Liberal Election Poster for 1909 Unemployment and Health Insurance

Yesterday I put up two photos from Rosemary Rees’ book, Poverty and Public Health 1815-1948 (London: Heinemann 2001). One showed a queue of mostly children waiting for charity hand-outs of food from the early 20th century. I said that this was still very relevant as such queues had returned with the appearance of food banks in the 21st. We are now in a period in which 4.7 million people in Britain are in ‘food poverty’.

Disgusting.

The other was of the very first person to draw an old age pension from 1909. I said that it should be an iconic picture, as it marks the beginning of the welfare state, which Cameron’s Tories are doing their level best to destroy.

This is another picture that also deserves to be a well-known icon, and is about the same subject. Entitled ‘The Dawn of Hope’ it urges the British public to support the Liberal government and their introduction of national health and unemployment insurance in 1909. Although it’s for the Liberal, rather than the Labour or other Socialist party, it marks the beginning of the modern welfare state. Which as I said, the Tories hate with a passion and are doing their utmost to demolish. This poster should be up everywhere as a symbol of what Cameron, Osbo, IDS and the rest of their coterie of toffs and factory masters are attacking through benefit sanctions, privatised ‘workplace’ pensions and the privatisation of the NHS.

We cannot let them.

Vox Political: Stephen Crabb, IDS’ Replacement, Believes People with Progressive Degenerative Diseases Able to Work

Mike over at Vox Political has written about how the latest sputtering from the new head of the DWP have effectively ended satire. Stephen Crabb, apparently an expert on such diseases, has declared that sufferers of brain tumours and progressive degenerative diseases like Parkinson’s and Motor Neurone are able to work. And so, presumably, they should not get any PIP or ESA, but the normal jobseeker’s allowance, until they are eventually sanctioned for not trying hard enough to get a job.

Mike states that this is beyond satire, because he commented in an earlier post about Crabb’s bizarre views on homosexuality. Crabb believed that homosexuality could be cured, and supported CARE, a Christian organisation that claimed it could cure gay people. In fact, gay cures don’t work. There have been a series of scandals in American involving these organisations, as well as concerns in the UK apart the potential harm they can do to the mental health of vulnerable people. Mike commented after Crabb announced his belief that there was a cure for gayness, that perhaps the new minister thought that Parkinson’s could also be cured.

And now he does.

Mike quotes Tom Pride as saying that satire died the moment this vile crew took power. Just like the pianist and satirist, Tom Lehrer, pointedly gave up satire after Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize after the bombing of Hanoi.

Mike’s article can be read at:http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2016/03/25/after-this-blog-joked-about-it-stephen-crabb-has-said-people-with-parkinsons-can-work-satire-really-is-dead/

Go there and be amazed at this pratt’s immense medical ignorance.

Now, I’m aware that some people might be able to work with Parkinson’s and Motor Neurone disease. Many years ago, I was interviewed for a place at Uni by a lecturer, who suffered from Parkinson’s. As I was told about his condition by one of the students, who was showing us around. He kindly told me about this gentleman’s condition so that I would not be alarmed when he did not stand up to greet me. It wasn’t because he was being hostile. It was because he was physically unable. I’m sure there are others like him that are able to keep working.

However, one of my own uncles, as Mike has already mentioned in the comments to his piece about Crabb, suffered from Parkinson’s. He was, like the lecturer, confined to a wheelchair and very definitely could not work because of the disease. It’s a progressively degenerative disease, which means it gets worse. It’s the reason we no longer see the American actor, Michael J. Fox, on our screens any more. He also suffers from this disease. It’s why he had to leave his hit series, Spin City. Crabb possibly believes people with Motor Neurone Disease can work, because he’s seen the severely disabled Stephen Hawking zooming around in his wheelchair and talking through his computer. Hawking is able to do so because he has the benefit of excellent care and computer engineers, which most people probably can’t afford. He has also been lucky enough to outlive vastly other sufferers from the Disease. I’m not expert, but from the reports about it on TV and the papers, it seems to me that most of the poor souls, who contract it only live for about two or three years at most.

My point here is not that there aren’t some fortunate souls who are able to carry on working, but that many, the majority of sufferer’s, can’t. And this should be enough for the government. If a doctor, a properly qualified doctor, not some paid clerk with Unum or Maximus, who just ticks boxes, says that a sufferer cannot work, then that should be enough for them. Anything else is pure bureaucratic quackery and pseudoscience based on right-wing wishful thinking.

