LIFESTYLES of the POOR and INFAMOUS

“Divide and rule” was ever the default position of Tories wielding power and George Osborne the Chancellor has wasted no time in invoking its methodology to drum up support for the dreaded Spending Review that is now only five and a half weeks hence. What he required for the role of scapegoat was a sector of the community that has little spending power, relatively few cheerleaders, no electoral influence (i.e. people who vote Labour anyway) and, best of all, a propensity to be cast as feckless ne’er-do-wells by the Tory press. Of course! Who else? Those who receive state benefits.

Here is what Osborne told BBC political editor Nick Robinson on Thursday: “The welfare bill has got completely out of control. There are five million people living on permanent out-of-work benefits. That is a tragedy for them and fiscally unsustainable for us as a country. We can’t afford it any more. So we need real welfare reform and there will be further welfare cuts on the 20th of October. I think this will be done in a way that encourages people into work. But there will be further welfare cuts. They will amount to several billion pounds additional to what I announced in the budget. Because I think the people of this country understand this choice and they have chosen for us as a government to push further on welfare reform”.

Responding to further questions from Robinson, Osborne continued: “We’re going to reform the out-of-work benefit system so that there is a very strong incentive for people who can work to get work”. And he went on: “People who think that it’s a lifestyle choice to sit on out-of-work benefit – it’s not somebody desperately looking for a job, someone really making the effort to go out there every day to find work, but the person who sits there and says ‘you know what, this is a lifestyle choice for me’. That lifestyle choice is going to come to an end … The money won’t be there to support that lifestyle choice”.

The robber baronet

Accordingly, Osborne says he intends to cut unemployment benefit by £4billion in addition to the £11bn cut already flagged in his budget in June. There cannot be any argument that a cut of £15bn in the provision made by the state for those whose income is not sufficient to live on will make a catastrophic difference to thousands of people. Osborne’s argument seems to be that the undeserving poor make up such a large proportion of those he describes as “living on out-of-work benefits” that cutting them adrift is morally justifiable.

But is it true that those who abuse the welfare state – who make, as Osborne characterises it, a “lifestyle choice” to “sit on” benefit – are costing the country so much? On the anecdotal evidence of the reports that Robinson filed prior to his interview with the Chancellor, it would appear that many people believe and resent that abuse is widespread. But Robinson failed to ask them – or if he did, the answers were not broadcast – whether they personally knew any benefit cheats and, if so, how many. Do you know any? I don’t. I know people who are looking for work and who are already living brutally constrained lives before Osborne slashes the meagre support to which they have hitherto been entitled.

A cartoon originally placed here has evidently been removed by the artist; a pity, as we are all the poorer (including him) for its removal

What is the level of benefit fraud in Britain? Is it commensurate with the threat of the Jews that was perceived in Germany in the 1930s? Does it resemble the level of immigration that, in Margaret Thatcher’s estimation in the 1970s, was about to “swamp our culture”? According to the government’s own figures, benefit fraud robbed the public purse of £900m in 2008-09. I don’t know how that figure is computed and I certainly don’t believe it is that high. But even accepting it as a credible rate, it means that Osborne proposes to cut benefit to those who do deserve it by the government’s own measure, who are entitled to it by previous standards of welfare, who have contributed to it by their earlier National Insurance payments, and who, in Osborne’s words, are “desperately looking for a job, really making the effort to go out there every day to find work” by the vast sum of £14bn.

Reading the words of Osborne above, you will have noticed – unless you are so besotted a Tory that you swallow what he says without question – that he uses the phrase “welfare reform” and the rather different phrase “welfare cuts” as though they might be interchangeable; hence, I think, we need to assume that they are interchangeable. Reform is a spin term for cuts. If “the money won’t be there to support [the] lifestyle choice” of living on benefit – where the “choice” is unjustifiable in Osborne’s eyes – it also won’t be there for people who have no choice about their “lifestyle” and who are out of work because there is no work, people whose situation Osborne lightly describes as “a tragedy” while he cynically sharpens his axe.

