – against everyone else.

My fear is that if he becomes leader of the Labour Party, he will quietly forget these pledges and continue the Blair project.

See: http://azvsas.blogspot.com/2020/02/keir-starmer-is-candidate-that-deep.html

http://azvsas.blogspot.com/2020/02/pauline-hammerton-expelled-for.html

Therese Coffey: Another Tory Minister Who Thinks Food Banks Are Brilliant

Yesterday the Canary reported that the Labour MP Zahra Sultana, who called food banks a ‘national disgrace’, wrote to Coffey about the obscene injustice of nurses having to use food banks while fat-cat bosses are rewarded with massive payouts. Sultana was understandably upset that there were now more food banks in the UK than branches of McDonald’s and that the British boss of the fast food firm had received a settlement of £30 million after they had fired him.

She got this bland reply from Coffey:

I visited a similar food bank in my own constituency that has been working together with food redistribution schemes. Marrying the two is a perfect way to try to address the challenges that people face at difficult times in their lives.

Coffey also called the people using food banks ‘customers’, thus giving the misleading the impression that they had some kind of choice over whether or not to be there.

Sultana wasn’t impressed, and neither were other commenters on twitter. She commented

I just asked the Secretary of State for Work & Pensions about the gross injustice of nurses relying on food banks while the rich get richer.

Her response? She called food banks a “perfect way” to meet the challenges of those in poverty.

The Tories are totally out of touch.

The article goes on to report that BristolLive had also said that they’d been told by one volunteer at a food bank that four or five nurses had visited a food bank in one week.

The Canary’s article also criticised Coffey for not mentioning that food banks run by volunteers are supported through donations. They’re there to help poor people struggling to feed themselves and their families because of ten years of Tory austerity, welfare cuts and Universal Credit. And Coffey certainly wasn’t going to tackle the problem of bloated salaries for fat-cat bosses and widening inequality.

The Canary further reported that the Trussell Trust had stated in April 2019 that food bank use had reached a record high point. Between 1st April 2018 and 31st March the charity had distributed 1.6 million food parcels. This was a rise of 19 per cent from the previous year. About half a million of them were given to children.

Sabine Goodwin, the head of the Independent Food Aid Network, commented that Coffey’s remarks showed how food bank use had been normalised in the UK, and that they were now the fourth emergency service.

The Canary concluded:

The DWP is not fit for purpose. And Coffey’s latest response highlights just how dangerous it truly is.

See: https://www.thecanary.co/trending/2020/01/28/dwp-minister-thinks-foodbanks-are-a-perfect-solution/

This is just the latest scandal in which a Tory minister has made a bland, evasive statement praising food banks and ignoring the underlying problem of the massive suffering the Tories themselves have caused. I think the last one was Jacob Rees-Mogg, who was similarly blasted for his complacency. In fact, food banks and the volunteers who run them are doing an excellent job. I know that two of the great commenters on this blog are involved with those in their communities. That isn’t the point. The point is, they shouldn’t be needed. There should be no benefit sanctions nor false or falsified fitness for work tests throwing people who are too ill or disabled to work off benefits. The unemployed and disabled should be given benefits at a level that allows them to live properly, paid the moment they request and need them. They should not have to wait a few days, let alone five weeks, before receiving a payment. Working people should also be paid a decent wage, so that they also can afford to feed, heat and clothe themselves and their families.

But this is precisely what Tories like Coffey do not want to happen. They are dismantling the welfare state because they wish to relieve high earners – the rich – of the tax burden of supporting the poor. They originally tried justifying this with specious arguments about ‘trickledown’. The money the rich saved would trickle down to the poor as their social superiors opened new businesses, employed more people and paid higher wages. But they don’t actually do any of that. It just stays in their banks accounts, accumulating interest while they boast about how many hundreds of K they’ve trousered. I also believe the Tories actually like food banks because they see them as the British counterpart to the American system of food stamps.