As for Crabb himself, his occupation of the place vacated by IDS reminds me of another quote from the Surrealist artist, Fascist supporter and pervert Salvador Dali. During his sojourn in America, Dali declared that his aim was ‘to cretinise the public’. Dali was, however, despite his considerable personality flaws, one of the greatest painters of the 20th century. Looking at the Crabb and the current members of the cabinet, his desire to reduce the public to sheer imbecility seems to be pointless. Cameron and his big business paymasters have clearly found a better way to lower intellectual and moral standards by promoting the culpably stupid, like IDS, Osbo, and now Crabb.

Young Turks Show that Welfare Does Not Make People Lazy

Okay, this is another video from The Young Turks news programme. I thought this one was well worth posting up, as it tackles and disproves the right-wing, Conservative assertion that welfare payments make people lazy. Presented by John Iadarola, the show presents the findings by Harvard and MIT of a study of the effect of cash transfer programmes in seven countries. This shows that by and large such payments do not affect how hard people work.

In fact, they may even encourage people to work harder. Two of the studies were of programmes in African countries, in which the recipients were paid while learning new employment skills. In both of these programmes, the recipients worked even harder than before. This included a programme in Uganda, in which women were taught basic business skills. This resulted in the women working 61 per cent harder.

The programme also mentions the effect of a welfare programme in Canada, in which a whole town was guaranteed a basic income through ‘negative income tax’. Despite having a fixed income, everyone continued to work as hard as before. The only exceptions were new mothers, who chose to spend more time with their newborns, and teenagers. Iadarola points out that both of these are probably beneficial. Certainly for the babies, and also for teenagers, who could use that time to study for college. Here’s the programme.

Now I realise that this applies only to welfare payments made to people, who are already working. But nevertheless, this is a powerful blow against the Tory and Republican ideology that claims that welfare makes people lazy. The whole of New Labour/ Conservative welfare policy is based on this idea. After all, the Tories introduced their harsh requirements for the unemployed to spend all their time looking for work on the grounds that if they didn’t, those poor, hard-working people on whose behalf the Conservatives so despise the unemployed, would be upset by having to see their closed curtains in the morning as they all had a long lie-in.

And then there’s IDS’ plan to cut benefits made to people in poorly-paid jobs, and give them a ‘job coach’ to encourage them to go for better paid work. That’s scuppered by this finding as well.

And you can imagine heads at the Daily Heil exploding over the news about the Canadian town, whose new mothers were able to spend more time with their babies due to the government granting them a fixed income. Since forever and a day it seems the Mail and other right-wing rags have been criticising women for daring to go to work, rather than staying at home to look after their children. This is part of the paper’s general anti-feminist bias. Now they should be delighted that, if women are given a guaranteed income, more of them will take time off to care for their children. But as it involves people being given money by the state – ordinary people, that is, not hard-working multi-millionaires like Viscount Rothermere – you can feel their hackles rising from here. The paper and its proprietor clearly believe that only the rich should be allowed to avoid paying tax. It’s why Lord Rothermere is another one whose non-dom, despite having lived all his life in the UK. And as for women taking time off work, rather than leaving work altogether, they really resent that, as it means that firms have to pay them for not working, as well as keep their jobs open and find someone else to do the job while they’re off lazing about, not having sleepless nights feeding their baby, changing nappies and cleaning infantile vomit off of everything.

I was told by a friend of mine with a background in economics and finance that a number of European parties, like the German Social Democrats, have advocated policy of a national wage – a payment everyone gets in order for them to live, and live decently. The experiment by the Canadians seems to show that it’s a good idea.

Which means that this is one finding you definitely won’t see published in the press.

And the study as a whole definitively shows that when IDS, Osbo and the rest of the carrion-eaters over at Tory HQ start going on about how lazy the unemployed or low paid are, they really don’t know what they’re talking about.

‘Frivolous and Vexatious’: Legal Obstruction to the Official Inquiry into the Deaths of Slaves

I’m aware that I haven’t been blogging as much as I should have over the past few weeks. As I’ve explained, I’ve got caught up in other things. I’ve also been too depressed and angry at the government and its smarmy, self-satisfied aristocratic servants that I really haven’t been able to face sitting down at the computer to write about them.

This little piece of historical fact was so telling, that I felt I had to put it up. It shows how little official attitudes towards the deaths of the poor and powerless have changed in certain sections of the establishment since the days of slavery.

