Bible-bashing Tim thinks it's acceptable to accuse others of what you're guilty of yourself

The May Bank Holiday Weekend hasn't just witnessed the finale of World Snooker Championships, it's also seen a concerted effort by the neoliberal establishment class to gaslight the nation with barrages of absolute nonsense.

First we had the mainstream media campaign to paint Labour's net loss of 84 council seats in the local elections (almost margin of error stuff when they were defending over 2,200) as if it were equally as bad as the Tories losing 1,330 council seats in by far their worst local election performance since 1995.

You're selling your car for £1,330 are you? Well I'll give you £84 pounds for it and you'll be happy because the guy from the BBC told us that the two numbers are identical!

Then we had Esther McVey's absurd Daily Express article claiming that the Tory party is the natural home of the working classes!

The billionaire bankrolled party that brought us a decade of austerity and wage repression, in-work social security cuts for the working poor, an explosion of exploitative, insecure, low-pay Zero Hours type jobs, unlawful Tribunal Fees designed to protect bad bosses from being taken to work by their abused workers, and a massive rise in the number of children growing up in dire poverty despite living in working households ... all while they lavished handouts and tax-giveaways on bankers, corporations, and the mega-rich!

Well they certainly sound like the natural party of the working class don't they?

And now we've got the former Lib-Dem leader and celebrity homophobe Tim Farron accusing Jeremy Corbyn of being an austerity enabler!

Farron wilfully participated in the ruinous 2010-2015 austerity government that trashed our wages and living standards, gutted community cohesion, vandalised the social safety net, deliberately under-funded our public services, and implemented devastating hard-right austerity fanaticism in almost every aspect of British life.

The Tory austerity fanaticism that Tim and his Lib-Dem mates enabled caused a significant collapse in living standards which resulted in the massive tide of public anger that drove Brexit marginally over the winning line in the 2016 EU referendum.
 

But instead of own his mistake and admit his culpability in this disaster, like any decent Christian should, he's actually trying to apportion blame for his own crimes onto one of the tiny minority of MPs who refused to ever jump aboard the Tory austerity bandwagon that he spent five years upon.

The reason that Corbyn won the Labour leadership in 2015, and again in 2016, was that he was the only candidate who had clean hands and a demonstrable voting record of opposing hard-right Tory fanaticism.

To see Tim Farron publicly accusing Corbyn of being an austerity-enabler just goes to prove that there's no depths to which these right-wing neoliberal austerity fanatics won't plumb in order to sow confusion and disorder.

Furthermore he accused Corbyn of enabling Tory Brexit, when he's the guy who missed a crucial knife-edge Brexit vote in order to swan off to Sherborne in Dorset to give a speech about how much he hates the idea of gay equality!

Farron, McVey, and the majority of the orthodox neoliberal Wesminster bubble aren't talking this absolute rubbish because they believe it, they know it's nonsense, they know most of us know that it's nonsense.

They just want to drive us to despair, to make us so sick and tired of the idiocy that we stop paying attention and thinking about politics because it's so relentlessly infuriating, because they know that if the debate is ever allowed to settle on policies, ideas, and good faith analysis, then most voters would end up turning away from the Tories and Lib-Dems to support anti-austerity anti-privatisation parties like Labour, the Greens, Plaid Cymru, and (to a lesser extent) the SNP.

So that's why they pollute the political discourse with such inanity and dishonesty, that's why they deliberately reverse reality, that's why they continually erode the actual meanings of words, that's why they accuse others of their own crimes against the economy, and that's why they constantly talk such infuriating fact-averse, reality-reversing nonsense.

They just want to make us so sick and tired of the whole political charade that we don't bother to think about who we vote for, or don't bother voting at all.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

OR

Who is gullible enough to believe the party of millionaires is the natural party of the working classes?

The Tory MP Esther McVey has put her name to a ludicrous article in the Daily Express claiming that the Tories are "the natural party of the working classes".

The crux of the argument is that the Tories are the natural home of northern working class Brexit voters, and that the disastrous Tory local election results somehow prove that they should just get on with delivering Brexit!

It's total nonsense from start to finish. The Tories aren't the party of the working classes; Brexit wasn't delivered by northern working class voters (the most likely demographics to vote for it were actually wealthy retired Tories in the Home Counties and the Shires); and the idea that local election results that delivered the worst Tory results since 1995 and huge gains for the Brexit-sceptic Lib-Dems and Greens are proof that the public are baying for Brexit to be delivered is absurdly nonsensical, even by the extraordinary propaganda standards that have been set by Brextremists and Remain ultras over the last few years.

