Theresa May's Hostile Environment legislation ruled unlawfully racist

In 2014 Theresa May was the Tory Home Secretary who introduced the vile Hostile Environment legislation that ultimately led to the Windrush scandal, but on March 1st 2019 a key plank of that legislation was ruled unlawful by the High Court because of the way it has unleashed a disgusting wave of racism.

The aspect of Hostile Environment that's been found unlawful is the "right to rent" policy that essentially turned private landlords into untrained freelance immigration agents by threatening them with jail and unlimited fines if they were caught renting property to people who couldn't prove their right to live in the UK.

The combination of this policy, and the Tory government's unwillingness to monitor and oversee the system they'd put in place created a massive increase in racism amongst private landlords.

Instead of implementing time consuming checks on residency status, huge numbers of landlords simply decided to not rent to any blacks, Asians, or foreigners, regardless of whether they had the correct paperwork or not.

The Home Office's own research showed that 25% of landlords would refuse to rent property to people unless they had British passports, yet despite their own department providing the compelling proof that their policy was being used to impose racist discrimination in the housing market, the Tory Home Office issued a statement saying that they were "disappointed" with the ruling, and that they're considering an appeal.

So after having one of their flagship policies being declared racist and unlawful by a British court of law, the Tory response isn't to apologise, it's to issue a statement that they're disappointed in the legal judgement against them!

It's important to remember that the "right to rent" policy is only one aspect of Theresa May's barbaric Hostile Environment. She also used similar threats to try to deny employment, banking services, social security, and even medical treatment to people who couldn't immediately prove their right of residence (like Windrush Brits who moved to the UK prior to 1971 and their descendants).

Theresa May and the Tories didn't just legislate to turn landlords into unwilling and untrained immigration enforcement officers, they did the same to bank clerks, teachers, medical professionals, and millions of ordinary employers too.

The attitude was that the Tory government couldn't be bothered to enforce their own immigration laws, so they would offload the task onto ordinary untrained members of the public, with no concern whatever for the fact that proportions of these ordinary people were always going to be racist, or incompetent, or just too damned lazy to bother doing things fairly, or at all.

And then there's the fact that scores of black British citizens have been refused reentry to the UK, including several who ended up dying in exile overseas.

But the Tories and the appalling "centrists" who colluded with Theresa May to impose this racist legislation by abstaining (Labour right-wingers) and even voting in favour of it (most of the Lib-Dems) can't pretend that they didn't know that these Hostile Environment policies would end up unleashing a sickening wave of racism and discrimination against Windrush Brits because they were warned.

Diane Abbott warned them during the parliamentary debate, but they ignored her. Immigration and anti-racism charities warned them from the beginning that these policies would end up stoking racism, but they ignored them. Even the Residential Landlords Association warned that turning landlords into unwilling and untrained immigration enforcement officers would lead to racist discrimination, but the Tories and "centrists" ignored these people too.

But if Tories and "centrists" are talented at one thing in particular, it's completely ignoring concerns over their own policies (just look at the fact that they're all still pushing ruinous austerity dogma even after 9 years of such wanton devastation that even right-wing economic organisations like the IMF and OECD turned their backs on the austerity ideology years ago).

So every time you see the mainstream media fixating on their agenda of portraying the Labour left (who were amongst the tiny minority who actually voted against Theresa May's racist Hostile Environment in 2014) as a hotbed of racism, just remember that the Tories have actually been condemned in court of law for ignoring all the warnings and imposing racist policies that have breached the human rights of thousands of real people.

Just remember that the mainstream media agenda of smearing the Labour left will always take precedence over reporting the observable reality that Theresa May and the Tories are a proven bunch of racists who ignored all the warnings and deliberately implemented unlawfully racist policies.

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How the Tories used "divide and conquer" tactics to trash all of our wages

Since the Tories were enabled back into power in 2010 workers in the United Kingdom have suffered an unprecedented attack on the value of their wages.

The wage collapse

George Osborne's imposition of hard-right austerity dogma and wage repression resulted in the longest sustained fall in the real value of workers' wages since records began.

In fact the only country in the entire developed world to have suffered a post-crisis collapse in wages as bad as Britain's was crisis-stricken Greece, and they were forced into imposing austerity dogma and wage repression by the Troika, the Tories imposed the same toxic hard-right economic snake oil on Britain simply because they wanted to.

