The Tories' war on independent women.

If the Conservative party is looking for a theme song that really sums up its message for the next election, it could do worse than Beyonce Knowles' pop smash 'Single Ladies: Put a Ring On It.’ The Tories have already made it clear that a return to marriage as the fundamental framework of socio-economic control is the aspirational core of the party’s ideology, and Tuesday’s emergency budget sent an uncompromising message to women who have the temerity to divorce or to remain unmarried: single ladies will pay heavy penalties, especially if they have children.

As well as excising the health in pregnancy grant and other rare, precious tokens of state support for mothers, the new budget expressly delineates welfare penalties and work sanctions for single parents, nine out of ten of whom are women. Single mothers will now be required to find a job in today’s shrivelled labour market as soon as their children are of school age, but as employers are under no obligation to pay a living wage that incorporates enough money to cover childcare, work itself will be no guarantee of a decent standard of living.

The changes to housing benefit - justified with solemn anecdotes about chav families living in castles that sounded a little like the chancellor had muddled his notes with a copy of the Daily Mail - will also imperil lone parent families, who are three times as likely to live in rented accommodation as families with two resident parents. The charity Shelter has warned that the cuts will "push many households over the edge, triggering a spiral of debt, eviction and homelessness."

The Tories may have sidelined their plans to recognise marriage in the tax system, but the cuts announced in the new budget are far more disastrous for women’s rights than the crass symbolism of tax breaks for married couples, making it significantly more difficult for women to contemplate raising children without a man, any man, to offer the support that the new government takes moral exception at providing.

Lisa Ansell, a single mother from London , explained that the new budget may destroy her chances of building a stable home for herself and her three-year-old daughter. “I have worked all my life, and done everything right, but the VAT hike and housing benefit cuts man I'm sitting here with a calculator wondering how I'm supposed to survive,” she said.

“This attack on single mothers is directly in line with Conservative rhetoric about encouraging marriage. If the only way for a poor woman to get out of poverty is a man, that has serious consequences for people like me and my daughter.”

Like many lone parents , Ansell was relying on a job in the public sector to support her family but after a freeze on recruitment in preparation for the cuts announced last week, the work she had lined up has disappeared. “I am an intelligent woman and a good mother, but on budget day, I woke up to find that I am society's garbage, ” she said. “If the new government feels that any woman who has a child with a man should be left in poverty if she separates from him, with a new sexual relationship her only route out, then it should just say so.”

David Willetts MP, who is to sit on a new taskforce for children and families, articulates the Conservative attitude to women and the state with icy clarity in his recent book The Pinch. Lamenting the rise in divorce and praising marriage as a solution to poverty, Willetts complains that "a welfare system that was originally designed to compensate men for loss of earnings is being slowly and messily redesigned to compensate women for the loss of men.” A Green Paper on “the Family” released in January by Iain Duncan Smith’s Centre for Social Justice suggested that lone parenthood is responsible for “fracturing British society,” and that governments should send a clear signal that “families matter”.

Unfortunately for millions of parents, partners and children in Britain, only certain families truly matter to the Conservative party. The entire premise of the Tory marital fetish is that ‘families’ are not just any old riff-raff who love one other and are committed to each other’s wellbeing: the proper form of the family in Conservative Britain is a rigid economic arrangement involving two married, cohabiting parents, preferably owning property and drawing as little state support as possible. Only 37% of the population enjoy this sort of ‘traditional’ arrangement, but Tory social policy has rarely taken the reality of working people’s lives into account when imposing its dictats.

One does not need to be a socialist feminist to understand that the history of women’s liberation has always been about economics. Indeed, after suffrage was achieved, the key victories of the women’s movement in the 1970s involved the fight to allow women and children to be financially independent of men should the need arise.

The hypocrisy of the Tory family fetish, which rewards married, middle-class women for staying at home with their children whilst demonising poor, single women for doing the same, should remind the British left that even the most fundamental of progressive reforms can be reversed unless progressives remain vigilant. Contemporary Conservative policy on ‘The Family’ encodes a cold, reactionary moral agenda in the rhetoric of “allowing people real choice over their lives”, but this budget threatens women's hard-won freedom to make important choices for themselves and their families: the choice to leave an unsuitable or violent partner without facing financial ruin; the choice to remain unmarried; the choice to live a dignified life independent of men, whether or not we have children. These choices are fundamental to women's rights. They are not optional extras that can be trimmed from the budget whenever the nation feels the piece; they are core provisions for female security in an unjust patriarchal world, and they are priceless.

This budget is not merely a repulsive moral assault on single mothers: it is a direct threat to all women who believe that our futures should not depend on the ability to catch and keep a man. The Coalition has claimed that the cuts annonced on Tuesday are 'unavoidable', but the new budget looks anything but reactive: it looks, amongst other things, like a concerted attack on women's hard-won freedoms, an attack based, in Harriet Harman's words, on ideology rather than economics.

ESA proves that Labour has betrayed its core values.

I spent this evening watching a black labrador slurpily lapping the shoes of a major think-tank director whilst its owner thought up ways to lie to me about his party's attitude to the poor and needy. In a speech given in conjunction with Progress, David Blunkett MP set out to demonstrate just why the Tories are so very, very different from New Labour. The former Home Secretary quoted Aneurin Bevan, who described the Conservative party's habit of using government policy to shore up the assets of the privileged as "sucking at the teats of the state".

"That sums it up pretty well", said Blunkett, who went on to describe how the evil, ghoulish Tories, are planning to reduce the size of the state by selling off central and local government functions to private companies in an effort to save money, because they, unlike Labour, care about money more than about people.

Mr Blunkett omitted to mention the small matter of the Welfare Reform Bill 2008, with its stated aim of saving cash by getting a million people off sickness benefits and back into work whether they are up to it or not.

World on Fire: Sinking and Swimming

[written for Progress magazine]

After 12 years of Labour governance, Britain remains a largely pleasant and prosperous place to live – but not for everyone. The Young Foundation’s latest report, ‘Sinking or Swimming’, is a damning investigation into increasing levels of social deprivation and insecurity. The report exposes how, for many people, simply maintaining their material and emotional wellbeing is a lonely, near-Herculean feat.

Self-reported cases of anxiety and depression have almost doubled in 12 years, with 10-15% of the population feeling depressed or anxious most of the time. With one in four people experiencing a mental health difficulty at some point in their lifetime, policymakers are only now beginning to seriously examine the connections between social deprivation, poverty and mental health difficulty, rather than assuming that mental health difficulty is merely a sign of ‘weakness’, occurring in isolation from social factors.

