Cuts and the CSR

Been busy this week; trying to find work, not getting work and protesting . Feel a mix of anxiety, anger and general depression . But hey, gotta a blog to attend to .

Tomorrow I plan to do a round up of posts , and my thoughts on the CSR. I'll have a potter round the blogs and papers , but if anyone wants to highlight anything they have seen, let me know in the comments box.

Is George Osborne squeezing the rich to help poor families? No!

I posted earlier this year in defence of universal Child Benefit, when gossip was spreading that it could come under attack. I won't repeat here the arguments I made there in defence of universality, but I do want to make a few points about the specific policy that the Tories have just announced - to remove Child Benefit from families where one person earns more than £44k.

In doing so, I want to tackle the aspect that I find particularly annoying - the Tories' pretence that this is a pro-working-class policy, which will no doubt find cheerleaders in the tabloids and may even impair the ability of some on the 'left' to defend universal Child Benefit against this attack.

Despite its pretensions at squeezing the rich, George Osborne's announcement leaves rich people without kids well alone while those with kids have money taken from them. No-one is losing money for being rich, but for having kids.

There is a serious ideological point here about society's attitude to, and responsibility for, children. The attack on Child Benefit is based on an assumption that children are the private indulgence of their parents rather than the responsibility of society in general. Sometimes, it feels like people think that "the taxpayer" is being asked to pay towards people's cars or butlers, not towards their children.

Moreover, earning £44k and bit most definitely does NOT make you "rich". It may be well above the average wage, but it is the wage of, for example, some skilled manual workers. If you are one of these and, say, you live in London bringing up three kids on your own or with a partner on much lower earnings, then you may get by, but you hardly live the life of Riley.

The rich-poor divide is not between people on £25k and people on £45k, but between people on £25k and people on £100k+ and a stash of wealth. Let's target our anger against the genuine rich, not on working families who might earn more than other working families, but who certainly do not share in the full fruits of their labour, and are definitely not "rich".

Even so, the way to deal with the genuinely rich is not to take away their child benefit, but to tax them til the pips squeak, or better still, to legislate a maximum wage.

'Middle Class Benefits' - My Arse!

I am heartily sick of the use of the term 'middle-class benefits' to describe universal benefits, such as Child Benefit and Winter Fuel Allowance.

The ConDem coalition announced yesterday that it will be reviewing said benefits, and the media happily went along with the term 'middle-class benefits' on the spurious grounds that as they are universal, even better-off people can get them.

'Universal' in this context has a similar meaning to 'comprehensive' in the context of schools. So perhaps we should start referring to 'comprehensive schools' as 'middle-class schools'. No, didn't think so.

When the filthy rich remain filthy rich, when they are suffering a tiny fragment of the cuts which hit everyone else savagely, it also seems to me that turning fire on the so-called 'middle class' is aiming at the wrong target. Usually, when anyone gets down to specifics, they talk about excluding families with an income over, say, £40,000 from these benefits. But raising kids, or paying the bills, on a joint income of £40,001 is not exactly the life of Riley.

If people are really railing at the injustice of very rich people being entitled to benefits, fair enough. But rather than take the benefits away, make them pay for it through a more progressive taxation system.

Because if a universal benefit becomes a means-tested benefit, it is not just the 'middle class' who suffer - it is the working-class people who might still be entitled to the benefit but will stop actually getting it. As explained in my previous post here.

Hands Off Universal Child Benefit

As David Cameron invites the nation to suggest public spending cuts, one thing that seems to be square in the government's sights is universal Child Benefit. What support there is for this appears to rest on two reactionary and annoying 'arguments':

1. That children are a private indulgence of their parents, who should therefore meet the costs themselves.

Actually, matey, they are the continuation of the human race, and therefore the human race collectively bears some responsibility towards them. Moreover, Child Benefit covers a bare fraction of the real cost of raising a child, but it is a useful contribution.

2. That rich parents do not need or deserve Child Benefit and it should therefore be means-tested. This 'argument' is bugging me, as it is superficially appealing but an abuse of people's class consciousness and rightful anger at the rich.

The fact is that once a benefit is means-tested, it is the poor, more than the rich, who lose out. Means-testing means that you have to apply, that you need to be able to navigate the system, to fill in the forms, to reapply periodically. Means testing still carries stigma, as well as practical difficulty. Nearly every means-tested benefit has an unsatisfactory take-up rate.

It also costs the state a great deal more money to administer a means-tested benefit than to give out a universal benefit. A large proportion of the money it would save, it would have to spend.

But why should working-class people's tax pay for rich parents' child benefit?! The answer is simple: pay for it with rich people's tax instead! Give them the Child Benefit with one hand, take their excess wealth for the common good with the other.

And keep Child Benefit universal.

The Uphill Struggle To Claim Your Rights

This year, I have successful claimed two very important rights for my son Joe - who has Asperger syndrome - and our family. Firstly, his Statement of Special Educational Needs, and secondly, Disability Living Allowance. The first means that he now has his own Teaching Assistant throughout the school day, playtime supervision and extra specialist teaching. The second means that we get sixty-odd quid a week towards the extra expenses of having a kid with his special needs.

