More Problems With The Welfare Card Idea

I was thinking, on my way up to the Post Office, about the welfare cash card idea that flared up, like a pustulent sore, recently. I’m sure it will return.

Is the idea to put all the claimant’s money onto the card? How else would it work? How would the money get onto the card if it’s paid, as it is currently, into the person’s bank? Wouldn’t the bank have something to say about this; after all don’t they make money from their own transactions.

If I want to pay for something from my local shop, or any small retailer (i.e. not a supermarket), there is always a minimum spend requirement for debit cards. This is about £7. I’m told this is to cover bank charges. Wouldn’t this apply for payments made using a welfare card? That money has to come off the card/from the claimant to the business, no doubt at a cost. This means that claimants will be forced to spend more than they’d like just to get what they need, even if the money is frontloaded onto the card.

If the payments are to be put directly onto the card then where does that leave banks? Who then will issue these cards and how long will it take to get one to a new claimant. How will they get their card filled up; can this be done only at banks or job centres? How will people get to these places? Will all banks have access to the DWP ‘central account’ for the purpose of topping up a card?

Surely this will leave people absolutely vulnerable; if my debit card gets stolen it has no intrinsic worth assuming the thief cannot access my account. If a welfare card gets stolen it has money directly onto it (even if the thief can only buy certain things – he’ll likely sell it on the black market). This could well be a lot of money, depending on the benefits involved. A single parent is likely to have JSA/ESA along with tax credits and potentially Housing Benefit, all under Universal Credit as the latter is no longer paid direct to the landlord. What about two parent families: who gets the card, whose card has the child/family benefits?

There are so many unanswered questions. In my opinion, though, this is simply about getting the credit card company to make money out of the welfare system. It isn’t about limiting spending or controlling behaviour; as I’ve demonstrated the practicalities involved ask too much of any single card system as to be utterly regressive and self defeating. This is a no mark Tory wannabe cosying up to big business trying to make a name for himself. I’ve no doubt he’ll return with more on this nonsense.

Fear and Scrounging

I’ve mentioned this before, but I’ve never actually watched it before (and with good reason), but having my breakfast I just accidentally caught five minutes of BBC’s Saints and Scroungers. My god, I just had to put finger to key and mash!

In about half an hour I have to catch a bus to town to do my shopping; how do I know there won’t be some DWP private dick hiding in a car watching me. How do I know he won’t be filing a report saying “well, he can walk and carry shopping, clearly he can work!” That’s the point: who else is the target audience but the daytime unemployed. The people the media criticise for consuming daytime media. Be afraid.

In the space of the five minutes I exposed myself to, I have gone from calm to shit scared. This is what this awful propagandist populist (you can tell, it’s hosted by Matt Allwright) rubbish has done to me. This is what black and white Third Man style stock ‘reconstruction’ footage of investigators with long lenses or sat in cars with clipboards has achieved. This is the aim: to create a sense of fear. This wouldn’t be out of place in a Philip K Dick novel: it’s almost pre-crime.

It’s easy then to imply that there are 100% of scroungers in the system because 100% of the ‘scroungers’ on the show are guilty. That’s what you are expected to think and to take away from this. You are meant to infer the same conditions in the real world: that 100% of claimants are scroungers.

Most of it seems to be pointless ‘reconstruction’ shots: the investigative montage, the closeup of a pen ticking a box the representation of the correct procedure of reporting things to the DWP. There’s even a DWP man on hand to recount the tale, in a tedious clipped monotone, of one particular scrounger who dared to claim while cleaning windows. Now to be fair, I had to switch off at this point because I couldn’t tolerate anymore of this fascist nonsense. It may be that the ‘scrounger’ was secretly trafficking children through his vast underground network of murderous window cleaners while claiming JSA as a front.

Or it may be that he just wanted to get on with his life and have a decent bit of money in his pocket. Compared to the likes of Eon, Amazon, Starbucks, Vodafone, and the countless array of corporate filth and rich scum that avoid and evade millions I can’t really find it within me to castigate this evil doer.

Yet the programme has served its purpose; make me scared. Frighten people from claiming what they might well be due, never mind breaking the law. Compare and contrast; that’s the point. Here’s a young lad that’s struggling to look for work (though they choose to show footage of him playing xbox with his cousin) who, no doubt, succeeded in the end (again I switched off). Then here’s another scrounger. The saints look all the more divine and the scroungers look all the more greedy and heinous. That’s the idea – and all it takes is a bit of elbow grease (though not cleaning windows) determination and diligence and you’ll succeed at finding a job. Though the real message is there’s now one less job in the economy thanks to that kid getting a job.