They also have absolutely no problem with rising inequality. In fact, I remember them openly being all for it. Right at the beginning of the Thatcher project in the 1980s, various Tories appeared on BBC documentaries about benefit cuts and wage restraint raving about how wonderful it was. They believed that conditions should be made worse for the poor, as this would encourage them to ‘do well’. Thatcher herself was a fan of the less eligibility system of Victorian poor relief. Like them, she believed conditions should be made as humiliating and oppressive as possible for those on welfare in order to make them get a job as quickly as possible. He successors have weaponised it further, and now see it as a means of culling the sick and poor. 130,000 people have been killed so far by austerity in a campaign described by Mike and other bloggers and welfare commenters and organisations as the genocide of the disabled.

Food banks are not a perfect solution for people people at a difficult point in their lives. They are a severely inadequate attempt to ameliorate some of the worse effects of Tory austerity and welfare cuts. It is great that people are there, trying to do something for the poor.

But it is a glaring disgrace that they should be needed in first place. Coffee is a smooth, smiling dissembler trying to put a good front over utterly disgraceful, murderous Tory policies. She and the wretched government she serves can’t fall soon enough.

Sanders Ahead of Biden in Race for Democratic Nomination

Great news from across the Pond! According to a brief report in today’s I, Bernie Sanders is ahead of Joe Biden for nomination as the Democratic candidate for the presidency in a poll in New Hampshire. The report reads

Surveys suggest US senator Bernie Sanders and former vice-president Joe Biden are locked in a tight race for the Democratic presidential nomination. Mr Sanders led a poll of New Hampshire voters with 25 per cent support. Mr Biden is on 16 per cent, according to a poll by CNN and the University of New Hampshire.

The American left-wing magazine, Counterpunch, had a piece about this last Friday by David Swanson. He stated that CNN had broadcast a very biased debate the week before intended to discredit Bernie’s campaign. The poll was intended to show CNN how successful they’d been. But they hadn’t. Support for Bernie was up 7 per cent, and down 2 per cent each for Biden and Warren. Swanson reports that Bernie won in the following categories, writing

Among men the winner is Bernie.
Among women the winner is Bernie.
Among whites the winner is Bernie.
Among non-whites the winner is Bernie.
Among registered voters the winner is Bernie.
Among those paid less than $50k the winner is Bernie.
Among those paid more than $50k the winner is Bernie.
Among non-college graduates the winner is Bernie.
Among college graduates the winner is Bernie.
Among non-white college graduates the winner is Bernie.
Among 18-49 year olds the winner is Bernie.
Among independents the winner is Bernie.
Among liberals the winner is Bernie.
Among those with their minds made up the winner is Bernie.
Among those without their minds made up the winner is Bernie.

Biden, by contrast, is only the winner among White college students, the over 45s, Democrats and moderates.

CNN asked people which candidate agreed the most on the issue that mattered to them, and who best understood the problems facing them. The answer to both was Bernie. But they reported that most people responded Biden when asked which candidate would best unite the Democrat party. This is highly questionable, as Biden is hugely offensive to large numbers of people. The broadcaster also reports that Biden is the candidate with the best chance of beating Trump. This is probably because the public has been told that Biden will, over and over.

Swanson concludes, however, that CNN’s bias is counterproductive. If people know that CNN wants them to vote against Bernie, then CNN has lost and Bernies wins. And Bernie should win, as he has the most support. But CNN has got to obscure that.

The good news is that what CNN tells people is becoming the opposite of effective. If CNN and its fellow corporate media outlets can convince people to vote against their own interests and to imagine that they came up with that idea themselves, Bernie Sanders is done. But if word leaks out that it’s CNN telling people to vote the way CNN wants, then CNN is done, and Bernie Sanders is headed to the White House.

The most electable candidate is the candidate with the most support. Only if this simple fact can be successfully hidden, can CNN continue its role as overseer of elections.