Of course there are a few idiots out there who would be convinced by this incoherent propaganda, but anyone with the vaguest grip on reality knows that the claim that the Tories are the natural party of the working classes is complete nonsense.

The Tories are bankrolled by a tiny clique of mega-rich donors, corporate fat cats, bankers, property speculators, landed gentry, private health companies, and Russian oligarchs.

Labour are funded by hundreds of thousands of small donations for ordinary people and workers through their trade unions, and have numerous policies aimed at supporting and improving the lives and communities of the working classes.

Even if you're too obtuse to follow the money to see whose interests are being represented by whom, there's the grotesque anti-worker Tory track record in government.

• Thatcher declaring ideological war on UK manufacturing and mining in the 1980s in order to wreck the trade unions by deliberately crippling the industries they represented.

• The privatisation of masses of public services, from the water supply and public transport, to the outsourcing of local services like grass cutting, meaning the replacement of vast numbers of stable long-term decently paid public sector jobs with insecure, low-pay private sector exploitation.

• The toxic "leave it to the markets" neoliberal mentality that resulted in millions of people across the UK ending up trapped in left behind high-unemployment communities, with desperately neglected public services and infrastructure.

• The lost decade of wage growth since the bankers' insolvency crisis as a result of deliberate Tory wage repression policies and the explosion of insecure, exploitative, low-pay Zero Hours type jobs since 2010.

• The imposition of unlawful Tory tribunal fees designed to protect bad bosses from being taken to court by their employees by deliberalely and unlawfully pricing poor workers out of the justice system.

• The ideological vandalism of public services and the social safety net, resulting in a violent crime epidemic, huge health service waiting lists for those who are not rich enough to afford private medical insurance, and an unprecedented rise in in-work poverty (70% of kids growing up in poverty are living in working households).

So maybe the extremely hard-of-thinking might be convinced by the nonsensical Tory propaganda that the billionaire-bankrolled party of corporate greed and inherited privilege is actually the party of ordinary workers, but convincing the gullible isn't the main point of reality-reversing propaganda like this.

The main point is a propaganda technique called "gaslighting".

Gaslighting involves psychological manipulation in order to make people question their own sanity.

Esther McVey and the Tories aren't pushing this absurd reality-reversal because they actually believe it, or because they expect many of us to believe it.

They're pushing it because they want to pollute political discourse with such a torrent of ludicrously incoherent nonsense that ordinary people end up dazed and confused, struggling to pick out the occasional nuggets of political truth from a disorientating torrent of deceptions, distortions, logical fallacies, propaganda tropes, and lies.

They're not actually trying to convince anyone besides the hopelessly gullible that "black is white", they're simply hoping that they can convince enough of us to give up on politics altogether in order to ride a wave of political apathy to success.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

OR

How bad is the Tory Universal Credit disaster?

There are so many problems with the Tory government's botched Universal Credit policy it's impossible to list them all, but here are just a few:

• There's a demonstrable link between Universal Credit being imposed on an area and rising rates of poverty and food bank dependency. The Trussell Trust has reported that Food Bank usage has soared 52% in Universal Credit areas, while the Joseph Rowntree Foundation have highlighted the way that Universal Credit has tipped struggling families into absolute destitution (the 42 day wait from initial claim to first payment being one of the worst aspects).

• Despite the 42 day wait a shocking one in six of the unfortunate people who have been subjected to the Tory Universal Credit experiment were still not even paid in time. Imagine if the business you were involved in had a 1/6 failure rate. There'd be hell to pay.

• There's the fact that Universal Credit discriminates heavily against the self-employed (especially seasonal workers and self-employed people with fluctuating monthly earnings), This means extreme income losses for self-employed people who are transferred to Universal Credit. That's some 5 million self-employed people in the UK at risk of impoverishment if this flawed Tory scheme is ever rolled out nationally.

• Another flaw in Universal Credit means that some people would actually be financially penalised for working extra hours. Research by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation found that some people would actually end up with less disposable income if they changed from working 3 days a week to 5. What kind of incompetent government economically punishes people for working longer hours?

• The way Universal Credit is paid out per household creates a very strong risk of domestic violence perpetrators taking control of the entire family budget. One victim told a committee of MPs that her husband would "wake up one morning with £1,500 in his account and piss off with it, leaving us with nothing for weeks". Shockingly the Tories have continued pushing ahead with the scheme despite these warnings, doing nothing but issuing an Orwellian statement that they take tackling domestic violence "incredibly seriously" as they simultaneously turn a deliberate blind eye to the devastating consequences of their own policy.