I used to do voluntary work in the Empire and Commonwealth Museum when it was here in Bristol, helping to catalogue the materials they had on slavery and the slave trade. One of the official government papers published in 1831 describing the reforms the British government was trying to push through the Caribbean legislatures to improve the conditions for its enslaved peoples contained the official correspondence on cruelty cases in St. Kitt’s and Nevis, and the failure of the islands’ grand jury to convict Walley and Swindell, the manager and attorney of Stapleton’s Estate belonging to Lord Combermere. Walley and Swindell had been prosecuted for the murder of three slaves – Bolam, Davis, and Cousins; the manslaughter of a fourth, Innes, and the maltreatment of three more, Frances, Monmouth and George Tobin. The Grand Jury, however, had thrown these out, declaring them to be ‘frivolous and vexatious’. See the government blue book – House of Commons Papers 1831: The Slave Population 1831.

Sound familiar? I’m afraid it does!

I’ve blogged repeatedly about how Mike over at Vox Political/ Benefits Bloodbath, and the other Left-wing bloggers demanding the release of the government’s stats on the numbers who’ve died after ATOS declared them fit and well have had their requests turned down. And in their case, the government’s excuse had been exactly the same – the requests were vexatious.

Vexatious: That’s how a jury composed of planters and other slave owners in the 1830s Caribbean described their government’s attempts to prosecute two of their members for the murder and abuse of seven human beings, who were denied their freedom as the private property of their owners.

It’s how the DWP under the Gentleman Ranker, Iain Duncan Smith, serving a government led by two aristos, Cameron and Osborne, describe attempts by ordinary citizens to hold them to account for those killed by their policies.

I’ve blogged along with Mike, the Angry Yorkshireman, and so many others, about the way workfare has effectively become a form of slavery. This provides further proof that Cameron, Osborne, IDS and co really are throwbacks to the 19th century slavemasters, jealous of their power of life and death over their workers.

There is one difference, however. In the 19th century even some of the most reactionary of the British Tories could be determined to end slavery. In those cases, the head of the Colonial Office, Viscount Goderich, along with the Chief Justice for Nevis, George Webbe, and Presidents Maxwell of St. Kitt’s and Maynard of Nevis were angered by the failure of prosecution to demand further action and changes to the law in order to prevent further miscarriages of justice. This present Tory crew and their media cheerleaders are determined to do the opposite, and make it even more difficult for ordinary people, the powerless, the disabled, to hold their masters to justice. And if we let them carry on, there will be slavery, real slavery, in 21st century Britain, presided over by a cruel, indifferent and sneering establishment.

TV on Tuesday: Celebs in the Workhouse

The past five Tuesday evenings, the Beeb has been showing the series 24 Hours in the Past. This is pretty much a reality TV show with an historical slant. Instead of being thrown into a jungle and then made to survive, or compete against each other to produce the finest cakes or dishes, each week the programme’s cast of celebrities are required to go back to a certain period in history and do some of the nastiest, dirtiest or most unpleasant work from the period. It’s like Tony Robinson’s 2004 Channel 4, The Worst Jobs in History, but with a crew of six as the unfortunate Baldricks forced to labour and grub for their living like the inhabitants of Victorian slums. Or the rookeries of 18th century London. Or whatever.

This week, however, they reach the very nadir of poverty and desperation: the workhouse. The blurb for the programme states that the workhouse was partly intended to reform the corrupt and indolent character of its inmates. It’s therefore a kind of irony that Ann Widdecombe is so bolshie, that she finds herself placed in solitary.

The blurbs for it in the Radio Times state

As the six celebrities stroll up to an impressive redbrick institution for their final Victorian experience, Miquita Oliver reckons it looks like somewhere she’d go for a weekend spa. Hardly. It’s the workhouse, where there are no rewards, only punishments, explains Ruth Goodman. So immediately bolshie Ann Widdecombe is put in solitary confinement.

In order to “reform the moral character of the undeserving poor”, workhouse inmates were degraded,k overworked and mistreated, taking the time travellers almost to breaking point.

Tempers are definitely fraying but to give them credit, nobody shouts “I’m a celebrity … get me out of here”. It’s been a filthy, gruelling history lesson.

And

Hungry and penniless after stirring up a worker’s rebellion in the Victorian-era potteries, there’s only one place left for Ann Widdecombe, Zoe Lucker, Colin Jackson, Alistair McGowan, Tyger Drew-Honey and Miquita Oliver. Clad in rough uniforms and clumsy clogs they enter the harsh world of the workhouse – the 19th century equivalent of the benefits system – where they are immediately stripped of their belongings and indentities. Filthy and exhausted the celebrities must endure relentless graft and grind for their basic necessities. Will they rise to this most daunting challenge and prove they can work their way out of the workhouse and back to the comforts of the 21st century?

