“I was very touched today when a man asked to shake my hand when giving out Stop Sanctions leaflets. He told me he had been sanctioned a week before Christmas and hadn’t been able to sleep for over a week because of the worry. He said it had made his day seeing people who care campaigning,” said an activist from Old Swan Against the Cuts, Liverpool.
Part of the government’s plan to get rid of the Welfare State is the creation of a weapon to attack claimants who are sick, disabled and unemployed. This weapon is “the sanction”. The DWP (Department of Work and Pensions) sanction regime, which was introduced in October 2012, removes basic support for weeks, months or longer from people who are already extremely vulnerable.
This weapon is creating a climate of fear and dread of anything related to the Job Centre and DWP, including correspondence and appointments, and is resulting in serious distress and harm to the victims.
In June 2011, the government introduced a series of far-reaching welfare reforms, part of which is sanctioning, which is used against those who are considered not to have satisfied the obligations to benefit set by the DWP. This includes being late for or missing an appointment, or being deemed not to have fulfilled sufficient steps to find work.
Whistle blowers and researchers have stated that some Job Centre managers have set incentivised targets of achievement. This has led to situations in which claimants have been intentionally confused and led into a position where they will inevitably fail, such as being obligated to sign daily, thus resulting in a sanction.
Alongside the sanction, this government has introduced many other directives to undermine the welfare system. They have eliminated Crisis Loans and Community Care Grants, and introduced cuts such as the pernicious Bedroom Tax (affecting Housing Benefit), Universal Credit and a Benefit Cap (set at £25,000 a year with plans already underway to cut it further).
The most vulnerable in our society are being driven to pauperism, reliant on handouts, food banks and soup kitchens, which are being normalised, as supermarkets and even restaurants encourage us all to feed “those who cannot afford to eat”.
The government has encouraged and created a situation of food and heat poverty but has abdicated responsibility to an act of charity or nothing. When the sanction regime was introduced the government legitimised this punitive system by suggesting that it would only be imposed as a “last resort”. It’s false.
Statistics from official data, analysed by academics at Oxford University and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, show that up to March 2014, over 1.9 million sanctions were imposed on people receiving Jobseeker’s Allowance (JSA).
A last resort?
“A woman called Theresa Curtis tells the story of how her 57-year-old brother, suffering from clinical depression after losing a child to cot death and a close friend to suicide, was sanctioned for 16 weeks after he could not cover the cost of the four bus trips needed to get him to a work capability assessment,” the Guardian reported from the House of Commons report, 23 January 2015.
The Derbyshire Unemployed Workers’ Centre said a man from Bolsover who was instructed by his Job Centre adviser to apply for a job in horticulture that involved “four weeks’ classroom-type training” before he would even be considered for an interview. Two weeks in, the man’s benefit was suspended, and then he was sanctioned for four weeks because he was not actively seeking work whilst undertaking the training.
This example proves that sanctions have nothing to do with finding work, but everything to do with grasping money from the poor and giving it to the clutching hand of the government. There are also many reports in the media about victims who have committed suicide or suffered serious harm after being sanctioned or threatened with a sanction. This is a regime that is normalising and institutionalising organised cruelty and whose aim is to destroy the welfare system completely.
Attacking the poor and vulnerable is being supported and further normalised by a supine media who criminalise, demonise and reinforce prejudices against anyone in receipt of benefit, single mothers and immigrants. Described popularly as “benefit porn”, sensationalist media attacks stigmatise and stereotype the poor and vulnerable.
They legitimise austerity and direct the blame for it away from the political leaders, the rich and the financial institutions whose wealthy investors have benefited from state bailouts. It is these same beneficiaries of state handouts who have exerted political power to ensure that austerity is imposed on the poor and working class.
Expose the lies
We have to tell the truth and expose the lies, myths and prejudices that abound politically and in the media. According to opinion polls, people think that about 27 per cent of welfare recipients are falsely claiming benefits when in reality it is just 0.7 per cent. At the same time there is £16bn of benefits unclaimed each year.
It is also perceived that 41 per cent goes to the unemployed, when the reality is just 3 per cent. It is not those on zero hour contracts and low pay employers who gain, it is landlords charging extortionate rents who exploit and extract from our welfare system, as they gain from subsidies paid through tax credits and housing benefit.
Low paid workers continue to struggle on in-work benefits and falling wages, and it is they who make up a large sector of Britain’s poor. The vast majority of welfare benefit is on pensioners who have paid into a national insurance system throughout their working lives.
Contrast this to the richest individuals and companies who hide trillions of pounds away in a web of tax havens around the world, and wealthy tax dodgers who fraudulently remove £25bn a year from the Exchequer.
A recent report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies claims that since the introduction of the austerity programme Britain’s poorest families have suffered the most, and households in the poorest 10 per cent have lost the most proportionately from tax and benefit changes.
This government insists that it is the wealthiest who are being hit the hardest, and the Tory employment minister Esther McVey argues that she wants to end “the something-for-nothing culture”.
Winnie Byanyima, executive director of Oxfam International, expressed her astonishment at the level of inequality that exists today in the 21st Century. She pointed out that the elite rich, that is 85 people in the world, own and control as much wealth as the poorest half (3.5 billion of the world’s population). The wealth of these 85 amounts to £60.88 trillion. Poverty and inequality has exponentially grown because of the greed for wealth and power by these wealthy elites, and their servants who are rigging the system in their favour.
The rich are not the hardest hit. They are the ones “making hay” in a “something for nothing system”.
Equality Trust research has shown that the combined wealth of the richest one hundred families in Britain in 2008 was increased by at least £15bn, when the average income was increased by £1,233. Britain’s current richest one hundred have the same wealth as 30 per cent of UK households.
A third of the 1,645 billionaires listed by Forbes inherited some or all of their riches, while 20 per cent have interests in the financial and insurance sectors, who saw their wealth increase by 11 per cent in the 12 months to March 2014.
So reality paints a different version than McVey’s, as to who is “making hay” in the “something-for-nothing culture”.
Fight back
We have to fight back and mobilise to restore respect and dignity to the most vulnerable and stop this pernicious social war against our welfare system. We have to stand up to the powerful and wealthy and stand up for the poor and voiceless. By uniting workers, claimants and campaigners we can build a movement that can demand the reinstatement and development of a decent welfare support system with a real and effective safety net.
- End sanctions now
- Restore the safety net now
- For a fair and decent welfare system
- Unemployed and workers mobilise against benefit cuts