The dreadful outcome of these fanatically right-wing economic policies put UK workers in a uniquely bad position. The UK is the only developed nation in the world where the economy has been growing, but the share of the wealth going to workers has been in decline, which leaves the obvious question of where all that extra wealth has been going if not to working people.

Another obvious question that arises is how on earth the Tories have managed to get away with such a prolonged ideological attack on the wages of hard-working people without triggering a furious backlash.

Propaganda

One of the obvious reasons the Tories have got away with this sustained ideological assault on ordinary working people is the fact that the complicit mainstream media barely ever covers the issue.

The facts that British workers have suffered the worst wage collapse since records began should be the narrative that underpins pretty much every newspaper article about politics or the economy, but somehow the ideologically driven Tory "war on wages" is a story that only ever pops up intermittently, with much greater prominence given to absolute drivel like Diane Abbott's bouts of innumeracy, fake stories about Jeremy Corbyn breaking a student debt promise he never made, and endless hate-mongering attacks against any public figure who dares argue for anything but the most extreme-right anti-democratic interpretation of Brexit.

Not only have the mainstream media been complicit with the Tory "war on wages" by omission, they've also desperately failed to ridicule the ridiculous Orwellian propaganda narrative from the Tories that they're the party for "hardworking people".

The Tories have orchestrated the worst collapse in workers' wages on record, repeatedly slashed in-work social security (Tax Credits, sick pay, the child welfare system, maternity & paternity pay, Employment Support Allowance ...), attacked workers' rights (like the right of low-income workers to take bad bosses to Employment Tribunals without paying £1,200 in unlawful Tory tribunal fees), and created a system where a shocking 55% of all families living in poverty are working families.

It's absolutely extraordinary that the mainstream media have allowed an anti-worker party like this to dress themselves up as friends of "hardworking people" without repeatedly calling them out on their completely backwards "black is white" propaganda.

Divide and conquer

One of the classic right-wing political tactics is to drive divisions within sectors of society in order to get them hating each other, rather than fighting back against the government that is actually to blame for most of their problems.

The division the Tories have created in order to drive down all of our wages is between public sector and private sector workers.

The right-wing press have been particularly helpful to the Tories in helping spread this social division with their continual attacks on public sector employees, especially teachers and NHS staff.

The idea is to stoke jealousy amongst private sector employees about the supposedly brilliant wages and fantastic pensions enjoyed by public sector workers in order to justify imposing real terms pay cuts on public sector workers year after year, whilst simultaneously increasing their workloads too.

The economy is interconnected

Dim-witted private sector employees buy into the crude envy politics of the right-wing press and actually end up supporting the public sector pay freeze. They support it because they're actually gullible enough believe the ridiculous narrative that public sector wage repression is about equalising conditions between the public and private sector, rather than a political means of driving down the wages of all of us.

The reason they're too stupid to understand is that they've been conditioned into thinking about the economy in super-simplistic "us and them" terms, rather than seeing the economy as a spectacularly complex mass of interconnections.

Just think about it. If nurses, paramedics and other NHS staff are hit by huge real terms pay cuts for seven consecutive years, what kind of effect would this have on the local economy? 

Would the private sector employees of a hospital's now-struggling local coffee shops and sandwich bars be better off, or worse off, as increasingly over-worked medical staff bring packed lunches instead of eating out?

Would local businesses like restaurants, cinemas, gyms, and takeaways fare better or worse as their public sector clientele are forced to cut back dramatically on luxury expenditure?

If public sector wages in your town are collapsing and people are quitting public sector jobs in droves to seek private sector employment, is this increased competition for private sector jobs going to have an upwards or downwards influence on wages in the private sector?

Anyone who can't see that an intense campaign of wage repression against one sector of society is going to have a knock-on effect on their own wages too is obviously so riddled with envy that they've abandoned even the most basic critical thinking skills in favour of outright jealousy and hate.

Tory inertia

Remember how the Tory party actually cheered themselves when they won their vote to continue repressing the wages of the firefighters, police officers and NHS staff who were the heroues of the Grenfell fire and the terrorist attacks in London and Manchester?

