Earlier this week the Spectator published a noxious piece by its noxious editor, Fraser Nelson. Nelson was complaining about the numbers receiving sickness benefit while businesses in Britain are struggling to recruit workers. This included, he said, army officers with a beginning salary of £35,000. From what I could gather, the thrust of his article was that the people on sick leave and benefits should be taken off them and then forced to go into one of these vacant jobs. This has been followed by various other right-wing politicians declaring that they intend to retrain the long-term sick to fill these vacancies. The implication here is the old Blairite assumption about people on disability benefits that a certain proportion of them, at least, must be malingerers. It’s why the work capability assessment was set up to find a certain percentage of claimants fit for work, whether they were or not, and the consequent scandals of genuinely critical disabled and terminally ill people being thrown off benefits and told to get a job. It’s the attitude behind the New Labour and the Tories’ wretched benefit reforms, which not only demands claimants look for work and have their searches checked by the staff, but also has them thrown off benefits and sanctioned on the slightest pretext. If they’re starting on the long term sick, it probably indicates that they’ve gone as far as they can demonising and humiliating the unemployed and have been forced to start demonising and humiliating the sick. It’s also based on the unsympathetic attitude that working is good for you and will get you back on your feet. This was the attitude a few years ago when Dave Cameron’s coalition government came to power, and disability campaigners tore into that, showing that this simply wasn’t the case. There seems to be no awareness that some people are sick because of their jobs and working conditions. As for the mental health crisis hitting Britain, it isn’t due to Gary Lineker spreading fears about climate change, as Richard Tice has declared. It’s far more to do with the cost of living crisis caused by rising inflation, stagnant wages kept below the rate of inflation, as well as job insecurity caused by zero hours contracts and the gig economy and the detrimental effects of Brexit. But Reform and the Conservatives can’t admit that, as they believe that this has all been a splendid success and will make us all wealthier and business more secure and prosperous in the long run.
Behind this, I suspect, is the need to get British workers to take the jobs that were originally filled by immigrants and migrant workers now that immigration has become such a hot topic and the Tories are announcing their intention to cut it. It’s basically a return to the calls for Brits to work a fruit pickers instead of migrant workers a few years. That was met by complaints from people who had tried, but were turned down as the farmers preferred to employ migrants.
As for retraining the unemployed to fill certain jobs, there are obvious problems with this. Not everyone has the strength or temperament, let alone the academic qualifications for certain jobs. Army officers are an example of this. Membership of the armed forces demands physical and mental toughness as well as the ability to kill while observing the laws of war. In the case of the officer corps, it also demands intelligence, the jokes about military intelligence being a contradiction in terms aside. Those are very exacting standards and not everyone is able to fill them. There are other problems matching people to jobs. I was given grief when I tried signing on after gaining my archaeology Ph.D. nearly ten years ago by the clerks at the Job Centre. They were annoyed that I spent my time looking for jobs as an archaeologist, particularly in academia. I was told at my last meeting with them, where the supervising girl basically told me not to bother signing on any more, that I should really have been looking for menial jobs like cleaning before trying to find the work I was qualified to do. It shows the way the Job Centre staff aren’t interesting in making sure the right people find the right jobs but simply getting people off their books. But the problem with this is that employers of such jobs probably aren’t interested in taking on graduates, who are obviously overqualified. And some of the jobs that need to be filled require years of training and experience. Our favourite internet non-historian the other day put up a piece asking why this country needed to import architects and archaeologists from overseas. With archaeologists I think he may have a point, as I think there may be surplus of qualified archaeologists compared to the number of jobs. The profession was expanding a decade ago, but that seems to have passed and the number of archaeology firms set up in the boom time may have shrunk. I don’t know about architects. Assuming that there is a shortage of British architects – and I’m not sure there is – the problem here is that it takes years of study and training to qualify as one. It’s not a profession where someone can be retrained and fit to work in a few weeks.