• Universal Credit is so badly flawed that it economically penalises parents for getting new jobs, forcing them hundreds of pounds into debt because the system won't take account of their childcare costs. Just imagine the combination of incompetence and outright malice that drives Tory ministers to continue rolling out a scheme that penalises people for finding work.

• A National Audit Office report into the early stages of Universal Credit found that £34 million had already been wasted on botched IT systems. In 2014 the amount wasted on botched Universal Credit IT systems was upped to £500 million+ by the Public Accounts Committee.

• A leaked 2013 report described the absolute chaos in the Universal Credit team. One respondent said that there was "a near complete absence of anything that looks like strategic leadership in the programme", and another said "I have never worked somewhere where decision making was so apparently poor at senior levels. This programme should be a case study for how not to engage with your people to get the most out of them".

• David Cameron had such a lax attitude to incompetence amongst his ministers that he simply ignored the hundreds of millions in scrapped IT projects and the reported administrative chaos at the DWP, allowing Iain Duncan Smith to continue as the minister responsible for the chaos until he resigned over Brexit in 2016.

• There's the fact that it's ridiculously delayed. The entire country was supposed to have been converted to Universal Credit by October 2017, but instead just 815,000 people in a few unfortunate areas had been subjected to it by March 2018.

• In 2017 Labour Party and other opposition MPs voted for a "pause" in the roll-out of Universal Credit to deal with some of the most glaring flaws. The vote was won by 299 votes to 0 after the government deliberately abstained on the vote, but the Tories have carried on with the roll-out regardless.

• In 2017 the Tories quietly shelved plans to roll out the full version of Universal Credit in the areas of several senior Tory MPs (Iain Duncan Smith, David Gauke, Damian Green, and Theresa May), including two of the DWP ministers who were responsible for devising and implementing the scheme in the first place. Cancelling the roll-out of Universal Credit in their own constituencies as they force it on Labour and SNP areas is a very clear implicit admission that they know Universal Credit is utterly flawed and devastatingly unpopular.

• In July 2018 the Tory DWP minister Esther McVey outright lied to parliament about the botched roll-out of Universal Credit, claiming that a damning National Audit Office report didn't take account of changes to the system when it actually did. Theresa may refused to sack her despite this egregious breach of parliamentary standards.

• There's the fact that the Tories repeatedly lied and misled to pretend that Universal Credit isn't making people worse off, before Esther McVey finally admitted the truth that people would be worse off under the scheme she's imposing just one day after Theresa May had lied to the public that nobody would lose out.

• The former Tory Prime Minister John Major attacked the scheme, saying that Univeral Credit has the potential to be as disastrous for the current Tory government as Poll Tax was for Margaret Thatcher!

• Fury amongst the Tory MPs has been further exacerbated by a Residential Landlords Association report showing a massive increase in landlords with Universal Credit tenants in rent arrears. A rise from 27% in 2016 to 61% in 2018. The immense suffering of the working poor under this botched scheme was never likely to factor into Tory MP's concerns, but ever growing numbers of wealthy Tory-voting landlords losing cash to the scheme is much more likely to grab their attention.

Despite all of these problems the Tory government continue pushing on regardless. They don't care that the scheme is pushing people into poverty and Food Bank dependency; they don't care that it's an absolute gift to controlling domestic violence perpetrators; they don't care that it penalises self-employed people and entrepreneurs; they don't care that they've wasted over £500 million of public cash on this botched scheme; they don't care that it actually creates various disincentives to work; they don't care that it's years behind target; they don't care that parliament voted for them to stop and iron out some of the worst faults; and they don't care that Theresa May outright lied to the nation when she said people wouldn't be worse off just one day before the minister in charge of it admitted that they would be.

The only real hope that the Tories will stop pushing this malicious and incompetent farce is if they start getting stick from the wealthy Tory-voting landlord class who find that Universal Credit is impoverishing their tenants so much that they can't afford to pay the rent.

If the Tories won't listen to the interests of the rich, then who will they listen to?

The other option of course is a Labour government. Whether they'd "pause" the Universal Credit roll-out in order to try and fix all of the Tory flaws, or scrap it altogether is a question that will be answered by the next Labour manifesto.

Whatever the case, anyone who votes Tory in light of this absolute farce is complicit in the waste, the inefficiency, the dishonesty, the poverty, and the suffering.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

OR

Esther McVey wants to make teenagers carry the can for Brexit

The Tory DWP minister Esther McVey has announced a bold new policy for mitigating the economic fallout from Brexit; she wants teenagers who were too young to even vote in the EU referendum to carry the can.

