The Daily Mail online has an excellent article by Sonia Poulton slagging off the way the current government pick on the poor, needy, desperate and defenceless. Something l have been banging on about for a while, but l was suprised to find it on the Daily Mail's (an outrageously right wing paper) website
Some of the article is below, and the full piece is here. Enjoy!
There we were thinking it impossible that David Cameron's Tory party could become even more dastardly, even more duplicitous, in their devastating aims against those in vulnerable groups - sick, disabled, single parent families and the elderly - but they have.
Take their next much-vaunted initiative - the Workfare programme. Controversial certainly - who can forget the graduate who declined to work at Poundland as part of the scheme? She who was reviled and martyred, depending on your political persuasion, reading pleasure and sense of justice, for refusing to work at the budget chain store so that she would continue to receive 'benefits' as she searched for the job she had studied and qualified for.
I agreed with her.
I deplore the Workfare programme for many reasons but primarily because it is deplorable. Trumpeted as a programme that will give the unemployed key skills, it serves nothing of the sort.
What it is, in actuality, is a benefit system for sections of our work force. And there was I, foolishly, thinking that when you are part of the capitalist work force then the appropriate term for remuneration received is salary.
Apparently not.
These days, and under Cameron's stewardship, we receive 'benefits' to become part of the job market. So I ask just this: how can it possibly be right for a multi-national - such as Tesco - to benefit from free labour? What Tesco, and other participants in the Workfare scheme, receive is far greater than what they give.
We, as the country, are, quite literally, paying the consumer giant to make even more money. And we are doing that by having our taxpayer funded job seekers work free for the company.
As a result of Cameron's spurious recent behaviour in pushing through crippling, quite literally for some, amendments to disability benefits, it has become clear that the attached issues are even more heinous that the blueprint of the Welfare Reform Bill, itself. And it is this: disabled people will now face the prospect of unlimited unpaid work or they will be subject to cuts in their benefits.
For millions that is nothing more than a line on a page but for many terrified and suicidal others, it is anything but.
The Royal College of Psychiatrists (RCP) have written to the Coalition outlining the dangers of forcing sick and disabled people into the job market (the one that currently stands at almost three million unemployed by the way).
The RCP have a number of fears about the inadequacies of such a system.
They worry, quite rightly, that managers in job centres and private companies - whose job it is to get people back to work - have inadequate health expertise and will push those with mental health issues into inappropriate placements.
Forcing people who have more than six months left to live - yes it is that stark, again - to earn a living is an outrage on a previously unseen scale.
If nothing else the Coalition are proving themselves, over and over again, to be worthy defenders of the rich. If you're in the top percentage of income earners in this country then you, too, should be OK. I'm talking about the CEO, the landowners and shareholders. The banking industry, the pharmaceutical giants, the retail multi-nationals.
It's no great secret that one of the main reasons that MP's take care of business is because so many of them have financial interests in the businesses that they do business with. They are protecting their own interests while governing over the rest of us and insisting we do the same.It's no great secret that one of the main reasons that MP's take care of business is because so many of them have financial interests in the businesses that they do business with. They are protecting their own interests while governing over the rest of us and insisting we do the same.
The thing is, the government don't really care about the poor, and unless direct action is taken (or they are booted out at the next election) this sort of policy making will continue. Don't blame me - l vote Labour (and no, it's not all their fault either).
toodle pip
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