As left-wing bloggers like Tom Pride, the Angry Yorkshireman, Johnny Void, Stilloaks, Jayne Linney, Mike from Vox Political and myself have pointed out, the ethos underlying the workhouse – that of ‘less eligibility’ – has returned to 21st century Britain in the form of the various tests, examinations and ‘work related activity’ benefit claimants are forced to go through in order to show that they really are looking for work, if fit, and genuinely deserving of invalidity or sickness support if they cannot. And as the government has made it very plain it wants to cut down on welfare expenditure in order to shrink the state back to its size in the 1930s, conditions are being made as hard as possible so that increasingly few people are considered deserving of state support.

And although not confined within the prison-like environs of the workhouse, its drudgery has been brought back in the form of workfare and the other requirements to perform ‘work-related activity’. This consists in performing unpaid, spurious voluntary work for particular charities, or big businesses like Tesco and so boosting their already bloated profits.

So far, conditions have not become quite so appalling as the Victorian workhouse, but real, grinding poverty, including starvation and rickets has reappeared in Britain, brought about by the Tories’ and Lib Dems’ atavistic desire to return to the very worst of the ‘Victorian values’ lauded by Maggie Thatcher. So far, 45 people have starved to death due to the withdrawal of their benefits, but the true number is probably much, much higher, perhaps 50,000 plus.

And it’s significant that while celebs, including a former Tory MP, are prepared to participate in a programme like this, the Tories have most definitely refused to experience its modern equivalent for themselves. Iain Duncan Smith was invited to try living on the same amount as a job-seeker for a week. He flatly refused, declaring that it was just ‘a publicity stunt’.

Well, what did you expect from ‘RTU’ Smith, the Gentleman Ranker. He’s a wancel (hat tip to Maxwell for this term), whose cowardice in facing his policies’ victims has been more than amply demonstrated over and again. Such as when this mighty warrior, who, according to David Cameron, ‘can crack skulls with his kneecaps’, hid in a laundry basked to hide from demonstrators in Edinburgh. Or when he sneaked out the back of a Job Centre he was opening in Bath to avoid meeting the demonstrators there.

Now I’ve no problem whatsoever with history programmes showing how harsh conditions were the bulk of people in the past, who didn’t belong to small percentage that formed the aristocracy or the middle classes. It gives a more balanced idea of the past in contrast to those programmes, that concentrate more on the lives of the elite. These programmes can give an idealised picture of previous ages, in which social relations were somehow more harmonious, and the lower orders were properly grateful and respectful to paternal employers and aristocratic masters. There’s been a touch of this, for example, in the Beeb’s Sunday night historical drama, Downton Abbey.

For most people, life was not a round of glamorous society balls, or a glorious career in the armed forces abroad, or in parliament at home. Most people did not have the luxury of fine food, wines and spirits, with their wishes attended by legions of dutiful servants.

Rather, the reality for most of the country’s population in the past was hard work, grinding poverty, and the threat of a very early death through disease and malnutrition.

However, there is also a danger with programmes like this in that they can give the impression of continual progress and improvement. There’s always the risk that some will look at the hard conditions of the workhouse and Victorian Britain generally with complacency. Well, that was terrible then, but everything’s somehow much better now. Things have improved greatly since then, and we have nothing to worry about. Indeed, the standard Tory attitude is that conditions have improved too much, to the point where the ‘undeserving poor’ have returned and are living very well from the taxes of ‘hard-working people’ like themselves, and other aristocrats, financiers and bankers.

For others, however, the programme may provide a salutary object lesson in the kind of country ours will be come once again, if the Tories aren’t stopped. One of the commenters on either Tom Pride’s or Johnny Void’s blog dug out a ConDem proposal for something very much like ‘indoor relief’ – as the workhouse system was called – for the disabled in the form of special units to provide training and accommodation to the handicapped.

In actually fact, the workhouses weren’t just a feature of Victorian England. They lasted right up to 1947, when they were made obsolete under the new welfare state.

Now with the Tories trying to destroy state welfare provision completely, and sell off the NHS, there’s a danger that they’ll return. The Tories have already brought back unpaid labour and less eligibility. They just haven’t got round to putting everyone on them in a prison-like environment yet.

