Voting Tory is an endorsement of their systematic abuse of sick and disabled people

If you watched BBC Question Time on Thursday November 9th 2017 you will have seen a Tory plant in the audience bridling with faux outrage at the accusation that the Tory government is responsible for the mistreatment of disabled people.  Here's a clip of the encounter.

The absolute state of this: A Tory plant in the BBC Question Time audience outright denying the Tories horrific mistreatment of sick and disabled people. pic.twitter.com/0NFQntHuot

— Tom (AAV) (@Angry_Voice) November 10, 2017

The audience member in question is the Tory councillor for Horley Central in Surrey, although he used to be a Ukipper until he saw the political tide turning and opportunistically jumped ship to join the Tories.

The Ukipper-turned-Tory (blue-kip) councillor furiously condemned Aditya Chakrabortty as "the Donald Trump of the left" for daring to highlight the Tory track record of mistreating disabled people.

Given that the Tory plant in the audience was basically trying to deny the appalling Tory track record of mistreating sick and disabled people as "inflammatory rubbish", it's obvious that he's actually the one using reality-denying Trump-style rhetoric to render uncomfortable truths as "fake news". But by now we should all be well aware that accusing your opponents of what you're guilty of yourself has always been one of the classic right-wing propaganda tactics.

Here's a list of issues that the Blue-kip plant in the BBC audience was trying to publicly deny.

• The Tory government's own figures admit that thousands of disabled people have died within six weeks of being declared "fit for work" and stripped of their disability benefits by the Work Capacity Assessment (WCA) regime. The Tory government desperately tried to hide these figures by refusing to comply with Freedom of Information requests.

• The WCA regime was declared unlawful for the way it discriminates against people with mental health conditions, but the Tory government carried on regardless.

• Appeals against botched WCA rulings have been costing £50 million a year. The Tory government have ensured that this cost is paid for by the taxpayer, not the profiteering corporations that made the botched assessments in the first place.

• The WCA disability denial regime costs way more in corporate outsourcing contracts to administer than it will ever save in reduced disability benefit payments, meaning the Tories are forcing the taxpayer to subsidise their systematic abuse of disabled people.

• An incredible 420,000 disabled people were hit by the Tory "Bedroom Tax", many of them for "spare" rooms used for medical equipment, or for carers to sleep in. The financial stress caused Stephanie Bottrill to commit suicide leaving a note blaming David Cameron and the Tory government.

• Tens of thousands of disabled people were forced onto the Tories' shambolic Work Programme, but the outsourcing companies running this scheme knew they could never make a profit from helping "difficult to place" clients, so disabled people were just "parked" while the corporate parasites focused on cashing in on easy to place clients. Just 8% of disabled people to be put through the Work Programme end up finding jobs!

• A United Nations investigation into the treatment of disabled people in the UK found that the UK government was committing "grave and systematic violations" of disabled people's rights.

• In March 2016 309 Tory MPs voted to cut the Employment and Support Allowance by £1,500 per year. Not a single politician from any other party voted in favour of these cuts. As a result of this brazen economic assault on disabled people, several Tory MPs were sacked as patrons of disability charities.

• The Tory party claimed to be scrapping the Disability Living Allowance (DLA) and replacing it with Personal Independence Payments (PIP) in order to make sure the money went to the right people, but in April 2017 they slashed PIP payments by 33% using the perverse excuse that this would incentivise them to find work (despite there being no evidence whatever to back up this claim).

• Disabled people undergoing PIP assessments have routinely been asked "why haven't you killed yourself yet?" by their assessors.

• An incredible 65% of PIP decisions that go to appeal are overturned, yet the profiteering outsourcing corporations making these botched assessments (Atos and Capita) just had their contracts extended by two years by a no-bid process!

• The Tory party constantly claim that the purpose of their disability cuts is trying to get disabled people into work, but they deliberately laid off 1,500 disabled people by shutting down Remploy factories, many of whom are still out of work years later.

• Despite constantly going on about the importance of helping people with mental illnesses, the Tories have been doing precisely to opposite; slashing funding for mental health services and actively instructing it's corporate army of disability assessors to discriminate against people with mental health conditions.