Never mind a flatlined economy. Never mind austerity. Never mind divide and rule. Never mind that the labour market is nothing but short term morsels and not careers and vocations. Just keep on applying. Do some workfare, we’ll call it work experience. That way people can see how committed you are. It’s the race to the bottom live on your screen.

Legacy

The Tories say: “it’s tough times; you must accept what’s available. The world doesn’t owe you a living.”

That last part always offends me. Of course the world owes you a living – you were born into and onto this earth, how can you not be entitled to a stake and a share? Who are they to tell us otherwise? Why do we let these born to rule – people who have been owed everything and continually feel the most entitled among us – elites treat us this way?

If one must accept what’s available then surely that is a failure of government? The Tories protest that the state is a burden and must be reduced (i.e. sold off), but they are the state: that’s what government is. They by and large come from the state: that’s what the aristocracy is. The ruling elite who have all the advantages in life handed to them on a plate. So therefore their argument must be seen as either an admission of failure bordering on ineptitude perhaps even negligence, or an abrogation of responsibility. If the state cannot provide decent opportunities for the people, then something is drastically amiss.

So why must I accept what’s available – particularly when what’s available is no use to society at all. Dodgy and non-jobs on Universal Jobmatch, or pointless sales/admin nonsense from agencies (work that I do not feel remotely suited to, as I abhor all the shit): that’s the choice. 

Why can’t I negotiate for and find something more useful. Why are we not structuring society around what needs to be done from a communal perspective, thereby building and integrating those communities. People working together in compassionate environments that value creativity and intellect; not a world dominated by ruthless ambition, profit, and selfishness. The Tories won’t even consider such a negotiation.

This is Thatcher’s legacy: save yourself, put walls between yourself and others and harden yourself to become callous and powerful. That is the world all around us and you don’t have to have been born during her reign to see it. As Owen Jones points out, you don’t need to have been born during the Blitz to know what life was like.

Thatcher was in many ways lucky – as well as ideologically motivated. The north sea oil revenue came online as she came into power. That money was the greatest opportunity for the government to put money aside for the proverbial rainy day tjhat has become all our tomorrows; 450 billion or so. She squandered it to buy votes through the sale of council property that was never replaced. The standard of living before she came to power was greater than it is now, never mind the oil shocks of the seventies that were, as the sub prime shocks of today, not the fault of Labour, even if New Labour were and still are a Thatcherite phenomenon.

People on the radio today moaning about the possibility of raising the age which people can enlist lament our ‘soft’ society. These are the people that would have no doubt lined the funeral march last week, doffing their caps to the woman that destroyed those ‘hard’ industries, replacing them with the service and financial industry of today.

If it is true that society is full of weedy wet liberal pinkos then it must have been Thatcher that made it so. Or would they argue that life down the pit was no tougher than life at the information seam in a call centre. Perhaps it was no tougher in the sense that the latter is soul destroying. Places where team leaders compete with each other for the favour of their masters by encouraging their members to work harder by tossing crème eggs at them like fish for performing seals.

That was a reference to a documentary inside a call centre where one particularly loathsome team leader used chocolate to ‘inspire’ his staff, rewarding them with an egg in return for saying an innocuous phrase during a call. What a waste of time and money; the bland erosion of the human soul.

And yet, as a rotten flower, the notion of ‘welfare dependency’ has blossomed from this muck. This is the laughable idea people are somehow made dependent by the state, even though people in and out of work need the same thing in a capitalist society: money –spending power, more accurately. A convenient excuse that allows the Tories to privatise the benefits system, which is surely their ultimate goal, already started with the Work Programme.

Among the ruins of our society laid low by the hammer fist of Thatcherite morality, people are left with nothing. They are forced to fight like hungry dogs for scraps thrown either carelessly or malevolently from the table of the masters and then chastised for having grown dependent. Animals will eat anything if they have to, so let’s call them animals. That way it becomes easier to separate the strivers from the shirkers. If you can’t find the wings to fly, then you deserve to fail – and don’t you dare to be dependent or different.