Behind this trend in policymaking – borne out by the government’s proposed mental health strategy, ‘New Horizons’ - is a profound sense of shock that rising material living standards have failed to make the people of Britain fitter, happier and more productive. In fact, as the report demonstrates, 60 years after the advent of the welfare state ‘psychological needs have become as pressing as material ones: the risk of loneliness and isolation; the risk of mental illness; the risk of being left behind.’

The Young Foundation report demonstrates that the psychological resilience of ordinary citizens, along with our ability to cope with setbacks and changes in our lives, is directly affected by our level of social, personal and financial stability, concluding that that ‘To deal with transitions, people need to have a stable home, an adequate income and supportive relationships’. Unfortunately, although Britain is a wealthy country, it is also a hugely unequal one, with a gap between rich and poor that has widened over the past decade.

Consequently, swathes of the population find it difficult to maintain this basic triumvirate of stability. Mark Brown, the editor of Britain’s mental health lifestyle magazine, One In Four, explains that ‘people need a regular income, a safe place to live and a supportive network of people to stay stable. It's like a stool: three legs, you're sitting pretty; two legs and you can keep yourself stable as long as nothing knocks you off balance; one leg and you're pretty much just holding on; no legs and you're on your arse and everyone else is looking down at you.’

Emma Mamo, policy and campaigns officer for Mind, agrees that ‘Poverty can cause and be caused by mental distress, and there are associations between lower levels of income, higher rates of unemployment and being on benefits, debt, poor housing and mental health problems. For example people with mental health problems are three times more likely to be in debt.’

Even before the extant financial crisis, various social groups were particularly at risk of experiencing mental health difficulties, or, as the report prefers to call them, ‘unmet psychological needs’: elderly people, school-leavers, the unemployed, and those making difficult life transitions such as coming out of prison or residential care, losing a loved one or starting a family. Today, with extra pressure on the Treasury to make cuts to frontline mental health services, the Young Foundation is not alone in expressing concern over the long-term future of Britain’s social and psychological wellbeing.

The Foundation’s recommendation that policymakers take a holistic approach to wellbeing and welfare provision is welcome indeed. In this period of social crisis and spending cuts, it is incumbent upon all of us to understand that investment in financial and social equality is also investment in mental health.

This government and whatever administration follows in 2010 must be made aware that investment in social justice, including a welfare state that allows claimants to live above the breadline, is essential to safeguarding the mental health of the nation. The needs of Britain’s most materially and emotionally vulnerable will not be met until investment in mental health services is enjoined with a commitment to improve the material and social stability of the poorest members of our society.

Hypocrisy and the death of the welfare state

You know that something's rotten in the state of Labour when you read about a Tory welfare proposal – that’s a Tory welfare proposal, written by the Tories - and find yourself thinking, 'that's actually the first vaguely sensible idea I've heard for a long time. It might improve things.'

The plan in question involves decentralising the benefits system - giving individual councils a lump sum of money to spend on welfare howsoever they choose. Provided that safeguards were put in place ensuring a minimum amount of benefits and housing support were offered to the needy, this would actually be an improvement on the current system, which involves a great deal of overheads for very little positive return. JobCentrePlus, incorporating the new Pathways To Work scheme, currently spends £3.36 billion a year on administration costs alone which, when you consider that the total amount the state spends on Job Seeker's Allowance handouts is £5 billion, is not an inconsiderable figure – especially as much of this money is currently spent on finding creative ways to deny people state support.

I understand, of course, that the Tories are about as likely to really have the best interests of the poor and unlucky at heart as I am to be a contestant on the next series of Strictly Come Dancing. The reason that this plan looks good is that it would be hard to envision a welfare system more punitive, more cruel and illogical, than the one we currently have, reworked under the expert supervision of former Work and Pensions Secretary, James Purnell MP for Stalybridge and Hyde.

One of the founding principles of the welfare state, laid out in the Beveridge report and part-quoted in a poor-bashing article by Michael Portillo in the Times this week, is that the state "should not stifle incentive, opportunity, responsibility; in establishing a national minimum, it should leave room and encouragement for voluntary action by each individual to provide more than that minimum for himself and his family". The current system both forbids other work ‘to provide more than that minimum’ and stifles incentive – not, as the received wisdom runs, by providing benefit recipients with a cushy lifestyle that they don’t want to relinquish, but by making it so bloody hard to access benefits that by the time you’re luck enough to receive your £50.95 a week, you’re terrified of giving it up.

Having lived with and financially supervised young jobseekers for a year, £50.95 a week isn’t much – in London, it’s barely enough to cover a basic, unhealthy diet of frozen pizzas, travel costs and heating bills. Britain has the stingiest welfare system in Europe – if you’re on jobseeker’s allowance, you can’t afford to buy a newspaper or take the bus into town to meet your parents, and you certainly can’t save any of it. But it’s the difference between poverty and absolute destitution, and despite the weeks and weeks of beauraucratic faff it takes to access it, as soon as you get a job, the benefit stops. Not only do you have no money to live off until you get your first paycheck, but if you lose the job at the end of your trial period, you’ll have to wait another couple of months before you get any money from the state, and you risk being turfed out onto the streets.

Centralisation of services should, in theory, streamline and speed up the welfare system. Instead, deliberate lack of communication between the DWP, the Jobcentre and the National Health Service makes it as difficult and as taxing as possible for people to access the benefits they need, an operating principle which punishes the sick and the mentally ill disproportionately harshly. Consider the case this month of the terminally ill hospice resident who was ordered to attend the jobcentre before he would be allowed to receive any benefits, and died without receiving a penny of state support. Or the woman with mental health difficulties who was so badly bullied by JobCentre staff and agencies that she was tipped into a major health crisis [reported by wimvisible, the campaign for women with non-visible disabilities]. There is currently no way for doctors and healthcare workers to ensure that vulnerable people get the support they need – instead, as many barriers as possible are thrown in the way of claimants, ensuring that it is the most doggedly persistent, rather than the most needy, who get state support whether they deserve it or not.

After helping my partner go through the agonising and humiliating process of filling out a form for Disability Living Allowance, we waited over four months to hear back from the DWP – four months of watching my partner get thinner and thinner through stress, poverty and persistent lack of proper food, whilst he came to terms with having to abandon his dream job because he could not walk well enough to sustain it. Four months at the end of which we were both sure that he would be given at least some money to improve his circumstances, because his is a clear case of not being able to walk without agonising pain and the use of crutches. Instead, we’ve just received a letter informing us that the DWP does not consider my partner disabled, and that he is well enough to work in any job immediately without any adjustments.