See: https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/01/24/cnn-poll-sanders-is-the-most-electable/

Although Sanders is running for the Democratic nomination, he’s a member of Democratic Socialists of America. He wants Americans to enjoy strong unions, worker-owned cooperatives, an America that supports working people, and most of all, Medicare For All. The state should pay for their medical treatment similar to the healthcare systems of the other western countries.

And the corporate elite have been desperate to stop him because of this, with the corporativist wing of the Democrats intriguing against him in favour of Hillary Clinton. And it was also pretty clear a few days ago that the extreme right was frightened of him after this poll, as Carl Benjamin aka Sargon of Akkad, the man who bust UKIP, put up another hit piece against Bernie on his YouTube channel.

But this is very optimistic news. If Bernie wins, he will transform America. And because America is still the dominant superpower, that influence will spread around the world to empower working women and men everywhere.

Go, Bernie, go! And win!

Reply to Argument that It’s the Poor’s Own Fault They Can’t Afford Food

We’ve all heard the arguments from the Tories and their lapdogs in the press denying the reality of hunger and starvation here in the UK. Tories like Edwina Currie, amongst others, have told us that people aren’t really desperate when they go to food banks. It’s just that’s free food. Or else they can’t cook properly, or when they do eat, they choose expensive meals that they can’t afford. Now there are some individuals, to which this does apply. But it is by no means the complete picture for everyone suffering ‘food poverty’. The real causes of people going to food banks or otherwise going hungry are benefit cuts and wage stagnation. Incomes now lag behind inflation, so that many people are simply unable to afford basic food items. Rebecca O’Connell and Laura Hamilton make this very clear in their chapter, ‘Hunger and Food Poverty’, in Cooper’s and Whyte’s The Violence of Austerity. They write

Reports of rising food poverty and food bank use have largely been ignored or dismissed by the UK government, with politicians suggesting that supply is fuelling demand and blaming the poor for lacking budgeting skills, making poor food ‘choices’ and being unable to cook. In contrast to government discourse, however, research shows that the cost of food relative to disposable income (affordability) is crucial and that in the wake of the financial crisis and the subsequent policies of economic austerity, the affordability of food was severely reduced. (p. 95).

I’ve put this up because this is an argument we have heard again and again. And it’s an argument you can bet the Tories will repeat ad nauseam. But it’s garbage. And it is going to need refuting again and again with passages like the above.

This Tory lie cannot be attacked and refuted too often.

The Crisis at the BBC and the Cancellation of the Victoria Derbyshire Show

A few days ago the Director-General of the Beeb, Lord Tony Hall, formally stepped down. According to Mike over at Vox Political, Robert Peston has said that this means that the Beeb’s chairman, David Clementi, can oversee the installation of a new D-G, who isn’t under the control of Boris and the Tories. But Mike argues instead that Clementi’s time as chair is nearly over, and it’s likely that Johnson will use his influence instead to make sure the next D-G is a Tory puppet, who will purge anyone BoJob and Cumming’s don’t like. He also reblogs posts from the ever-perceptive Tom London, who points out that the Beeb has already been significantly biased towards the Tories. The bias against Labour and Jeremy Corbyn personally was so pronounced that it denies the election democratic validity. Tom London says that while it might say ‘Democracy’ on the tin, that democracy has already vanished when nothing but propaganda is being pumped out.

Quite so. As Mike says, the Tories’ plan is to install someone, who will raise no objection to their privatisation of the Beeb and its replacement by commercial operators, who will kowtow to the Tories.

See: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2020/01/22/johnsons-corrupt-plan-for-the-bbc-the-propaganda-arm-of-the-tory-party/

In fact, as Mike also says, the Beeb has been under Tory influence for quite some time. Ever since David Cameron passed legislation allowing the public sector to recruit from the private industry. This has led to the influx of further senior management and corporate bosses at the Beeb, determined to turn it into a propaganda mouthpiece for the Tories.