Gravedancing

In years to come will we be asked if we can remember the details of our lives the day we heard the news. I was at a bus stop listening to Radio 2 (unless I wasn't, details are sketchy). It's hard to remember anything or think clearly in the midst of this nauseating propaganda pea souper; the outpouring of Tory sycophancy and mistruth has been staggering - and it's still going on, partly because of the disturbances caused by 'leftists' dancing on Thatcher's (for it is she that I speak of) grave.

I am currently typing this (if, thanks to this broken keyboard, it can be called such) at Bristol library. On the way here I heard a couple of students, kids, on the seat behind me; one of them was saying that she wanted to get into 'sales'. That is the legacy of the 'iron lady'. Even when I was at school (which was during her heyday) I remember people saying similar things; one lad saying he wanted to get into accountancy. Even then I sneered - ok we need some people, I suppose, to deal with money matters, but to aspire to accountancy? In each case the motivation seems to be the same: it's good money. Whatever happened to true aspiration, with wanting to do something at least beneficial for society. While we might need people to count the coins, that's only because we live in a monetarist age.

There are better places to go to find a true representation of her reign of terror. Another Angry Voice is a blog on the links on this very page, while the Red Pepper has another analysis. Both will know doubt be ashes in the mouths of effusing Tory eulogists who, like Cameron, are happy to waste public money burying this creature while using the whole affair to launch into more ideological bollocks. I'm not going to engage in grave dancing, that's the sort of form the right wing media has (I seem to remember they 'celebrated' the sinking of the Belgrano with the phrase 'Gotcha'). This is how they operate, not I how operate.

Besides this isn't a victory: it's the marking of a new phase in the war against the Tory monied elite that worship Thatcher. The battle has not ended.

This whole business has revealed the Tories in a way they perhaps didn't realise. In their public eagerness to reveal their love for her warped and broken ideology they show their true colours in a way we could only have dreamed of during the Corporate Sports Festival and the Diamond Jubilee last year. Where it was ridiculous for GOve to suggest we all chip in to buy the Queen a new boat, we are told we must for out 10 million for a funeral.

It is now clear in a way it has never been before just how desperately wedded to a small minded ideology the Tories are, along with their hapless Libdem underlings. Every tribute is merely a thinly veiled pop at socialism/labour/the unions; a remark on how broken Britain was during the seventies. Yet it took a war and the vile rhetoric of the gutter press to shore up her support in the early years.

Noone can deny the devastating impact that is her legacy. No social housing at a time we are forced to undertake a 'spare room subsidy' (it's not a tax, remember!). She sold off the housing which of course gave more power to the banking sector (that she also supported). Why do people still have to rely on a huge millstone of debt - hundreds of thousands of pounds - just to get into a home! Thatcher allowed people to buy these houses, which of course is a vote winner, and never replaced them. Gone forever it seems is the notion of housing as a right and a communal resource. Now it's all housing bubbles and property speculation, all helped by banks that were unfettered in he eighties as never before. Where has that left us, well that's obvious to anyone with a brain surely.

Utilities were privatised in a purely ideological drive to destroy society leaving people with a dependence on market forces and profiteering corporations. This takes more money out of the economy as people have no choice but to spend their money on heating lighting and water. That is less money to be spent freely.

Perhaps the most nauseating part of her legacy is the perverse notion that she was an example to women. People the world over - including hopeless Hollywood actors like Streep - see her as a powerful icon of womanhood. They of course forget that she was backed by a very rich husband and was, ultimately, stabbed in the back by the stuffy patriarchy that remains in power to this day. There are very few women in the Tory party and in politics in general, yet most of them are obliged to pay this singular tribute to Thatcher just because she happened to be born with a particular set of chromosomes: had Thatcher not been the first, someone else would have. In my, masculine, opinion it means nothing. She did nothing to reform politics into a more gender equal environment, certainly didn't reform the attitudes of the ruling elite, and has left us with creatures as reprehensible and morally dead as the disgusting Edwina Currie and Theresa 'catwoman' May.

Yet since Monday the BBC has gone into overdrive, predictably I suppose, hosting an endless array of political superstars from yesteryear, from spitting image puppets like Douglas Hurd to Glasnost Gorbachev. It's like some ghastly TV reunion show. No doubt next week there will be wall to wall coverage of her corpse proceeding through the streets of a changed London, as oblivious in death as in life, to the havoc her stubborn ideas wrought.

Vile

If you didn't see the Daily Mail's headline in the wake of the Philpott verdict then you'd have to be blind or perhaps very lucky. 

