Black Monday

[forthwritten]

The Guardian described today as "a new world heav[ing] into view [...] with sweeping changes in the fields of welfare, justice, health and tax".

I am in a position to be most scared about the NHS. For the record, I love the NHS. I wrote about it a few years ago in the context of US debates on private/public healthcare and it fscking guts me that the NHS is being steadily dismantled. My experiences of it are somewhat less rosy now - involvement with a Gender Identity Clinic will do that to you - but I still think it's better than private healthcare and its failings are not due to it being a public, nationalised system. If anything, its problems are due to a culture of targets and commodification.

BMJ: The future of the NHS—irreversible privatisation?
Max Pemberton: NHS reforms: From today the Coalition has put the NHS up for grabs
Owen Jones: Farewell to the NHS, 1948-2013: a dear and trusted friend finally murdered by Tory ideologues
An ever-useful reminder of the 60+ MPs who have or had links to companies involved in private healthcare

However, as The Staggers notes, the really frightening thing about today's cuts is that no one knows their combined impact. Polly Toynbee summarises their cumulative impact:

No amount of IDS newspeak can turn the bedroom tax into a "spare bedroom subsidy" [...] it's all a fraud, since IDS knows that 660,000 tenants with a spare room can never be found smaller properties, they will pay the extra or fall into debt and arrears until they are evicted. From Monday, most of the poorest get a new bill of an average £138 for council tax. Landlords expect mayhem when tenants are paid rent directly every month: pilots show many fall into debt.

Now add in these: disability living allowance starts converting into personal independence payment with a target to remove 500,000 people in new Atos medical tests. The Guardian has revealed how jobcentre staff are under orders to find any sanction to knock people off benefits. New obstacles are strewn in their path: people must apply for their benefits online from computers they don't possess; many of these claimants are semi-literate. When in dire straits, there will be no more crisis loans, only a card for buying food, with not a penny for bus fares. Trussell Trust food banks expect a great surge of the hungry, so they ask everyone to donate the price of an Easter egg.

Here is the final wicked twist: legal aid has been removed for advice on benefits, housing, divorce, debt, education and employment. On Monday the budget of Citizens Advice for such cases falls from £22m to £3m. The few emergency cases still covered – families facing instant eviction – can only use a phone service, not face-to-face legal help. Law centres will close. There will be no help on school exclusions, landlord or employer harassment, or failure to pay wages.

Every new benefit system starts out with a high error rate: everyone knows the complex universal credit will leave millions with incorrect or no payments – and now, nowhere to go for help. Courts and tribunals expect chaos as people try to make their own cases without any help. Try to imagine the plight of people in debt because of the non-arrival of payments, with no credit on their phones to call and inquire, no crisis loan to buy phone credit, no internet access – and now no advice service either.

There's an e-petition calling for a Cumulative Impact Assessment of Welfare Reform, and a New Deal for sick & disabled people based on their needs, abilities and ambitions.

This Government frightens me. They have no mandate and they don't care. This is going to be brutal and people are going to die because of it, and they still don't care.

ETA:
10 lies we're told about welfare
And on IDS claiming to be able to live on £53/week: You'll never live like common people and perhaps my favourite post on the "but of COURSE you can eat on £2/week!" argument.
“The revolution starts in the ATOS smoking area” - on welfare, addiction, and dependency

Comments

[kaberett]

Yes. :-(

Thank you for writing this; for reading all these things; for putting together the links. This is so, so hard - I can't, can't face reading about it; can't face thinking about what it's going to mean for me, and for people I love, and for - you know - everyone else. But the cumulative horror is too great, and that feels like a coward's way out - and at the same time, I laugh hollowly to discover I've already signed that petition.

[forthwritten]

Part of the reason I posted it is because I can't bear to have those links open in my tabs. I'm not brave and I don't deserve that thanks :/

[hunningham]

So bloody despressing that I cannot bear to think about it.

[kotturinn]

Isn't that one of the things this Government is hoping for?

That and an inability to translate individual changes into cumulative effect?

[such_heights]

Thanks for this. I read that Guardian article at the weekend and it's just devastating. I wish I knew what to do.

[forthwritten]

I wish I knew what to do too. I've marched and occupied and signed petitions and protested outside ATOS offices and none of it feels like it has any effect.

[alwayswondered]

legal aid has been removed for advice on benefits, housing, divorce, debt, education and employment.

This is the part that depresses me most. So much so that I don't even know what to say about it.

Honestly, part of me thinks that they're hoping people WILL die in large numbers, because they haven't been able to legalise culling them yet.

[forthwritten]

I think the cuts to legal aid and the CAB are some of the worst aspects too - it horrifies and angers me that as well as ripping away people's financial safety nets, they're also removing any recourse people might have to legal action and representation to challenge that. Horrible.

Part of me suspects the same. It's not just the impact of these cuts; as a linguist I find the representation of people claiming the "wrong kind" of benefits as shirkers and scroungers to be really disturbing. Much easier to abuse people if you've demonised them, made them unworthy of compassion or respect and rendered them different and less than human.