It was also announced today that the Corporation was axing the Victoria Derbyshire Show. Derbyshire is a highly respected journalist, and the decision dismayed journalists and media figures as diverse as Paul Lewis, Stephen Pollard, the extreme right-wing editor of the Jewish Chronicle; Martin Barrow, and the Labour MP Tracy Brabin. Lewis described the show as ‘innovative’, praising the way it dealt with important social issue like poverty other mainstream shows would have struggled with, and called it ‘a people’s current affairs programme’. The former MP Danielle Rowley said that the show made complex issues accessible through a wide-ranging format, different voices, and great journalism and presenting. Martin Barrow, who is a foster carer as well as a journo, condemned its cancellation, and said he would always be grateful to the show for its reports into children’s care and young people’s mental health. Brabin said that the show was unique in having rigorous campaigning and allowing the public to have their say. She also praised Derbyshire as sharp, approachable and with a personal story that made her relatable. Laura Smith from Crewe and Nantwich praised the show for making sure that the voices of the survivors of historic abuse were heard, and praised the personal bravery of named victims that appeared on the show.

Zelo Street states that not everyone was upset by the show’s cancellation. Right-wing guttersnipes Darren Grimes and the Economist’s David Vance were overjoyed, though Vance considered it no more than a welcome start and wanted the complete closure of the Beeb.

Zelo Street believed that the show’s cancellation might not be unrelated to the fact that Derbyshire showed up Dominic Raab in the 2017 general election. Raab had claimed that the people using food banks weren’t poor, just experiencing ‘cash flow problems’.

The Street concluded

‘Once again, journalism is publishing, or indeed broadcasting, what someone does not want to see published, or broadcast. And the increasingly craven BBC is axing it.

Trebles all round for leering Tory boot boys. A lesson in grim reality for everyone else.’

See: https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2020/01/victoria-derbyshire-binned-big-bbc.html

Another right-wing figure, who was not at all sorry to see Derbyshire and her show cancelled was Carl Benjamin, aka Sargon of Akkad, the man who broke UKIP, who has made a video about it. Sargon and his equally deranged followers are convinced that the Beeb is biased towards Left and against the Tories, even when all the evidence shows the complete opposite. He thought she was particularly biased towards the Tories because she accidentally used the ‘C’ word for Jeremy Hunt’s surname when announcing a story. She immediately apologised, and said it was usually men, who used that word. Which is actually true, though I have heard it used by some foul-mouthed women. Sargon decided her comment showed that she had planned it, and thus her whole demeanour was an act. My guess is that it was a genuine mistake, but someone in the Newsroom probably had been referring to Hunt by the obscenity. Hunt’s name practically invites it. Derbyshire may well have heard it so often, that she accidentally said it herself, even though it was genuinely something she wouldn’t normally have said.

I’m not sure that Derbyshire is as unbiased as her supporters claimed. I was at a local Labour party meeting last week, and one of the subjects that came up again and again was the extreme bias against Labour by the media and its continued pushing of the anti-Semitism smears. And Derbyshire had done her fair share of this as well. When interviewing a spokesman from the Labour Party, Derbyshire had persistently asked them if they thought Corbyn needed sensitivity training. The spokesman had replied that he already had such training, as had they all. Too which she responded that she couldn’t believe the Labour party representative had said that he didn’t need it. Which is not what the Labour person had said.

Sargon’s video about it is interesting, however, for some of the stats he found. These included Derbyshire’s salary – £200 – £249,000 – and her viewing figures: 39,000. He concluded that her show had such a small audience that this was reasonable saving. He also pulled out the ratings for the audience of BBC news. Under Lord Hall, it has declined from 27 million three years ago to 18 million. It’s lost a third of its audience. While Sargon and other members of the right and extreme right are convinced it’s because of the Beeb’s nonexistent left-wing bias, the reality is that many of those 9 million viewers, who’ve turned off or over, will be left-wingers and Scots Nats put off by the Corporation’s pro-Tory bias.