Vile product of the welfare state, is how they lead yesterday's episode of the daily hate crime that is the Mail. Splashed above a family picture of the now-guilty Mick Philpott. I have never in my life read a headline as vulgar, as crass and as deeply offencive as that. 

It's been no secret for a long time that decent journalism has been in terminal decline in Britain, but this takes the absolute fucking biscuit - to use the death of children to push an odious agenda like this is not just a new low, it's the absolute nadir of journalism. Yet there will be plenty of people that believe this garbage. Plenty of programmed, emotionally charged insecure people that the Mail has convinced are the target of every weak minded lesser lazier person on the face of god's green earth. Whether it's foreigners, people practising one of those odd desert religions, people with brown faces, people on benefits, leftists, trots, socialists, unionists, unmarried women, single parents, children, other people, everyone else, they are all after you, your money, your house, and your family - in that order.

These purveyors of hate - as guilty as any Muslim hate preacher they spent the last decade decrying - would have us all believe the welfare state breeds these people. That it turns decent people into idle, good for nothing criminals, one step away from becoming the next child murdering arsonist scrounger, all because the devil makes work for idle hands. 

Social security is a very important safety net. Without it the capitalists have free reign to abuse and exploit. If you don't think that would happen then you are completely out of touch because it's already happening. Chris Rock, the comic, once made a joke about the minimum wage saying that what it really meant was "if I could pay you less, I would". How true. These are all protections for those of us not born into the right class or the right money. Take them away and we have the law of the jungle - then you really will see the likes of Mick Philpott multiply.

The way you deal with people like Mick Philpott isn't to deny those who need the money their benefit (a pittance paid to allow the dignity of not dying in the street). It is to invest in society. Instead of cutting the state to the bone and selling the hot flesh off to grubby American privateers, we should be investing in social services and education. Instead we get more horrible divide and rule hate crime from the black and redtops disguised as journalism.

If someone threw a petrol bomb (please don't) into the offices of the Daily Mail resulting in a complete loss of life, Mick Philpott would still be an even bigger criminal.

More BBC Bias

Yesterday I blogged about James Bartholomew and his bullshit performance on 5live's morning phone in. I didn't mention that he was opposed in that discussion by Polly Toynbee, who many see as a voice of the left - a 'guardianista'. This is because she was useless, conceding way too much and providing bugger all authoritative opposition to the flurry of unchecked right wing histrionics.

However at that point I had not listened to the entire discussion. Later, at about the 50 minute mark (after the umpteenth travel and weather update) the final three callers were brought on, together. Eileen called in from the Benefit Justice campaign, Jason called in as the voice of entrepreneurs from, of all places, the south of France, and Francine, a small business owning bigot, came on and spoke first. 

What she said was some of the most disgusting bigotry I have ever heard. Using the term 'benefit breeders' this ignorant bigot proceeded into a lunatic tirade against feral kids, antisocial behaviour and large families. When corrected by Eileen she couldn't even keep quiet, again another right winger so programmed, so on edge, that she had to release that tension by huffing and tutting and sighing audibly. 

Throughout her tirade Nicky Campbell did nothing to correct her or moderate her appalling bigotry. Of course had she made equal comments about race, gender, sexuality or even age, you can be 100% sure he would have stepped in. Yet, and more proof of the BBC's disgraceful bias, when Eileen made a broad point about big business evading tax, he stepped in to 'correct her' articulating an apparent, yet hypocritical, need for accuracy. 

Ok, the point about taxes may have been slightly off topic (though not really) and it may be, technically, a bit of a generalisation to say they all pay zero percent tax, but really that's the part you decide to correct? That's the comment that warrants an intervention? This is the problem with the BBC; the left is at a huge disadadvantage because of the prevailing media message, yet is never given a proper platform on an equal footing accordingly.

I tweeted Nicky Campbell about this. To his credit he did respond, but only to say that 'it wasn't an interview it was a discussion', and that 'lots of callers corrected her'. They didn't, those three were the last to phone in; besides it's the job of the chair of a discussion - in my view - to maintain objectivity and correct false information and prejudice. Not so with Auntie.

I Hate James Bartholomew

Know the Tory mindset: according to these creatures welfare breeds dependency. Meanwhile they do not want to set a minimum wage, they do not want to create legislation to protect the un - and under - employed from the predations of the system they benefit from. That word is chosen deliberately, because they like benefits for themselves - the ability to sack whom they like, when they like and how they like. In this UKIP are the same. This is the febrile heart of the right wing.