• Since 2010 the Tories have had seven different disability ministers in seven years, with most of them using the position as nothing more than a stepping stone to higher positions in government, rather than doing anything to actually help disabled people. The latest Tory disability minister Sarah Newton has a shocking track record of voting against the interests of disabled people. 

• The Tory government are confiscating an astounding 900 adapted motability vehicles from disabled people per week. In one case they confiscated the motability vehicle to save £6,000 and then agreed to pay £65,000 in taxi fares so that the disabled person could continue going to work!

The mainstream media has given this disgusting Tory track record only a tiny fraction of the attention it deserves, so people can be forgiven for not knowing all of it. However, you would have to have spent the last seven years living in a lead box to not be aware of any of this stuff.

The fact is that when it comes to election time, Conservative voters are aware that the most vulnerable people in society suffer under Tory rule, but in the grim amoral calculus they perform in their minds, the suffering, destitution and actual deaths of disabled people are somehow a price worth paying for whatever (probably imaginary) benefit they think they'd be getting by electing a Tory government.

Of course the majority of the blame is shouldered by the Tory politicians who voted in favour of these horrifying policies, and cynically used the role of Disability Minister as a temporary stepping stone to other things instead of trying to actually help disabled people, but Tory voters are not exempt from blame because by endorsing the Tory party, they're complicit in allowing this disgraceful systematic abuse of disabled people to continue.

It doesn't matter how much blustering faux outrage and denials of reality people like Chris Stevens utter, the fact is simple: People who vote Tory are guilty of voting in favour of more suffering for sick and disabled people.

 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

The Tories are defending their sanctions regime with outright lies

The draconian Tory sanctions regime has come under fire in a November 2016 report by the National Audit Office (NAO). This is far from the first report to slam the sanctions regime as chaotic, ineffective, discriminatory and a major cause of destitution and homelessness (Joseph Rowntree Foundation, Crisis, Citizens Advice Scotland, Church Action on Poverty) but this NAO report is particularly damning because it comes from the government's own spending watchdog.

Selected findings

The findings of the NAO report reiterate the damning findings of previous reports into the draconian Tory sanctions regime. Here are a few extracts:

"The fact that sanctions are widespread does not mean they are well designed, fairly administered or effective."

In other words: The sanctions regime is badly designed, unfairly administered and ineffective.

"Use of sanctions varies substantially between jobcentres and between providers."

In other words: The sanctions regime is not being consistently applied. It's basically a postcode lottery of a system where some Jobcentres and private contractors apply sanctions for the most trivial of reasons, while others are much less trigger-happy about throwing people into absolute destitution.

"26% of all sanctioned Work Programme participants had their decision overturned, compared to 11% of jobcentre sanctions."

In other words: Employees of the rash of parasitical outsourcing companies that the Tories have brought into the welfare system are more than twice as likely to use spurious reasons to throw people into absolute destitution as actual Jobcentre staff are.

"The Department [DWP] has not used its own data to evaluate the impact of sanctions in the UK."

In other words: The draconian Tory sanctions regime is based on ideology, not evidence.

"The Department has not supported wider work to improve understanding of sanction outcomes."

In other words: The Tories are terrified of evidence being uncovered that their draconian sanctions regime is counter-productive, so they refuse to support evidence based research into the consequences of their policies.

"The Department does not track the costs and benefits of sanctions."

In other words: The Tories don't give a damn whether their draconian sanctions regime actually costs the taxpayer money. They're determined to economically cripple people, often for the most trivial of reasons, regardless of how much this vindictiveness costs the taxpayer in the long-run.

"Our review of the available evidence suggests the department’s use of sanctions is linked as much to management priorities and local staff discretion as it is to claimants' behaviour."

In other words: Whether a person is impoverished with a benefit sanction depends on the attitudes of the people making the sanction decision as much it does on the actual behaviour of the person being thrown into poverty!

Apologist responses

In response to this damning report the Tories and their DWP minions came out with a predictable pack of lies. A DWP spokesperson claimed that sanctions "are only ever used as a last resort after people fail to do what is asked of them in return for benefits" which is a demonstrable lie.

Not only is the assertion that sanctions are "only ever used as a last resort" contradicted by the actual findings of the report the DWP are trying to smear, it's also contradicted by countless examples of sanctions being imposed for utterly spurious reasons.

