Further piss-poor plans for the Social Fund…

In response to the feedback received regarding the consultation on The Social Fund: A new approach published at the end of last year, NL has come up with these proposals:

We will also change the way that Community Care Grants are awarded so that some individuals will receive goods or services instead of money. This will ensure hard pressed families receive good value and good quality products in these difficult times.

We will also be able to negotiate with the suppliers to get a better deal for the taxpayer so that we can make our budgets go further. We hope for constructive dialogue with stakeholders throughout the passage of the bill, as we develop the detail of these proposals further.

The question that comes to my mind is why? People at the moment receive money to buy necessities and usually from shops like Argos. And it also gives control to the individual. Surely this new proposal will create more bureaucracy? Someone somewhere will be pricing necessities, probably contracted out as well. And what do they exactly mean when they say better deal for the taxpayer?

And furthermore:

But we want to go further. We want to ensure that the support we offer is active and enabling – a means of promoting financial inclusion for people on low incomes and to help individuals access mainstream financial services.

As a first step in this direction we will take the power to work through outside organisations that are better placed to offer financial advice than we are. However, should we in the future ever decide to offer loans through external stakeholders such as credit unions, to replace the current Social Fund provision we will not charge interest on these loans.

In other words poverty is viewed mainly as being a manifestation of people’s own financial ignorance and irresponsibility: the idea that what people really need is not money but a good dose of patronising and lecturing.

Jack Straw: publish and be damned!

This is utterly politically obscene and beneath contempt. Right-wingers whinging on about taxpayers’ money along with the racist bilge about Binyam Mohamed’s immigration status is shocking. But what can you expect from a Tory vile rag. The gaping hole in this frenzied political attack is no mention that this man endured torture including the hellhole Guantánamo Bay:

(His account of  his imprisonment and torture  at ‘Dark Prison’ near Kabul, Afghanistan, a secret prison run by the CIA)

It was pitch black, no lights on in the rooms for most of the time. They hung me up for two days. My legs had swollen. My wrists and hands had gone numb. There was loud music, Slim Shady [by Eminem] and Dr. Dre for 20 days. Then they changed the sounds to horrible ghost laughter and Halloween sounds. At one point, I was chained to the rails for a fortnight. The CIA worked on people, including me, day and night. Plenty lost their minds. I could hear people knocking their heads against the walls and the doors, screaming their heads off.

And the British State were complicit in all of this and desperate in their cover-up. It’s up to the Americans, according to Miliband, to release the information. Talk about smoke and mirrors…with a large helping of obfuscation.

Talking of complicity, lying and spinelessness, the latest from Jack Straw about why he won’t release the cabinet minutes relating to the Iraq War from March 2003:

Cabinet is the pinnacle of the decision-making machinery of government. It is the forum in which debates on the issues of greatest significance and complexity are conducted.

This matter – whether the nation took military action – was indisputably of the utmost seriousness.

However, I disagree with the reasoning of the majority of the tribunal. In their decision they refer to the “momentous” nature of the decision taken, the public interest in understanding the approach taken to that decision, and the public interest in the accountability of those who took the decision

Mind you, is it really believable that someone in the cabinet, knowing they were being minuted, would come out with “we must go in with the Bush administration if we are going to stay in their good books and get a share of the spoils”. No you are going to say something along the  lines of “I have considered this matter with the utmost care and in the light of all the evidence Saddam is a threat blah pompous blah…”

We are living in a surveillance society where what we do is under scrutiny, unfortunately the same can’t be said for NL and the possibility of any of these sordid individuals to be prosecuted as war criminals….

Mark Serwotka on welfare reform

Below is an article by Mark Serwotka (General Secretary PCS) on welfare reform. Very remiss of me not to post this before but have been netless (though it has now been sorted out with new router..hopefully).

Just to reiterate the point he makes regarding the Lobby of Parliament. It will be on the 3rd March from 12:30-2:30, Committee Room 14.

There’s a Facebook events page been set up. So please if you want to oppose this draconian and punitive Bill turn up to this Lobby of Parliament.

David Freud, investment banker and key architect of the current welfare reform bill, has waved goodbye to the government, but he won’t be stigmatised for adding to the rising claimant count, because he’s opted to embrace a job on the Tory frontbench instead.

Let us remember that back in 2007 Freud wrote the government’s controversial white paper Reducing dependency, increasing opportunity: options for the future of welfare to work (pdf).

At the time he identified a “multi-billion pound market” for companies to profiteer from the sick and unemployed. Despite admitting he “didn’t know anything about welfare at all” when he started, politicians on all sides of the House embraced his ideas.

Fast forward to February 2009 and Freud’s original proposals to privatise the public employment service are at the heart of the current welfare reform bill. The bill also includes powers to privatise the social fund, abolish income support and introduce compulsory “work for your benefit” schemes. These are defined as compulsory full-time community activities that will be exchanged for the pittance that is jobseekers’ allowance. In common with a growing number of people and organisations, the members of my union are opposed to these plans. We want public ownership of our welfare state.

The government should be creating jobs instead of introducing punitive sanctions and increased conditionality for claimants. Cutting up to 40% of benefit payments will drive more people, including children, into poverty. The UK is near the bottom of the western European league table in comparative rates of unemployment benefit, so we are campaigning for the government to urgently increase benefit levels to help people in these difficult times.

The government has repeatedly asserted it is doing “what works”, yet it blatantly ignores the evidence. Jobcentre advisers outperform the private sector. The government’s own workforce already has the skills and expertise to respond to increasing levels of unemployment. The welfare state is one of the UK’s greatest achievements. We want to protect our public services from the drive for profits. We want the government to treat unemployed people with the respect they deserve.

That is why we have organised a lobby of parliament and public meeting on Tuesday 3 March 2009. This event will bring together trade unions, service user groups and campaigning organisations to demonstrate our opposition to the bill.

Now that the banker has ditched the government, we think Gordon Brown should respond by ditching the banker’s ideas.