The sublime hypocrisy of all this, of course, is that JobCentrePlus – which employs nearly 700,000 staff and spends billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money telling disabled people, in the words of shoutyporn victimblaming Channel 4 hatefest Benefit Busters, that they can "walk down the street and get a job tomorrow" - has a very poor record itself on employing people with mental or physical disabilities. Despite being one of the only companies currently hiring, just 1.26% of the thousands of people taken on by JobCentrePlus in 2007-2008 had any sort of physical or mental disability, compared with15% of working-age people. I know a young man, a graduate with a degree from a top university, who got to the last stage of interviews for a benefit adviser job– the only interview he had been offered in six months of jobhunting – only to be turned down after disclosing that he had bipolar disorder.

You may have surmised that all of this makes me unspeakably angry. This is not how the welfare state is supposed to work. It's meant to help people, not punish people. It's meant to listen to people and work with them, rather than shunt them between departments and use any excuse to reject their claims. It's meant, in short, to be a welfare state, not a special circle of hell for anyone unlucky enough to lose their job, which these days could be anyone. In a few days, I'm going to tell James Purnell that to his face.

Turns out that contributors to this blog have finally shouted loud enough for the former Work and Pensions Secretary to hear - so on Wednesday night I'm due to have a personal meeting with Mr Purnell to discuss our differences. If anyone has a story or an issue they want to raise with him, post it in the comments and I'll print it out and take it along. Keep it clean, he's apparently a sensitive flower. I shall report back on my return, presuming I make it back unscathed; if not, I'll be locked in a basement at Demos, and I'm relying on you guys to send a vanload of heavily armed banjo-playing junior socialist feminists to rescue me.

Put People First March 28/03/09

My throat is raw. I'm screaming at the top of my lungs:

One, two, three, four -
Corporate bailouts no more!
Five, six, seven, eight -
Spend it on the welfare state!

There's city dust in my eyes, and my legs feel like blocks of wood as we take the final mile down Picadilly towards Hyde Park. A painted banner flaps against my body, proclaiming us Anti-Capitalist Feminists. And I'm still chanting. I'm an animal, a tiny, burning ball of rage and justice, I've got all my sisters with me, it's been four hours since my last latte and I'm running on adrenaline and outrage. Me and thirty-five thousand others.

And yet the Put People First march is still, somehow, suffused with an air of pessimism. The Troops Out Of Baghdad placards look especially mournful: because yes, we have been here before. The last time I marched down Picadilly in the cold March breeze with thousands upon thousands of angry fellow citizens, we wanted to stop the troops going in to Baghdad, and we were heard, and we were ignored. The samba players are overwhelmed by the thump and screech of a marching band from the end of the world, and the set-piece of the procession is a cheery twenty-foot tall rendering of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. Thunderclouds are gathering.

A woman I'm marching with tells me that she doesn't think the G20 will change anything even if it's in their power to do so. Ahead of me, in front of the RMT banners, an old man is explaining to the just-walking little boy holding his hand about the protests in 1981. We've seen all this before. So why are we still here?

We're here because we're fed up of being lied to. We're here because we've been royally screwed over, and now we're angry. We're here because even if we don't expect to be listened to, that doesn't mean we'll stop trying to be heard. Not ever.

On my way home through Green Park, tired beyond words, I pick a bunch of wilting daffodils that glow faintly in my grimy hands in the noonlight. Around the corner, the band are still playing, the people are still screaming, the dull rumble of thirty-five-thousand feet is still ringing down the thoroughfare. Dreamily, I give out the daffs to the rows of police officers standing in front of the Ritz. One of them even takes a flower, and pops it in his lapel.

Photos to follow.

Rip it up and start again.

It's not often that my faith in the British press soars quite as much as it did yesterday, when I offered up silent thanks to the nameless journalist who did the digging on Tony McNulty MP's claming of £60,000 as 'expenses' on a second home in Harrow, where his parents currently live. Yes, that Tony McNulty, Purnell's lapdog. The same Tony McNulty who believes that crushing poverty is an important incentive to persuade benefits claimants into jobs that aren't there. The same Tony McNulty who believes that the Welfare Reform Bill - voted in last Wednesday, albeit with some important amendments - is an appropriate strategy to bully the workless back into below-minimum-wage jobs. He claimed as much as £14,000 per year on the home, on top of his considerable MP's salary and additional expense claims.

It has been pointed out numerous times, not least by McNulty himself, that the money he claimed - equivalent to the entire salary of many of his constituents - wasn't against the rules. I'm sure it wasn't. I don't however, give one solitary iced damn if the Queen gave him the cash in a gold-plated envelope scented with the royal perfume, it's still entirely and indefensibly wrong.

Because, well. How dare he, really. How dare he dictate to the poor and needy how they should live their lives, how dare he imply that people are 'playing the system' when he himself has been playing the system for at least five times the annual rate of jobseekers' allowance every year. How dare he tell Britain's poorest and most disadvantaged young people that they do not deserve the paltry £48 of jobseekers' allowance they receive every week, when he himself has been claiming at least £270 per week in additional expenses on top of his salary. The sheer pig-headed hypocrisy of it all makes my ovaries itch.

It has further been reported that Mr McNulty claims to have made "considerable" use of the property, but said that he had stopped claiming the allowance in January - get this- 'because the fall in interest rates meant he could afford to pay the mortgage from his MP's salary'. As Mr Eugenides puts it, 'you have to marvel at the sheer ingenuity of people who only stop stealing from us when they've driven the economy far enough into the ground that it becomes temporarily cost-effective to act honestly.'

I mean, what is it with these guys? Have they completely lost all sense of narrative subtlety? Do they actually wander the corridors of Whitehall stroking overfed white cats, cackling to themselves and rubbing their hands with glee when brownbeaten assistants scurry up to tell them that the local orphanage has been demolished just as they ordered? What has happened to this government, when the Conservatives - the Conservatives! - have to suggest to McNulty that 'questions need to be answered'?

If you hadn't guessed, I'm incandescently angry about this.

They have no idea how the other half live, these people; they have no compassion, they have no compunction, and they lie. I refuse to believe that Labour MPs are stupid as well as hypocritical, mainly because I've met some. They know. They know full well just what £270 per week would mean to some of Britain's poorest families, in terms of staving off daily hunger and protecting parents from loan sharks. They know. They just don't care. They're content to claim it for themselves instead, all the while refusing to instigate policy changes that might help the 1.3 million unemployed young people in this country being thrown on the scrap-heap for good, all the while refusing to help Britain's 2million workless citizens and many more benefit claimants raise themselves above the poverty line.