Those cheers were an illustration of the ideological hatred that Tories have towards public sector workers (despite being particularly well-paid public sector workers themselves!). 

To actually cheer themselves for their continued attacks on public sector pay just goes to show how much the Tory party have bought into their own vile divisive propaganda.

A significant proportion of the Tory party are now so enamoured with their own anti-public sector propaganda that there is no way that the party can change direction without triggering yet another internal party civil war on top of the battles that are already raging over Europe and Theresa May's pathetic leadership.

These people actually believe that it makes economic sense to attack workers' wages which depresses economic demand, and create a repetition of the household debt boom that preceded the 2007-08 financial sector meltdown.

They also see public sector workers like nurses, firefighters and teachers as the new "enemy within" who need to be attacked and crushed like the miners were in the 1980s.

The Tories are now in a hopeless bind because they're incapable of seeing beyond their own propaganda. 

They've spent seven years making excuses for socially and economically ruinous austerity dogma, and they've spend seven years deliberately repressing all of our wages.

Just look at the epic struggle Jeremy Corbyn has had trying to tear the Labour Party right away from their fixation with hard-right austerity dogma and attacks on the in-work benefit system, and Labour are traditionally the workers' party (hence the name)!

If Corbyn's had such a difficult job of steering Labour away from hard-right austerity dogma and wage repression policies, just imagine how difficult it would be for a new Tory leader to convince their MPs and party members that they need to reverse austerity and stop wage repression because they've been guilty of driving the UK economy in totally the wrong direction for seven disastrous years.

As long as this Tory government continues to defy the national interest by clinging onto power, there's going to be nothing but the most superficial PR-driven changes of direction.

As long as they cling to power their wage repression policies which affect all of us will continue to increase rates of in-work poverty, cripple economic demand, and re-inflate the dangerous household debt bubble.

 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.

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10 Economic fairy stories that people need to stop believing in

One of the big problems in the UK is the fact that the vast majority of the 93% of kids who go to state school end up with no economics education. This means that an awful lot of people are susceptible to the kind of ridiculous economic fairy stories that are pushed by right-wing politicians and their cheerleaders in the mainstream media.

In this article I'm going to quickly run through ten of them. I've already written articles critiquing several of these myths individually. Where this is the case I've linked to the full article underneath the section header.

1. Government finances are like a household budget
[Main Article]

This is one of the most pervasive right-wing economic myths. The Tories love it because it allows them to hoodwink economically uneducated people into supporting their economic policies by making them think they understand economic issues that are actually very much more complex.

If your family home has a printing press that can produce money out of nothing (like the Bank of England) then the government finances-household budget analogy is slightly less misleading, but it also means you're a bunch of money forging criminals, so hardly representative of the typical UK family.

Anyone who tells you that government finances are like a household budget is either economically illiterate, or they're someone who knows perfectly well that they're talking economic gibberish but they're deliberately lying to you because they're assuming you to be economically illiterate.

2. The private sector is more efficient than public ownership
[Main article]

There are so many examples of this being completely wrong it's impossible to list them all. Think of the G4S security fiasco at the 2012 Olympics when public sector workers like the army and police had to step in at the last moment to rectify a massive private sector blunder. The private company had months to prepare a security plan and failed, the public sector stepped in at the very last moment and succeeded.

Then you've got the publicly operated East Coast Mainline rail franchise that was outperforming all the private franchises so dramatically that the Tories quickly bundled it back into private ownership to avoid the embarrassment.

If private ownership really is so much more efficient than public ownership, ask yourself why the military wasn't one of the first things to be privatised. Ask yourself why countries at war tend to bring private industries under public management.

3. House price inflation is good for the economy and creates growth

I'm sure you'll have seen plenty of news items focusing on house prices. When house prices fall the media report it as if it's some kind of terrible tragedy, and when house prices rise they often paint it as evidence that the economy is recovering. This is completely wrong-headed.

There's no major problem if house prices increase more or less in line with average earnings, but that's clearly not been the case for decades. The more house price inflation outpaces earnings, the bigger the percentage of people's incomes end up going on mortgage repayments rather than being spent on genuinely productive economic activities like setting up businesses, investment and consumption.

The higher the rate of house price inflation, the more skewed towards house price speculation the economy becomes. 

