‘We are raising more money for the rich’ revisited: some thoughts

The exposure of Cameron’s lie that the welfare “reforms” are about “making work pay” and his Freudian-style slip – “We are raising more money for the rich” – during Parliamentary debate on 12th December 2012 deserve a little scrutiny and analysis. This was a memorable Commons debate, with Ed Miliband delivering some outstanding challenges to David Cameron, some of which provoked the Freudian-style slip, and exposed the traditional Tory values and neoliberal ideology underpinning their policies.

So Cameron is raising more money for the rich. Get outta town! Well, it’s not as if most of us haven’t spotted the growing gap between the wealthiest and the poorest, and made a fundamental connection there.

Tax avoidance and evasion costs this Country at least £69 billion a year, at a conservative estimate. Also, note that the highest earners each stand to gain a further £107, 000 EXTRA per year, courtesy of the Tory-led Coalition.

That’s most certainly reflects traditional Tory ideological commitments, and it drags Osborne’s sham “economic strategy” shrieking into daylight, revealing it starkly for what it is. The real reason for the austerity measures this Government have inflicted on the poorest citizens is that Tory sponsors and very greedy, hoarding rich people are being handsomely rewarded with tax payers money.

The money for our welfare provision, our healthcare, our public services, schools, and so on, is being stolen from the British public and backhanded to the undeserving rich – there is the REAL “culture of entitlement”.

Private companies, many of which donate to the Conservative party, and have a subsequent powerful (and corrupt) lobbying influence on Tory policies, are making a fortune from the poverty that has been inflicted on many citizens. We have seen that the private sector do not deliver public “services” or meet public needs at all. (Atos, A4E , G4S, for example.)

Private companies simply make profit. Indeed, that profit is all too often made at the expense of the well being of Citizens. That is most certainly and clearly true of Atos.

Ed Milliband said: ‘David Cameron and George Osborne believe the only way to persuade millionaires to work harder is to give them more money.’

‘But they also seem to believe that the only way to make you (ordinary people) work harder is to take money away.’ 

A very well spotted contradiction regarding Cameron’s claims about how “incentives” work. Apparently, the rich are a different kind of human from the majority of human beings. One set of punitive incentives for the poorest, another set of deluxe incentives, based on reward, for the wealthiest. That’s most certainly discrimination, embedded in Tory policy.

Cameron rewards his wealthy friends and has a clear elitist agenda, while he funds his friends and sponsors by stealing money from the tax payer, by stripping welfare provision and public services down to the bare bones. The truly terrible and catastrophic thing is that some are paying for Cameron’s shameful and unwarranted generosity to the already wealthy with their very lives. 73 sick and disabled people die on average every week, having their benefit claim ended by the Department for Work and Pensions.

This Government have written targets into Atos’s contract when they renewed it: 7 out of 8 claimants to lose their benefit. That indicates quite clearly that people are losing their benefit regardless of whether or not they they are fit to work, since the target exists before the claimant is even assessed.

Cameron’s generosity to his pals means eugenics by the back door for the most vulnerable citizens.

• Article 2 of the Convention of Human Rights uses the following definitions of genocide, amongst others: 
• Killing members of the group Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group.

However, under the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, disabled people are not currently recognised as a clearly defined protected group. The many deaths of vulnerable people are currently being denied or passed off as “unintended consequences” of Coalition policies.

The persistent denials and consistent refusal to carry out a cumulative impact assessment, or conduct an independent investigation into the many  deaths indicates, to me, that those policies are intentional. The Coalition have no intention of changing them.

Taking money from the most vulnerable and poorest members of Society means they are unlikely  to be able to meet their basic biological needs. Welfare provision – our various benefits system – was based on the carefully calculated amounts we need to survive, so the amount of benefit we have meets just basic needs. The Tories have cut that basic survival level from the money we paid in for our own provisions and services. Meanwhile, those provisions and services are being sold off to Tory-sponsoring businesses. What a truly cunning heist.

This is not just about an ideologically motivated economic theft from the people with the least, and a redistribution of wealth to those that need it least, the Tories have also waged an existential attack: a psychic war is being waged on us every bit as much as a fiscal one, with the media on the enemy frontline, attacking on a linguistic and psychological level every day.

Unemployed, ill and disabled people have been redefined, semantically reduced, dehumanised, and demarcated from the rest of the population and turned into the ‘others’, and this divisive strategy has paid off for the enemy, because we are now regularly attacked by our own side: by those people who are also with us on this increasingly sparsely resourced, economically excavated side of the growing inequality divide.

Imagine what that does to faith and hope. For those of you that are not sick and/or disabled, I can tell you that it is often a very isolating and lonely experience. That is made so much more unbearable by prejudice and hate from other people. To be excluded further from everyday life and experience, both materially and existentially, brings about a terrible, bleak, desolating sense of social abandonment and a very real imprisonment.

We are living in a Government-directed culture of division and hatred.  

It’s no coincidence that hate crime against disabled people has risen steeply over this past two years. Most of us have experienced some verbal abuse from members of the wider public, at the very least. It’s become such a common experience that it may be regarded as almost normalised behaviour.

So let’s get this right… Cameron claims that the wealthy need more money as an incentive to work, whereas the poor need money taking from them via “Reforms” to “incentivise” them to work harder. Sixty percent of the welfare cuts will affect the working poor most of all. So much for the flat lie that Cameron and Co. are “making work pay”. The jobless, of course, are to be starved into finding none-existent jobs, in an economic depression.

Everyone knows that when people are prevented from meeting basic needs – food, fuel and shelter –  they die. It’s an irrefutable fact. Consider the new sanction regime that the Tory – led Government has just introduced from December 3rd 2012. Up to three years with no benefit at all for those benefit claimants that don’t “meet certain conditions for eligibility.” 

That certainly contravenes fundamental and established human rights. And it is certainly calculated and deliberate removal of the means that the poor have of basic survival. That is certainly a calculated and deliberate eugenics agenda.

Bearing in mind that the Government has set sanction targets for the DWP, and also, we know that claimants are set up to be sanctioned by DWP staff, we know that the sanction regime is just another way that the Government are stripping welfare, punishing and harming claimants, and in a recession (some are calling it a depression).

How on earth did it become the ‘norm’ – for a government to punish people by withholding public funds to deny them their basic survival needs? How is it acceptable in any way that people are being punished by starvation and the threat of homelessness? This is a government creating destitution within a targeted sector of the population.

What kind of Government would do that? This is Cameron’s Cruel Britannia. Killing vulnerable citizens via policy IS deliberate.

People are dying so that Cameron can hand out their publicly funded welfare provision budget as pocket money for the already rich.

We are raising more money for the rich

Hansard source and my original article 

 Many thanks to Robert Livingstone for his brilliant artwork

Worth reading:

Ed Miliband challenges Cameron on the massive growth of food banks over the past two years –“I never thought the big society was about feeding hungry children in Britain,” Miliband tells Cameron.

On the subject of foodbanks – private companies with Conservative connections are benefiting from ‘reform’ of the British welfare state

 

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