The exodus of EU workers is already harming various sectors of the British economy including health and care services, tourism and hospitality, manufacturing, and the agricultural sector.

The number of nurses coming to work in the NHS from the EU has collapsed by 90%; the hospitality industry are projecting a huge post-Brexit recruitment crisis; and £millions worth of fruit and veg are already being left to rot in British fields ... but Esther McVey thinks that the solution is to get British teenagers to plug the gaps by getting Saturday jobs!

It's not just that these youngsters are being robbed of their right to live, study, and work in any of 27 other European nations as the result of a referendum they weren't even able to vote in, they're now being told by out-of-touch Tory millionaires that they should carry the can for the economic fallout of this decision too.

In a way this approach does kind of make sense from a rudimentary greed-based, pro-corporate, hard-right agenda. Why should corporations pay European Union workers full minimum wage of £7.83 per hour to pick fruit and veg or work in the hospitality industry, when they could get a bunch of British teenagers in and pay them as little as £4.20 per hour?

But of course it's necessary to skip over the fact that the cumulative worker-hours of a few tens of thousands more teenagers doing evening and Saturday jobs will never be able to make up the huge labour shortfall Brexit is already delivering, but since when were stuff like facts and evidence ever important to the Brextremists?

It could be argued that Brexit was delivered by pensioners, so pro-Brexit pensioners rather than teenagers should be the ones to fill the gaps in the economy by picking fruit and veg or working in the hospitality industry for just £4.20 per hour.

This makes a lot more sense than trying to shift the workload onto teenagers because there are far more pro-Brexit pensioners than teenagers. And anyone who believes that Britain should be aiming to become a high-skill high-tech economy must surely believe that teenagers should be concentrating on their studies, rather than picking fruit and veg for £4.20 an hour because the Brextremists chased all the migrant workers away.

But the Brexit-voting pensioners obviously won't lift a finger because they'll be perfectly happy as long as all of the negative consequences of the chaotic "make it up as we go along" Tory Brexit farce are loaded onto the shoulders of the younger generations who didn't even get a vote on the issue.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

OR

Theresa May's message to Britain: "don't get old, don't get sick, don't lose your job"

The 2015 General Election was an absolute disaster to any non-Scottish person with even remotely progressive social values. The Scots could celebrate their remarkable wipe-out of the neoliberalism-fixated Westminster establishment parties, but elsewhere there was little to celebrate after Ed Miliband squandered his golden opportunity to win a landslide victory by opposing ruinous Tory austerity dogma, because he chose to offer a disgustingly unpalatable and uninspiring prescription of austerity-lite snake oil instead.

One of the few highlights of the 2015 election was the people of Wirral West seeing sense and ditching their atrocious MP Esther McVey.

The ruthlessly self-serving McVey had spent the previous three years acting as Iain Duncan Smith's merciless henchwoman at the DWP, and the people of Wirral West were rightly sickened and appalled at her callous attitudes towards the poor, the sick, the disabled, and the unemployed, so lost her seat, and her role in government.

McVey used to brag about how rising dependency of food banks is a good thing, and she also had a central role in promoting the draconian Tory sanctions regime.

The mainstream media rarely address the issue of the benefits sanction regime that McVey had such an important role in expanding, but even fleeting analysis reflects extremely badly on the Tory party, so it's no surprise it gets so little coverage.

The first thing to note about McVey's beloved sanctions regime is that despite a barrage of lies and denials (including from McVey herself), the Tories operated a system of benefits sanctions targets and league tables designed to incentivise Jobcentre staff into sanctioning quotas of people per month. The purpose being to drive down the unemployment figures by throwing people off benefits for the most trivial of infractions (people out of work and not claiming benefits are not classed as unemployed!).

The next thing to note is that the most likely people to get caught up in the Tory benefits sanctions regime are the most vulnerable. Just think about it for a moment. If you were a hard-pressed Jobcentre employee with a target of sanctioning let's say two people a week, would it be easier to go after the minority of hardened benefits scroungers who probably know the benefits rules better than you do yourself, or to trick a few people with mental health issues or learning disabilities into committing sanctionable mistakes?

Just take the case of the former soldier David Clapson who was sanctioned and left penniless. He died at home from diabetic ketoacidosis after his electricity was cut off leaving his supply of insulin to spoil in the fridge. When opposition MPs questioned McVey over the dangers of sanctioning vulnerable people like David Clapson, she responded by accusing them of "inflaming" the issue. 

