If you live in one of the large estates in Bristol, you are working hard for little more than the minimum wage, you have a zero hours contract, you have to use food banks, you live in a damp, squalid, barely furnished flat in a council block, you cannot afford to heat the place and sometimes you have to go without hot water, I wonder what you made of David Cameron’s New Year message today. Here is a part of it:
“These are the big challenges of our age, some of the biggest our nation has ever faced and this year is a test of our mettle – whether we put up with poverty or put an end to it; ignore the glass ceiling or smash it; abandon the tenant or help make them a homeowner; appease the extremist or take apart their ideology piece by piece.”
Now excuse me, but it was just a few short weeks ago that Cameron’s government was going to cut tax credits drastically for the working poor. Thanks to the House of Lords – and who would have thought someone of the left could say that given the number of times the Lords obstructed the last Labour government? – Cameron’s government backed down and stopped the cuts. But did they? I don’t think so. The cuts have just been shifted somewhere else, in this case the somewhere else will be to the Universal Credit (UV). And who in the main will be entitled to the UC? Why, the poor, of course! George Osborne will be taking money from the poor in another way.
Cameron is not content with attacking the working poor, of course. After years of referring to the sick and unemployed as shirkers and scroungers, the attack on non working poor has gathered pace. I would suggest these are not good times to be sick and disabled because Dave wants to add to you misery by making you even poorer. With more children in poverty than for years and homelessness on the rise, it is hard not to reach the conclusion that far from being a war on poverty, there is now a war on the poor.
Those who wield the power in this country do not, I am sure, have the first clue how ordinary people live, or in some cases merely exist. It is not the fault of Cameron and most of his cabinet that they have lived extraordinarily privileged lives so we cannot blame them for that, but have you ever visited Witney, in Oxfordshire, where Cameron is the MP? No Greggs or charity shops on the High Street there, but burgeoning independent specialist stores catering for the better off. It’s picture postcard stuff and a million miles away from, say, some deprived parts of Bristol. It is a different world.
Those in poverty have been first to feel the effects of Cameron’s government. They get the worst jobs, earn the least money, are unlikely to attend universities (and certainly not the elite universities which are preserved for the upper classes), are unhealthier and so die younger. How does Cameron suppose he will attack poverty by making the poor poorer? But that’s what is happening.
Remember pre-2010 Cameron, forever going on about “Broken Britain” and how he was going to fix it? Well, not all of it was broken, but much more of it is now and what’s worse is that he is the architect of the worsening inequality that blights our society. You just cannot trust the bloke.
I do wonder about what sort of society we are living in and where it is heading. No one can seriously say we have a free press when, of all the national dailies, the Guardian is the only genuinely independent and free newspaper – and who reads the Guardian except for me? The BBC cowers against a hostile government that wants to get rid of it and so dares not criticise the government. And the Tories, by way of cutting “short money” in parliament, further castrating Labour’s funding and changing the constituency boundaries in their own favour pose a major threat to democracy itself. Put these things together it becomes clear why Cameron’s outrageous comments about attacking poverty are the direct opposite of what is actually happening and why no one is saying much against it.
We are now far nearer to a truly Broken Britain than we were when Cameron used the phrase purely, it turned out, for political reasons. Part of the problem is that most people aren’t in poverty and it is the job of the opposition to to persuade everyone else why poverty is unacceptable in the modern age.
Iain Duncan Smith once had a “Road to Damascus” experience in Glasgow where he saw the effects of poverty and he vowed to do something about it. He certainly did that, but not in the way we might have expected. Instead he continued his assault on the most vulnerable members of society. With someone like Duncan Smith at the DWP, we can be certain that Cameron’s words are empty. It is a shame so many people believe them.
