So we are back with a vengeance to notions of the undeserving poor. Electronic cards are to ensure that the poor can only spend their benefits on basic necessities like food and clothing, and not on a lifestyle of alcohol and illegal drugs.
Having lived a rather spectacular life encompassing both ends of the social spectrum, I can state with utter conviction that consumption of illegal pleasure-giving stimulants is far higher among the very wealthy than among the very poor. The notion that only the rich should be allowed to have any enjoyment in life is deeply offensive. It is fine for the Bullingdon Club to get plastered on Krug and cocaine and smash up restaurants. That is all jolly japes and high spirits. For a desperate man to seek solace in four cans of Tennant’s strongest or a bottle of Buckfast is however a dreadful sin and sign of social irresponsibility.
The high streets of our poorest towns are strewn with betting shops, bargain booze outlets, pawnbrokers and payday lenders. For anybody to believe that state compulsion of the patrons is the answer to the problem is the ultimate counsel of despair. Forget giving people a better hope, a greater chance, more socially useful pleasures. Just ban the little solace they have now. We have a government which holds a large section of the population in contempt; which cannot imagine that given a different birth, these people might have been sitting next to them in the Bullingdon Club; in short, which has no notion whatsoever of human dignity.
This latest move against benefits claimants is consistent with the entire development of the modern British economy. High wage economies generate a self-sustaining high domestic demand which keeps the economy growing. Our three main political parties postulate a low wage economy, with a minimum wage below the level which can sustain a family. The low wage economy is defended as a guarantee of strong international competitiveness and thus export performance. In fact Britain’s low wage model is entirely different, and the vast majority of those on low wages have no relation to exports. What Britain has developed is a model where a thin layer at the top are on extremely high remuneration. This of course includes bankers and the financial services industry, but also through the cult of managerialism, CEOs and directors have vastly increased their remuneration. For the multiple between the highest and lowest paid in a company to be 70 – the cleaner on 15,000, the core level majority on 20,000 and the CEO on 3,000,000- is now absolutely routine.
Even the public sector is ruled by this pretence that executive work is harder, more stressful, more uniquely difficult than core work. Well, I have been an Ambassador and a barman, and I can tell you which was hardest work. University vice chancellors are on over 300,000. Local councils regularly have a score of people on over 100,000.
We have no media willing to take on the triumph of greed. The most “left wing” of British newspapers, the Guardian, pays its editor total remuneration of over half a million per year and “star” columnists 300,000, while exploiting interns and junior staff, and squandering 35 million pounds a year of C P Scott’s great endowment in losses – straight into its senior staff’s pockets.
Britain has developed a new kind of low wage economy – one where the bulk of those on low wages work to provide services to those on very, very high remuneration. In a sense it is very old. We have become a helot society. It should be stressed that low wage is a deliberate policy. There is absolutely no reason why those in work could not be paid more. The economy would not crash. In Norway the median wage of the lowest 10 percentile is over 20,000 pounds, while the multiple between the lowest ten percentile and the top ten percentile is less than one third what it is in Britain. The UK’s astonishing and accelerating wealth gap is a result of deliberate ideological policy, founded on a notion that those at the top are possessed of rare and extraordinary abilities – whereas in truth, in the UK more than anywhere, their main achievement was usually to be born into the right family.
The concomitant of that worship of the rich is the belief that money measures worth; that if you have a low income then you are scum. That is the attitude that underlies these benefit smart cards. It is truly disgusting.
I agree with Craig entirely – It is a stupid idea, as unworkable as it is callous. You can see why it would appeal to a nasty fucking idiot like Iain Duncan Smith.
Across the UK millions of people are facing a Winter where they will face the bleak choice between heating or eating and many will not be able to afford either.
This miscarriage has been proven in Australia; stores operating separate queues for smart card customers further stigmatising the very poorest. Complex regulations for retailers have meant only large companies have opted into the scheme which means claimants are only able to shop at large chain stores. Economic apartheid and government approved shops would become the norm for the very poorest.
I note Miliband Labour is reticent and mute…
“Back in the New Deal era, the federal government fostered electric power co-operatives, which provided electricity at lower rates than the for-profit corporations. But they did not displace the for-profit corporations, nor become a model for how to operate electric utilities.
Instead the electric power industry successfully pushed for deregulation of the industry, in which competition between electric power providers was supposed to keep rates low. Deregulation also abolished a requirement that an electric utility have enough reserve generating capacity to prevent future blackouts and brownouts. Nobody is responsible for keeping the lights on now.”
http://philebersole.wordpress.com/
Don’t believe this crap about lazy-layers on crack and booze binges. It’s a conservative trap for everyone else who falls into poverty due to no fault of their own; you know, the majority.