Just imagine the scheming callousness of a woman whose own policies have resulted in a man's death, who refuses to accept any responsibility, but instead tries to play politics by posing as the victim herself.

Another important thing to note is that Esther McVey repeatedly talked out of her posterior claiming that the sanctions regime exist to "help" the unemployed. 

The reality is the exact opposite. Numerous studies have shown that leaving people penniless hinders their ability to find work. Just think about it. If you can't afford to eat properly, clean your clothes, get a haircut, public transport fares, your phone/Internet bill, the cost of printing CVs ... would you really be more likely to find a job? All the research says no you wouldn't. Esther McVey says yes you would.

Then there's the absolute kicker. It turns out that deliberately thrusting hundreds of thousands of people per year into absolute destitution actually costs the taxpayer more money than it saves in reduced benefits payments!

This means that Esther McVey's draconian system of condemning hundreds of thousands of people per year to absolute poverty actually costs the taxpayer vast sums of money, making it a grotesque example of taxpayer subsidised Tory malice.

After she was rejected by the people of Wirral West the Tories handed McVey a ticket back into Westminster by parachuting her into the super-safe Tory seat of Tatton at the 2017 General Election. Now, within the space of a year, Theresa May has actually appointed this callous and scheming woman as the head of the DWP.

Make no mistake, this appointment is a clear statement of intent from Theresa May. She's not going to reverse course and stop squandering taxpayers' cash on the kinds of wasteful,  socially destructive, and downright malicious Tory impoverishment schemes favoured by Iain Duncan Smith.

In fact she's decided to double-down on this kind of disgusting hard-right malice by appointing the cruellest and most uncaring of Iain Duncan Smith's minions to carry on his work of punishing and abusing the poor and vulnerable.

You couldn't really get a stronger indication of Theresa May's absolute contempt for the welfare of the poorest and most vulnerable people in society than the appointment of Esther McVey as the head of the DWP.

So be warned. This is Theresa May's unmistakable message to the people of Britain: "don't get old, don't get sick, and don't lose your job".

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

OR

How could anyone believe that Iain Duncan Smith is now serious about combating food poverty?

In December 2014 a shocking Church of England funded report into the exponential growth in food bank dependency was published. In this article I'm going to consider the report and its findings, look at the ludicrous initial responses from the Tory party and then examine Iain Duncan Smith's claims that he will offer a "positive response" to the findings.

The report

As is often the case, the vast majority of the mainstream media coverage has failed to include an actual link to the report so that people can read it for themselves. I think it's important that people do have the option of viewing the documents for themselves, so here's a link.

The Feeding Britain report was financially backed by the Church of England and the inquiry members were Tim Thornton (the Bishop of Truro) Frank Field MP (Labour) John Glen MP (Tory), Sarah Newton MP (Tory) Emma Lewell-Buck (Labour) and the unelected peer Anne Jenkin (Tory).

The report concluded that a number of factors have contributed to the dramatic rise in food bank dependency. One of the main factors is the skyrocketing cost of living, with food prices prices up 46.4% since 2003 and fuel up 154%. These rises compare very badly with the average increase in wages (up just 27.9%).

Another important factor is the increased use of benefits sanctions designed to condemn people to absolute poverty for "crimes" such as being five minutes late for an appointment, having a heart attack during a employment assessment, selling poppies for a few hours a week for the Royal British Legion, attending a job interview, or refusing to work for no wages at giant multinational corporations like Poundland (owned by the US Private Equity group Warburg Pincus). The report itself details cases of people having their benefits cut off entirely for writing information on the wrong line of a document, attending an urgent medical appointment with their daughter and not applying for jobs after the deadline had already passed.

Some of the recommendations in the report include better redistribution of food wasted by supermarkets so that it can be used to feed the poor, the establishment of an Office For Living Standards within the Treasury, an increase in the minimum wage, reform of the benefits sanction system including the introduction of "yellow cards", reductions in benefits delays and many other things. I suggest that you follow the link to the report and scroll down to page 46 if you want to read the summary of all of their recommendations.

The initial Tory spin

At first the Tories attempted to spin their way out of admitting there was even a problem. The unelected Tory peer John Nash tried to deflect criticism by saying that food bank usage "went up 10 times under the previous government" a look at the actual figures shows how misleading this particular statistical soundbyte is. Food Bank usage increased from 2,814 in 2005-06 to 40,898 in 2009-10, an overall increase of 38,000 people per year using food banks. Under the Tory led government it has soared to 913,138 people per year - an increase of 872,240 people. Only in the world of tribablistic political excuses does an increase of 40,000 counterbalance an increase of 870,000.