• Sanctioned for failing to complete a fitness for work assessment due to having a heart attack during the interview. [source]

• Sanctioned for not carrying out a job search on Christmas Day. [source]

• Sanctioned because the queue at the Jobcentre took so long that the appointment time was missed, even though the claimant arrived in plenty of time. [source]

• Sanctioned for nine weeks for missing a Jobcentre appointment due to suffering a heart attack earlier in the day. [source]

• Sanctioned for missing an appointment due to being in hospital with his wife who had just had a stillborn child. [source]

• Sanctioned for four weeks for being 5 minutes late to an appointment. [source]

• Sanctioned for four weeks for being 9 minutes late to an appointment. [source]

• Sanctioned for thirteen weeks for the "crime" of not wasting an employers' time by applying for a job that the claimant knew they didn't have the skills to do. [source]

• A 60 year old veteran sanctioned for selling poppies for a few hours a day. [source]

The NAO report makes it absolutely clear that thousands of people have their spurious sanction decisions overturned on appeal, and anyone who has read the above list of atrociously harsh reasons that people have been hit with absolute destitution must know full well that the DWP spokesperson was brazenly lying through their teeth when they claimed that sanctions are "only ever used as a last resort".

The Tory DWP minister Damian Green (a seasoned liar) got in on the act by dismissing the findings of the NAO report with claims that the sanctions regime encourages people to look harder for work, which is a claim that the actual report found that there was no actual evidence to support.

In all likelihood it's probable that Damian Green didn't even bother reading the report he immediately began slagging off, because it's not so long since he slurred the Ken Loach film I Daniel Blake as a "monstrously unfair" portrayal that "bears no relation to the modern benefits system" before admitting that he hadn't even bothered to watch the film before drawing his conclusions and then furiously spouting off in public about it.

One of the below-the-line comments on the Guardian coverage of the NAO report perfectly exemplified the vindictive evidence-free mentality of people who continue to support the draconian Tory sanctions regime.

A commentator calling himself Danny Sutherland said "I would hope sanctions are not about saving money, but about getting people out of bed".

In one short sentence this guy sums up several things that are wrong with the vindictive Tory mentality. He displays a complete disregard for whether this regime costs the taxpayer money or not (presumably he doesn't give a damn that the Tory disability assessment regime costs the taxpayer far more in corporate outsourcing fees than it will ever save in reduced benefits payments either) and also he demonstrated a total disregard for the actual evidence by simply expressing a "hope" that sanctions are "about getting people out of bed".

It doesn't take much brain power to understand that far from being an incentive to get out of bed, absolute destitution is a massive impediment to active job searching. Imagine a person is left with no money whatever to pay for food, heating, transport costs, cleaning of clothes or even a haircut, do these conditions really mean that they would be more likely to find work? Or would they actually be more likely to try to stay warm and expend as little energy as possible by staying in bed?

There are clearly a lot of vindictively minded Tory apologists out there who don't give a damn how much it costs the taxpayer, how hopelessly ineffective and unfair the system is, how many innocent people get caught up in it ... they just want to see savage kickings meted out to people they perceive to be below themselves in the social pecking order, because the suffering of others makes them feel so much better about themselves.

Equilibrium unemployment

One of the worst things of all about the vindictive treatment of unemployed people by this Tory government is that the Tory government and the Bank of England have a deliberate policy of keeping a certain percentage of the population unemployed.

The reason the political establishment like to deliberately keep a percentage of the workforce out of work is that full employment allows workers to demand higher wages and better working conditions. If there are plenty of jobs for all, then people can just move on to a better job if they feel they are being underpaid or exploited in their current job.

If, on the other hand, there is a constant pool of unemployed people vying for insufficient jobs, this creates the fear of destitution amongst the workforce, meaning employees are much less likely to demand higher wages or better working conditions, which means higher profit margins for their employers.

The harsh benefits sanctions regime can be seen as part of the plan of stoking even more fear in the workforce. If workers know they're one step away from a cruel and draconian benefits system that dumps people into absolute destitution for weeks or months at a time for "crimes" such as having a heart attack, attending hospital, being five minutes late for an appointment, or selling remembrance poppies, then they're much less likely to rock the boat by asking for a pay rise or complaining about dangerous conditions in their workplace.