The demands for people on sickness benefit to be retrained to fill these job vacancies then is just more right-wing Tory ideology about benefit scroungers and malingerers, which ignores the real reasons behind their sickness and the problem the unemployed face finding jobs they can actually do. But as the government and business faces increased difficulty recruiting foreign workers because of Brexit and the controversy over immigration, we can expect these demands to get worse.
GB News and the Depress have reported that London mayor Sadiq Khan is facing calls to sack his advisor on Black culture, Kemi Olivia Alemoru. Alemoru’s the former editor of Gal-Dem, and now folded magazine for women and non-binary people of colour. So what were these terribly tweets that she made that have caused such offence? Well, she called Johnson ‘the Grim Reaper’ and wondered why he hadn’t been attacked as others had got a slap for less. She also called the Tory government ‘murderers’ and said “They have stood by idly and let people’s families die taking too much time to make decisions that could save lives, using money to make their friends rich rather than make our pandemic infrastructure robust or useful.” The GB News article about this quotes a Conservative member of the London Assembly, Neil Garratt, as saying “It is quite wrong for Sadiq Khan to appoint someone with extreme and hateful views to a role meant to bring Londoners together”.
Really? ‘Cause I don’t see anything factually incorrect in what she has said. Johnson dithered about imposing the Covid lockdown, listening to stupid eugenicist wibblings about herd immunity instead of what real epidemiologists were telling him. As a result, people caught Covid and died. On other issues, Johnson showed himself far less interested in the actual business of government and more in publicity shots and campaigning. He seemed to be going off to Checkers every weekend during the Covid crisis. And unlike other PMs during national emergencies, he never attended the COBRA meeting about it.
But why stop with Covid? The work capability tests and benefit sanctions have led to untold deaths of the disabled and unemployed, who were thrown off benefits for trivial or utterly fabricated reasons. I remember that c. 2015 people were putting up on their blogs faces of the hundreds who had died, some of them in appalling deprivation and hunger. This included a mentally ill young Black man, who I think had been unable to get himself the insulin he needed for his diabetes. There was also a case of a young woman, who committed suicide with her baby, out of despair after she had her benefit cut off, and an elderly couple who starved to death. As for that vaunted privatisation, that Sunak thinks has done so much for the NHS, a study found that instead it had caused 350+ unnecessary deaths. Quite apart from the chaos caused by massive funding cuts, that left us unable to cope with the pandemic unlike our continental cousins. And Black Brits have been particularly hit by the Tories’ wretched austerity, so Alemoru has undoubtedly seen the greater harm Tories policies have had on the Black community. I despise Critical Race Theory, but Alemoru has a particular right to be angry as a woman of colour.
But could there be anything else that riles the Tories? Well, yes. She’s an admirer of Jeremy Corbyn. She’s supposed to have tweets: A vocal supporter of Jeremy Corbyn, who is rumoured to be pondering throwing his hat in the ring for the London mayor role, Alemoru once tweeted at 1am in November 2019: “I love Corbyn so much”, followed by a post in April 2020 that read: “CORBYN CAN NEVER GO HE LIVES IN MA HEART”. She isn’t alone. Corbyn is an inspiring speaker and people wanted and supported his socialist political agenda. Which is why he was smeared as a Commie, Trotskyite and anti-Semite, and his supporters purged from the Labour party.
And she also committed the heinous sin of dissing Keir Starmer, calling him a scab.
GB News states that she tweeted ‘No one can tell me that @Keir Starmer is not a Tory plant. He’s too s*** to be trying! He’s not trying to be anything to anyone for any reason. I wish he broke the law with that curry.”
She later referred to Starmer as a “SCAB” for sacking Labour MP Sam Tarry from the Shadow Cabinet for joining a strike picket line.’
I’ve thought exactly the same thing about Starmer. He and the Blairites are Thatcherite infiltrators. Various right-wing members of the NEC were on Conservative forums. One of them was even more vitriolic about Corbyn and the left than the Tories. And yes, I do question his support for the strikers. I’ve heard various explanations that, of course the Labour front bench supports the pickets and Sam Tarry shouldn’t have joined the line for various reasons. But Tarry’s sacking still looks like the actions of a Tory scab trying to ingratiate himself with the right.