Then the unelected Tory peer Anne Jenkin waded in trying to distract attention away from the findings of the report with a ludicrous assertion that poor people use food banks "because they don't know how to cook". If this were really the reason for the exponential growth in food bank dependency it would mean that hundreds of thousands of people must have simply forgotten how to cook since 2010! Anne Jenkin was quick to retract her remarks after the storm of criticism they provoked, but the fact that such a person was on the Inquiry panel arguing the Tory case that poor people are to blame for their own poverty, just goes to show that had the inquiry team not been packed out with Tories, the conclusions and recommendations would surely have been even more hard-hitting.

Iain Duncan Smith's response

Iain Duncan Smith has a long track record of obfuscating, misleading and outright lying when it comes to issues such as benefits sanctions, absolute destitution, workfare, the appalling treatment of disabled people and food bank usage, however this report poses a serious problem for him. Not only is it backed by the Church of England (Iain Duncan Smith laughably claims to be motivated by Christian ethics!), more than half of the politicians on the inquiry were Tories.This means that he can't just dismiss the report as being politically partisan in the way that he's casually dismissed other hard-hitting food poverty reports (such as the work of the Trussell Trust).

In a particularly weasely and misleading statement Iain Duncan Smith promised to respond positively to the report, but anyone who is familiar with Iain Duncan Smith's track record (making up qualifications on his CV, bragging that he could live on £53 per week for a year then not following through, obfuscating and obstructing, showing contempt for the dead, misusing official statistics, unlawfully bypassing parliament, lying about court judgments against him, willfully ignoring court judgments against him etc) must know that he's not a man to be taken at his word.

We only have to look back to December 2013 to see the real attitude of Iain Duncan Smith and the Tories. After laughing, shouting and smirking their way through a debate on food poverty the Tories and their sickening Lib-Dem enablers defeated an opposition motion to compel the government to begin combating food poverty (by 294 votes to 251). Iain Duncan Smith showed his outright contempt for the whole issue by refusing to speak on behalf of the government (instead passing the buck to his odious sidekick Esther McVey) and then walking out of the debate after less than an hour. Within a week he launched a blistering tirade at the Trussell Trust, which gave a very clear forewarning that the Tory Gagging law was actually designed to silence political criticism, not to regulate the lobbying industry as they tried to pretend.

Does anyone really believe that a man with a long track record of dishonesty; a man who who instructed his Tory colleagues to vote down a motion to compel the government combat food poverty just one year ago; a man who couldn't even be arsed to speak in, or even sit through the debate, is a man who has suddenly had an epiphany and decided to make combating food poverty one of his main priorities? Is anyone really that gullible?

A look at some of Iain Duncan Smith's other comments about the Feeding Britain report illustrate the fact that he's sticking to the same tactic of snide, sneering dishonesty.

Not got a leg to stand on? - Time to deploy a straw-man argument

One of the strongest indicators that he's simply going to continue as before was his statement that "It’s really ridiculous to assume that every single reason why someone is going to a food bank is down to what the DWP does". This is a blatant straw-man argument because the report doesn't say this, in fact nobody says this. Most people are well aware that the Tory "war on wages" has resulted in the longest sustained decline in the average wage since records began, and that as a consequence, huge numbers of working families have been driven into dire poverty and food bank dependency, which means that DWP decisions are clearly not the root cause of every single instance of food bank dependency.

What this straw-man argument shows is that Iain Duncan Smith is still insistent on using fallacious debating tactics to make his own incredibly weak debating position look stronger. We shouldn't be shocked that a man with such an appalling track record of dishonesty would use the tactic of making up a rubbish argument and then demolishing it in order to make his own desperate position look better. What we should be shocked by is the fact that, as always, the mainstream media are totally unwilling to hold him to account for using these appallingly sly debating tactics.

Workfare and sanctions league tables

Another indicator that Iain Duncan Smith is going to continue his shockingly dishonest approach is his attempt to paint the exponential growth in the use of benefits sanctions as some kind of accidental occurrence where vulnerable people are slipping through the cracks, rather than them being deliberately forced into the meat grinder by a department driven by Iain Duncan Smith's desire to juke the unemployment statistics by tricking as many vulnerable people as possible into losing their benefits and by forcing them onto Stalinist style unpaid labour schemes under the threat of absolute destitution.