The potential to create jobs in this economy is staggering - and yet the government is sitting on its hands. No FDR-esque New Deal for us, the country with one of the most meagre provisions of social security in the developed world - just more expensive and fruitless chivvying of the jobless into jobs that aren't there, with a workless to vacancy rate of 30:1 in many parts of the country. For some of the millions of school and college leavers out there, it is already too late. For many of Britain's long-term unemployed, grinding poverty and hopelessness have already done their damage. For the rest, time is rapidly wasting. As Saint Polly puts it:


The social cost of leaving a generation to rot will be far greater than the small financial cost of creating jobs and training now. Crime, welfare dependency, children's problems, mental and physical illness and all the social ills that shame Britain from previous eras of gross social neglect are huge debts weighing on the nation's future as surely as IMF sums. A job creation programme can be afforded, in the same way that war, anti-terror measures or an outbreak of avian flu have to be afforded. The social destruction wrought by long-term unemployment is a national emergency.

They could afford to bail out the banks at fifty times the cost of these damaging new welfare reforms; they can afford to save us from desitutition if they choose, but instead, the cabinet ministers we elected to serve us sit on their bottoms paying themselves vast salaries under the table, in a state of near-perfect inertia.

Bugger this. I want a better world.

Days like this make me want to forget any notion of Trotskyan Transitionalism and take it all in my tiny hands and smash it to brittle bits. Instead, I'm going to be taking my frustration out on the streets of London this Saturday, at the Put People First march and rally in Hyde Park. Hope to see some of you there. I'll be the short one.

No to Welfare Abolition!

I've just got back from a very strange activist meeting, albeit one with only minimal hand-signals, in the upstairs of a London pub which was playing Johnny Cash classics on a loop. The details of the action we're planning took two repeats of Ring of Fire to get through, which is pretty good going. Anyway. As promised, here are some details for action taking place next week, which has been thrillingly designated a 'Week of Action' to concide with the vote on the Welfare Reform Bill that's being rushed through the Commons. The week is being organised by Feminist Fightback, the London Coalition Against Poverty (LCAP), the Disabled People's Direct Action Network, and other supporting groups.

Here are the details:

*Most importantly: next Monday, 9th of March, LCAP and Feminist Fightback are planning an immensely fizzy and exciting piece of direct action which is SO secret and super-special that I can't even give you all the details online. Suffice it to say: we'll be dressed as bankers, and my outfit (as discussed below) is going to be spectacular, darlings. This will be a fun, disruptive action, and there will be all kinds of roles for people to play, some with more of an arrestable factor than others. We'll be meeting on the 9th at 10.00am, in Central London. Everyone is welcome - the more the messier! To get the details call 077 480 52289

*Disabled People's Direct Action Network and LCAP will be taking part in a high-profile direct action in central London on Wednesday, March 11th at 10:30 a.m. To get involved, contact cripps_r_us@tiscali.co.uk or see the facebook page.

*A picket has been called outside of the Mare St Job Centre (Hackney) for March 16th at 11:00 am. This is very near the time of the 3rd reading, so the groups involved want to make this picket as big as possible. If you would like to help leaflet and inform people about their rights during the week, or if you'd like to get involved in planning the picket, email londoncoalitionagainstpoverty@gmail.com. Activists all over London will be leafletting outside of their local Jobcentres all week, and if you'd like to be one of them, there are leaflets available for printing on the LCAP website at www.lcap.org.uk

Make trouble!
x

Purnell's welfare plan 'close to collapse'!

Haha!

Sucks to be you, Jimmy boy!

'Responding to warnings that his reforms will not work without major changes, James Purnell, the work and pensions secretary, has abandoned plans to announce the preferred bidders for the multi-million-pound contracts this week. This follows demands from the firms involved for hundreds of millions more in "up-front" cash. A crisis meeting between top department officials and the bidding companies was cancelled on Friday after Whitehall announced a "short pause" in the tendering process.

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) said it had been called off "because of the snow", but one company manager involved remarked: "The most telling thing is that no new date was set."'

No, this doesn't mean we can relax. No, I'm not going to get off this man's back or stop pressing for liberal reforms in any small way that I can, not until I see a radical new deal on the table for the sick, disabled and long-term unemployed coupled with a requirement that work pay a living wage. Yes! Yes, alright, I'm a goddamn socialist! What are you looking at? *twitches*

After months of trying to feed six people on two minimum-wage salaries, after months hunting for jobs that don't exist in a market that mistrusts the physically and mentally impaired, my household has decided to beg the government for our dinners again. I've spent the last two hours filling in online benefits claims forms for my severely disabled partner, and no, the support isn't adequate and no, no I'm not happy about that. But I'm going to sleep a little bit sounder tonight knowing that there's less chance that my lamb of a lover is going to have to hobble on his poor leg to stack shelves in ASDA for less than half the minimum wage.

Thanks to everyone who commented on the welfare posts; keep on propagating, guys. It's too early to let our guard down just yet.

Redistribute this: Fabian NYC report *1

I've just got back from stewarding at the Fabian Society Conference, 'Fairness doesn't happen by chance', tickets fairly priced at £30, which is why I was stewarding. As soon as I saw the title of Secretary James Purnell's keynote debate - 'SOLIDARITY LOST? Reviving the will to re-distribute' - I got an intense and heady craving for a sausage roll. A cigarette. A hard slap in the face. Anything, actually, to reassure me that the life I'm living has some connection to reality. The Welfare Reform Bill may be a hundred and nine pages' worth of suspicious gibberish and the debate that followed was vaguer and more dubious still, but you always know where you are with a sausage roll.

After some initial platitudes - 'What is solidarity? Well, I'd say it's kindness transformed into political reality...' - the Work and Pensions Secretary got down to the meat and bone of what he has in mind for the nation's poor. Apparently, 'passive redistribution' - the worn, outdated notion of actually transferring money from one group of people to another - simply isn't 'modern' any more. 'We need to move from the concept of passive redistribution to one of active redistribution-increasing aspiration, education and opportunities'. Not thirty seconds before, Purnell himself had noted that aspiration, education and opportunities are accurately predicted by parental and personal income - but apparently financial redistribution is still just a bit too last century, not to mention expensive.

Onto welfare reform. Purnell's new Welfare Reform Bill contains nothing whatsoever about actually spreading wealth around (I've read it. Twice) and a great deal of sops to an imagined Daily Mail readership - and this is cheerily deliberate. 'I think politicians need to respond to public opinion,' Purnell said. And yes, that's commendable, and that would be fine if there were real research into public opinion behind this Bill, but trouble is that the Mail does not, in fact, reflect public opinion so much as create it - which begs the question of why it's this particular piece of 'public opinion' to which the Brown administration has decided to buck a ten-year trend and pay some attention, a question which was left dissolutely dangling.