In the meantime, it should be very interesting indeed to see how six people from the 21st century fare in the harsh conditions of the 19th. And especially a former Tory MP, like Ann Widdecombe.

Private Eye on Hugh Montgomery-Massingberd and the Resurgence of the Aristocracy

One of the reviews in the collection of pieces from Private Eye’s literary column, Lord Gnome’s Literary Companion, is of Hugh Montgomery-Massingberd’s The Field Book of Country Houses and their Owners: Family Seats of the British Isles from 1988. Massingberd’s a true, blue-blooded aristo, who wrote a ‘Heritage’ column in the Torygraph. In the book, he made it very clear that he stood for a return of the aristocracy, their power and prestige, after years of Socialism as a ‘social restoration’ under Maggie Thatcher. It’s a view that Private Eye took issue with, and put the boot in accordingly.

Despite being nearly thirty years old now, the review’s still relevant. Cameron is a toff leading a cabinet of toffs – George Osborne, the scion of the baronet of Ballymoney, Nick Clegg, and IDS, who is himself a great landowner, even if he isn’t a member of the titled aristocracy. It is a government that has consistently defended and promoted the interests and power of the rich against those of the poor, and made very sure that the rest of us are kept under their heel.

Their welfare reforms, and the massive curtailment of workers’ rights under the Tories have meant that people with a job now live in fear of being laid off, while those fortunately enough to get jobseekers allowance are effectively treated as helots – state slaves – by the self-described ‘creators of wealth’, who then compete for gaining their free labour on workfare.

It’s a restoration of the old feudal order of serfdom, but under the guise of preparing the unemployed for the labour market, and making them sturdy, self-reliant individuals. As the business leaders imagine themselves to be, all the while they’re demanding more tax breaks and subsidies from the government.

And UKIP are no alternative. They’re further to the Right than the Tories and Lib Dems. The vice-chairman of the Kippers in Wales was a member of the Traditional Britain group. These stand for the restoration of the feudal order, the destruction of the welfare state, the privatisation of the NHS, no immigration and positive no Muslims.

The Eye’s review, then, is a pretty prescient description of the attitudes and motives behind this government, nearly three decades later.

Nob Value

Hugh Montgomery-Massingberd has one great qualification for his line of work. When the toffs he writes about – Cruwys of Cruwys Morchard, Dymoke of Scrivelsby, Fetherstonehaugh-Frampton of Moreton, Houison Craufurd of Craufurdland, Foljambe of Osberton, Steuart Forthringham of Murthly – hear that he is on his way, they must feel pleasantly reassured. For Montgomery-Massivesnob is the only hack in the business with a name as ludicrous as theirs.

It has been the making of him. Massivesnob is no detached architecture critic or social historian. He is himself of the class he portrays: his articles are themselves exhibits in the show, if not the main turn. It is useless to wonder whether or not he realizes that this is why the Telegraph employs him. So much reflection is not in the nature of a nob.

Massivesnob writes a column in the Torygraph called ‘Heritage’. This is the persuasive sales word of our time, signifying anything old and agreeable which might form the basis of a day trip. We have even been encouraged to think that there is such a thing as, contradiction in terms, a ‘national heritage’. Somehow we have accepted that being herded around big houses, behind ropes, by self-important matrons means that we are ourselves the true legatees of the aristocracy.

Massivesnob, quite rightly, has no time for this confidence trick. When he says ‘heritage’ he means it: the inheritance of a name and of a house together, by a private family. He has conducted a long campaign to disabuse us of our belief in a ‘national heritage’ and to reassert the rights of the squirearchy. (His insistence on this has, doubtless, been a reaction to his own family house having been made over to the National Trust before his birth.) And he is admirably purist. These reprinted articles from the pre-lifestyle Field are not about great houses – or interesting people. True squires, they have no other distinction than their success at transmission.

That Massivesnob is now in demand to write similar pieces as a ‘Heritage’ column in a national newspaper says something about the times. For years he snuffled away at family trees as the editor of Burke’s Peerage, scribbling too for the country magazines. he joined the Torygraph as obituaries editor. But now his pieces have become more than antiquarian. Hymns to private property are apropos. The landed are richer than they have ever been in their lives – and even council-house buyers are beginning to feel happier about family seats.

