Britain’s better than this

By Pilgrim Tucker

Unite has had enough.

It needs to be said – yes, there are welfare cheats. They are in the government – and they are swindling our country.

Next week they will give the super wealthy on average £100k. At the same time letters will drop on mats across the four nations demanding that the poorest pay for the crisis not of their making.

It is high time that we, as the biggest movement, the most progressive force for change this country has seen, said ‘no more’.

Our welfare state civilises this nation. From the cradle to the grave, it was designed to support our citizens through their lives, to banish the “five giants” of want, disease, squalor, ignorance, and idleness. It glued – and still glues – us together as a people. We ought to pride ourselves as being a nation that cares for those in greatest need.

Not any more. Three years of punishing cuts have forced our once proud system to its knees. NHS waiting lists are growing, homelessness is on the rise, legal aid has disappeared for many, child care provision is vanishing from our poorest communities, libraries are closing their doors, food banks are the only banks that are giving.

In a crude attempt to distort a crisis of neo-liberalism into a crisis of state spending, this government has used the politics of division to warp perceptions of the British welfare state. In the often quoted words of Rahm Emanuel, they were determined not to let a “serious crisis go to waste”.

Under the pretext of handling a debt crisis, the government has pushed ahead with a ferocious, yes ideological, shrinking of the state, hacking cuts in our social security system that would have made Thatcher blush.

George Osborne may have delivered a miserable, hope-denying budget, but the real story is the 80 per cent of cuts yet to come – and the further 10 per cent scalping threatened by the comprehensive spending review.

Already, we have a quarter of a million people reliant on food banks and 650,000 face being uprooted by the Bedroom Tax. We have, by the government’s own admission, 400,000 children about to be pushed deeper into poverty.

This is brutal. And it is needless.

This week, British Gas executives rewarded themselves £16m in benefits – while ordinary people shivered, the sun shone on them.

Last week, just as George Osborne was telling the nation that our pain will not ease, Barclays bosses were preparing to ‘reward’ themselves with millions.

It was satire worthy of Tom Wolf – yet there are real people who cannot find this funny.

I’ve seen the sharp end of this absurd system myself. Shortly before becoming a community coordinator at Unite I was unemployed and really struggling to find work, but my experience of the jobcentre was actually making that harder. Just a few weeks after my contract finished my advisor was threatening me with Mandatory Work Experience, then shortly before I went back to work I was sanctioned, as I hadn’t collected a clothing voucher for Burtons, the Top-Shop chain. I went without any money for two weeks. I’d already accumulated debt, and of course had to borrow money from friends and family to get by.

Yet the situation is about to become even worse. On Monday, millions of people across the country will be made poorer. What little money there is will get tighter. Shopkeepers will ponder empty tills. Children will go hungry. Food banks will be pressed to help the desperate. Parents will worry themselves sick about the heating bill, the rent, the debt.

With eleven and a half million people set to be hit – yes, those in and out of work – pretty much everyone will know someone who will suffer as cuts to support like housing benefit, tax credits, child benefit and disability support start to bite.

Even at the best of times this would be cruel, but as people continue to struggle with insecure low waged work where they can find it, rocketing prices and frozen wages the impact is devastating.

But that does not seem to be enough for this government. It seems they need us to fear, to demonise (as with immigrants), the poor. So they set about the deliberate demonisation of our social security system and the people who rely on it.

Cheered on by the rightwing press, we have been warned about people who “keep their blinds drawn” all day. Never mind the proportions of people hit by welfare cuts who are in work, or the fact that no evidence could be found for widespread intergenerational worklessness or that less that 1% of the welfare budget is claimed fraudulently.

No longer are we asked to celebrate the advancement of generations – improved health and literacy, better life chances for working people, access to justice regardless of your wallet size, a health service that cares for the patient not the private health policy. No, we are told our welfare state is a drain on our nation, and that those who receive it are scrounges or shirkers.

So today Unite is starting a new campaign that will give a fresh perspective to the debate on welfare.

The OurWelfareWorks.com website could be seen as an attempt to bring some balance, but actually the sad fact is that it is needed at all.

So it is time for some home truths about the welfare state, time we heard from those the government don’t want to hear from – the ordinary people who are striving, yes striving, to keep their families together, astonishing people who are trying hard to prevent poverty unspooling their communities, the sort of people this country needs to get it out of recession but is instead forcing them to the corners of existence.

When we set up the Unite Community Membership last year, it was to reconnect our workplaces and our communities. Little did we know that our members would be in the frontline, defending people against the bedroom tax, universal credit and the benefits cap and the social upheaval they bring.

Our welfare state works. It has made this country a better, more civilised nation. It is the social fabric that binds us. It was born out of vision and courage, it has made us a stronger, better nation.

It is being attacked in the most cowardly terms. And this attack will set us back. Spare a moment for the truth. Go now to www.ourwelfareworks.com.

Because Britain is better than this.

Pilgrim Tucker is the Unite community coordinator