The rest of the debate meandered over issues of what the left really mean, what they really mean by the concept of fairness, and was ultimately hijacked by a worthy but somewhat off-topic immigration conversation between Trevor Philips of the ECHRC and Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, much to Purnell's beaming relief. Brown was right, but the extent and detail of her rightness conveniently allowed the entire discussion to abandon all hope of actually addressing actual redistribution actually at all, which nobody had seemed very keen to do in the first place anyway.

So I put up my little ink-blotted hand and flapped ineffectually at the air for twenty minutes, until I realised that no, the chair was not going to take my question, because he'd met me. And after realising this, I waited for a pause in the proceedings, and stood up and said it.

''So, Mr Purnell, is there actually going to be any increase in financial redistribution, or not?''

Purnell flustered for a split second, and then he asked the chair, ''do I have to answer that question?'' The chair (not his fault) shook his head. ''I'm not going to answer that question,'' declared the Secretary.

So when the legitimate questions had finished, I stood in front of the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, and said,

''Mr Purnell. In this Welfare Reform Bill, a copy of which I have here *brandish*, you have this week suggested that you're going to impel long-term benefits claimants to work for large companies, which you're going to sub-contract at public expense, and you're going to pay those workers under half the minimum wage, and pay the difference to the companies, companies that include the US mega-firm Wal-Mart. Is that correct? And is it just?''

''Well, Ms Penny, *grin wearing thin*, I think the question we need to ask is, 'does it work?, isn't it?''

No, James. No, that's not the question at all.

A lot of things work, and a lot more things work for a little while. Fascist regimes, for example. Or cleaning your teeth with bleach. Or crash-dieting. The question is, is it fair? Is it right? And is it going to create a stabler and more functional society, as opposed to a dazzlingly unequal corporate archipelago? Unless the answer to all of these questions is 'yes', does it work doesn't come into it - not before you know precisely what it is you're trying to acheive.

''A lot of people would be happy to stack shelves for Wal-Mart, if they were given the opportunity to do it for a living wage. What do you say to that?''

''Well - yes, but we couldn't do that for everyone who was unemployed for even a day, could we?''

Purnell glared at me, and put on his long, black, expensive-looking coat in a looming-looking way. I, however, am under five feet tall. I'm used to looming. I was not impressed. I remain unimpressed. And as the Bill proceeds through the House in the teeth of a recession, we can only hope that a few stalwart Westminster souls still believe in redistribution - because the Labour's figureheads certainly don't.

If you're feeling a little chilly inside right now, you might want to take a look at this reassuring picture of a very tasty and wholly predictable sausage roll, and possibly go and eat one. I know I shall. There, don't say I never have any practical solutions.

Public service announcement!

Genitals, ladymen, devoted followers and other rubber-necking squinters at the car-crash that is this blog: a public service announcement follows.


1.If you aren't currently following alright tit, the massively well-written story of a 29-year-old battling breast cancer, you bloody well should be. Entirely worksafe, providing that your work tolerates sudden crying jags and bursts of laughter, sometimes simultaneously.

Another thing that you all need to be reading right now, this very instant is John Q Publican's new blog. JQP is an old friend of mine and something of a mentor, too, and he has been more than tangentially involved in some of the processing behind Penny Red over the past 18 months, and I can confirm that he is a real live barman in real life. We often disagree, but I have huge respect for him as a systemic thinker, and I'm deeply excited to see how the new blog develops. The latest post is a response to this blog's Welfare Reform howzits and ponderings, and is joyous. Go, join the debate.


2. I am toying with the idea of moving Penny Red over to Wordpress. It's in every way a better system, and I'm in the process of constructing a site over there just in case, although I've not even half finished fiddling with the HTML yet after importing all the posts and comments. How would you people feel about this? If there are strong objections I'm happy to keep the Blogger format.


3. Talking of Welfare Reform, the Bill itself had its first reading precisely two and a half hours ago, and since I happened to be in the area I may just have sneaked into the votes office, sneaked in with my public pass on small and sneaky feet to get a copy of the document - hot off the press in all its thick, stinking manila glory. I'm reading it right now. If this blog doesn't update again it's because I've choked on this gingernut trying to comprehend how a Labour government can possibly justify abolishing Income Support - point 7 in an extensive contents page dripping with ominous portent.

Watch this space.

Mental health and welfare: a stamping manifesto

The tendency not to want to believe in mental illness festers across the Western world, and particularly in Britain, the nation that gave us Shakespeare, concentration camps and the stiff upper lip. From the friends and families of sufferers to the upper echelons of government, the suspicion that mental health difficulties are forms of weakness – simple personality flaws that could be eradicated if more of these mentalists would jolly well buck up – informs policy and influences behaviour. We need to look this institutional prejudice in the face and call it what it is: outdated, destructive and desperately unhelpful.

Over the past few months, I have interviewed a great many people suffering from mental health difficulties in the course of my work for the Independent and for One in Four magazine, and none of them are feeling optimistic about the New Year. All of them fear being forced back into work that they will not be able to cope with even if they find it; they fear government interference with benefits that they rely on for survival, and they are disappointed at the lack of positive changes the much-touted Welfare Reform Bill has brought.

In the face of what appear to be across-the-board rises in cases of serious depression, anxiety and other debilitating disorders, the response of our government in boom times has been to quietly shunt the sick onto a government poverty package and tell us to be grateful. However, as incapacity levels continue to rise, the DWP’s new Work to Welfare policy threatens to shunt us just as quickly back to the jobcentre, telling us that we’re scroungers who were actually making it up all along. This comes just as the little glut of crap menial jobs available before the stock market crash has disappeared. Nice timing, Purnell.

Many of the 40% of Britain’s 2 million IB claimants who are unable to work due to mental health difficulties already have a few problems with paranoia. But, as the noted social theorist Kurt Cobain observed, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re not after you. Because when any major political party talks about moving people off Incapacity Benefit, when they talk about instituting a system of interviews to ‘weed out’ benefit ‘scroungers’, we know that they’re talking about the mentally ill – those whose disabilities and challenges are most difficult to see and to quantify, often the poorest and most vulnerable members of society who have since Thatcher’s day been the first in the firing like when budget cuts needed to be made. I am, indeed, talking about Care in the Community, the policy decision also known as 'chuck the nutter in the gutter'.