Not that any of this is made explicit. Massivesnob’s appearances in print are winningly slapstick. His own ancestors invariably feature – usually his feminist great-grandmother, who tragically turned the family pub, the Massingberd Arms, into a temperance house. And his ‘robust digestion’ also stars, as he caps each visit by putting himself outside ‘a couple of jumbo cold bangers and a glass of iced lemon tea’, or a large helping of treacle tart. The words ‘ravishing’, ‘luscious’, ‘exquisite’ and ‘engagingly feudal’ exhaust his adjectival resource. Two obsessions recur: Lincolnshire, ‘the still undiscovered Lincolnshire’, and cricket, as played between the big house and the village.

The appearance of this buffoon must be entrancing to the proprietors of what he enthusiastically calls ‘the dimmer sort of seat’. Here is someone who sincerely thinks nothing in the world so fine as ‘the proud distinction of being, say, Fulford of Fulford, Fursdon of Fursdon, Kelly of Kelly or Spurway of Spurway’, who, quite fantastically, is as gratified as they are themselves by their own existence.

Any further qualities are beside the point, though squirearchical accomplishments are loyally applauded. Burrell of Knepp Castle’s appointments ‘have included the chairmanship of the North West Sussex Water Board’; Staunton of Staunton is ‘an enthusiastic beagler’; Sir Anthony Milbank of Barningham is ‘an enthusiastic Gun and enjoys fishing’; while Robert Scrysoure Steuart Forthringham of Pourie and Murthly is a wizard with a bow and arrow.

Clearly the social system that supports such accomplishments must be maintained. As Cookson of Meldon, owner of a measly 5,000 acres, somewhat laboriously explains: ‘If the people of this country wish houses such as Meldon to continue to exist as part of the heritage – especially when the occupants are of the family for whom the house was originally built – then more consideration must be paid to them financially to help keep the system in being.’

Absolutely. And it will be, partly because the National Trust, ostensibly a democratic movement, has transformed public perception of what big estates represent. The houses were the pretty part of the whole social organisation; they are the only part now on view; the system itself is thus glamorized by them. For himself, Massivesnob is quite unembarrassed to state that the fortunes of the Hobhouses of Hadspen were founded on slavery.

Conveniently for the National Trust, those who traipse round the houses, or buy picture-books like this, do so in order to fantasize about themselves as owners, not as scullions. Massivesnob, more lucidly, responded to the ‘euphoria’ of the budget earlier this year with an article looking forward to the return of servants, jovially reminiscing about the days when drunken gamekeepers could be shot.

The ‘heritage’ mania has softened us up for a return to inherited wealth. Hugh Montgomery-Massingberd may be a richly Wodehousian figure, but his book, lauding the privately owned, is symptomatic. It is the correlative to Peregrine Worsthorne’s recent articles about the desirability in short of ‘a social restoration’. Come the day, of course, Massivesnob knows where he will be – in his seat again. But the fans of his snufflings seem curiously unaware of where that leaves them: which is sat upon.

The Young Turks: Racism More Acute in Recession

This is another Young Turks’ video. I know I’ve posted a lot of them, but bear with me. This one’s also relevant to the situation here in the UK. The Turks’ in this one are talking about a study in the American liberal magazine, Mother Jones. Black Americans have suffered disproportionately in the presence recession. This isn’t just because they have most of their wealth invested in property, which they’ve lost due to the banking crisis and sub-prime mortgages. It’s also because racial prejudice amongst Whites also increases during recession.

I know Black people here in Britain, who have had exactly the same experiences as those reported in the magazine article. I was talking to a Black friend about a fortnight ago, who has a very stereotypically Black first name. He’s a businessman, but found that fewer of his potential customers called him back if he used his first name. So he took to using his far more mainstream second name in order to get more trade. This is exactly what the Mother Jones’ article reported Black American businesspeople had experienced.

The Turks state clearly in this piece that it shouldn’t be about blaming Whites for unconscious racism, but simply of acknowledging it and finding ways to move on to create better, more non-racist society. It’s extremely wise words, as studies have also found that Whites become more racist when somebody accuses them of racism. This last piece of research was not lost on one extreme Right-wing Canadian site, that recommended that Conservatives use that study to attack anti-racism and affirmative action policies.

I’ve decided to post the video here because, like the other Young Turks videos I’ve posted, it also relevant to the situation here in Britain. Not only is the experience of Black business people losing trade because of their name the same in America and Britain, but Black people over here have also suffered disproportionately due to the recession. Johnny Void has pointed this out in his last piece detailing the racist background of one Iain Duncan Smith, the mass butcher in charge of the DWP.

And the problem has been made even more urgent by today’s announcement by the Fuhrage that if the Kippers ever gain power, they will scrap the anti-racism legislation.