Back to her comments about killing Johnson, she made it clear that she wasn’t calling for anyone to do it, just wondering why they hadn’t. So she was inciting people to commit a crime, merely expressing an opinion about our massively incompetent, corrupt and egotistical PM.
When reading, remember that GB News is effectively becoming a mouthpiece of the Tory party. It now employs a number of Tory MPs as presenters, including Jacob Reet Snob, as well as Nigel Farage, former UKIP caudillo. I think I’ve also heard rumours that they want to give a post as presenter to Anne Widdecombe and Liz Truss.
When it comes to GB News, the remarks of a Labour MP while grilling the head of Ofcom is right: they offer a choice of opinions – right or far right.’
More proof of the Tories’ complete indifference to ordinary’s people’s suffering. The Trussel Trust, which runs the majority of Britain’s food banks, reported yesterday that there had been a steep rise in the number of people using them. They reported that last year they had served 1.3 million emergency food parcels. This is an absolutely disgrace in a country as rich as Britain. They recommended that benefits should be pegged to keep pace with the price of food.
Brilliant idea!
The response from the Tories was predictable, however. You got a statement saying that they were determined to eradicate poverty or something, and that they had raised benefits already by 10 per cent. My guess is that however much they raised it, it’s still below the rate of the inflation, so that food is still unaffordable for some people. Also, it doesn’t address the issue of the vicious and sadistic sanctions system, nor the poverty wages being paid by some businesses which means that many of those claiming benefits are actually working people.
The Beeb on their breakfast news this morning put up a series of graphs showing wages compared with the rate of inflation. The railway workers average wages were above, but those for teachers and nurses were below. Well below. If teachers’ wages had kept pace with inflation, they’d be on £44,000 by now.
But wage rises in line with inflation is too much for the Bank of England and the Spectator.
Yesterday an article from the Spectacularlyboring appeared stating that the Bank of England was right to demand that wages be kept low. This comes from very well paid Tory journalists repeating the ideas of exceptionally well paid Bank of England executives. I think the attitude is that if wages are raised, this will increase inflation.
Except that it’s not ordinary wages driving inflation. Robert Reich has said that it’s driven by profits, and although he was referring to America I dare say it applies over here.
What we need is a return to a prices and wages policy, but as this went out with Maggie Thatcher, it would be admitting that part of Thatcherism is a massive failure. And once that’s admitted, the rest is vulnerable too. And we can’t have the masses questioning the absolute truth of Thatcherite economic orthodoxy.
It’s long past time that Thatcherism fell. And the Trussell Trust is right:
I got an invitation the other day from the Labour party to buy tickets so that I could meet Peter Mandelson at a special dinner in Swindon. It was a repeat of a similar dinner a little while ago, in which they Labour faithful were asked to buy tickets to a similar event to meet certain members of the party’s front bench. I didn’t want to go then. Not just because I couldn’t afford it, and am too sick to travel to Swindon anyway, but also because I objected to it in principle. The Labour party was set up by the trade unions and socialist parties to fight for working people. It should be funded from their subscriptions, not from corporate donations and dinners set up in emulation of the Tories.
And principle says I don’t want to meet Mandelson anyway. He was very clever as the party’s spin doctor and electoral strategist, but he and Blair prolonged Thatcherism well past its proper lifetime. It was Blair’s government that cut of benefits for asylum seekers and pushed them into detention centres, pushed NHS privatisation into high gear, and went about cheerfully outsourcing more state business, introduced the work capability tests, carried on with benefit sanctions, and was very enthusiastic about private management of prisons. Blair also took money from pro-Israel Jewish businessmen, thus ensuring his silence over that country’s flagrant human rights abuses. And then there was a little matter like the illegal war in Iraq. It was under Blair that the party turned away from its working class roots to appeal to middle class swing voters. They condescendingly expected Labour voters to go with it, as they had nowhere else to go. Hence the shock and outrage when Jeremy Corbyn started packing them out at halls, parks and sports grounds up and down Britain. Hence also the rise of UKIP, as White working class voters who felt they’d been abandoned by the both parties turned to Farage’s xenophobia and populism.