Yes, there are more people receiving IB now than there were a generation ago. No, this does not mean that all of the extra people are skivers who’d rather sit around watching Trisha and drinking milkshakes. The sweeping social change that has transformed society in the past fifty years has led to an increase in the numbers of those deemed unable to work due to mental illness for many reasons. Not only has society become more treacherous and unpredictable and the working world more stressful (especially in stonkingly pro-market, anti-worker countries which exempt themselves from working time directives) but more men and women are expected to hold down full-time jobs which are increasingly focused in the service, information and fourth-sector industries, meaning that it’s more important for these employees to be entirely mentally and emotionally on the ball. Simply put: as the labour market is changing and becoming more mentally and physically stressful, the mentally ill, whose care has been successively eroded by government after neoliberal government, are being left out in the cold.

Mental illness is perhaps the subtlest and most frightening of all forms of social difference, because of its invisibility, because of the difficulty in quantifying it, and because it is not a binary condition: you’re not either mad or sane, there’s a whole spectrum involved. But the hatred and fear that the mentally ill face on a daily basis, the lack of understanding shown to them by the welfare state and criminal justice system, and the fact that they are perpetually the first targets of punitive budget cuts, adds up to a sum of institutional bias which belongs in a previous century.

Just look at Mind's recent report on mental illness within parliament itself. Twenty-seven percent of MPs, Peers and their staff have personal experience of mental health difficulty, and one in three said work-based stigma and the expectation of a hostile reaction from the media and public prevented them from being open about mental health issues. This is a problem that touches everyone, and it isn't going to go away if we collectively stick our fingers in our ears and sing a little song.

Employment law is another area where the Disability Discrimination Act has so far failed to translate into action when it comes to the mentally ill. The argument goes something like this: it’s more risky and more costly for company x to hire person y if they suffer from a mental illness – after all, how is company x to know that that employee y won’t fall behind on their work, start slicing themselves up by the water-cooler or march into the office one day spraying slugs of hot lead death into co-workers and clients? Simple ignorance is the first obstacle to greater understanding here: in fact, the mentally ill are statistically less likely to perpetrate violent crime, and far more likely to become victims of it. But a subtler prejudice against minorities is inherent to the hypercapitalist machine – because yes, it is technically less costly for a firm to hire an individual who is entirely mentally well. By the same logic, it is also better business sense to hire someone who is neither physically disabled nor a female of childbearing age. Yes, these people represent a financial risk to the company; no, this doesn’t mean that discrimination is a logical and acceptable consequence of that risk.

What happens when companies are allowed to set their own hiring policies purely on the basis of business sense is that a large amount of the nation’s talent remains untapped, and swathes of people who need to be in work more than almost anybody become dependent on the state. Individuals suffer, and the entire economic community suffers. Anti-discrimination legislation and hiring standards are not only essential for the advancement of true equality; they advance free nations both spirituality and economically.

The market, by itself, cannot deliver health, happiness and universal suffrage by treating people as commodity inputs. This is why, especially in a period of social transition like this one when our ideals and our economic and technological mores so often clash, government intervention is one of the only logical temporary solutions.

It is not enough for the Ministry of Plenty Department for Work and Pensions to demand that mentally ill recipients of incapacity benefit find themselves a job in an employment market which was highly suspicious of them in the boom times and which is now rapidly contracting. What we need if we are to avert a genuine crisis both in employment and in public health is a radical restructuring of what it means to be a worker in the information age.

It is also not enough just to whinge about current policy without suggesting viable alternatives. We’re not just holding jobs and having dinner: the point of progressive debate is to work out how to create the better world that we want our descendants to inherit. So, what would a world with fewer stigmas against the mentally ill look like?

It would be a world in which employers and businesses recognise that mental disability, like physical disability, does make it more of a challenge for an employee to carry out a job of work – and that those challenges can be surmounted with understanding and reasonable adjustments Fifty years ago, the idea of having ramps on public transport, in offices and public buildings in order to help the physically disabled participate in normal life would have sounded preposterous and wildly costly – now it is more or less accepted that the physically disabled have just as much drive to work and live as the rest of us, and should be aided in that goal. The same attitude needs to be applied across the board.

It would be a world in which flexible and part-time working is not only available but a respected and well-taken up practice required of all employers, in order to help the mentally disabled, the physically incapacitated and those with caring duties, including parents, to stay in appropriate work. It would be a world in which part-time work is supported by government benefits, allowing the hundreds of thousands of people with mental health difficulties who cannot cope with full-time work to participate more fully in the economic and cultural life of the nation.

It would be a world in which the many laudable grants, higher education places, work schemes and training projects set aside specifically for the physically disabled and other minorities are matched by similar schemes for the mentally and emotionally disadvantaged.

Last but not least, it would be a world in which, for as long as necessary, large businesses were obliged to take on a set quota of people with mental health difficulties – say one in eight, helping to reflect the one in four citizens who will experience mental health difficulty at some point in their life.

This is about socialism, but it isn’t just about socialism. It’s about creating a world that is fairer and more efficient, carrying every citizen with it. If the government really wants to leave no one behind – if it wants to move more of the mentally ill into rewarding, taxpaying work, rather than simply pare more fat from the already scrawny welfare state – we need to dare to dream of a society in which everyone can participate.

******

And with that, I'm going to go and excercise another of my dysfunctional coping mechanisms and have a little cigarette. I'd offer, but you wouldn't want one. It's fucking menthol *cackles*.

Hope and Humbuggery: a Christmas tantrum.

This sucks.

I’ve just arrived back from my mum’s place and been greeted with a bollocking HUGE gas bill that we have only a slim chance of paying, plus a plumbing system that’s still buggered to the tune of having to wash my hair and essential parts in the sink, with a saucepan. All this, and scrabbling to prepare for a parental visit: clean, fumigate, hide the S’M posters, hide the ashtrays, hide the kingskins, hide our same-sex partners, and maybe, just maybe, we’ll make 2009 intact.

At this most magical time of the year, I truly pity the undeserving souls who work in call centres. Having been on the line to a dogged unresponsive pissed-off hack for half an hour, you could hear a festering note of impending armaggedon in the weary British Gas man’s voice when he asked if he could keep me informed of any new products and services.

Talking of festering Armageddon, does anyone else feel like we’re approaching the end times?

Maybe it’s just me. But in the latter months of 2008, it’s become far less easy to be a freak in this country. The black dog of recession is crunching us in its bloody jaws and, unlike the States, we don’t have any liberal saviour preaching change who we can clutch at, whispering save us. The government is clamping down on everybody, no matter where they live or why. The poor, single parents and the mentally ill are going to suffer under the new welfare plan. The atmosphere in Whitehall is one of stunned denial, with ministers emerging over the ramparts to frantically fire desultory, mean sallies such as today’s announcement that bailiffs will be given new powers to enter debtors’ homes at will, physically restraining or pinning down the occupants if necessary.