Things have got so bad in the UK that four times as much money is created by the private banks to channel into house price speculation than is lent to businesses outside of the financial sector that actually produce things and provide services. The more house prices inflate, the more incentive there is for the banks to pour even more money into the housing bubble rather than into the sectors of the real economy that actually generate real economic activity.

4. Austerity is necessary and not just an ideologically driven choice
[Main article]

"Let's cut our way to growth" is an absolutely ridiculous policy from a macroeconomic perspective. The majority of economists recognise that severe spending cuts are harmful to the economy, and more and more people are waking up to the fact that austerity is a con job that uses debt-fearmongering as a cover for policies designed to ensure a huge transfer of wealth from the poor and ordinary to the tiny super-rich minority.

5. Everyone maximising their self-interest promotes wellbeing

This is one of the central ideas that underpins the right-wing economic models that have become accepted as the economic orthodoxy since the 1980s, and it's utterly ridiculous.

The concept that humans are rationally self-interested beings who will always act in their own self-interest is utterly ridiculous. Rational self interest is an impossible concept because in situations with multiple choices (like supermarket shopping) the number of different combinations of choices mean that a rational analysis would take thousands of years to complete, so people just use heuristics to make their decisions. 

A look at the concept of information asymmetry demonstrates how wrong-headed the idea of humans as perfectly rational economic agents is, because without a perfect supply of information, perfect rationality is clearly impossible to achieve.

Another glaring problem is that the concept of people as purely rational self-interested economic agents is the way it conflicts so dramatically with what we know about reality. If we were all perfectly selfish economic automota, then stuff like charity, empathy, voluntary activities and philanthropy simply wouldn't exist.

The problem goes further than the fact that humans don't and can't act as purely self-interested individuals. The idea that if only we were all just entirely selfish, then general wellbeing would be promoted is staggeringly backwards. If only everyone would stop giving to charity or volunteering in their community then the world would be a better place? Who actually believes this drivel?

6. It is a good idea to get China to finance our infrastructure projects
[Main article]

Even before it was revealed that one of the Chinese stakeholders in the bid to construct the Hinkley Point C nuclear power plant is accused of espionage in the US, George Osborne's own father-in-law described the deal concocted by Cameron and Osborne as "one of the worst deals ever" for energy consumers and the UK taxpayer.

I'm not going to go into any more detail on this because it really boggles my mind that there's anyone out there who thinks that the UK is better off bribing the Chinese into building our infrastructure for us than building it for ourselves.

7. Impoverishing people on benefits makes them find jobs

The idea that the benefits system is too generous and that people will just go out and find jobs if the welfare system is slashed is one of the most pervasive right-wing economic myths.

The first problem is that many people on benefits are simply incapable of work. Cutting the benefits paid to the severely disabled and terminally ill doesn't make them more likely to find work, it just makes their already difficult situation much worse.

Another problem is that an awful lot of benefits go to the working poor. Stuff like working tax credits and in-work benefits accounts for a much bigger slice of the welfare system than unemployment benefit. Additionally an ever increasing slice of the vast housing benefit budget goes to the working-poor, whose employers pay such pitifully low wages that their employees can't even afford to cover their housing costs. 

Slashing Working Tax Credits, Housing Benefit, Statutory Sick Pay, maternity and paternity pay and other in-work benefits, whilst harking on about "making work pay" is obscene political propaganda from the Tories, but lots of people actually buy into it because they're unwilling to differentiate between the benefits paid to the unemployed, and benefits paid to the working poor.

Another major problem is that the concept of equilibrium unemployment is central to right-wing economic orthodoxy. They actually believe that there is an ideal rate of unemployment and design their economic policies to ensure that there's always a pool of unemployed workers. The idea of deliberately maintaining a standing army of unemployed people to drive down the wages and working conditions of those with jobs is bad enough, but it's utterly appalling to then say that we have to slash the pitiful subsistence incomes they live on in order to force them into work, when the policy is actually to keep them out of work to keep wages as low as possible.

One last problem is that the government's own evidence shows that impoverishing people in order to make them look for work is totally ineffective. In fact it actually creates more barriers to employment (inability to pay transport costs, printing CVs, cleaning clothes ...).