If I want to go and see someone from the Labour party, it’d be Richard Burgon, Jeremy Corbyn or that other dissident, ‘Red’ Ken Livingstone. I’d go and see Rosina Allin-Khan, a woman of mixed Polish and Asian heritage, who’s a doctor working in the NHS and concerned, as so many are, about the state the Conservatives have reduced it to. I’d want to hear Black Activists Rising Against Cuts. I dare say they have takes on racism and White privilege that might annoy me, but austerity is hitting the Black community hardest, as is clear from a paper in the collection The Violence of Austerity. I’d go to see the head of Young Labour as she defies the leadership on issues like socialism and Israel.
I want proper, working people back leading the Labour party. I want to see a working mother tell her story about struggling to keep her family fed and their home heated on her and her partner’s wages. I want to hear former students tell how, despite their degree, their now mired in £40,000 worth of debt and are flipping burgers at McDonald’s for a living. I want to hear the people who volunteer at food banks about the starvation and privation they see. I want to see someone from Disabled People Against Cuts talk about how austerity, low wages and welfare cuts is affecting ordinary disabled folk. I want to see Jews like Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, Tony Greenstein and Jackie Walker talk about Israeli atrocities and the sectarian anti-Semitic persecution to which they’ve been subjected. I want to see Alexei Sayle, shouty, foul-mouthed Sayle, make jokes about Communism and the Conservatives, celebrating and supporting real anti-racist activists like Marc Wadsworth.
I want to hear the voices of ordinary men and women stuck in dead-end jobs and zero hours contracts talking about their lives and how they can be improved. People on supermarket checkouts, cleaners, white-collar office workers, now being depressed into the rest of the proletariat. As for business, I only want to hear from the small business people, the Arkwrights, who run local stores and corner shops, who are being driven into the ground as the Tories and corporatist New Labour support big business and the supermarkets.
I want to hear from the elderly as they worry about pensions and issues like mobility, as well as the problems they experience as everything goes on line. Many of them don’t have a computer and don’t understand them. They have to rely on their children to sort some of this out for them. What if they haven’t had any, and don’t have younger friends and neighbours to help them?
I want the victims of the benefit agencies humiliations and sanctions regime to tear into that and the cruelty and self-interest of the clerks administering it.
These are the people, I’d pay to see. Not someone like Mandelson, Blair or Starmer, who seem to have only a nodding acquaintance with working people, and see them through the prism of voting and demographic documents with the cool, detached eye of the ad man. Not someone who patronises them with management-speak, who expects Labour grassroots activists and supporters to act as drones reading from specially prepared scripts.
I want that to end. I want it to have ended long ago, when Brown lost the election.
I want to see local MPs for local people, not right-wingers parachuted in against the wishes of ordinary voters.
Those are the real Labour party. Not Mandelson, Blair and Starmer. I want to see proper Labour activists at protests, picket lines and church halls. I don’t want to see corporate closet Tories across a dinner table.
Yesterday I put up the list of questions I’d like to be put to Starmer, which he would be forced to answer without any refusals or evasions tolerated. One of these covered the benefit sanctions regime. I said that Labour under Ed Miliband offered only tepid resistance to them. I think this was about an issue when the supposedly ‘Red’ Ed ordered the party to abstain, rather than vote for it. Trev kindly set me straight about this with this comment, pointing out that Miliband’s Labour party didn’t resist at all:
‘Under Miliband Labour didn’t show any opposition to Benefit Sanctions, quite the reverse, they actively supported the use of Benefit Sanctions and told me in an email that they (the Labour Party) believed that Sanctions were “a vital tool in helping people back to work”. And for that reason I voted Green instead. I’ve emailed them several times since then to ask if they’ve changed their minds yet but so far got no reply.’
