Aux armes, citoyens!

The sheer arrogance of the Tories and their Lib Dem poodles as they go about making the poorest and the most vulnerable targets for benefit cuts increasingly makes them resemble the French court on the eve of the revolution of 1789.

Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette lived the life of aristocratic indifference while the majority of French peasants could not afford bread because of rising prices. While the queen may never have uttered the immortal phrase “let them eat cake”, she might as well have. Her reputation for profligacy was such that she became known as Madame Déficit, held personally responsible for bankrupting the treasury.

So when housing minister Grant Shapps, defending the bedroom tax,  says his sons share a room, he is having a laugh at our expense. His house is big enough for each of his three children to have their own room if one wasn’t used as a study.

Treasury secretary Danny Alexander, a Lib Dem, has attacked “bedroom blockers” –  his description of social housing tenants who need help with their rent but are deemed to have a “spare room”. From yesterday their benefit was cut. This is the very same man who deprived the Treasury of over £100,000 during the expenses scandal.

He registered a property as his second home when he became an MP in 2005, despite admitting to Revenue and Customs that it was in fact his main residence. The trick allowed him to claim over £37,000 of taxpayers’ money doing up the London home, which he sold for £300,000. He used a tax loophole to avoid paying capital gains tax.

Not so much a spare room as taxpayers’ cash going spare – if you’re an MP that is.

And what about Iain Duncan Smith, who has spearheaded the attack on the poorest section with the bedroom tax, caps on benefit uprating, council tax benefit deductions and an array of other measures that target the disabled?

Yesterday, the work and pensions secretary, claimed he could live on state benefits of just £53 a week – if he had to. By this morning, more than 125,000 people had challenged him to do so via an online petition.

You can’t imagine IDS moving from the lap of luxury to a life of intolerable hardship where £53 a week means a choice between poor quality food and heating your home.

Duncan-Smith’s 16th-century Tudor house in the Buckinghamshire village of Swanbourne is said to be worth £2m. The property, which includes a swimming pool, tennis courts and three acres of grounds, belongs to the family of his wife. Duncan-Smith’s salary is over £134,000 a year. That’s 48 times more than a person living – or barely surviving -  on £53 a week.

April 1 turned out to be a joke played at our expense by the ConDems. Access to legal aid was savaged while the contracting out of large parts of National Health Service was introduced. Most of the policies described here were, of course, built on foundations laid by the previous New Labour government.

Yet the right-wing of the Tory Party is far from satisfied. Yesterday, the Daily Telegraph, wrote: “The NHS and welfare remain hugely expensive monoliths, prone to excesses that are unaffordable in an age of austerity. Today’s reforms are a step in the right direction, but only the beginning of what must be a very long journey.”

As is commonly known, Antoinette and Louis XVI met their fate at the hands of the guillotine. The French Revolution frightened the life out of the British ruling classes, who thought they were next in line for the chop.

What the ConDems show is that history sometimes offers up a second chance. They are impervious to protest, limited strikes and direct actions. Something a lot stronger and more permanent is needed.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

Labour's 'opposition' to bedroom tax is phony

The campaign against the “bedroom tax”, with over 660,000 households due to start losing significant amounts of housing benefit from Easter Monday, has exposed the duplicity of a Labour leadership that has tried but failed to hijack the protests.

Labour is not actually opposed in principle to the ConDems’ punitive cut in benefit for those in social housing of working age deemed to be over-occupying by having a spare bedroom. In fact, New Labour introduced the criteria for private-sector tenants in 2008. The Coalition uses this fact to justify extending the policy into social housing.

Shadow works and pensions secretary Liam Byrne has actually linked a fake opposition to the bedroom tax to plans for tougher workfare. He was roundly booed at a recent rally in Birmingham. Byrne was behind the abstention by Labour in parliament  last week over the vote on retrospective laws to enforce workfare.    

By contrast, left MP John McDonnell was cheered at the rally for declaring that Labour councils should refuse to implement the policy. His is a lone voice.

If tenants are deemed to have one spare room, the amount of rent eligible for housing benefit will be cut by 14%. If they have two or more spare rooms, the cut will be 25%. This will mean an average loss of about £14 a week for council tenants. Those who rent from housing associations are facing an average loss of about £16 a week.

In Scotland, the Scottish National Party has said the local authorities the party controls will refuse to evict people who get into arrears as a result. No doubt the SNP has one eye on encouraging people to vote “Yes” in next year’s independence referendum. Whatever.

Meanwhile, not a single Labour council in Britain has made the same declaration (Green-led Brighton has, however). In Dundee, the SNP led-council was the first to pass a policy to stop evictions, but this was opposed by Labour councillors.

Just as Labour councils have busily gone about implementing ConDem cuts in local spending, destroying jobs and services en route, they will enforce the bedroom tax. Labour leader Ed Miliband has no intention of instructing them to do otherwise, although if he did the tax would become unenforceable.

For Labour, it’s about people moving to smaller homes as a “solution”. As shadow cabinet member Helen Goodman said: “We’ve said that the bedroom tax should only apply if people have been offered a smaller place to live and turned it down because, obviously, it is better to use the housing stock more efficiently.” Yet all the figures indicate that smaller properties simply do not exist in the required numbers.

In Liverpool, where 6,700 tenants of Riverside Housing Association alone face severe benefit cuts, senior staff acknowledge that the “impact on communities could be profound”. They, naturally, intend to carry out their orders should evictions become necessary.