8. Driving down wages is good for the economy

UK workers have suffered a 10.4% decrease in their average real terms incomes since 2007 which is a decline only matched in severity by Greece in the rest of the developed world. The Tories have actually tried to make out that repressing wages is good for the economy as they tried to justify their 1% cap on wage increases for public sector workers (whilst accepting an 11% pay raise for themselves of course).

Slashing wages is bad for the economy because lower wages means lower aggregate demand in the economy. The only way that demand can be kept up when wages are falling is if people avoid cutting back by incurring private debt. Anyone who thinks that cutting wages and stimulating an even bigger private debt bubble than the one that preceded the 2007-08 financial sector meltdown is a good idea really hasn't been thinking very hard about economic issues at all.

9. Government spending crowds out the private sector

The idea that government investment crowds out the private sector is difficult enough to justify in economic good times, but in a economic situation where the private banks are unwilling to lend to businesses because they see much greater returns gambling on the house price bubble or playing the global derivatives casino it's utterly senseless.

Just look at the decline in house building since the 1970s (see image). The Thatcher government basically put an end to government house building, and if crowding out theory is correct, the private sector should have taken up the government share in the market which would have kept the number of new builds per year more or less the same.

In fact if you combine crowding out with the myth of private sector efficiency there should actually have been a huge house building boom since the 1980s, but what has actually happened is an extraordinary slump with new builds falling to the lowest level since the 1920s under David Cameron's government.

The private sector didn't build more houses at all, they simply sat back and enjoyed a huge unearned bonanza as the supply of new houses dwindled and ever increasing demand resulted in skyrocketing prices and corporate profits.

Crowding out theory clearly didn't even work in the pre-crisis period, but in the post-crisis economy it's absolute gibberish to claim state investment crowds out the private sector when the private banks are refusing to lend to genuinely productive sectors of the economy.

10. Government money creation always creates inflation

This myth is easily accepted by the masses because "wheelbarrows full of cash to buy a loaf of bread" in Wiemar Germany has been part of the history curriculum for millions of UK school kids. It's easy to perpetuate the myth that money creation creates hyperinflation when you can hark back to stuff like that, but it's basically just economic fearmongering because it relies on a complete misunderstanding of where money actually comes from (it's actually created out of nothing by the private banks) and a failure to consider the different ways in which the money could be spent.

It is true that money creation can lead to inflation, but it clearly depends where the newly created money is directed. The private banks create money out of nothing every time they make a loan and this led to a huge house price bubble. After the 2007-08 economic collapse the monetary system was not reformed and we're now seeing the development of another, even bigger house price bubble.

When the Bank of England created £375 billion in quantitative easing cash to prop up the insolvent financial sector it did not create a large spike in general inflation. The purpose of this vast cash injection was to stave off deflation in financial sector assets that are mainly held by the wealthy. As a result of it the values of the assets held by the rich were significantly inflated, while the values of pension funds and savings were deflated.

The type of inflation caused by money creation clearly depends on where the targeted money is directed into the economy.

If the government created money to just hand it out to the public that would likely cause price inflation in goods and services, but imagine if the government created £50 billion to invest in ensuring that every business and household in the UK gets free access to high-speed broadband. This spending would obviously have a significant economic effect but whether it causes inflation or deflation would depend on which area of the economy you were to look at. Such a scheme would create a large number of relatively high-skilled jobs meaning an earnings boost. It would create increased demand for materials which would have various economic repercussions, and it would also clearly cause a collapse in the value of companies providing home broadband services.

Anyone trying to claim that money creation to invest in infrastructure and services would always create hyperinflation is clearly trying to con you, probably because they prefer money creation schemes that inflate the assets of the rich, rather than money creation schemes that benefit all of society.

Conclusion

After the 2007-08 financial sector meltdown the "too big to fail" banks still utterly dominate the UK market; bankers salaries and bonuses are way higher than before the crisis; ordinary British workers have suffered a collapse in the value of their wages as bad as in Greece; private banks still have a monopoly on money creation and are still using the money that they create to inflate speculative housing bubbles; and the Tory government has simply repackaged the hard-right economic dogma that caused the financial sector crisis as their Austerity snake oil elixir to supposedly cure the crisis.

This utterly unacceptable response to the financial sector meltdown has come about because far too many people accept the facile and completely inaccurate economic fairy stories propagated by the Tory party and their chums in the mainstream media. 