Obviously they haven’t. They’re still chasing the Tory vote and the millions of people, who believe everything the read in the Scum and the Heil that the feckless unemployed are all living the high life scrounging off their hard-earned tax money. The reality is people are starving, and the reason why work doesn’t pay is because wages are too low, not benefits too high. It’s another example of why the Labour right shouldn’t be in control of the party and can’t be trusted in national government.
Okay, I keep hearing rumours that the gender-critical, ‘femalist’ women’s rights campaigner Kellie-Jay Keen has turned her organisation, Standing For Women, into a political party, and is preparing to stand against Keir Starmer. She has said before that she doesn’t expect she’ll win, but simply wants to take the opportunity during the leadership and election debates to ask Stalin a few awkward questions that he’ll have to answer. No doubt these will be ‘What is a woman?’ and ‘Do women have cervixes?’, both questions that have had Starmer running away as fast as he could when asked them. The trans issue is an uncomfortable one for Stalin, especially as he’s zigzagged all over that issue – first stating he would back a gender recognition act, then saying it wasn’t an issue he’d pursue, before going back to saying he’d back it again. But there are other, equally important questions the scumbag should be asked, and no evasions or refusals tolerated. Like:
How can we trust anything that comes out of your mouth when every pledge you’ve made has been broken?
How can we trust you with our traditional freedoms when your leadership of the Labour party has been authoritarian in the extreme?
How can potential allies and supporters in parliament and local government trust you, when you’ve been treacherous in your treatment of Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour grassroots socialists?
How can we trust you with the NHS after your hero Blair pushed privatisation up a notch or two and you’re bringing in a CEO from a private healthcare company? Blair also modelled his reforms on the American private healthcare company Kaiserpermanente. He thought they were more efficient than the NHS. They weren’t.
Why should the poor, the sick, the disabled and unemployed trust anything you say, after Blair brought in the work capability tests and under Ed Milliband the party showed very tepid opposition to the sanctions regime? Why should genuinely starving people on food banks, and those fearing that they’ll end up on them, trust you and your cronies, after Rachel Reeves said that in power Labour would be even harder on the unemployed than the Tories?
Foreign policy: Blair launched at least one illegal war in the Middle East, the invasion of Iraq. That was nothing to do with democracy, but simply a grab for oil and the country’s state industries. It has reduced a middle eastern country with a reasonably secular government into a hell-hole riven by sectarian violence, one that became another theatre of war when ISIS raised the vile, barbaric heads. Brave, genuinely patriotic men and women were sent to risk life and limb on false pretences so that even rightists like Paz49 is wondering why Bush and Blair aren’t sharing a cell with Putin and the monsters of the former Yugoslavia looking at war crimes charges. Blair’s bombing of Libya in support of the rebels has also done much the same to that country, leaving part of it under the control of Islamist slavers. That’s S-L-A-V-E-R-S, in case your grubby mind can’t grasp how monstrous this situation is. How can we trust you not to start another fake, illegal, bloody war and waste more of our best people and destroy more countries?
Also: the Palestinians really are suffering terrible, racist persecution by the Israeli state. It has been repeatedly condemned by the international community. How are you going to stop this and not make libellous accusations of anti-Semitism against those campaigning against it instead?
Anti-Semitism: How can we trust you to take a genuinely objective, nonpartisan view of anti-Jewish hatred, when your definition of who is a true Jew is whether or not they support Israel? How can ordinary, grassroots Jewish members of the party trust you, when about 4/5 of those you’ve smeared as anti-Semites are self-respecting Jews themselves, as well as gentile supporters and activists against anti-Semitism?
Racism: Ditto. There’s been a rise in Islamophobia in the party, as well as notorious incidents of bigotry and bullying against Black and Asian members and officers. Yet again, all we’ve heard from you is lies: lies that you’re implementing the Forde report, when all the evidence says you’re doing nothing of the kind and are actively blocking people from putting it into practice. Why should people of colour trust you with this issue?