Rigging the headline rate of unemployment is one of Iain Duncan Smith's main objectives as head of the DWP. The way this is achieved is by forcing unemployed people onto unpaid compulsory labour schemes like "Help to Work". Even though the hundreds of thousands of people forced on these schemes have no wages, and they're still claiming unemployment benefits, they are not included in the official unemployment statistics. If people refuse to go on the schemes, they are stripped of their unemployment benefits, meaning that they too are not classed as unemployed on the official statistics (unless they carry on signing on in order to receive no money).

Thus under Iain Duncan Smith's system people are given the choice of doing forced labour and disappearing off the unemployment stats, or refusing to be exploited as a source of free labour for Iain Duncan Smith's mates and disappearing off the unemployment stats.

Another way in which Iain Duncan Smith's department have tried to artificially reduce the headline unemployment rate is through sanctions league tables. Before 2013 Iain Duncan Smith, other members of the Tory party and numerous DWP spokespeople all repeatedly lied that there were no such things as sanctions league tables, until the sanctions league tables (that supposedly didn't exist) were leaked to the press in March 2013.

The problem with sanctions league tables and the setting of sanctions targets is that it is much easier for Jobcentre staff to meet their targets by tricking the mentally ill and the severely uneducated into committing sanctionable offences, than it is to invest a great deal of time trying to catch out the tiny minority of hardened benefits claimants who are very clued up at gaming the system. Thus hundreds of thousands of vulnerable people have been thrown into absolute destitution to meet the sanctions targets that Iain Duncan Smith and the Tories repeatedly lied about the non-existence of.

Sanctions league tables and targets do exist, a culture of tricking people into committing sanctionable offences has been encouraged within the DWP and hundreds of thousands of people have been faced with the "unpaid labour or destitution via sanctions" dilemma. These are some of the big reasons behind the exponential growth in people getting sanctioned, and significant causal factors in the rise in food poverty, but instead of admitting culpability in these deliberate policy of impoverishment, Iain Duncan Smith is insistent that it's all some kind of unforeseen tragedy, and now that he's aware of it "we want to do everything we can to make sure that people do not stumble into a process of sanctions".

Iain Duncan Smith's track record

When the Trussell trust used the information in the "reason for referral" box on their referral forms to begin collecting proof that benefits sanctions and benefits delays were responsible for a significant percentage of food bank referrals, Iain Duncan Smith refused to countenance reforming the system so as to prevent people falling into abject poverty (because the fear of abject poverty is one of the main tools he uses to get people to participate in his forced labour schemes). What the DWP did instead was to ensure that the "reason for referral" box was simply removed from the food bank referral form so that the Trussell Trust no longer had easy access to the data proving DWP culpability.

When Iain Duncan Smith says that he's going to "do something positive", we should be very wary indeed that his idea of doing something positive is not some kind of euphemism for attempting to destroy or cover up the sources of the information that people are using to criticise him with.

Conclusion

In my view Iain Duncan Smith is the most dishonest and vindictive cabinet member in the most dishonest and vindictive government in living memory. He's proven his dishonesty and his malice towards those he considers to be beneath him on countless occasions.

Anyone who is inclined to believe his claims that he's going to take "positive action" to combat the exponential growth in food povery only needs to look at his shocking behaviour (and the outrageous behaviour of his party) when the subject of food poverty was debated in parliament less than a year ago.

This is a man who couldn't even be bothered to sit through the food poverty debate (as well as having lied about the non-existence of sanctions league tables, lied about court judgments against him and blatantly misused official statistics). If anyone thinks that this is a straight-talking guy who will stick to his word, they must be the most dismally poor judges of character.

It is incontestable that thanks to his draconian regimes of "workfare or sanctions" and the widespread use of sanctions targets and league tables within the DWP, Iain Duncan Smith is largely responsible for the shocking rise in food poverty. Therefore you'd have to be completely out of your mind to think that he's an appropriate person to be given responsibility for reversing it. 

 Another Angry Voice  is a not-for-profit page which generates absolutely no revenue from advertising and accepts no money from corporate or political interests. The only sources of income for  Another Angry Voice  are small donations from people who see some value in my work. 

If you appreciate my efforts and you could afford to make a donation, 

it would be massively appreciated.

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Esther McVey's "attitude tests" and Tory backwards thinking

The Tory Minister of State for employment has announced a new scheme to impose "attitude tests" on unemployed people.

These attitude profiling tests would attempt to judge whether unemployed people are "determined", "bewildered" or "despondent" about taking a job. The results of the tests will be used to "segregate" them into different classes of jobseeker, those that are keen to work, and those who are "scum" to be abused and sanctioned until they drop off the unemployment figures.
Before I get to the explanation of how this ludicrous policy demonstrates Tory backward thinking, I'd first like to note that the inspiration for attitude testing is the Australian work of a private company called Ingeus, which was owned by Thérèse Rein (the wife of former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd) before she sold it off earlier this year for around $220 million.