Will Monaco and Jersey swarm with smart-suited Scrooges wearing knuckle-dusters? Will hired muscle be sent to collect billions of pounds’ worth of debt from Britain’s richest tax-dodgers, like Philip Green? Will members of the treasury, recently found owing £645bn which my generation will have to stump up for in our middle age, be turfed out onto the street in their scanties? Nah, thought not. Once again, it’s the poorest and most vulnerable who are being targeted by this supposed people’s government, this government that promised us change, transparency, a new world order. Maybe that’s why Obamania is failing to cheer us up: we’ve heard this line before.

Meanwhile, in Vatican City a nominally celibate former Hitler Youth member in a dress has a Christmas message of goodwill and peace in our time. Yup, Ratzinger wants to defend holy heterosexuality from the despicable ‘gender blurring’ perpetrated by gays, bisexuals, transsexuals and women who don’t sit with their knees together in church:

‘We need something like human ecology, meant in the right way. The Church speaks of human nature as 'man' or 'woman' and asks that this order is respected.

"This is not out-of-date metaphysics. It comes from the faith in the Creator and from listening to the language of creation, despising which would mean self-destruction for humans and therefore a destruction of the work itself of God."

I would like, at this point, to swallow the greater part of the Fuck The Pope tirade that was going to be my inevitable next outburst and instead point Herr Ratzinger towards the roll-call of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Christian saints recently enumerated by activist scholars, amongst them Saint Joan of Arc, Saint Sebastian and ooh, wouldn’t you credit it, Saint George, patron of this blinkered isle.

I apologise for the unseasonal amount of bile and hatred in this post. Believe me, behind this cold, hard exterior twitters the pink and fluffy heart of a perpetual six-year-old who bounces out of bed at 5am on Christmas morning and dreams in sugarplums and fairy lights. But behind that is the chill adult realisation that we’re going to have to take the long road home. 2009 will be a hard, hard year, we didn’t need the IMF to tell us that. The rest of this beautiful, broken, brilliant decade is going to entail threats to socialism, liberalism and freedom of thought and action from all sides, with governments offering no quarter and giving none. Those of us brave enough to weather the distance, those of us with the strength and temerity to hold on to our liberal ideals, will need everything we’ve got to keep the hope in our heads alive.

The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks;
The long day wanes; the slow moon climbs; the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends.
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are,--
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. [Tennyson, 'Ulysses']

And that’s my Christmas message. Hope, if nothing else: hope, because that’s all we’ve got, that we will come through this with our sanity and our integrity, everyone: the poor, the young, the mentally ill, the geeks, the freaks, the queers and their allies, the feminists and race-activists and socialists and war protesters and those who dare to dream of a better and a fairer world. When we have nothing else but hope, we will have to find the energy from somewhere to keep on getting out of bed, keep on striving, keep on thinking for ourselves. I’m certainly going to keep on writing; I hope you’ll keep on reading. Thank you all for keeping up with this blog over the past year, and please believe me when I wish you, whatever your faith, a merry Christmas.

The writing's on the wall.

You have talked so often of going to the dogs - and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them - George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London

I am seriously considering whether the best use of my time would be to torch myself on the steps of Parliament in protest - Withiel Black Esq., this morning.

I am angry, today.

But Ms Red, I hear you cry, you are quite often angry. Well, yes, that's so, but today I'm bloody angry, angry for a reason. I am sitting in a house from which my current family and I may soon be evicted, because we have failed to make our rent. We have failed to make our rent because we have failed to gain employment, we are paying off debts, and the pissingly tiny amount of benefits to which we are entitled have failed to arrive. We are spending our time watching ripped downloads off the interwebs and living on fried potatoes and tea and cigarettes re-rolled from the butt-ends of what we'd imagined our futures would be.

We're in our early twenties; the whole world is ahead of us, but a recession-bitten employment market and an increasingly punitive welfare system are making the immediate world look grim. It's going to be worse, still, for those friends of ours who are due to leave school or university this year and take their first faltering steps into a world that won't let them work and can't afford to keep them. This is not romantic. Poverty and hopelessness are not romantic. They're a fucking pain, is what they are.

When I met James Purnell in September he was half-cut, coming out of a party and manifestly didn't want to be talking to the small insistent girl reporter in black, but he took the time to explain to me why he thought his welfare reforms were going to help the poor and incapacitated. He genuinely impressed me. He knew his stuff. Three months on, with the recession steaming in and all my friends and loved ones poor and depressed and rejected by a nominally caring Labour welfare state, I'm beginning to think we've been had. I have a visceral fondness for energetic, hobbit-looking men, but not when they instruct the poor and needy to bend over and spread for a rogering, telling them in breathless pants that it's for their own good. Let's take a look at that party line:

Myth: 'work is the best way out of poverty.'

Fact: work is the best way out of poverty provided that there is work available, and provided that that work does not pay a poverty wage. Most of the journalists and politicians smugly licking Purnell's shiny arse on this one are lucky enough to have well-paid, fulfilling careers. But have you ever worked as a fast-food waitress? Have you ever worked in a call centre? You spend nine solid hours in a cramped, light-sputtering cage being bullied by your bosses and harassed by people who didn't ask you to call and harangue them. The work is soul-eatingly dull and draining and when you come home, blinking, dried-out, feeling ancient and depressed, you have to do it all again tomorrow, and you are still poor. You are still poor because you are being paid way below what might constitute a living wage, and you have no career prospects to keep you motivated. You get to choose between this and staying on benefits, being ever so slightly more crushingly poor but more physically and mentally well. What will you choose? (NB: call centre work is the only work many school leavers and graduates in the cities are currently able to find).

Myth: There is work there for people, and we believe they should do it. We can't afford to waste taxpayers' money on people who are playing the system. [Purnell]

This recession is not the fault of the poor. It is the fault of well-off wankers who live in large houses and go on holidays to Majorca, and now that the proverbial has hit the proverbial, nobody wants to take responsibility. Treating people like criminals for failing to find jobs that aren’t there is kicking us while we’re down. And that is what ‘"a system where virtually everyone has to do something in return for their benefits” means. Yes, it’s right that people take responsibility for their own lives – but what creates poverty, worklessness and drug and alcohol abuse is not moral decline, it's social and economic decline, and that's the fault of governments and the fault of a financial and business sector which sees no reason to look after its workforce in any way whatsoever.