If the British public do not learn to stop believing in economic fairy stories like these, there's little hope of any kind of change in direction away from the kind of hard-right economic dogma that created the conditions where the 2007-08 financial sector meltdown became inevitable, which means another meltdown at some point in the future and yet another effort to rebrand the exact causes of the meltdown as the solution to the meltdown.

 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.

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NOTE: This article was inspired by a comment from a guy called Simon Cohen in the comments section on the Guardian website who came up with a list of 10 economic myths that need busting. I kept several of the myths he suggested, but changed others.

Capita employed a Britain First sympathiser to assess disabled people

Under Tory rule the DWP has outsourced the assessment of disabled people to a bunch of private firms like Atos, Capita and Maximus (a move that costs far more in corporate outsourcing fees than will ever be saved in reduced disability benefits payments). 

Capita were put in charge of carrying out assessments for Personal Independence Payments (PIP) and it turns out they've been employing a hate-filled Britain First sympathiser to strip disabled people of their benefits.

This extreme-right Capita employee was at it for years before being busted after she wrote a report full of lies about a woman called Sarah Goldstein.

Goldstein suffers from fibromyalgia, Raynaud’s syndrome, chronic migraines, anxiety and depression but was awarded a zero on her claim. She was upset and angry about the lies but had the insight to look into the background of the woman who lied about her. What she found was a Facebook page full of savagely racist and disablist comments stretching back for years, including items from extreme-right hate groups like Britain First and Infidels of Britain.

After Sarah Goldstein reported her findings to Capita they suspended the assessor from her job and the company responded with promises of a re-assessment for Sarah and a load of guff about their supposedly "strict" social media policy.

Capita's social media policy is obviously a very weak and reactive one if they have to be told about their employees extreme-right hatemongering activities by one of the people she falsely denied benefits to. The hatemongering had been going on for years, but Capita obviously does nothing to at all to vet their employees for the kind of extreme-right sympathies that make impartial assessment of disability claims pretty much impossible.

A pro-eugenics Nazi poster complaining that
ordinary citizens are carrying the burden
of looking after the genetically sick

Not only does employing extreme-right sympathisers make bias against ethnic and religious minorities in assessments highly likely, the extreme right also have a long history of supporting eugenics against people with disabilities (see image).

The woman who carried out the dishonest assessment had been working for Capita since early 2014. Just imagine how many people she could have falsely stripped of their disability benefits because of her xenophobic and anti-disability attitudes. Just imagine how many more extreme-right people like her could be still out there, joyously using the already horrific Tory welfare reforms to wage their own warped racist, xenophobic and disablist vendettas.

Of course Capita, and the Tories, and everyone who actively voted for more Tory mistreatment of the disabled at the 2015 General Election will try to wash their hands of this incident and pretend that it's just one "rotten apple" incident, but the whole concept of paying far more to private companies than they can possibly save the taxpayer through stripping disabled people of their benefits is sick enough as it is. Then allowing the private companies to employ hate-filled individuals to use the assessments as an excuse to wage their warped personal vendettas is absolutely disgusting and completely unacceptable.

As British people we should be thoroughly ashamed of the way we have allowed our government, a bunch of mercenary profiteering corporations and their employees to systematically mistreat disabled people. 

We should be up in arms about the appalling treatment of some of the most vulnerable people in society but after 40 years of Thatcherite greed-worship spoon fed to us by the Westminster establishment and the right-wing press, the "I'm alright Jack" crowd are happy to vote for even more abuse of the disabled. They're happy for the systematic abuse to continue as long as they think it means more house price inflation for them to enjoy, more tax-cuts for well off people like them, fewer workers' rights and tenants' rights for the people they got rich on the backs of, and more pulling up of the social mobility ladder so the younger generations are denied the advantages they took for granted.

We live in a sick society, but it's not people who are disabled who are sick, it's the people who abuse the disabled and the people who turn a blind eye to this systematic abuse who are the social cancer we're 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.

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For more information on the Tory vendetta against disabled people check out DPAC and the Disability News Service.

The Tory plan to force privatise every school in England

  
George Osborne used his 2016 spring budget to reveal his plan to forcibly convert all local authority schools in England into unaccountable privately operated academy schools, whether they want to become academy schools or not.

