Indeed when you are worth a cool £4million and more you really don’t have to think too hard about your existence. What a nice and bubble-esque privileged life. And that illustrates just what a cushy number someone like George Osborne has…. yet he’s wielding the axe in smashing and slashing welfare benefits. In some ways though the real wretches are the LibDems. For all their historic talk of a better more open way of politics they have handed the government of Britain to a cabal of privileged toffs at one with the high command of News International and the top bankstas.
To return to Osborne’s proposals for Child Benefit and benefit capping. The Child Benefit proposals are the thin end of the wedge. Sooner rather than later the bar will be extended down the salary scale and/or this benefit will disappear: merged with Child Tax Credit into a means tested child element of Universal Credit. The cap at £500.00 will mainly affect a small number of extremely fragile households or Black households in London. It will not save much money. It is an attempt though to do two things. Firstly it suggests that people on benefit can expect the equivalent of an annual net salary of £26,000. This is nonsense. The majority of current households on benefit will be far less than this. This could change with a new crop of public sector workers/private tenants being sacked. These people will be paying very high rents compared to council tenants or housing association tenants. They pay this extra, typically twice as much for like for like housing, not because they like living in luxury but because they are forced into a bad deal on their housing. The benefit cap combined with the changes to Housing Benefit will make these victims of the ConDems homeless in double-quick time. However most people forced onto benefit get nowhere near this amount to live on. The other thing it attempts is to stir up resentment against the poor amongst the not quite so poor. Classic divide and rule.
The other point worth making is that these two cuts will add complexity to the system. Politicians always claim that they are going to simplify the benefits system and always make it more complex. New Labour did it with tax credits and Employment & Support Allowance. The ConDems are now adding a new form of means testing to the system. Means testing is the main reason for the benefits system being complex. On top of this the method of means testing is different from the means testing for other benefits and tax credits, so not just more means testing but different types of means testing within the system. So for instance: a single earner household with let us say a freelance IT professional. Your Child Benefit is a weekly benefit. You get CB for each week that you fulfil all the conditions of entitlement. This will include there not being a high rate taxpayer in the household. Due to the double dip recession during the first half of a coming tax year you have not much work and you are skint. You need the CB to put food in your children’s’ mouths. During the second half of the year the private sector recovery predicted by Mr Osborne and Mr Cable rides to your rescue and you have plenty of work and when you file your online tax return guess what… Mr O will want the CB back to pay his pals in the banks so they can invest it for themselves in the property boom that will be underway in Brazil (or somewhere if not there). The point is that Mr O has fallen into the same trap that Mr B did 9 years ago. Mashing together the benefits system and the tax system gets you into a horrible and complex mess.
[...] See also Harpy Marx. [...]