Transgender issues: I’m gender critical, but this is fundamentally about trust. Starmer’s attitude to trans people has changed with the political winds. How can trans people and their allies trust what you say? Are you going to throw them under the bus as well?
Channel Migrants: You seem opposed to their mistreatment and the various harsh policies of Cruella and the Tories, but how long’s that going to last? Your behaviour suggests that you have no policies except what the Tories do, and no real ideological criticism of them. How can we trust you to bring about a fair, human solution to this problem, one that doesn’t involve treating asylum seekers as criminals? Italy’s Far Right Prime Minister, Georgia Meloni has made speeches declaring that to stop the flood of migrants, we should be tackling poverty and exploitation in Africa. She has also demanded that the international community do something to shore up the banks in Tunisia, as the banking crisis there is likely to set off a fresh wave of desperate migrants. She’s an authoritarian, who has impounded migrant vessels. Her party, God help us! – is descended from Mussolini’s Fascists. But she seems to have a far better grasp of solving the problem at its source in Africa’s poverty than you do! And no, I am not recommending anyone vote for the Far Right.
Northern Ireland: At the moment Nationalists and Loyalists are on knife edge. Tensions are rising and there are real fears that the hard men are going to come back and destroy everything decent people have worked for. My local MP, Karin Smyth, respect you because of the work you’re supposed to have put in on the Good Friday Agreement. But so did a lot of other people, including Mo Mowlam, Jerry Adams and Jeremy Corbyn. I’ve come across very dark hints that you were involved in some of the nastier, terroristic tactics carried out by parts of the secret state, and in your actions as Attorney General or head of public prosecutions or whatever, you showed no compunction on cracking down on civil liberties in order to protect the establishment. How, therefore, can we trust you to help solve this problem and protect the North of Ireland’s ordinary people?
Economy: The majority of the people of this grand country want the utilities renationalised. Thanks to privatisation, people can’t afford their energy bills, sewages is being pumped into our rivers and seas by the private water companies and nearly every month or so – I exaggerate, but it feels like that sometimes – a railway company has to be taken back into public management. But all I’ve seen from you is more support for the failing, undead shambling corpse of Thatcherism, a corrupt corporatism you learned from you mentor, Blair, which rewards shoddy service and political donations with government contracts and bloated profits. How can ordinary people trust you with our utilities?
The cost of living: Inflation is rising all the time, and hard-working ordinary people really are wondering how they make ends meet. You’ve suggested some policies like using a windfall tax from the energy companies to put extra investment in some services. But I’ve seen absolute no evidence that you want to do everything necessary to tackle this crisis. That means going all the way to the root. But instead you quail and cower before the press and political establishment, falling over yourself to reassure Murdoch and the rest of the blackguards that you’re a safe pair of hands, won’t upset Thatcher’s raddled, shop-worn legacy. You’re not a tribune of the people, but an establishment puppet, dancing whenever the donors pull your strings.
And we could go on and on, with issues like schools. The academies are another flagship project of Blair, one that he took over from Maggie Thatcher. Except she and Normal Fowler had enough wits about them to know it was failing and were winding the city academies up. Since then, academy chain after academy chain has had to be taken back into public management because they were failing. But I’ve seen no sign from you that you have the backbone to realise this is another failed Thatcherite policy that should be brought to a close. Or indeed, do anything about education except what might look good on the pages of the Scum and Heil.
In short, why should anyone, anyone at all, trust you within a foot of power?
I can’t remember where I saw it, but I came across a video today quoting one of the Tory MPs – I think it may have been the egregious Lee Anderson – as saying that the Conservatives value the workers. What! The Tories have never valued ordinary working people. Maggie Thatcher personally didn’t know anyone from the working classes and she certainly didn’t know or want to know anyone who was in a trades union. A friend of mine told me that when she was campaigning, she once said to the people around her before going up someone’s drive, ‘And now to put the working man in his place’. He didn’t know himself whether she’d actually said it, but it certainly encapsulated her attitude. But let’s itemise how well the Tories value working people.