The NAO report makes it clear that the Tories don't care about how much the sanctions regime costs the taxpayer. It also makes it clear that they don't give a jot about what the actual real world consequences are for people who get caught up in the sanctions regime.

The Tories don't care about these things because the sanctions regime isn't about saving money or encouraging people to find work whatever. It's actually about keeping the people who are lucky enough to have jobs in this rigged system in a state of fear so that they're afraid to rock the boat. It's all about protecting the interests of corporations and employers, and absolutely nothing to do with combating unemployment.

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OR

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. 

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Universal Basic Income vs the current welfare system

In this article I'm going to set out the case that a Universal Basic Income based welfare system would be a massive improvement on the current punitive welfare bureaucracy in the UK.

What is Universal Basic Income?

[Main article] 

I've already written a fairly comprehensive article explaining Universal Basic Income, so for the sake of brevity I'm not going to go into masses of detail about it again here, other than to say that it is a form of unconditional welfare payment to which all citizens are entitled.

Ideally the UBI payment should be set at a rate which covers the basic costs of living (housing, water, energy, food) meaning that nobody would be forced to live in abject poverty in 21st Century Britain. Those wanting anything more than a frugal and very basic standard of living (stuff like foreign holidays, expensive furniture, new cars, fashionable clothes ...) would have a strong incentive to work in order to pay for their luxuries.

One of the main benefits of a universal, unconditional welfare payment would be the removal of virtually all of the costly means testing bureaucracy from the welfare system. Another benefit would be the near complete elimination of welfare fraud, which would free up teams of fraud investigators to go after much bigger fish such as tax-dodgers and organised crime networks.
                   

What is wrong with the current welfare system?

There are so many flaws in the current welfare system that it would be literally impossible to list them all in a blog post. It was in bad enough shape when New Labour left office in 2010 but after four long years of Iain Duncan Smith's hopeless mismanagement, it is now a humanitarian disaster of bad planning, poor implementation and dehumanising bureaucracy. For the sake of brevity I'll limit myself to detailing just four of the worst aspects of the current welfare system, and how the introduction of UBI would represent a significant improvement.

1. The disincentive to work

One of the biggest problems with the current welfare system is the way in which it creates strong disincentives to work through the removal of benefits. In many cases benefits are removed at such a rate that people find themselves even worse off if they decide to work. 

Many hundreds of thousands of people have found themselves receiving desultory increases in income (often less than £1 per hour worked) because of the way that benefits are removed almost as fast as additional income is earned, or have even found themselves economically worse off for having found a job.

At best, the additional income through finding work is desultory, at worst finding a job actually costs people a share of the pittance they were surviving on. Few would argue that these factors are not strong disincentives to work.

Iain Duncan Smith's catastrophically botched Universal Credit scheme was supposedly designed to eliminate these appalling disincentive to work, but research by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation found that it actually does no such thing. Should Universal Credit even survive Iain Duncan Smith's incompetent management, many people would still be financially worse off should they decide to increase the number of hours they work under the Universal Credit system.

Even though Iain Duncan Smith and the DWP relentlessly talk up their Universal Credit scheme as the biggest welfare reform in decades, it's absolutely clear that it is actually nothing more than hugely expensive tinkering with an already dysfunctional system.

The introduction of a system based on Universal Basic Income would neatly resolve the disincentive to work problem because if the public are always entitled to their basic unconditional income, paid work would always result in a notable increase in individual income, since the individual would be earning their salary, on top of their unconditional basic income payment.

2. Sanctions

The problem that the disincentive to work problem presents to the establishment order is that it is extremely difficult to tackle long-term unemployment when work doesn't pay, or results in nothing more than a desultory increase in overall income.

The fact that people can't be positively encouraged into work with the "carrot" of increased income means that the only motivational tool left for the state to use is the "stick" of rendering people absolutely destitute through arbitrarily applied sanctions if they won't comply with DWP demands.

