Millionaires' government batters the poorest

Submitted by Matthew on 6 April, 2011 - 12:26

At the same time that its policies send unemployment skyrocketing, the Coalition government is persecuting the unemployed.

On 1 April the Guardian cited Jobcentre Plus workers whistleblowing on a practice of bosses imposing arbitrary targets for throwing people off the dole. Claimants have been deliberately confused tricked into failing stringent obligations placed on them to look for work. Staff at one Jobcentre, for instance, were given a target of three people a week each to refer to “sanctions” i.e. removal of benefits. Individual advisers, teams and regions are being pushed to compete for who can be most deceitful and brutal.

According to DWP statistics, the number of cases where people have lost their benefits soared to 75,000 in October 2010. 20,000 claimants with registered disabilities were cut off. That figure is likely to increase dramatically when people claiming Incapacity Benefit are “reassessed” this month. The work test involved in assessing people who are sick or disabled is notoriously inaccurate — and it has got worse.

According to the Guardian’s analysis, the number of people losing benefits has grown by about 40 percent, far faster than the number of claimants — and grown most in the most deprived areas. Throwing people off the dole is starting to replace pushing people into crappy, low-paid jobs as the main aim of Jobcentres.

While this shift is primarily an attack on the rights of the claimants — and particularly young, uneducated and some disabled people, who are easiest to manoeuvre off benefits — it is also ramping up pressure on benefits workers, under ever greater administrative and psychological pressure to brutalise unemployed working-class people.

Such changes come in the context of the Coalition’s Welfare Reform Bill, which introduces an across the board attack on entitlements of all sorts.

And all this misery is not just aiding profit-making indirectly, but directly too. The woman appointed by the Coalition to get people off benefits and (supposedly) back into work, Emma Harrison of Action for Employment (A4E), is paid £365,000 a year, lives in a Peak District stately home and is estimated to be worth £1.4 million. A4E has won five of the 40 new DWP contracts under which private companies net a total of £5 billion for pushing people off benefits and/or into crap jobs. Serco of private prisons and Dockland Light Railway fame is also in on the action. It pays its chief executive £1.86 million and its finance director £984,295.

It is not surprising that the government finds it easier to throw people off benefits than push them into work, when their policies are destroying so many jobs. 2.53 million are out of work, the largest number since 1994, and rising. (In the three months to January, this figure grew by 27,000, while the claimant count dropped by 10,200!) There are 974,000 16-24 year olds out of work — an increase of 30,000 and the highest since comparable records began in 1992. And while some of us are denied the right to work, others are working harder and longer: the number of over-65s in work is at a record high of 900,000, up 56,000.

These figures tell us all we need to know about the callous class war the government is inflicting on the poorest and most vulnerable people.

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