When Cameron took time off to criticise Jimmy Carr’s tax-dodging, it wasn’t long before people started to ask him about his own friendly links with “morally wrong” tax dodgers. That these people happened to be using the cash they saved to fund the Tory party is no more than an unfortunate coincidence.
All very embarassing right? So the Tories took out their frustration on – you guessed it – unemployed people. With 1 million youth not in education, training or employment, there’s enough to choose from. Cameron said he wants to end the ‘culture of entitlement’. Apparently he doesn’t mean the bosses’ entitlement to chuck thousands out of a job, offshore their factories and come to an ‘arrangement’ on taxes over a cosy dinner with a Tory minister or two.
When the Tories’ economic ignorance sends the whole country to shit, the first people they blame are the people suffering the most from their extraordinary incompetence.
Cameron reckons people under the age of 25 should be stripped of their housing benefits and made to remain at home until they can afford to move out. Presumably, this will be made into a sane policy by the setting up giant plantations of magic job trees.
Youth unemployment = 1 million+
EMA = gone
Tuition fees = £9,000 a year
Minimum wage = frozen
Schools = privatised and branded with corporate logos
The record speaks for itself. Cameron obviously never did meet anyone who lived in a normal home – if he did he wouldn’t be suggesting that its normal for young people to live with their parents til they’re 25!
Anyway why should young people be made to live at home, why shouldn’t we be given the chance to become independent adults, capable of making our own decisions?
Because that would cost money – the government would have to reverse hundreds of thousands of job cuts, invest in secure jobs, regulate agency work, equalise the minimum wage – and most importantly, build millions of new homes to address Britain’s housing crisis.
What the proposals mean
The government has already overseen the destruction of millions of jobs. Now they’re taking away housing benefit. Osborne is famous for his mathematical ignorance, but even he can work out that no job + no money = no house. Or, more people will be kicked onto the streets.
Or perhaps Cameron and his mates will open up their 10-bed mansions to those whose homes get repossed by Britain’s nationalised banks?
His attack particularly affects single parents or families with children. With 1 in 8 mothers leaving a job and 1 in 5 turning down a job due to the cost of childcare, the true cost of cutting schemes like Sure Start is to plunge working families into poverty.
His new proposal includes benefits cuts to those families with 3 or more children ‘to stop the out-of-work being better of by having children.’ With child benefits already having been slashed having another child barely gives you enough extra money to feed them let alone any left over.
‘Consider paying some benefits “in kind” rather than in cash,’ is Cameron’s way of saying ‘all these benefit scroungers spend their money on booze and drugs.’ The USA and France have had ‘food voucher’ schemes for decades – and their problems are even worse.
The disabled are being attacked too with Cameron saying that two thirds of those on Disability Claimant remain on it for their whole lives. He believes these people should be forced to do full-time community work and take steps to improve their health. It’s the great irony that the high number of Disability allowance claimants stems from Tory attempts in the 1980s and 90s to disguise the tru level of unemployment by convincing people to sign on for Disability instead of Jobseekers’.
During his speech Cameron clearly stated that pensions wouldn’t be affected in the next wave of reforms. ‘If you work hard all your life, you deserve dignity in retirement.’ The implication being that those young people deserve nothing because they’ve given nothing to the state yet. The youth are an easy target because with no money and living with mum and dad, it’s more difficult for them to organise.
The real point though, is that most young people don’t vote Tory – so why look after people who’d sooner string you up than “call you ‘Dave’”?
These proposals are savage, but are mainly the reaction of a Prime Minister who knows he has blundered from one scandal to the next, and is trying to reconnect with his Party base.
Nevertheless, it’s a glimpse of what Cameron would certainly like to do, should he ever get into power with a clear majority. All the junk about big society and ‘all in this together’ has been well and truly ditched.
The Tories are telling ordinary working people that we’re going to pay for the crisis, and if we protest, they’ll simply pass laws to stop us. Are we going to let them?