Nearly a million people were left destitute by DWP benefits sanctions in 2013. The widespread use of benefits sanctions is a humanitarian catastrophe, and I'm not exaggerating with hyperbolic language either. Very many people have died during their benefits sanction period (most often the mentally disabled and severely ill). In many cases people were still fighting appeals against arbitrary DWP sanctions until the day they died from their illnesses, in many other cases people committed suicide or even starved to death.

Iain Duncan Smith and the DWP have repeatedly lied that there are no such things as sanctions targets and sanctions league tables, however sanctions targets and the official DWP sanctions league tables were both leaked to the press in 2013.

Sanctions targets and league tables are particularly vile things because it is blatantly much easier for DWP staff under enormous pressure to meet their monthly sanctions quotas by tricking the mentally disabled and uneducated into violating DWP rules, than it is to expend a great deal of effort in catching out the minority of committed benefits "scroungers", who often understand the DWP rules better than the staff themselves.

Under Universal Basic Income this kind of deliberate impoverishment by the state simply couldn't happen because everyone would be entitled to an unconditional subsistance income. This would mean that the pressure on DWP staff to trick vulnerable people into making mistakes in order to fulfill their sanctions quotas would be completely eliminated.

The power of the state to use absolute destitution as a social weapon against the public would be completely removed by virtue of the fact that the public would have an unconditional right to their subsistence income.

3. Means Testing

There are two main problems with the idea that all welfare payments must be means tested.

The first is the costly burden of bureaucracy that this approach loads onto the system. The current welfare system employs tens of thousands of people to means test welfare payments, welfare recipients are made to waste countless hours filling out forms with the same personal information and collecting supporting evidence over and again, and the whole system costs countless £billions to administer.

The second problem with means tested benefits is the way in which they are perceived by the public. When a benefit is universal, very few people strongly oppose it because everyone is entitled to it. Take the provision of universal healthcare through the NHS as an example. The NHS has very strong public support, with just 7% of the public favouring NHS privatisation (not that this remarkable level of public support has stopped the Tories from carving up the NHS and giving it away to their donors).
   
If the state decided to bring in new rules to means test health provision (lets say anyone earning over £20,000 per year would have to pay compulsory medical insurance and/or pay for their medical services) there would almost certainly be a large decline in the level of public support for the NHS. It's much easier to convince people that welfare provision is a very good thing if they are entitled to a share of it. If they get the idea that they are paying for it, but that they are barred from receiving any of the benefit, it's easy to understand how strong feelings of resentment would arise.

The introduction of Universal Basic Income would resolve both of these problems.

The bureaucratic costs of administering the system would be massively reduced if the vast majority of people received a standard UBI payment. Of course administrative costs cannot be completely eliminated from any system, however, the lower the cost of administration, the higher the share of the budget that actually ends up where it should be - with welfare recipients. UBI would ensure that a much higher proportion of the welfare budget actually gets paid out to the public, rather than being wasted on the administrative costs of endless means testing.

The introduction of UBI would also assuage public resentment at the cost of the welfare system. The fact that everyone would be entitled to UBI would mean that nobody would be left thinking "why should I have to pay for this when I get no direct benefit from it".

4. Corporate parasitism

In recent years there has been an ever accelerating drive to bring in private outsourcing companies (A4e, Atos, Serco, Capita, G4S, Pertemps, Seetec ...) to carry out the administrative functions of the welfare system. This process was not started by the Tories (New Labour were the ones who introduced the discriminatory Atos WCA assessment regime for the disabled for example), however, under Iain Duncan Smith's "leadership" the DWP has brought in ever more private outsourcing companies into the welfare system on vast £multi-million contracts. Some of the most shocking examples include, the expansion of the notoriously inaccurate Atos WCA regime, the hopelessly underperforming Work Programme and their "Help to Work" forced labour scheme.

Many of these parasitical outsourcing companies make near enough 100% of their revenues from government contracts, and the contracts are so badly written and one-sided that it really doesn't matter how badly these outsourcing company perform, they suffer no financial penalties, they still get paid and they still get awarded even more government contracts despite their appalling track records of failure.

The problem is so serious that even companies like G4S that have carried out vast frauds against the taxpayer still end up being handed more £multi-million contracts, even though they were supposedly barred from bidding for government contracts during the tendering process.

