Back next week.
Will leave you with this thought about Universal Credit until then:
Universal Credit hasn’t gone wrong. It has gone exactly as planned.
The application process is difficult and convoluted. It excludes anyone who can’t use a PC, or who struggles to navigate complex public sector bureaucracies. It has built-in delays which leave people in debt as a matter of course – rent arrears, in particular. It really is no exaggeration to say that just about everybody I speak to at foodbanks and jobcentres these days is in debt.
Universal Credit strikes terror into anyone who might have to use it. That’s the whole idea. Its depravity is entirely in keeping with assaults on social security as we’ve seen them in the last decade or so. The replacing of DLA with PIP, the harshness of the ESA work capability assessment, the closure of the Independent Living Fund, the tightening of eligibility for social care, the caps to LHA – these so-called reforms have been as brutal. Universal Credit is the latest chapter in an evil story.
UC is an assumption that’s already happening, I say assumption because it’s the mother of all feck ups.
The neoliberal onslaught against the non-rich, all on track and going accordingly to plan. Despite Blair’s (now historic) claim to the contrary, The Class War continues….lest we ever forget.
As someone who has had to face the awful changes in DLA to PIP two years ago then, this last year, losing my husband, and having to claim ESA for myself, I’m now going to have to face, for the third year running, yet another torture in the form of UC, which comes to my part of the world this December!
The Tories, and their cronies in other parties, couldn’t have thought of anything more Machiavellian (“the employment of cunning and duplicity in statecraft or in general conduct”) in order to make the unemployed more despairing, the poor even poorer, or the disabled even more so, could they?
Synonyms for Disabled: disqualify, prevent, invalidate, declare incapable, rule out, preclude, debar, prohibit, disentitle; disenable!
They got that right, then! 🙁
Thomas G. Clark’s commentary on Universal Credit (Another Angry Voice)
http://anotherangryvoice.blogspot.com/2018/10/how-bad-is-tory-universal-credit.html?m=1
@ Katy
That might explain Alok Sharma’s warped views toward subjecting the sick & disabled to Benefit Sanctions then, because to do otherwise would be doing them a “disservice”, apparently:
https://www.disabilitynewsservice.com/minister-says-stopping-benefit-sanctions-would-do-disabled-people-a-great-disservice/
Spot on Kate. These words need drilling into every mealy-mouthed MP who claims to have ‘reservations’ about UC, anyone who thinks it’s just a good idea gone bad, any welfare rights adviser, any Citizens Advice worker, any homeless charity volunteer and any vaguely left leaning journalist. Universal Credit is a disgrace.
Absolutely