Academies

I've already written an extensive article detailing the severe ideological vandalism the Tories have already inflicted on the English education system, so I'll just stick to bullet points here:

• A large number of academy chains are owned and operated by Tory politicians and major Tory party donors. Anyone who expects such people to provide a politically neutral education to our children must be spectacularly naive.

• The process of turning local authority schools into academies results in public land and infrastructure being transferred, for free, to unaccountable privately operated academy chains.

• A large number of academy chains have set up ludicrous executive pay structures to allow a handful of directors to topslice hundreds of thousands of pounds per year out of publicly funded education budgets to pay themselves vast six figure salaries.

• Other academy directors have been caught out using their own companies to supply the schools in their chains on overpriced no-bid contracts. They are aided in this corruption by the fact that academy schools are subject to far less public scrutiny than local authority schools.

• Academy schools have been exempted from all kinds of regulation that ensures that local authority schools provide a decent standard of education, such as school dinner nutritional standards, requirements that teachers actually have teaching qualifications, and minimum outdoor play space requirements.

Loss of local control

One of the main complaints about the forced academification of schools into the control of unaccountable private sector pseudo-charities is the loss of local control. If a local authority school is failing, then it's possible for parents and concerned citizens to hold the local authority to account by voting out the ruling party. If a privately operated pseudo-charity school is failing, found to be brazenly topslicing the local education budget to fill the pockets of their directors, or corruptly awarding supply contracts to companies belonging to the directors - local people have very much less power to intervene.

What if local parents don't want their school to be taken over by a private sector pseudo-charity owned and operated by a major Tory party donor. The Tory answer is "screw them, they'll get what they're given and put up with it".

The deliberate removal of the influence local people can have over the running of their schools is completely at odds with all all of the Orwellian rhetoric they spout about how important it is to give more power to local people. All the Tories are really interested in is giving more power to their cronies to leech as much cash out of public coffers as possible, and screw the objections of "the lower orders".

Privatisation 2.0

In the old days of Thatcherism the Tories used to privatise things by selling them off at a fraction of their true value. This "sell the national silver" form of privatisation was bad enough, but the kind of privatisation that is going on in the English education system is very much worse.

If the original Thatcherite privatisations took the form of "selling the national silver at bargain basement prices", the academification process is clearly "giving away the national silver for free, then renting it straight back at hugely inflated prices".

Not only are the Tories giving away all of our schools, for free, to unaccountable private sector pseudo-charities, then paying the national education budget directly to them to do with as they please. They're also using taxpayers' cash to cover all of the admin costs of the forced privatisations, which come in at an estimated £1.5 billion.

Cronyism

The Tories love to pretend that they're a capitalist political party, but what they're doing here isn't capitalism at all, it's blatantly cronyism.

If you think capitalism is about central government distributing public assets to favoured private entities and allowing them to form localised monopolies/oligopolies/cartels all subsidised with taxpayers' cash, you clearly have no idea what the word "capitalism" actually means and need to go and do some very basic level political reading.

The forced privatisation of publicly owned schools into the ownership of private taxpayer subsidised pseudo-charities (many of them owned by members of the ruling political party) is about the clearest example of cronyism possible.

Competition

One of the things that this plan to forcibly privatise all local authority schools proves beyond any doubt is the Tory fear of competition.

The Tories always bang on and on about how competition is so vital to capitalism, but what they're doing here is deliberately eliminating competition to their ideological reforms. They're so afraid that local authority schools will outperform privately operated academies, they're determined to eradicate proper publicly run schools completely so it's impossible for critics of their cronyist system to point to examples of public sector success to highlight private pseudo-charity failure.

Another example of this Tory fear of competition was the way they hastily re-privatised the East Coast Mainline when it became clear that the public sector body that was running it (after the previous private franchise bailed out of the contract at short notice) was doing a far better job of it than any of the private sector rail franchises.

If the public sector is ever in danger of outperforming their private sector cronies, the immediate Tory response is to eradicate the successful public sector operation.

The re-privatisation of the East Coast Mainline and the eradication of publicly provided education in England are two crystal clear examples of the Tory terror of competition from the public sector. They're crystal clear demonstrations that they secretly know that the public sector run services are actually far more efficient than handing control of public assets to their cronies.