Another example of a corporate outsourcing parasite that has been caught out defrauding the taxpayer is A4e. This is a company which made 100% of its revenues from government contracts at the time its director Emma Harrison decided to award herself an £8.6 million dividend. Given that all of the companies revenues are generated through the taxpayer funded "welfare to work" system, it's easy to see how this vast dividend represents nothing more than skimming off a percentage of the welfare budget to fund the lifestyle of a very wealthy individual.

The introduction of a system based on Universal Basic Income would eliminate the possibility of corporate outsourcing parasites skimming the welfare budget and diverting money that should be helping the most vulnerable people in society into their corporate accounts.

With the massively reduced bureaucracy, and the end of sanctions backed forced labour schemes that UBI would bring about, the scope for corporate parasitism of the welfare system would be severely reduced.

Of course there would still be a role for private companies looking to profit from helping people into work, but they'd have to help people train for and find the kind of work they want, rather than just hoovering up government subsidies in return for forcing them onto unpaid forced labour schemes under the threat of absolute destitution via benefits sanctions.


Conclusion

The current system was bad enough before the Tories even came to power, but after four long years of Iain Duncan Smith's maniacal blundering it's in the most appalling shape it's ever been in (and many would argue deliberately so). Iain Duncan Smith's tenure at the DWP has been little but a dreadfully prolonged systemic failure.                   
I'm not trying to say that Universal Basic Income is some kind of wonderful panacea. It wouldn't cure all of the problems in society in one simple step. There are no such things as magic bullets. What I have tried to demonstrate is that the principle of UBI could make the foundations of a much better welfare system than the current shambles.

I believe that a person would have to be delusional to argue the case that the current welfare system is well designed, well managed and efficient, therefore most sensible people would accept that there are grounds for improvement.

In my view you can either support the near identical prescriptions of the Westminster establishment parties (tinkering with the broken system) or you can support a completely new approach, be it based on Universal Basic Income, or some other fundamental reform to the system.

I suppose it comes down to this. If you are naturally a right-wing authoritarian who believes that the state has a right/duty to use the threat of absolute destitution as a social weapon against the public to force them into paid or unpaid work, you're probably quite happy with the way things are done right now.
             
If however you believe that the state has no right to force people, including tens of thousands of children, into absolute poverty simply because a family member committed "welfare crimes" such as being five minutes late to an appointment, selling remembrance poppies, attending a job interview or even suffering a heart attack during an interview, then Universal Basic Income represents an elegant solution to the problem. If every citizen has a right to an unconditional subsistence income, then the state would no longer have the ability to use the threat of poverty/hunger/cold/homelessness as a social weapon.
   

 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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Who is to blame for the economic crisis

                                            

Iain Duncan Smith's "profound moral mission"

I've written before about the Orwellian Tory assertions that Iain Duncan Smith's ideological attacks on the social security system represent some kind of "moral mission" (here). However I'm going to address the subject again, but this time I'm going to examine the thoughts of people that are delusional enough to believe this ludicrously Orwellian distortion.

The primary piece of evidence I'm going to refer to in this piece is an utterly ludicrous piece in the Daily Telegraph by Peter Oborne, which was published in the first week of April 2013, which was the most symbolic week of Tory malice. That was the week in which they introduced "Bedroom Tax" designed to further impoverish hundreds of thousands of the poorest people in society, whilst simultaneously handing a £100,000 per year tax cut to the 13,000 income millionaires in the UK.

The mind-boggling title of Oborne's article is "George Osborne can’t claim credit for Iain Duncan Smith’s virtuous reforms" so lets have a quick look at some of these supposedly "virtuous reforms".

Bedroom Tax: This malicious policy was introduced in the very week that Oborne penned his article. I've written about "Bedroom Tax" several times (here, here, here and here) but perhaps the most damning evidence is the death of Stephanie Bottrill, who committed suicide after being driven into debt by "Bedroom Tax". It was only discovered months after her death that "Bedroom Tax" had been implemented in such a cack-handed way that, like some 40,000 other victims, Stephanie Bottrill should have been exempt all along.

What kind of Orwellian definition of "virtuous" would you have to be using to apply it to a "Bedroom Tax" regime that was implemented so incompetently that it drove someone to suicide, even though they should never have been made to pay it?