My guess is that Derbyshire’s cancellation shows the direction the Beeb is moving. The Corporation’s being run down as it becomes nothing but a Tory propaganda outlet. The Tories would like to privatise the Corporation completely, but still recognise how valuable it is in the meantime. 70 per cent of the British public take their broadcast news from it. So the BBC will retain its main news programmes while closing down those, like Derbyshire, that provide a public service but don’t have massive ratings.

In that way the Tories will turn it into a propaganda network Goebbels would have been proud of, while preparing it for eventual privatisation and replacement by the networks of the Tories’ corporate backers.

 

The Tory Attacks on Health and Safety Legislation Is Causing Carnage

Since almost as long as I can remember, the Tories and their lackeys in the press have been attacking health and safety legislation. The common reasons trotted out are that it is an unnecessary burden to employers, binding them with complicated red tape and costs. More recently the authors of Britannia Unchained and similar works have demanded that such legislation protecting people at work should be rolled back in order to make Britain more competitive against countries in the Developing World, whose workers don’t benefit by such protection. The Tories have tried to make this assault popular by making health and safety legislation seem not only cumbrous, interfering and bureaucratic, but also massively overprotective and silly. Remember all those stories from the Heil years ago claiming that, thanks to the ‘Nanny state’, schools were having to make children wear goggles before playing conkers?

The truth is that when health and safety legislation was introduced in the ’70s, it massively cut down on deaths and injuries among working people – and that’s basically why the Tories would like to get rid of it. They want labour to be cheap and easily disposable, and health and safety laws are an obstacle to that. And the chapter by Hilda Palmer and David Whyte in The Violence of Austerity by Whyte and Vickie Cooper shows exactly how devastating in terms of lives and injuries their attacks on the legislation has been. The government watchdog in charge of overseeing the implementation of the legislation, the Health and Safety Executive, has had its funding cut by 47 per cent. The Tories have also threatened to close it down altogether. In 2013 the government launched a review in order to see whether there was still a need for its functions and if it complied with good governance. The number of staff employed at the executive fell from 3,702 in April 2010 to 2,706 in December 2013. Since the Tories came to power, the number of inspections by the Executive has fallen by a third.

These cuts have resulted in an increase in work-related accidents and injuries, although the authors warn that the government’s figures are almost certainly too low. The real figures are almost certainly higher. They write

Typically, the official ‘headline figure’ published by the HSE records between 140 and 240 deaths per year resulting from sudden injury and 13,000 deaths caused by occupational diseases and illnesses. Those figures, however, only reflect a small proportion of total deaths caused by work. The first figure does not include key categories of deaths cause by work. The Hazards Campaign estimates that seven times more deaths are caused by work incidents than the figure official cited by the HSE. HSE figures exclude work-related road traffic deaths, the workplace deaths recorded in other industries that the HSE does not have formal responsibility for, like the maritime and civil aviation industries, or deaths to members of the public killed by a work activity, such as scaffold collapses or train crashes. A more complete estimate would also include suicides attributed to work related stress. There are approximately 6,000 suicides involving working-age people in the UK each year, and a number of those involve workers driven to despair by work-related stress. In Japan, where work-related suicides are officially recognised and compensated, it is estimated that 5 per cent of suicides are work-related. This estimate, if applied to the UK, would amount to roughly 300 people killed through work related strees.

In sum, a more complete figure of workplace deaths caused by sudden injury, which takes into account all of the above exclusions, would amount to between 1,000 and 1,400 deaths every year, or 3-4 deaths per day. (p. 142).

They also argue that the estimated number of deaths from occupational diseases are also probably grossly underestimated once recent academic studies are taken into account. For example, a 2005 study of the causes of occupational and environmental cancer by Richard Clapp estimated that about 8-16 per cent of all cancer deaths came from occupational cancer. If the mid-range figure of 12 per cent is taken as the number of occupational deaths from cancer, the number of people dying through work-related cancer is 18,000 per year.

