What has happened to my country? I grew up in a Christian household — my father was Church of England, my mother Methodist — and both believed in Christian charity; in other words, the need for people of faith to look after those less fortunate than themselves. In the case of my Methodist heritage — as a working class religion, rather than the establishment C of E — this care for those in need was absolutely central to how the world was perceived, providing a social and political perspective as much as one based on religion.

Christians — and, of course, believers of other faiths — have their own share of hypocrites, and certainly do not have a monopoly on caring for the poor and the sick, as can be seen by the number of atheists with a well-developed social conscience, but in the Britain of today, driven by the Tory-led coalition government, concern for the poor and the ill appears to have become deeply unfashionable, leading to a callousness in society as a whole that has been encouraged by governments themselves (not just this shower of heartless Etonians), and by large parts of the media.

The defining characteristics of this cruel new world appear to be a preoccupation with selfishness and materialism, and, as part of a decline in empathy and the dissolving of the kind of political solidarity that was central to those opposing Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, for example, a narrow and horribly misplaced focus for dissent — not on the bigger political picture, and on the corporate and banking elites getting way with financial murder, but on people’s neighbours, or those regarded as different, or inferior, or feral, or workshy scroungers. Read the rest of this entry »

Two weeks ago, doctors at the annual conference of the British Medical Association (BMA), which represents 141,000 doctors and trainee doctors in the UK, delivered a resounding rejection of the Work Capability Assessment (WCA), which is being used by the government to establish that people who have physical and/or mental health disabilities are fit for work.

The inflexible computer-based system, administered by ATOS Healthcare in sessions that last for just 20 to 30 minutes, has been repeatedly condemned by disability campaigners, and/or by those subjected to it, and at the BMA conference, as a press release noted, London GP Louise Irvine said the WCA system “was causing ‘distress’ to thousands of people with long-term health conditions deemed fit for work, as well as subjecting the doctors involved to ‘McDonaldisation’ of their careers.”

She added, “There is no empathy in the system, it is all accusatory.”

Although David Snashall, a London-based consultant in occupational medicine,  “urged the meeting not to call for the WCA to be replaced, arguing that there was a scrutiny process in place to improve the system,” the BMA supported a motion to demand that the WCA should be ended “with immediate effect and be replaced with a rigorous and safe system that does not cause unavoidable harm to some of the weakest and vulnerable in society.” Read the rest of this entry »

Since coming to power in May 2010, through a Frankenstein’s Monster coalition with the Lib Dems, the Tories have embarked on the most sustained and unprecedented assault on the British state in history, and seem determined to turn back the clock to a time before notions of universal suffrage, of education and healthcare for all, and a welfare state that would look after the most vulnerable and unfortunate members of society took effect.

In this savage world, in which, for ideological reasons — and using the global economic crash of 2008 as an excuse for punishing those who had nothing to do with it, and allowing the rich crooks to escape scot-free — the Tories and their Lib Dem stooges have been pushing a criminally deceptive message: that everything that has not yet been privatised must be privatised, and that the state provision of services is unaffordable, and must must be brought to an end.

Amazingly, the government has largely been getting away with its lies, shielding irresponsible and almost unthinkably greedy bankers and corporate tax avoiders from scrutiny, and these 21st century neo-liberal butchers, whose policy decisions are all filtered through an un-Christian, cruel, myopic and destructive worldview, have even succeeded in making people believe that, although we, the taxpayers, pay over £500 billion to the government in tax and national insurance every year, we no longer have any right to demand that any of that money — any of it — is used for the state provision of services like health, education, or welfare. Read the rest of this entry »

Today, largely unnoticed by British citizens fortunate enough to not suffer from any sort of disability, the vile Tory-led government hacked away much of the financial support for disabled people. As austerity cuts go, the cutting of Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) for disabled people is particularly harsh on some of society’s most vulnerable people, to an extent that makes me feel queasy, and will severely diminish the lives of tens of thousands of disabled people and their partners, reducing them to a level of poverty that ought to be unacceptable in a civilised society.

As Claudia Wood, head of public services and welfare at Demos explained for the Public Finance blog yesterday:

Today marks a watershed in the history of the welfare state. It is the last day that the contributory principle — the concept of social insurance that underpinned [William] Beveridge’s vision [for a welfare state] — remains intact.

This is because tomorrow 70,000 ill and disabled people will lose their Contributory Employment and Support Allowance — a benefit that provides financial support for those who become unemployed due to illness or disability, in return for the national insurance contributions they made during their working life. Read the rest of this entry »

With the Tory-led coalition government attacking vulnerable people on so many fronts, and with the last month in particular dominated by the last-ditch resistance to the wretched NHS reform bill, it’s been a while since I had the time to examine the ramifications of another appalling piece of legislation — the welfare bill that became law six weeks ago.

Since this government came to power through a Frankenstein-like coalition agreement, I have been disgusted by the Tories’ mission to savagely cut expenditure on welfare, for a variety of reasons.

The first is because the government is fundamentally dishonest, and is falsely insinuating that cutting the country’s deficit through cuts to state expenditure is the only way forward. This involves the Tories (and the Liberal Democrats propping them up) blaming all our economic woes on Labour’s welfare expenditure, when it was criminal activity by investment banks that caused the economic crash of 2008, dealing a savage blow to our economic health as jobs were lost and government revenues fell, leading in turn to an increase in government spending, including bailing out the banks that failed.

Along with this fundamental dishonesty, the government is fixated on reducing the deficit, even though it is clear to anyone not blinded by ideology that savage austerity will only further depress the economy, leading to a kind of economic death spiral from which there will be no recovery. Also dishonest is the government’s refusal to tackle the widespread tax evasion by corporations and rich individuals, estimated to cost £95bn a year, and the “implicit subsidy” to UK banks in the wake of the 2008 crisis, in which high-risk behaviour is essentially underwritten by the government — to the tune of £100bn a year, according to a Bank of England official speaking in 2009. Read the rest of this entry »

When it comes to callousness, the supposedly caring veneer of David Cameron’s Tory party disintegrated almost as soon as the expedient governing coalition with the hapless Liberal Democrats was formed, when our new leaders announced, with evident relish, their intention of haranguing those without work at a time when there was only one job available for every five unemployed people.

Targetting the unemployed during a recession would be cruel under any circumstances, and it was disgraceful to see the government peddling the false notion that anyone without a job was a workshy scrounger and parasite — and to see that particular lie being lapped up by large numbers of my fellow citizens, thereby revealing that, beneath many people’s superficial respectability beat hearts of hatred, forever burning to find a scapegoat and to make them suffer.

With a sleight of hand, involving an absurdly strict cap on immigration that seemed to have been sourced directly from the fascist BNP, Cameron and his fellow butchers of the British state diverted attention away from immigration but made sure that the new scapegoats consisted of people without a job — even if, or perhaps especially if — they have physical or mental health problems. Read the rest of this entry »