Forced Labour: Another one of Iain Duncan Smith's favoured "welfare reforms" is the economically illiterate policy of using the unemployed as a source of free labour, often for highly profitable foreign corporations. The hundreds of thousands of people that are herded onto these schemes under threat of absolute destitution, are removed from the official unemployment numbers, despite the fact that they have no paid work and are they still in receipt of unemployment benefits. After Iain Duncan Smith's workfare schemes were declared unlawful by the courts, he had the law retroactively rewritten, so that his schemes would have been lawful had the law been written that way at the time. This grotesque abuse of parliamentary process was carried out in order to stick two fingers up at the courts and keep the estimated £130 million he stole from his victims.

What kind of Orwellian definition of "virtuous" would you have to be using to apply it to Iain Duncan Smith's Stalinist Workfare schemes, and his "I'm Above The Law" retroactive legislation?

The Atos WCA regime: Iain Duncan Smith's forced labour schemes are not the only parts of his supposedly "virtuous reforms" that have been condemned on multiple occasions by the courts. The Atos administered Work Capacity Assessment regime has been condemned by the courts as discriminatory on two occasions, yet Iain Duncan Smith, the DWP and Atos have carried on with their discriminatory regime regardless. The WCA regime is notoriously inaccurate, the constant flood of bad decisions made by Atos have resulted in a cost of £50 million per year in appeals, which is borne by the taxpayer (rather than the company that made all of those inaccurate assessments in the first place). Yet another consideration must be the 10,600 people that died between January and November 2011 within six weeks of being declared "fit for work"by Atos. Unfortunately it is not possible to provide more up-to-date death statistics since the Iain Duncan Smith and the DWP are stonewalling numerous Freedom of Information requests to release the data for 2012 and 2013.

What kind of Orwellian definition of "virtuous" would you have to be using to apply it to the discriminatory WCA regime, that results in countless thousands of people being told they are fit-for-work within weeks of their death and costs the taxpayer £50 million per year to deal with all of the appeals against these disgustingly inaccurate "fit for work" judgements?

Sanctions: The number of people being stripped of all all of their social security payments (often for absolutely ludicrous reasons) has risen to an all time high of 874,850.  Between 2010 and 2013 Iain Duncan Smith and the DWP repeatedly lied to parliament and the public that there was no such thing as Sanctions League Tables. In March 2013 (a month before Oborne declared IDS's reforms "virtuous") the supposedly non-existent Sanctions League Tables were leaked to the press. DWP whistleblowers have explained that the sanctions regime resulted in the unintelligent and mentally ill being tricked into committing sanctionable offences, whilst the small minority of hardcore benefits cheats were left well alone (because more often than not they know the rules better than most of the DWP staff). One of the most shocking cases is that of Mark Wood, who starved to death four months after being declared fit-for-work by Atos and being stripped of his benefits.

What kind of Orwellian definition of "virtuous" would you have to be using to apply it to a sanctions regime with targets to drive vulnerable people off benefits, resulting in people actually starving to death?

Wasteful spending and mismanagement: One of the most ludicrous aspects of Iain Duncan Smith's welfare reforms has been his ludicrous profligacy with taxpayers' money. His Universal Credit scheme is way behind schedule and way over budget. Already £120 million has been written off on botched IT procurement and staff working on Universal Credit have described working on the project as "soul-destroying", "unbelievably frustrating" and "a complete nightmare". Other staff complained of "a near complete absence of anything that looks like strategic leadership in the programme" and "a divisive culture of secrecy" [source]. Another area of extraordinary waste is Iain Duncan Smith's Work Programme, in which private companies are paid ludicrous bribes for finding people work. It has been shown over and again that these companies claim their bribes from the taxpayer even when their clients found work entirely independently of, or even despite their interference. If it were a Labour minister responsible for this kind of grotesquely incompetent financial mismanagement, Peter Oborne and the Daily Telegraph would be screaming blue murder, but because it's Oborne's mate IDS, it is instead described by them as "wonderful and virtuous"!

What kind of Orwellian definition of "virtuous" would you have to be using to apply it to welfare reforms which ensure that ever larger slices of the welfare budget end up in corporate pockets, instead of in the pockets of the people the welfare system was actually designed to help?

