What can be done about child poverty?

These reports commissioned by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation on child poverty make interesting reading. They explore every aspect of poverty, not just the financial and how this impacts on a child’s wellbeing and the knock on effects.

Child poverty’s consequences are wide-ranging and long-lasting. Children from low-income families are less likely to do well in school, and more likely to suffer ill-health and to face pressures in their lives that help to explain an association with anti-social behaviours and criminality.

Harpymarx as said before and will say again: we need programmes of work to provide affordable housing and childcare. We also need more people employed in health and education. We do not need tax cuts to fund SUV’s, fancy holidays and private schools.

One demand which could make a difference would be to have a progressive taxation system. Put bluntly, tax the fecking rich! These are basic social democratic demands.

Hat tip: The F Word

Michael White on welfare reform

Michael White in today’s Guardian gives his own impressions of welfare reform.

They fear punitive tabloid language and money-saving motives, reinforced by coercion, all based on slender evidence. Nonsense, reply the loyalists. Is the glass half full or half empty?

I chose the quote at the end of the article because it sums up concerns about welfare reform. Fanning the flames of hate by blaming the most powerless in this society along with NL playing right-wing populism i.e. getting those workshy scroungers off the dole and into any old job. NL is in a quandary and also contradictory. Is welfare reform about, in all honesty, getting people into work by supportive mechanisms based on their terms and choices? No, not in a million years, it is also supply side economics and non compliance gets you penalised and benefit sanctions (that will lead to increased poverty).

More stress. More despair. More fear. That is missing from White’s article as he doesn’t tackle the impact these pernicious reforms will have on people. What else is missing is NL’s love-in with the private sector, contracting out public services by throwing good money after bad. Milllions of pounds has been spent to encourage and incentivise the private sector to take on the contracts.

Chucking good money after bad. Supporting people shouldn’t be about making profits, bonuses and incentives. It should be about what is in the best interests of the indivudual not whether you can “park” or “cream” them. Again, White doesn’t mention NL’s worshipping at the altar of free-market capitalism and inviting the likes of David Freud to advise on welfare reform.

Unfortunately, Michael White, the glass is most definitely half empty.

Employment and Support Allowance: a contradiction?

So today is the brave new dawn of Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) and Incapacity Benefit is no more. Gordon Brown was meeting with business leaders talking tough about welfare reform.

Welfare reform will be intensified and, as we do, we should also match the right to additional support with the responsibility on people to do all they can to help themselves.

But what of this new benefit, ESA? NL insisted that the amounts paid to people going from IB to ESA would remain the same. But, according to CPAG, this has been reneged upon.

Government commitments that claimants would not receive lower amounts on the new benefit have not been kept for all groups.

Disability Alliance highlight that in the Green Paper, No one written off, IB claimants on higher rates of benefit will have their benefit rate gradually brought into line with the rate they would be entitled to under ESA. This means in reality means a cut.

… a freeze of ESA rates [that] may increase the poverty experienced by many disabled people.

But one man is pleased as punch at the arrival of ESA and the fanfare he thinks it deserves. Indeed, James Purnell has this to say:

In the 1990s people were written off on incapacity benefit with no help to overcome their problems or support to get them into work. It is even more important during an economic downturn that we increase support for people not take it away. The introduction of employment and support allowance … will offer the help and support disabled people and people with ill health are telling us they want in order for them to get back to work.

ESA is undermining and will create more fear, a fundamental attack on social democracy. NL claims to support people back into employment but are punished through increased conditionality and penalties. And if they don’t attend work focussed interviews further sanctions await. Employment and Support Allowance has one massive sting in its tail.

Jean Charles de Menezes inquest: C12 under cross-examination

C12, one of the shooters who shot Jean Charles de Menezes being cross-examined by Michael Mansfield:

Under cross-examination by Michael Mansfield QC, for the Menezes family, C12 said he had been sitting in an unmarked car outside Stockwell station awaiting instructions when De Menezes arrived on the bus.

“Did you hear any radio traffic from the firearms team saying, ‘We can’t do it [intercept him] – we’re not there’?” Mansfield asked.

C12 replied: “No, sir.”

Mansfield continued: “Because the truth was, you were there and you could have done it, couldn’t you?”

C12 answered: “Yes, sir.”

C12 then apologised for failing to tell his superiors he had been in a position to intercept De Menezes. “You are correct: the onus was on me in that situation,” he told Mansfield. “I was listening to the radio, waiting to pick up what I could and waiting for a decision to come through.

“The only explanation I am offering to you is that things happened so quickly as we came closer. Why I did not tell them where I was, I just cannot tell you. I was trying to listen to the radio, I had a lot going on, and if that is an error, then, you know, I apologise for it.”

Again, this throws up some many questions such as why C12 didn’t tell his superiors that he was sitting in an unmarked car outside the tube station. Also, Rick at Ten Percent asks (in the comments box) a very pertinent question about:

what kind of culture these shooters live in, what movies books, tv, what political/racial attitudes, because it was their decision in that carriage after a completely botched briefing/surveillance and what informed that is important.

The core of their ideology is to take orders without thinking for themselves and not to question their surroundings or to use their initiative. Instead C12 was waiting for those instructions to be explicitly given over the radio before he took action. He coulda intercepted but chose not to. And apologies are just not enough.