But each claim was a struggle up a very steep hill, which not only used up a lot of our time and energy but also made me realise that many people in a similar situation to us will not be getting these rights.

To apply for a statement, you have to fill in a form and write about your kids' condition and needs. It helps if you can get other people to write supportive stuff too, so we enlisted Joe's speech and language therapist, child psychologist, consultant paediatrician and inclusion co-ordinator at his playscheme. The initial result we got was a 'high incidence' statement - so called because it rules that your kid's special needs are so common that the school should be able to deal with them within its existing budget. So that's no good to anyone. In fact, as a retired school teacher mate of mine said, it can be worse than nothing, as the kid gets all the stigma of having a statement but none of the support that comes with it.

So we had to appeal. We wrote more text, and enlisted more people to write more text. The appeal succeeded, and Joe got a 'low incidence level 3' statement, which gives him the support listed earlier in this post.

I strongly suspect that our local education authority - Hackney's Learning Trust - has a standard practice of offering crap statements all the while planning to improve them on appeal. Perhaps they are hoping to save cash with the families who are too poor, unsupported, vulnerable, foreign, lacking in confidence, inarticulate, pressed for time, stressed out or just plain grateful for the slightest support to summon the strength to appeal.

Drafting an appeal is, after all, second nature to me and Joe's dad, as we are both union reps who have lost count of the number of appeals we have drafted for members.

The application form for Disability Living Allowance is about 80 pages long. I submitted it online, and had to come back to it day after day after day after day, wading through the sections, reviewing what I'd written, adding things I'd overlooked, making sure that it really did accurately describe Joe's needs, and answered all their questions, including the several confusing ones. When my partner announced to the family support group that we attend that we had successfully claimed the benefit, he got a round of applause, as many of the other families there had been defeated by the application process.

In my experience and opinion, the system is biased against poor and working-class families.

Lone parents and the green paper on welfare reform

Article for next month's Labour Left Briefing

Peter Hain recently insisted that getting lone parents back into work, was, apparently a respectable socialist cause.

According to Hain, full employment and conquering child poverty, in his opinion are socialist statements and “nobody can argue with them”.
But Peter, penalising and coercing people back into work with threat of benefit loss is something socialists would reject.

The proposals outlined in the green paper on welfare reform have a dishonest ideological basis with the emphasis on “culture of dependency”. With various legislative attacks on the poor in this society (Welfare Reform Act and Freud Review) this green paper and its contents comes at no surprise.

What comes across is that worklessness in marginalised groups such as single parents is seen by the government as the result of individual failure. If it is anything collective at all, in the government’s view, it is about culture of dependency and low expectation.

A real progressive socialist government, contrary to Hain’s recent pronouncements, would envision a more inclusive society that has affordable housing and good quality childcare as opposed to the free market view of work as simply being as much productivity as possible for as little wage as possible.

The aspiration behind the green paper is full employment for disadvantaged groups. A noble goal but to be pursued by ignoble means: More mandatory requirements on Jobseekers and tighter job search conditions before benefit is paid.

Nowhere in the green paper is there any mention of universal childcare be provided; a traditional socialist demand that would immediately free up single parents to study and work.
John Hutton earlier this year sited Sweden, which has around 80% of lone parents back at work as opposed to over 56% in the UK. Hutton failed to mention that money has been invested in the childcare system in Sweden.

Many European countries spend 3 or 4 times more than the UK on child care provision. In Sweden the early system is an almost universal public service and in Finland every child has the right to childcare from birth. While in the UK childcare is fragmented and beset with uncoordinated initiatives.

As Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) recently argued, lone parents need good supportive and flexible working conditions (certainly the pay gap is amplified for women workers who return to the workplace).

For example nowhere is there a proposal to help fund study so lone parents can increase their chances of getting better paid work. Instead the list of companies the green paper boasts as “partners” suggests careers of badly paid drudgery in the retail, hospitality and care home trades…the jobs nobody else wants. Many of these jobs would vanish over night in a recession. It would people from disadvantaged groups that would be laid off first if the firms are hit by the fallout from the credit crunch or a similar crisis courtesy of the merchant banks.

A recent book (Collapsing Careers by Joanna Grigg) reveals that every year 30,000 women in Britain are sacked, made redundant or leave their job because of pregnancy discrimination.

And further stigmatising of lone parents is David Cameron’s support for tax breaks for married couples as Britain must “lose its anti-marriage bias" if the UK's "broken society is to be fixed”. Cameron has back peddled over this as last year he said the, “Tory war on single parents was over”. He is surging towards to the right and championing the ideology, once again, of the heterosexual nuclear family (married of course). The same old Tories!

The culture of dependency is an invention of right-wing ideologies and those who go along with this thesis demonises the powerless. Socialists have to challenge this ideology.