This is another short video from RT covering Prime Minister’s Questions the other day. Labour’s Ian Blackmore stated that research has shown that families on Universal Credit will lose £1350 of benefits. This will make them worse off. Universal Credit is fast becoming May’s Poll Tax. This is a reference to Margaret Thatcher, whose administration fell in 1989 due to the protests against her attempts to replace the rates with a universal poll tax. And, he asks rhetorically, isn’t it about time she stopped talking about its implementation and did something to fix it.
May responds by talking a lot of nonsense and lies about how Universal Credit isn’t just about Universal Credit, but about supporting people into work, giving them the skills they need to work, and then, once they are in work, allowing them to keep more of the money they earn.
Bilge. All of it. The government doesn’t support people into work. It just hits them with sanctions, which they claim are to provide them with the motivation to find work, but which are simply a rationale for throwing claimants off benefits on the most flimsy of pretexts. Or phoning them up to harangue them for being on the dole, which they then claim is also motivating them. This is another lie. It’s just abuse and harassment. As providing people with skills to get into work, this presumably means the workfare, in which people are expected to work for supermarkets and other big corporations simply for the benefit money, rather than be paid a proper wage and the corporations actually having to employee real workers and pay them proper salaries. It does not provide people with the skills they need. In fact, it actively prevents them from acquiring them, as has happened with the graduates, who had voluntary work lined up in museums, but were told that this was not part of the scheme and they had to fill shelves for Tesco instead. As for allowing people to retain more of their earnings, that’s another whopper. The tax breaks implemented by the Tories are designed to benefit the rich 25 per cent, and the tax burden has been shifted lower down the scale to the poor, who are now subsidizing them. Which is just how the Tories think it all should be, as they still have the feudal attitude that the poor should be bound to supporting their rich masters for as little as possible.
Rather than making people richer, Universal Credit, and the rest of the Tories’ welfare policies, are designed to make ordinary people poorer for the benefit of the rich. And May has told so many half-truths and lies in her reply to Blackmore that I’m amazed she could keep a straight face.
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