The stories about boarding houses, bed and breakfasts and hotels not taking Blacks, Irish and dogs are not myths. One of my uncle is Irish, and he suffered that discrimination while working on a site. Clearly, the Generalissimo of the legions of squalid weirdoes is upset that this kind of behaviour is no longer legal.

Welfare Weekly: Cost of Benefit Sanctions to Unemployed Soared 3,000%

Welfare Weekly has this article, Cost To Jobseekers Of Benefit Sanctions Rockets 3,000% reporting on the analysis of government unemployment statistics by the PCS union. It begins by describing the massive increase in the costs to the unemployed of benefit sanctions, the numbers forced to use foodbanks because of these, and, most worrying, the number of children, who were penalised last year by the new regime. It begins

The cost to job seekers of having their benefit payments stopped has rocketed by 3,000% under the Tory-led coalition Government, new figures show.

Analysis of Government figures by the PCS union reveals that the value of Jobseeker’s Allowance (JSA) payments sanctioned in the year to September 2014 was £355 million, compared to just £11 million in 2009/2010.

PCS says the shocking figure explains why benefit sanctions have been directly linked to a surge in food bank users.

The food bank charity Trussell Trust supported more than 913,000 people with three-days worth of emergency food in 2013/14.

The new research from PCS is published ahead of a Dispatches investigation to be broadcast this evening into the government’s sanctions regime.

The documentary will feature details of a new report from a coalition of major churches, which reveals that nearly 100,000 children were affected by benefit sanctions last year.

Under changes to the sanctions regime, the length of time sanctions can be imposed for has increased, with the minimum set at four weeks, rising to 13 weeks and up to three years.

The article quotes Mark Serwotka, the General Secretary of the PCS Union and TUC General Secretary Frances O’Grady on the injustice and cruelty of the sanctions system. Serwotka remarked on the way the regime punishes and vilifies the unemployed for their inability to find work. They do not help them to find jobs, and should be scrapped immediately. O’Grady also comments on the failings and injustice of a system that has reduced 100,000 children to poverty, and which has become a maze in which even the most hard-working and desperate to find a job can be sanctioned for the most trivial infraction of the rules. She also criticised the system for the way Jobcentre staff no longer provide positive help, but merely bully both claimants and their frontline staff.

The article can be read at http://www.welfareweekly.com/cost-to-jobseekers-of-benefit-sanctions-rockets-3000/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+welfareweekly+%28Welfare+Weekly%29.

Serwotka has spoken out many times about the failings of the benefits system and its victimisation of claimants. Owen Jones quotes him extensively in his book Chavs. His and O’Grady’s comments are entirely accurate summaries of the present grim, degrading state of the benefits system. It’s a regime entirely based on the humiliation and degradation of the very poorest in our society, promoted by fake science and the fear-mongering and naked hatred of right-wing rags, particularly those owned by Murdoch and Dacre. And it takes its lead from the incompetent bully at the top, IDS, who seems to be trying to make up in vindictiveness for his manifest unsuitability for real power.

Vox Political Calls on DWP Staff to Oppose IDS’ Persecution of the Poor and Sick

Mike posted this piece, DWP employees: Do the right thing – because Iain Duncan Smith never will, calling on DWP staff to obey the dictates of their conscience and start collecting information on the sheer viciousness and brutal determination to destroy the very lives of those the benefits system was set up to support by their master. It begins

The effect of Iain Duncan Smith’s ‘welfare reforms’ should, by now, be plain for all to see: Increased poverty – including child poverty, the torture of starvation for people who have been sanctioned off of benefit and cannot afford food, hopelessness, despair, suicide.

We saw the signs as long ago as 2012, when the man we call RTU (Return To Unit) and SNLR (Services No Longer Required) launched his famous rant on the subject against Owen Jones.

This blog reported it at the time: “Irately wagging his finger in Mr Jones’s general direction, he barked: ‘We’ve heard a lot from you. I didn’t hear you screaming about two and a half million people who were parked, nobody saw them, for over 10 years, not working, no hope, no aspiration. We are changing their lives; I’m proud of doing that. Getting them off-benefit is what we’re going to do.‘”

Establishment figures like David Dimbleby, it seems, wanted us to take this at face value – that the Secretary-in-a-State was going to put people to work (whether they liked it or not).

Now we know that wasn’t what he meant.

He meant he was going to force people off benefit by perverting the system in the worst way possible. He was going to order his staff to find any slight excuse to inflict benefit sanctions on society’s most vulnerable.