The Tories value working people so well that
They have kept wages at starvation level for a decade or more, so that many households now have a choice between eating and keeping the heat on.
Thanks also to the Tories low wage policy the majority of people using food banks are actually working.
They have not increased funding for schools in line with rising costs, and so children in the state sector must work in undermaintained buildings short of needed educational materials.
They are running down the NHS, which has kept working people healthy since 1948, in favour of the private sector. As a result, waiting times have lengthened and the performance of the NHS, once a world leaders, has fallen dramatically. All this is to prepare for its privatisation, when people will have to pay for their own care at costs that will drive them into debt and bankruptcy.
They value working people so much, that they have raised university tuition fees to exorbitant costs, burdening young people with enormous debt.
Unemployed and disabled people are harassed and thrown off the benefits they need on the slightest excuse. These people are willing to work, but treated by the Tories and scumbag rags like the Heil as welfare scroungers and fraudsters despite the fact that the amount of welfare fraud is infinitesimal.
They value ordinary people so much, that they have pursued economic policies that have disastrously raised people’s mortgages and rents. A generation of young Brits now have to live with their parents because they can’t afford their own homes.
Thanks also to the Tories, the nation’s health is declining and for the first time life expectancy has fallen.
So: disease, starvation, poverty, homelessness and debt.
Michael Heaver is another hard-right YouTuber pushing Reform and praising Brexit to the rafters, despite the devastation this has wreaked on our economy and the lives and livelihood of British workers and businesses. If Brexit was a religion, his would be the blind faith of the true-blue Thatcherite fanatic. And this morning Heaver posted a video praising the latest effusion from Reform’s current fuehrer, Richard Tice. Tice is upset that 5.2 million people are in receipt of benefits. This, he declares, is one eighth of the working population. But at the same time, there are job vacancies going unfilled, which is why the government is importing foreigners. This is because some people on benefit are doing better than they would be if they were working, and so are leaving their jobs to live off benefits. The welfare state is properly there to support those genuinely in need, but people are using it as a lifestyle choice. We must therefore cut benefits in order to force people back to work so the government won’t import more foreigners as cheap labour.
There are so many falsehoods in this statement that it’s amazing in its own way. Firstly, most people on benefits in the UK are actually working. They’re forced to use state benefits as well because their pay is insufficient. As for people deliberately leaving work to live on benefits – presumably he means jobseekers’ allowance – does he know anybody who’s suffered that humiliating process? My guess is he doesn’t, because otherwise he’d know it was a lie. Actually, on second thoughts, it’s quite possible he knows it’s wrong, and is deliberately lying anyway. For a start, the Tories passed legislation years ago stopping people from receiving benefit immediately after resigning from work. The wait for a claim to come through is several weeks, so if your previous job paid so badly you didn’t have anything left over by the end of the month, the further wait would push you down to starvation level. As does the various sanctions imposed on the unemployed and disabled for the flimsiest of reasons. Welfare researchers and activists, like the excellent Disabled People Against Cuts, have shown that in the case of the Fitness to Work assessments, this is based on an assumption that a certain percentage of cases must be fraudulent. There is therefore pressure on the assessors to find the disabled well enough to work. Hence we have had assessors declaring that people in terminal comas were fit to work. They even asked amputees when they expected their limbs to grow back!
And then there is the humiliating process of claiming benefits itself. This takes its inspiration from the Victorian idea of ‘less eligibility’: receiving state aid must be made so humiliating that it will deter people from claiming it. It’s one of Thatcher’s disgusting ‘Victorian values’. And so you are required to spend so many hours a day looking for a job, keep a log of the jobs you’ve applied for, while the clerk dealing with you keeps asking why you’re still claiming and didn’t apply for that one yet. Claiming benefits is unpleasant, difficult and humiliating.
But this is ignored by Tice, who is simply spouting more of the ‘make work pay’ nonsense pushed by David Cameron and Iain Duncan Smith when he was head of the DWP. And then there’s the stuff about immigration.