A 2005 paper in the journal Occupational and Environmental Medicine estimated tath 15-20 per cent of all cases of COPD – chronic obstructive pulmonary disease – could be work related. Which means 6,000 deaths per year. There is also evidence that up to 20 per cent of all deaths from heart disease are related to conditions at work. This figure adds up to 20,000 deaths per year.

A further conservative estimate that diseases in which work can be a contributory cause, such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, rheumatoid arthritis and so on comprise a further 6,000 deaths per annum.

They state

All of this adds up to an overall estimate by the Hazards Campaign of up to 50,000 deaths from work-related illness every year – four times the typical HSE estimate of around 13,000 per year. Our contention then, is that the HSE figures grossly underestimate the number of workers whose current working conditions expose them to both the well-known and the newer risk factors, that will produce the workers deaths of the future. (p. 143).

They also make the point that the death toll is still rising, because of toxins to which people may have been exposed to as much as 40 years previously, such as some carcinogens. The EU has estimated that in the 1990s five million workers, or 22 per cent of the working population, were exposed to cancer-causing substances.

They also argue that, thanks to austerity, more workers are suffering under poor working conditions that are damaging their health. These include bullying and harassment, long hours, and the zero hours contracts imposed on 5.5 million workers. The insecurity these contracts cause are linked to stress, heart and circulatory diseases. Workers are also still exposed to dusts and chemicals that cause or contribute to respiratory and heart diseases. They also point to the connection between low paid work and poor safety standards

Low paid work guarantees more than hardship: low pay goes hand in hand with low safety standards. Occupational injuries and diseases such as diabetes and cancer are directly linked to low paid jobs. (p. 144).

They also make the point that the ‘compensation culture’ the Tories have claimed exists is actually a myth. In fact, many workers don’t receive the compensation to which they’re entitled. They write

One of the first moves of the Coalition government, in October 2010, was to appoint Lord Young, a former Cabinet minister under Margaret Thatcher, to deliver ‘a Whitehall-wide review of the operation of health and safety laws and the growth of the compensation culture.’ He found absolutely no evidence of this ‘compensation culture’, citing figures which actually showed a downward trend to legal claims, but still demanded action to deal with ‘red tape’. Indeed, figures obtained by Hazards Magazine show that fewer than one in seven people suffering an occupational injury or disease ever receive compensation. For occupational diseases alone, this drops to just one in twenty-six. For most occupational cancers, there is barely any prospect of compensation at all.  (p. 145).

They also show that the government’s division of work into high and low risk is also highly dubious and has resulted in an increase in deaths at work. It was done by Cameron’s government in order to restrict HSE inspections to those jobs considered high risk. But the low risk category is wide, and includes textiles, clothing, footwear, light engineering, road and air transport and docks, electricity generation and the postal and courier services. Hazards Magazine found that 53 per cent of all deaths at work caused by sudden injury were in the low risk sector. Palmer and Whyte state ‘In other words, the government’s fiscal purge of health and safety enforcement has meant abandoning scrutiny of the workplaces where the majority of deaths occur’. (p. 145).

Palmer and Whyte state that this death toll should be a ‘call to arms. to any government, regardless of its political stance. But instead, despite the ‘glaring’ evidence that the red tape is good for workers, employers and the economy, governments have doubled down and insisted that such legislation is an intolerable nuisance. This has reached the point where the HSE doesn’t even both to ask ‘what’s so wrong with red tape anyway?’ The government’s ideological obsession with red tape means that ‘there is no room for argument or evidence that health and safety legislation doesn’t burden business, while its absence carries a high cost to business, workers and the public purse.’

This means that when some rag like the Heil, the Depress, or the Scum claims that health and safety legislation is unnecessary, costly and stifling business, they are lying. And lying to defend an attitude to workplace safety that is murderously dangerous to working people.

But then, as the disabled have found, Tory responsibility for mass injury and death is nothing new.