Tories are finding new ways to demonise welfare

To prepare the ground for the next phase in their ongoing obsession with cutting back the public sector, the Conservatives announced last week that they were spending £5m of public funds to send all taxpayers a leaflet breaking down how the tax they pay is spent (Mason, 2014).

This Tory presentation on government spending has been criticised, in particular, for presenting welfare spending in an incredibly simplistic, and so misleading, way (Moore, 2014). It has been suggested that the primary aim of doing so is to justify future cuts in welfare spending, by comparing its cost versus other popular priorities like healthcare and education (Ball, 2014).

These leaflets, with their presentation of the cost of welfare are just the latest assault. Yet, a more detailed look at government spending reveals much different picture. Of spending on welfare, 46% of it goes on pensions, with only 3% spent on jobseekers allowance. A further 8% goes to the disability living allowance, and 14% is spent on housing benefits (Moore, 2014). Furthermore, the 3% spent on support for the unemployed, while they look for work, is less than 0.6% of tax revenues (Ball, 2014).

Those figures make the Conservative government's pursuit of cutting back welfare, in order to reduce overall public spending, seem absurd. It also puts into context how heavily the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has been criticised for its zealous pursuit of this Tory ideological aggression towards welfare (Toynbee, 2014).

The DWP has even faced legal challenges over its 'workfare' policy, on the grounds that it constitutes forced labour - and has even refused to release information of where it is forcing people to work on the astonishing grounds that it would provoke protests (Chakelian, 2014). It's attitude has, however, provoked protests regardless, unsurprisingly, with people are being forced into work without pay in ridiculous situations (Malik, 2014).

These moves tie in perfectly with the Tory obsession with demonising welfare and demolishing public welfare safety nets. Their illiberal approach is undermining the wellbeing of the poorest, leaving them at the mercy of the market, mostly in the name of supporting capitalist free enterprise by saving the wealthiest the trouble of contributing to the common fund.

That approach, in pursuit of statistical success to justify the very unequal distribution of wealth that their economic approach requires (Watt, 2013), is crushing the real people behind the percentages and the entries in spreadsheets, and dividing the communities that bind them.

Welfare is all about a community coming together to ensure that, should any one of them stumble, everyone else will rally to help them back to their feet - and yet it is being replaced with a modern day workhouse for the poor, forcing the unemployed to labour unpaid in increasingly temporary jobs, in a job market that is being propped up on temporary workers. Throwing more obstacles in the path of those who find themselves at the bottom, or leaving behind those that falter, is an inadequate and unfair response to hard times.

Instead, we should be looking forward with ideas like a Citizen's Income, to engage with new ways to liberate people from poverty and provide opportunities. We need to provide better prospects, created by better investments in people, and the provision of better access to better opportunities - an unlocking of the doors barring the least well off from access to the connections and resources they need for a better life.

==========
References:
==========
+ Rowena Mason's 'Tax statements from George Osborne to show government spend'; in The Guardian; 2 November 2014.

+ Susan Moore's 'What the Tories won’t tell you in their ‘transparent’ tax statement'; in The Guardian; 3 November 2014.

+ James Ball's 'Osborne’s tax summary shows benefits bill is biggest drain. Is this fair?'; in The Guardian; 3 November 2014.

+ Polly Toynbee's 'Help to Work is a costly way of punishing the jobless'; in The Guardian; 15 April 2014.

+ Anoosh Chakelian's 'The DWP won't tell us exactly where it sends people on placements for fear of protests' in New Statesman; 4 November 2014.

+ Shiv Malik's 'DWP orders man to work without pay for company that let him go'; in The Guardian; 3 November 2014.

+ Nicholas Watt's 'Boris Johnson invokes Thatcher spirit with greed is good speech'; in The Guardian; 27 November 2013.