A cartoon originally placed here has evidently been removed by the artist; a pity, as we are all the poorer (including him) for its removal

The Spending Review, be under no illusion, is going to create immediately a large amount of new unemployment. The state is a major employer. The coalition government is committed to reducing the patronage of the state by between 25 and 40 percent. That means that capital projects will be among the first to fall – these are, by their nature, dependent on a substantial workforce – and a number of enterprises will be wound up, pushing into the jobs market personnel whose work experience will have been particular and whose job prospects will hence will be the poorer. The number of people to whom Osborne will lightly offer the term “tragedy” will be huge.

The thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, newly unemployed will be seeking, as they will be entitled to seek, social security support to replace their lost income. But Osborne is cutting the welfare budget ahead of this inevitable surge in those out of work. What else can we expect but hardship of a depth not seen in this country since the beginning of the 1930s, when a series of marches on London climaxed in the National Hunger March of September 1932. These cuts will create a new class divide between haves and have nots, between those in work and those out of benefit.

I do not suppose that George Osborne has any experience of job-seeking. The heir to a baronetcy and the lucrative firm of Osborne & Little, interior design suppliers to the quality, has never wanted for a penny and is thought to be worth the better part of £5m. He would find it an instructive experience to register his details on one or two of the many on-line employment sites that have grown up to service the jobs market. I have done this, to see how it works. It is not an encouraging experience.

Such sites customarily ask you to supply some information that would, you might think, narrow the choice of vacancies to which the service alerts you. I entered a number of provisos – that I would want to work from home, that I don’t drive, that I am looking for a post in the environs of Bath. So I get offered driving duties in London, posts in various countries in Africa and cold-calling jobs that I wouldn’t take if they offered shares in the company and the bonus levels of an arbitrageur (and for which anyway I am grossly overqualified). Friends who are job-seeking in earnest report that this is getting off lightly, that you can spend hours each day wading through farcically unsuitable and irrelevant links and that, even if you find a post for which you feel you can reasonably apply, you never ever receive any kind of response to your application.

Clint Eastwood was among those imploring Osborne not to cancel funding for the UK Film Council

Now how are the government’s attack dogs going to determine who is, in Osborne’s words, “somebody desperately looking for a job, someone really making the effort to go out there every day to find work”? Are they going to confiscate their computers to check how diligent have been their searches? The fact is that, in a buyer’s market, the seller is seriously disadvantaged and when unemployment is climbing, the out-of-work are less and less able to find work. Osborne’s remedy for this, he seems keen for us to believe, is to reduce if not remove entirely the support that the state has previously granted to those for whom employment prospects are ranged between scant and void. The result will be inevitable: on the one hand, numbers of people losing their homes and drifting into homelessness, families breaking up, suicides, depression and despair; on the other, civil unrest, lawlessness, rises in chronic addiction and in street and house crime at a time when the numbers of police on the street are in rapid decline.

That the rationale offered for slashing benefit is that there is far too much benefit fraud is as cruel as it is cynical. Unemployment for the three months to the end of June was 2.46m. A whole million of those unemployed people, for one reason or another, claimed no Jobseeker’s Allowance. By this time next year, who knows what the unemployment rate will be, especially if the feared double-dip recession materialises? Brendan Barber of the TUC, speaking on Any Questions?, astutely called the present period, ahead of the Spending Review, “the phoney war”.

Osborne by Steve Bell

The best we can look forward to, in my view, is a new winter of discontent. Indeed, I hope that the people will rise up and not stand for the ideologically-motivated punishment of those who are perceived as “weak” by this government that thinks every unpopular measure can be justified by the simple and simple-minded expedient of blaming the last administration. Osborne’s mantra that “we are all in this together” is as big a lie as this government has yet told. There will be no “together” until he and his colleagues address the fiscal and pay-restraint responsibilities of the banks (that are, after all, presently owned in great part by the public), the widening gap – yes, it certainly widened disgracefully under Labour – between rich and poor, and the vast amounts that the Treasury misses because of tax evasion both blatant (non-doms, for instance) and sly (through clever accountancy). Caning the weakest and calling it fair is pure cant.

A postscript to Mary Riddell’s remark that I mentioned in the previous posting, ‘Smear Studies’: while The Guardian and the BBC have long given up on the subject of William Hague, The Daily Telegraph prolongs it yet again today by running on the front page a photograph of Hague with his wife, thereby to justify showing additionally (and yet again) a shot of Hague with Christopher Myers and rehearsing once more the tired bones of the story.