As you rightly point out Craig not only are the majority of UK wages low pay, there’s a 2 million standing army of unemployed people who fill the gaps which keeps the wages low, I wouldn’t be surprised if the low wage agenda, helped maintain that army, and vice versa.
It’s called a ‘flexible labour market’, RoS. And if you are a Good Chap, it is a Jolly Good Thing. You are exactly right. To keep wages low, you need a pool of desperate unemployed, trained at public expense, not yours, and with low expectations. (After a year on the dole, applying continuously and unsuccessfully for jobs which may or may not exist, for which you are overqualified, and which offer no long term security, boy, are your expectations low)
The USA pioneered the formal principle, I believe, and threw into the mix the ability of employers to up sticks and move to a poorer State offering hungrier labour. This, applied worldwide, is now called globalisation, and allows profits to be maximised for the directors and shareholders. Who are the sole beneficiaries of the system.
“You can always hire half the poor to kill the other half”
–Jay Gould
Here in the US these EBT cards are common. What ends up happening is crooked corner shop owners work with claimants to get them the cash they want and turn a bit of a profit in the process!
Which suggests a new non-negotiable demand for leaders of Scottish self-determination:
http://www.vox.com/2014/9/8/6003359/basic-income-negative-income-tax-questions-explain
MPs being investigated for alleged abuses of their expenses will have their names kept secret, the Commons watchdog has announced.
The Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority will no longer release the names of MPs under investigation and the public will be barred from hearings.
The watchdog claimed that the move was intended to protect the MPs from the reputational damage they would suffer because of public scrutiny.
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These political scumbags have just been awarded a 10% wage rise, now their financial underhanded deeds will be above public inspection, a Helot society indeed.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/mps-expenses/11128702/MPs-investigated-over-expenses-should-not-be-named-watchdog-says.html
The scheme does not appear to be planned for indiscriminate use. According to the Daily Mail, “The first welfare recipients to get the cards are expected to be drug addicts and alcoholics, or those who are problem gamblers, in order to ensure that taxpayers’ money is not used to fuel addiction and dependency.”
My concern is more about misuse of information – I wouldn’t want this and other cashless payment systems to lead to a regime ruled by a dictator where everyone is branded with an electronic passport. It may be better to use paper vouchers instead.
Ian Duncan Smith will be trying to kill off more folk before the 2015 GE, he and his attack dog ATOS have been pretty successful up until now.
The governments own figures show that 10.600 people died within six weeks of ATOS declaring them fit to work.
IDS knows the assessment plan of ATOS isn’t fit for purpose, but why let that get in the way of a good plan, to kill of the UK’s sick and disabled.
http://union-news.co.uk/2014/02/unions-join-anti-atos-demos-today-10600-people-die-declared-fit-work/
I think that’s the point, Abe. They always begin with an eminently reasonable position. It’s a slippery slope that they grease for further goals, not explicitly stated.
@DtP 3:25
What a callous comment.
Let’s hope you never need to present yourself claiming you’re hearing voices, think your food is being poisoned, feeling suicidal etc. I, as a ‘professional’, might have to consider the fact that you’re shirking and just out for some easy dosh!
“The first welfare recipients to get the cards are expected to be drug addicts and alcoholics, or those who are problem gamblers, in order to ensure that taxpayers’ money is not used to fuel addiction and dependency.”
And the next tranche? Not that it will offer any significant savings, as it will probably be contracted out to Crapita, which will (a) fuck up the IT installation and (b) go howling to the Treasury if it doesn’t show a fat profit.
Learning from history dept. …
The scheme does not appear to be planned for indiscriminate use. According to the Daily Mail, “The first welfare recipients to get the cards are expected to be drug addicts and alcoholics, or those who are problem gamblers, in order to ensure that taxpayers’ money is not used to fuel addiction and dependency.”
My concern is more about misuse of information – I wouldn’t want this and other cashless payment systems to lead to a regime ruled by a dictator where everyone is branded with an electronic passport. It may be better to use paper vouchers instead.
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ABE RENE
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Whats to stop the recipient of the cards selling them for a lesser amount of cash,then obtaining alcohol or drugs, unless some kind of bio-security measure is put in place, then its a flawed proposal to start with.
IDS will not be at the DWP in seven months time – even if the Tories are in government – because Universal Credit has been a huge mess. There is no way, HM Treasury will let him anywhere near another major IT project such as e-cards.
“The UK’s astonishing and accelerating wealth gap is a result of deliberate ideological policy”
You got that right. But that policy has nothing to to with “a notion that those at the top are possessed of rare and extraordinary abilities.”