Yesterday on 5 Live's laughable morning phone in - bigots drink for free - another right wing excuse for a human, James Bartholomew, revealed another aspect of their nasty prejudice and staggering ignorance. Not surprisingly this vile creature was once a banker. He writes (if one can call it that) for the Telegraph and though I don't know the content of his ballot paper, I dare say I can guess. He props up every tory myth about the unemployed and welfare with dull witted aplomb.

He believes people have been induced to worklessness. A thoroughly bizarre phrase completely unsupported by facts, evidence or even anecdote. He believes that the government's welfare reforms are the proverbial bitter pill that, after the pain of swallowing has subsided, will bring about a change for the better. These changes will lead to more employed people in the country. This is a complete nonsense, unless you are so delusional that you think starving people out of their bed in the morning (if they have one left after paying for their 'spare' rooms) will create jobs. 

How will this create work? In the minds of these fevered capitalists it's all the fault of the claimant (though they try and soften this by blaming it again on the state, conveniently). The situation here isn't so dire that they can explicitly blame the unemployed for their condition (as they view it), but no doubt that's what they think. So if we do away with welfare - regardless of the human cost - there will be no impediment to work. But what work? What wages? People receive tax credits as a sop to the corporations that refuse to pay decent wages. Capitalist big business want it both ways and make sure their Tory servants achieve this: keep wages down, and keep welfare down. I don't think that's sustainable. 

Bartholomew thinks that tax credits subsidise the worker. He doesn't get it at all. They don'; they subsidise the employer. They are a poor substitute, typically of New Labour, for a decent wage that enables the right wing and libertarians to squeal about how the state breeds dependency. Of course someone working for NMW in the likes of Tesco is 'dependent' on Tax Credits: they can't live otherwise. In truth it's the employer that gets the real benefit, but benefits for the capitalists and the rich and the corporations are the acceptable face of welfare.

There was a caller, audibly anxious and using a pseudonym, that commented on the difficulty of life under ATOS. She explained her health conditions, suffering from extreme anxiety (only the most hard hearted could deny the clearly perceptible reality). She even said that, if a home visit from ATOS was possible, she'd be happy to go through the process. In response Bartholomew made some of the most disgusting comments I've ever heard:

"James Bartholomew," says Nicky Campbell (of whom I'm not a great fan), "there's a lot of people in Sarah's position."

"It's incredibly difficult to decide if someone is capable of work or not," James is not a doctor, nor has he any training as a diagnostician. People don't just get sick notes. If a GP cannot determine, with enough confidence, the veracity of someone's claim they can send them to a specialist who will know. But of course such people are marginalised by the right wing media that lacks the guts to come right out and accuse them of fraud. Insinuating this instead.

"The big rise in the disabilities that people have come to the welfare state with. The big rise has been in two disorders: musco (sic) - skeletal disorders - in other words backache - and mental problems."

But wait it gets better (that is to say, worse):

"These are two areas, not by coincidence in my view, where it's impossible to say yes you have or no you haven't a problem."

But wait it gets better (that is to say, worse):

"There's been no rise in broken legs or deafness. Only a rise in these conditions which you cannot verify."

How does he know these conditions cannot be verified? He doesn't; he's basing his entire position on the usual 'John had backache but was caught refereeing the local football team on Saturday' stories. Stock in trade for the right wing press, of which he, don't forget, is a member.

And the broken legs/deafness comment is just...what the fuck? 

But wait it gets better (that is to say, much worse):

"So it's going to be very difficult to distinguish between those people who have maybe below average intelligence, or not very able, or some mental problem, and those that have a smaaaall (his emphasis) problem and are egging it on and don't really want to bother."

'Mental problems' = low intelligence. Nice. James, you're a cunt. Of course he can't comment on Sarah's case "I can't comment on individual cases". No, but you can make sweeping wholly uninformed generalisations instead. It's all a mess, apparently, and you can't clean up a mess - unless you live in the grandeur of Torygraphshire or Westminster or the Square Mile - without pain. So suck it up, that's the message. 

No, James Bartholomew, people are not, nor have they ever been, better off unemployed. If you are only looking at the money - and even then you are only looking at a very few distorted cases (someone with 11 kids for instance, never mind that she's had cancer as well) - then you are not just missing the point, but wilfully ignorant.