Mike itemises the various ways the system of sanctions has made the situation of the poor much, much worse. Like trapping them in a cycle of debt, torturing the innocent, using fraudulent and illegal reasons to find any pretext for throwing people off benefit. His staff are so callous, that they have actually asked those suffering from suicidal thoughts why they haven’t committed suicide. And finally left the homeless to die of cold and starvation in the street.

IDS will never stop this persecution and victimisation himself. He must be forced to do so by the people below him.

Mike goes to urge them that

It is time to start copying information. Iain Duncan Smith will want to cover up all his dirty little secrets and it is likely that his shredder will be working day and night if he thinks someone else might discover any inconvenient truths.

If there are any inconvenient truths, then as servants of the country – rather than servants of the Conservatives or the Secretary of State – it is your duty to collect this evidence, preserve it and bring it forward after he has been ousted.

Nobody can order you to do this. Undoubtedly you will be discouraged from doing it; there are likely to be rules that say you must not, invoking the same national interest that Yr Obdt Srvt is invoking here.

This is a matter for your conscience.

Do you think Iain Duncan Smith and his associates should be allowed to go unpunished for the harm they have caused?

Do what you think is right.

The article can be read at: http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2015/03/03/dwp-employees-do-the-right-thing-because-iain-duncan-smith-never-will/

There have already been a number of courageous whistleblowers, who have had the honesty and integrity to denounce the lies in RTU’s administration. These include former Atos personnel who revealed the existence of the quotas they were given for throwing people off benefits. Others have shown the weird system of incentives the department uses to encourage its staff to sanction people. Like Easter eggs, and even ‘marshall’s badges’, of the same type I can remember getting as small child as part of a Milky Bars’ promotion. There’s nothing wrong with Milky Bars, except, perhaps, the usual dangers from eating too much chocolate. There is, however, everything wrong with the DWP and its cowboy management.

I have to say, though, I am not hopeful of Mike getting much a response from this post. It seems to me that the rot has gone too far, and those with any shred of self-respect, integrity, or simply competence, have departed the DWP long ago. Those who are left are the cruel, the callous, the vicious, the incompetent and the bullying. Exactly like their master.

But please, if there is anyone out there concerned at the way twenty years of maladministration has corrupted the system, then PROVE ME WRONG.

Vox Political on the Tories Gradually Stripping the Elderly of their Pensions

Mike over at Vox Political has this article asking the question Cameron promises to protect pensioners’ benefits. Do you believe him? Mike points out that Cameron broke his election pledges not to introduce means testing for certain benefits, and to the NHS. He stated that spending on the Health Service was to be ring-fenced against cuts.

He broke these promises, and is set to break his promise to protect pensions.

The pensionable age is being raised. Firefighters will be sacked, and thus lose their pensions, if they fail the fitness test. Francis Maude wishes pensions to be accessed only through the internet, which will prevent many pensioners from getting theirs. The Tories are also going to end the protection for those on Pension Credit, and Iain Duncan Smith is mooting ending the free TV licences, bus passes and winter fuel allowance as part of his benefit cap. And pensioners will definitely be subject to the bedroom tax.

Mike’s article begins

Why should you believe a word David Cameron says?

He has repeated a pledge not to introduce means testing for benefits such as bus passes, TV licences and the winter fuel allowance, if elected (not re-elected; he didn’t get enough support for that in 2010) in May.

This is the man who “looked down the barrel of a camera” (as he describes it) in 2010, promised to protect the NHS, and to tell any cabinet minister proposing cuts to frontline services that they should go away and think again.

He is denying the state pension to increasing numbers of people with a staged plan to raise the pensionable age. Members of Parliament, meanwhile, will receive transitional protection as the pensionable age rises – meaning they won’t miss out. Members of the public fund 60 per cent of Parliamentarians’ pensions.

The article is at: http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2015/02/23/cameron-promises-to-protect-pensioners-benefits-do-you-believe-him/.

The Republicans in America were moaning under George ‘Dubya’ Bush about how greedy senior citizens were. They would very definitely have liked to cut their pensions, but were well aware that if they did so, they’d lose vital electoral support. And so they complained bitterly about their greed and how selfish they were, when everyone else was having to tighten their belts.

The Tories have copied much of their rhetoric and strategy from the Repugs. There can be little doubt that like the Republicans, they want to get their hands on senior citizens’ pensions and cut them.

Do not trust anything Cameron says, and do not give him your vote.