So now to Peter Oborne's ludicrous Daily Telegraph article. Here are some selected quotes, and my responses:

"At the heart of Mr Duncan Smith’s programme is a profound moral vision"

The only way that these welfare reforms could be considered "moral", is if you are the kind of ruthless Social Darwinist that believes that the poor and vulnerable should be hounded to death like Stephanie Bottrill, Mark Wood and the countless other victims of Iain Duncan Smith's "virtuous reforms".

"I can confidently assert that Mr Duncan Smith’s inspiration is less political than religious."

If Mr Duncan Smith's inspiration is religious, then it is certainly difficult to figure out what religion is responsible, given that there has been a chorus of condemnation of his "virtuous reforms" from all kinds of denominations, including the Catholic church, the Church of England, the Quakers, the Church of Scotland, Unitarians, the Baptist Union, the United Reform Church, the Scottish Episcopal Church, the Moravian Church and many more. It is absolutely clear from this chorus of condemnation, that the teachings of Jesus Christ are fundamentally incompatible with modern Conservatism. The truth is that Iain Duncan Smith is driven more by his ideological adherence to neoliberal pseudo-economic dogma than anything derived from the teachings of Christ.

"Mr Duncan Smith fully accepts that a civilised society must always extend a helping hand to those who, often through no fault of their own, fall on hard times or are genuinely in need"

In my view, Iain Duncan Smith's reforms demonstrate precisely the opposite. They demonstrate his determination to distribute ever more of the welfare budget to corporations and the idle rentier class, instead of to the people that have "fallen on hard times or are in genuine need". As the welfare budget has been ruthlessly cut, the amount paid out as subsidies to private landlords via Housing Benefit has continued to skyrocket, and the amount being paid out to parasitic corporate outsourcing companies (Atos, A4E, Ingeus,  G4S, Serco, Avanta, Seetec ...) has also skyrocketed. If the welfare budget has gone down, yet private landlords and corporate outsourcers are getting more than ever before, it is beyond obvious that the people the welfare system was actually designed for must be the ones losing out.

"All of Mr Duncan Smith’s changes reflect a determination to enable everyone to live free and morally autonomous lives."

What could possibly promote less "freedom and morally autonomy" that Iain Duncan Smith's Stalinist Workfare schemes that work on the assumption that the labour of the individual is a commodity which belongs to the state which can be extracted, under threat of absolute destitution, by the state for distribution to highly profitable foreign owned corporations like Warburg Pincus, the giant US based private equity firm that operates Poundland. It is absolutely clear that this is another attempt by Oborne to dress up brutal Social Darwinism and ruthless exploitation of the vulnerable as something "moral".

"Mr Duncan Smith is in the process of making a series of momentous and inordinately ambitious reforms to our welfare system. They bear comparison to Margaret Thatcher’s great economic reforms because they involve a recasting of the relationship between the individual and the state."

They certainly do bear comparison to Margaret Thatcher's destructive economic reforms. Just as she used the power of the state to crush British industries and transfer ever more wealth from working people to corporations and the idle rentier class, Iain Duncan Smith's "welfare reforms" use the power of the state to crush the most vulnerable in society in order to transfer even more wealth to the corporations and the idle rentier class.

Conclusion

By describing Iain Duncan Smith's brutal ideologically driven welfare reforms as "a wonderful and virtuous idea", Peter Oborne is one of the people that feeds into Iain Duncan Smith's psychotic delusions that his "war on the poor" is some kind of virtuous moral crusade, rather than a disgusting Tory project to divert funds that are meant to protect the vulnerable into the bank accounts of corporate outsourcing parasites and the idle rentier class.

Iain Duncan Smith is clearly a dangerously delusional individual. However, in my view, the people that actively feed into his delusions like Peter Oborne are even more contemptible. The evidence is absolutely clear that the Tories know how incompetent Iain Duncan Smith is, because they didn't dare let such a cognitively illiterate charisma void lead their party into the 2005 General Election.

It illustrates exactly how much contempt the Tories have for the poor, vulnerable and disabled they now champion the man that they didn't trust as steward of their own political party with such Orwellian superlatives, when his track record of failure, incompetence, malice, arrogance and obfuscation is so incredibly clear.

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