Given the Tory model of outsourcing the functions of the social security system to private companies in order to siphon off an ever increasing proportion of the welfare budget into the profits of private companies, it's almost certain that a company such as Ingeus, or one of the alphabet soup of other parasitical outsourcing companies (A4e, G4S, Atos, Serco, Capita, Seetec, Avanta) will end up with lucrative taxpayer funded contracts to carry out these sham "attitude tests". Just as they've picked up lucrative £multi-million contracts to administer the hopelessly failing and fraud riddled Work Programme and the "Help to Work" forced labour schemes.

The clear problem with the concept of "attitude tests" for the unemployed is the fact that the information obtained will be of so little use.

• What is the point of paying a fortune to a private company to establish the attitude of a kid who has only ever experienced paid work on extremely exploitative and low paid Zero Hours contracts and actually spent most of their working life doing unpaid forced labour schemes? Of course they're going to be "despondent" and "resistant to work". 

• What is the point of paying a fortune to a private company to find out that a person with a long employment history in decent jobs who has briefly fallen on hard times is "determined" to find another decent job?

• What is the point of paying a fortune to a private company to report that a person suffering severe mental disabilities who has been thrown off disability benefits as a result of the unlawful and discriminatory WCA regime for disabled people, and then been forced to look for work they are clearly incapable of doing, is "bewildered"?

In my view a much more useful approach would be to attempt to find out what value these people have, rather than trying to classify what is wrong with them. Instead of a ridiculous privately administered attitude test, I'd like to see the DWP launch an in-house standard aptitude test.

Such an aptitude test would attempt to establish the individual skillset of each Jobseeker. by assessing things like memory, reading, maths, critical thinking skills, manual dexterity, problem solving skills, stamina, reaction times, patience, concentration etc. This would allow suitable people and employers to be directed towards each other. It would also give people a very clear idea of what their skills and abilities are, and where they need to make improvements.
Other than the huge difference in the quality and usefulness of the information obtained, the big difference between these proposed Tory attitude tests, and a comprehensive aptitude test is the motivation behind them.

The kind of Aptitude test I've described works on the assumption that each person has a set of values, and that it beneficial to all of us if the state helps them to identify their skills and find appropriate employment.

Esther McVey's Attitude tests work on a very different assumption: The assumption that the unemployed are mainly "scum with bad attitudes". Her test is about attempting to find out what is wrong with them, and using draconian measures to force them to change, or drive them off the unemployment figures altogether.

That Esther McVey and the Tories have got it so completely backwards illustrates the fact that they are just a bunch of opportunistic right-wing authoritarians who have no conception of what the social security system is actually supposed to be for.

As Minister of State for Employment, Esther McVey's job isn't to belittle and demean the unemployed by herding them into sham attitude assessments carried out by corporate outsourcing profiteers, then to segregate them into different grades of "scum", to be abused and threatened into unpaid forced labour schemes (which are administered by the same bunch of corporate outsourcing profiteers) under the threat of absolute destitution via social security sanctions.

The job of the Minister for Employment is to help people when they fall on hard times by providing a subsistance income, helping them to identify their strengths and weaknesses, offering them training and courses appropriate to their needs, and helping suitable employers and employees come together.
This sordid scheme once again reinforces two things that we should all know about the Tories by now: The first is that they will never ever pass up an opportunity to pump more public money into private companies. The second is that they have absolute contempt towards "the lower orders", so much so that Esther McVey imagines that it is her role to belittle, demean and punish the unemployed, rather than to actually help them in any meaningful way. 

 Another Angry Voice  is a not-for-profit page which generates absolutely no revenue from advertising and accepts no money from corporate or political interests. The only sources of income for  Another Angry Voice  are small donations from people who see some value in my work. 

If you appreciate my efforts and you could afford to make a donation, 

it would be massively appreciated.

More articles from
ANOTHER ANGRY VOICE    
    
12 things you should know about "Help to Work" forced labour schemes
               
Does the WCA regime for disabled people constitute psychological torture?
           
The "Making Work Pay" fallacy

Why do right-wing people support workfare?
     
Problem Solving with Iain Duncan Smith
       
Poverty in 21st Century Britain; a Tory comedy

Iain Duncan Smith's bizarre tirade against the Trussell Trust

The Tory ideological mission
           
Margaret Thatcher's toxic neoliberal legacies
           
The Great Neoliberal Lie