This is nonsense because Brexit has resulted in a loss of foreign labour. Many of the foreign workers in the NHS have left Britain, including skilled doctors and nurses. I think we also lost the foreign fruit pickers, who used to come here, which is probably the type of workers Tice is thinking of when he talks about cheap foreign labour. But when the issue of forcing unemployed Brits to work as fruit pickers came up a while ago and was being discussed, many of the commenters on YouTube had said they’d tried and been turned down as farmers preferred foreigners. Some of the farmers rejecting British labour said it was because Brits were lazy. Possibly. Or perhaps just not so easy to exploit.
As for immigration generally, I have the distinct impression that the type of foreign workers the government is keen to recruit are skilled workers, particularly in the STEM subjects. They are definitely not keen on importing unskilled labour to add to the number of domestic workers with a similar lack of skills. Though here again, unskilled immigrants do take the jobs Brits don’t want, like cleaners, as shown in Ken Loach’s film, Dirty, Pretty Things. But my guess is that when Tice and the other members of the anti-immigrant right start ranting about low-skilled foreign immigrants, much of their audience will automatically think of the Channel migrants. But these unfortunately haven’t been recruited. They’re asylum seekers, who have been excluded from the official ways of applying for sanctuary in Britain. Hence part of the hostility to them.
Tice’s spiel is pretty much the old Daily Mail directed at the unemployed and non-White immigration jammed together. It’s nonsense, but will appeal to the readers of the right-wing press, who’ve been subjected to the same bilge since before the welfare state was founded. It also bears out Tony Benn’s statement that when a government wants to persecute its working people, it begins with immigrants.
Don’t be fooled. Tice is not a friend of ordinary working Brits. The solution to the problem of making work pay is to raise wages. This is the solution in classical economics to the problem of a shortage of workers. But this would cut into the already bloated profits of the obscenely rich that Tice, the Tories and the other hard right parties are pandering to.
They want to keep working people poor, starving and desperate, whatever lip service they give to the welfare state. And they’re using the old spectre of foreign labour to do it.
That Preston Journalist, whose real name, I am assured by the great people who comment here, is Ashley Kaminski, put up a genuinely heart-breaking video last night. People had been queuing outside a soup kitchen in Glasgow. Among the adults were ten children, including a babe in arms. Kaminski thought that this was terrible, as he should. He’s an avowed opponent of Nicola Sturgeon and all her works, dubbing her ‘McKrankie’ after her supposed resemblance to one half of a double act back in the 1980s. From the tone of his piece, he clearly wanted to blame her, but couldn’t quite. It was wrong, he said, whoever was responsible.
Okay, I don’t know what powers the devolved Scots parliament has, especially regarding welfare policies. I am sure that many Scots voted SNP, not because they wanted independence, but simply because they wanted a proper welfare state, something that wasn’t being offered by Jim Murphy’s Scottish Labour party. But this scandalous situation has been around far longer than the SNP’s administration, and it afflicts communities right across Britain. In Scotland there was a parliamentary inquiry into food banks a few years ago. One of those speaking before the committee was a volunteer, who described the intensely dispiriting deprivation and poverty he saw as he did his job. And I can remember putting up a 19th-early 20th century poem about children queuing outside a food kitchen. It’s disgusting that Britain has returned to such levels of poverty.
But Krankie isn’t responsible. The Tories are. They’ve insisted on wages so low working families can’t make ends meet, and cut welfare payments again and again, all with mantra of encouraging ‘welfare scroungers’ to look for work, making work pay and all the other nonsense. They’ve also introduced benefit sanction after benefit sanction, all with the same intention. It also helps to fiddle the unemployment statistics, as if they’re off the DHSS’ books, they aren’t counted as unemployed.
It’s possible that Sturgeon’s policies aren’t helping the situation north of the border. But the ultimate blame lies with the Tories, and it started when Ruth Davidson, the head of the Conservatives up there, was in power. And Sturgeon definitely isn’t responsible for it down south in England and Wales.
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.
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