The alleged lack of virtue of the working classes is now being exploited in order to offload the blame for what this Labour government has done – over 2 million unemployed, a toppling economy, another million so mentally and emotionally incapacitated that they cannot work. The idea that people without jobs are lazy, exploitative, ungrateful and engage in piffling class-defined vices places the blame for ‘Broken Britain’ on a group of people who have less to do with it than anyone else. The political and financial classes refuse to take responsibility for where they have landed us, and are now telling us that it’s our fault, because we are just not trying hard enough.

Don't for a moment imagine that the Tories are planning anything better. In fact, as David Cameron's latest editorial in the Hate shows, Tory contempt for the poor is if anything more shameless and ingrained than frantic Labour scapegoating could ever be: Cameron and his gang believe that the poor are lazy, and should be punished lest they all turn out like 'evil' Karen Matthews. As Matthew Norman puts it in the Indy, it takes a rich man to pour such scorn on the poor.

But I've had enough. I've had enough with trying so very, very hard to be a Labour apologist out of fear of the Tories. The Labour DWP's strategy is not just not good enough: it's actively immoral, scapegoating the neediest and making it more difficult for us to work and live just at the time when we should be carrying our wounded.

Fuck you in the fucking eyes, Purnell. It just saddens me that by the time that you see the wrong end of a dole queue in 2010, it'll be way too late for you to help even yourself.

Welfare reform: what's the deal now?

Ooh, James Purnell. Those kindly eyes, that roguish smile, that cheeky little pro-war voting record. He can call me any time, but meanwhile, guys and gals, let's satisfy our post-adolescent political lust by calling the Secretary on welfare reform.

The national drive towards reform of the benefits system has been gathering momentum over the past 18 months, with the pace stepping up from January when the Conservative party released 'Work for Welfare', a short proposal for some pretty draconian reforms to the current welfare state where all 'able bodied' men and women would be expected to work (the fact that one in four claimants of incapacity benefit are severely mentally ill clearly does not register with tory stiff-upper-lippers). Hot on the heels of this report came Purnell's green paper, the rather more progressively titled 'No One Written Off: Reforming Welfare to Reward Responsibility.' Cue a tiresome little inter-party squabble with a lot of bitchy back-handing to the BBC over just whose idea it was to bring the British welfare system into the 21st century.

On first reading, both reports advocate a greater emphasis on individuals taking responsibility for and 'earning' their own benefits; both want to encourage more people into work and provide better checks to do so; both want a clearer distinction between the genuinely needy and those relatively able to work, those whom a medieval government might have called 'sturdy beggars'. The net effect of the reforms is that in October 2008 a new Employment and Support Allowance will be introduced for new claimants of Incapacity Benefit and other benefits before being rolled out to all recipients.

There, the similarity between the proposals ends. It must be made absolutely clear that Purnell's green paper treads an extremely fine line between positive reforms that empower people to work and victimisation and further isolation of already poor and vulnerable sections of society. For now, in the months pre-instigation, the proposals come through relatively successfully, with welcome additions such as a long-overdue simplification of the benefits claiming system, making it easier for genuinely needy claimants to access vital support. Until you've sat up with a severely physically and emotionally disable friend and watched them crying in frustration as they try to fill out the forms, you may not understand quite how vital this particular change is. The old system was designed to be complex in order to discourage fraudsters from bothering; the new system will build in more proactive checks. And about bloody time too.

The tory proposals, on the other hand, are replete with the rhetoric of disdain for the poor and needy. In the conservative worldview, people need to be stopped at all costs from 'playing the system'; the government has a 'moral right' to 'protect families', the practical upshot of which is tax benefits for married couples, as if a silver ring ever solved anything. Quite apart from the fact that Labour's report is massively longer and more in-depth, quite apart from the fact that it answers the conservative challenge with the diligence of a progressive government purposefully handling the difficulties of practical power, we cannot - simply cannot - have tory hardliners like Chris Grayling in charge of this delicate transitional period in the benefits system.

This welfare reform package is one that can only be successfully implemented by a socially aware, self-policing socialist party of the type that, at its best, Labour tries to be. Conservatives such as Grayling have claimed that Purnell's proposals are a 'straight lift' from tory plans; they are not. If anything, the latest proposals represent a visionary re-working of a policy which, under the Tories, would further criminalise the working classes and drive hundreds of thousands into poverty, debt, addiction and despair.

Because the tories have far less idea even than the incumbent government of what real poverty really means. You can't say 'credit crunch' with out baring your teeth into a snarl, and it's going for the throat of benefit recipients trying to live on £40 per week. MPs demonstrating 'belt-tightening' by not demanding increases on their sixty grand salaries live in an entirely different world from people on JSA and Incapacity Benefit. The welfare state was never designed, as the tories claim, to allow 'a young man to grow up' knowing that 'the state will support him' whatever choices he makes: if you live on benefits, you are poor. Very poor, and you'll stay poor unless your circumstances change. A life lived on benefits is a life on the breadline, a life replete with stress and starved of reward and acheivement, a life in many respects half-lived. The vast majority of people on state benefits are keen to return to work - the problem, is that many face tremendous obstacles in obtaining and retaining employment.

The conservatives' mantra of small government, of decreasing state support in every arena in favour of 'the family,' will be massively detrimental to the real good that has been done in moving millions of people off benefits and over the poverty line in the past decade. David Cameron believes that:

'The primary institution in our lives is the family. It looks after the sick, cares for children and the elderly, supports working people and the unemployed' -

Woah there. Reading between the lines, doesn't that mean that families should be doing the work of the state, just like they did in the pre-industrial era? Well, presumably they're planning to reward domestic work financially, then, aren't they, and take massive social steps to encourage social cohesiveness within all family structures, and provide equal benefits for civilly-partnered homosexual couples and married straight couples alike? No? Or, just for instance here, could it be another strategy to shove vital care structures such as 'caring for children and the elderly, supporting working people and the unemployed' out into the streets in order to save money? We've heard this one before. It was called 'Care in the Community.'

Oh, yes. And tucked away in the pages of 'Work for Welfare' are some really juicy howlers, such as:

'Equal pay audits will apply only to those firms which lose pay discrimination cases'.

Which is a logical and VITAL part of making the welfare state work for everyone, clearly. Only a progressive socialist government has the tenacity and social responsibility to make welfare reform work: we must work now to avoid handing a fledgling system based on 'rights and responsibilities' over to the tories, who will never understand in our lifetimes what it really means to be poor, sick and desperate.