It is founded on the liberal notion that capital should be free and profits maximized, which means off-shoring of most manufacturing and wide open borders that place virtually every job seeker in Britain, from Cambridge professors of Economics to cleaners of bedpans, up against an immigrant who is better qualified than they are and ready to work for less.
“Britain has been stuck in the position of Germany in 1932 since the late 60s, which is based on the fascist electoral system.”
Wasn’t Germany using proportional representation in 1932?
Ten million families will be left almost £500 worse off under a dramatic plan to freeze all working-age benefits unveiled by Chancellor George Osborne today.
He paid tribute to the British public for enduring the hard years of austerity to fix the economy, but warned in total another £25billon in cuts is needed to balance the books, including a fresh squeeze on public sector pay.
In his keynote speech to the Tory party conference in Birmingham, Mr Osborne tore into Labour and insisted the tough decisions taken so far mean that Britain’s recovery has been faster than any major economy on earth.
________________________________
George Osborne and Ian Duncan Smith are performing a pincer movement,against the sick/weak/poor that Hannibal would have been proud of.
Never mind there’s always the distraction of the £3 Billion quid war in Iraq/Syria, don’t say Westminster doesn’t give you anything.
“The first welfare recipients to get the cards are expected to be drug addicts and alcoholics, or those who are problem gamblers, in order to ensure that taxpayers’ money is not used to fuel addiction and dependency.”
(again)
I remember Thatcher explicitly resisting proposals to restrict what benefit claimants spent the dole on. It was their business, she said, and none of the state’s. E-beer to anyone who can find the speech, but it was pretty well pre-internet. It’s a measure of how far the drain the country’s gone that this is even being proposed.
“It is founded on the liberal notion that capital should be free and profits maximized,”
You mean liberals like this?
“The decadent international but individualistic capitalism in the hands of which we found ourselves after the war is not a success. It is not intelligent. It is not beautiful. It is not just. It is not virtuous. And it doesn’t deliver the goods.”
John Maynard Keynes
…down the drain..
It delivers the goods, all right, Ben. For the 1%. It just progressively impoverishes the rest, and we can forget all about them if we are neoliberals with capital. Forget about who? Them? Is that a subsidiary of Me?
“Our three main political parties postulate a low wage economy, with a minimum wage“
The three main political parties do not “postulate“ a low-wage economy, they have created one by (a) allowing mass immigration, which drives down wages in every sector of the economy; and (b) accepting the globalist agenda that places British garment industry workers in competition with Bangladeshi workers employed in collapsible factories and earning eighty dollars a month (http://news.nationalpost.com/tag/bangladesh-clothing-factory-collapse/).
The minimum wage is the icing on the cake. It ensures that millions of workers, youths in particular, are unemployable because their labor is not worth what an employer would be compelled to pay them. So, in fact, minimum wage laws and efforts to raise the minimum wage, merely drives millions either into a welfare trap or the black economy.
In other words the economic conditions that you deplore are the inevitable and direct consequences of insane policies that you and other liberals relentlessly promote.
Republicofscotland (15h11)
That’s exactly what I was after, many thanks!
Nice Keynes quote Ben.
And I take that the liberals you refer to are “The decadent international but individualistic“ capitalists, not JMK.
No E-beer for me Ba’al. Couldn’t find your ref, but this nugget applies.
“Thatcher moved on her plans for privatization. She pushed to make nationalized industries successful enough that someone would be willing to buy them. Her government sold Jaguar. British Telecom became a private company with shares sold on the open market. British Petroleum and British Aerospace became private corporations, as did the National Bus Company, the Associated British Ports, ship yards, factories of the Royal Ordnance and others. The Thatcher government also sold off 1.5 million publicly owned housing units to their tenants. All of this added money to the government’s treasury. And the Thatcher government encouraged growth of the financial services industry that some critics were to describe as “casino capitalism.”
http://www.fsmitha.com/h2/ch37-thatcher.htm
On ‘deliver the goods’ see my 3:05
If we think its bad here in the UK, current wages in Hong Kong according to RT news are $3.86 per hour, and Hong Kong is the second most expensive city in the world, the population of Hong Kong is currently 7.25 million.
Which is why I remember the remark re benefits, Ben. It was apparently completely out of character…but there was that in her character, too. Her antistatism was at least consistent.
That’s exactly what I was after, many thanks!
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Your Welcome.
As you know CanSpeccy most ‘liberals’ have been joined at the hip of conservatives, so yes for them, no to Keynes.
Of course the middle classes think it is a revelation worth a blog post that there is a class war going on. FFS start discussing what’s to be done rather than wallowing in the bleeding obvious.