Conclusion

If you think that unaccountable, topslicing, private sector pseudo-charities (many owned and operated by Tory politicians and major Tory party donors) will do a better job of educating future generations of children than publicly accountable local authorities, perhaps you could explain how you think that might work in the comments section?

  
  

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Iain Duncan Smith's Universal Job Match fiasco

Yet another one of Iain Duncan Smith's flagship welfare "reforms" is in chaos. We already know that Universal Credit is turning into an expensive, criminally mismanaged farce; we know that the WCA assessment regime is cruel and discriminatory, and so unpopular that the company that administers it (the French corporate outsourcing firm Atos) would apparently rather quit than continue raking in millions by incorrectly declaring disabled and seriously ill people "fit-for-work"; we know that his Soviet style forced labour schemes are as economically illiterate as they are illiberal; we know that "Bedroom Tax" was launched in such a cack-handed way that it ended up driving one poor woman to suicide, even though she wasn't even liable to pay it; and we know that the Work Programme has been a fraud riddled and hugely expensive failure.

The latest aspect of Iain Duncan Smith's welfare system to come under concentrated criticism is the dogs-dinner of a website for jobseekers, called Universal Jobmatch.

It turns out that something like half of all the jobs listed on there are fakes, frauds, phishing scams or duplicates, which is a problem caused by the fact that the DWP specified that Monster build them a website without proper identity checks for recruiters. The site is so badly designed that in 2013 it won an award for being the worst recruitment website, which is quite an achievement for a site that cost £17 million to build and £6 million per year to administer.

Probably the worst thing about Universal Jobmatch is that Jobcentre staff have been given the power to force Jobseekers to use this catastrophe of a website under threat of absolute destitution via benefits sanctions.

Here's what recruitment industry veteran Stephen O'Donnell had to say about the practice of forcing the unemployed into using the Universal Jobmatch website:

"I think it's criminally unfair to sanction jobseekers for not using such a clumsily built website, rife with spammers, identity thieves and anonymous job ads."

O'Donnell was also keen to point out that Monster (the private company that has raked in £millions of pounds for building and running the site) are not so much to blame for the failure of the website, as the true culprit; the DWP, and ultimately their boss Iain Duncan Smith.

Now it turns out (via leaked documents) that the DWP are fully aware of how terrible the Universal Jobmatch site is, and that they have drawn up secret plans to scrap it in 2016. The appalling thing about this decision is that it shows that they intend to continue forcing unemployed people to use a hopelessly flawed system for the next two years, simply because they don't want to suffer the PR disaster of shutting it down early and having to compensate Monster for breach of contract.

Iain Duncan Smith and the DWP are responsible for the disgracefully poor design of the site, and they are quite happy to abuse the unemployed by forcing them to continue using their hopelessly botched and fraud riddled website for the next two years.

We know that Iain Duncan Smith only has two reactions to cock-ups, he either denies reality by claiming that the cock-up is actually a success, or he blames someone else. In my view it is beyond doubt that Iain Duncan Smith is an extremely limited individual (and a sufferer of some kind of narcissistic personality disorder) who has been promoted way beyond his capabilities. It is a disturbing sign of the shocking contempt that David Cameron and the Tories have for the poor, the disabled and the unemployed that they continue to allow this walking disaster zone to rule over the lives of many of the most vulnerable people in society.

With such an appalling track record of cock ups, of which Universal Jobmatch is just the latest in a long succession, David Cameron has every justification for sacking Iain Duncan Smith, should he actually want to.

Given Cameron's statement that "people have to take responsibility for the actions and show how they're going to be accountable for these actions. It’s very important that goes all the way to the top of the organization", when he was trying to force the resignation of Barclays CEO Bob Diamond, it is a clear demonstration of rank hypocrisy that Cameron hasn't got rid of Iain Duncan Smith, or even fallen on his own sword given the appalling scale of poverty, misery and death that Iain Duncan Smith's catastrophically mismanaged DWP have been inflicting on people for the last four years.

The fact that Iain Duncan Smith is still in his job after all of his blunders, and the fact that the Tories are determined to carry on forcing the unemployed to use their catastrophe of a website for the next two years are yet more demonstrations of the absolute contempt with which the Tory party regard "the lower orders".


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