Tenants groups across the city have come together to spearhead the national campaign against the bedroom tax. Labour set up its own “campaign” in a bid to limit the protests to petitions and pleas. Tenants saw through this and are planning their own Assembly on April 6 to plan further resistance.

Ultimately unaffordable rents are the reason for a housing benefit bill of £23 billion a year. This huge sum is, in effect, a subsidy to landlords of all types. With social housing rents due to rise further – thanks to New Labour’s policy of “convergence” across different sectors – the attack on tenants is certain to increase.

The obvious alternative is to slash rents, build more homes at affordable rents, requisition empty properties, socialise land ownership and create an economy founded on decent wages for ordinary workers. Labour’s policy, by contrast, is to encourage “responsible capitalism”, a society that only exists in dreamland. As we have said many times, what is the point of Labour?

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

  

Revolt over benefit cuts taking off

If there was ever a government intent on getting blood out of a stone, then it is the ConDem coalition. Yet a revolt is growing over the plans to impose a “bedroom tax” and cuts to council tax benefits from April 1. Some are even suggesting it could be Cameron’s poll tax moment.

Even some Tory councils are disturbed at the implications of the so-called “welfare reforms” which are the exact opposite in their effect. Whereas “reform” means to improve things, these changes actually worsen the plight for hundreds of thousands of people.

In North Yorkshire, it’s dawned on eight Tory councils – including one that covers foreign secretary William Hague’s constituency of Richmond – that council tax benefits will hit the low-paid disproportionately hard. Pensioners are exempt so all the savings will have to come from other groups and these councils have a high proportion of older people.

Resistance is not universal by any means. Manchester, a Labour-controlled council, is working on plans to cut council tax benefit by 15%.

The present means-tested benefit provides assistance to nearly 6 million low income families in the UK, of whom 3.2 million are of working age. From April 1, a new benefits scheme administered by local councils is accompanied by a 10% cut in funding from central government. Councils have the option of absorbing this cut or passing it on. You’ve no doubt guessed which way most have gone.

A report from the Resolution Foundation says: “Almost three quarters of English local authorities, faced with these constraints, are set to respond to localisation by introducing less generous systems of support.” In other words, people who have never had to pay the tax before will find themselves hundreds of pounds worse off over a year.

Unemployed people who pay no council tax at present could find themselves having to find between £96 and £255 a year, presumably out of their pathetic dole money.

A typical single parent with children in childcare and working part-time on minimum wage will face increases in their annual council tax bill ranging from £96 (an increase of 55% on their current payment) to £577 (an increase of 333% on their current payment) depending on the severity of the local scheme introduced, says the Resolution Foundation report.

A typical couple with children where only one partner is in full-time work on the minimum wage will face increases in their annual council tax bill ranging from £96 (an increase of 12% on their current payment) to £304 (an increase of 37%on their current payment).

Then there is the “bedroom tax”, which is also due to start on April 1. Residents deemed receive housing benefit could find that significantly reduced if their social landlord deems that their accommodation is too large for their needs. They are being advised that they should move to a smaller home, take in a lodger or find a better-paid job! A family of seven in Hull could lose £80 a month under the proposals.

Resistance is building amongst tenants to the bedroom tax and other cuts. Tenants in Liverpool have organised a Defend Your Home Against the Bedroom Tax campaign while both Shelter Scotland and the STUC are backing a No Eviction for Bedroom Tax campaign organised by Govan Law Centre. 

In Liverpool, tenants are fighting back against Liverpool Mutual Homes (LMH) who manage 15,000 homes in the city. They have attacked chief executive Steve Coffey for proposing that tenants do odd jobs like litter picking on the association’s estates to help make up the shortfall. Tenants have called a “ruckus” outside LMH for February 7, declaring “We Can’t Pay and We Won’t Pay”.

Writer and artist Penny Anderson believes that the bedroom tax could become the poll tax around the Coalition’s neck. We’ll find out soon enough.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

Austerity with a class vengeance as benefit cuts bite

Most people were aware that the cuts would be harsh and affect the most vulnerable in society. But now religious figures around the country are joining with charities to point to deep privation amongst large numbers of families, long before the full range of cuts are implemented.

In Manchester, Bristol, Birmingham, Sheffield and Liverpool, many people are already experiencing cuts in benefits of £200 to £300 a year. James Jones, the Bishop of Liverpool, has warned that many cities will suffer from “urban diabetes”, where blood pumps around the heart but fails to reach other parts of the body.

Thousands of families already rely on food banks to survive and numbers are growing fast. In Liverpool, for example, 6,000 families signed up for food parcels in the city in the last six months alone. Last year, 2011-12 food banks fed 128,687 people nationwide; in 2012-13 it is thought this could rise to nearly a quarter of a million.

The ending of universal benefits with the termination of child benefit for all  – a policy promoted by the ConDems but accepted by New Labour Mark II – is being disguised by the introduction of “universal credit”. Within this consolidation of benefits into one payment are severe reductions in what people can claim.

Housing benefit for private sector tenants is being capped and most social housing tenants will have to make a contribution to their council tax. Many families are already deep in debt. It has been left up to charities to try to help those faced with council bailiffs claiming back arrears. One local vicar Rev Paul Nicholson in Tottenham, north London, has set up a group called Taxpayers against Poverty. says that charging council tax to the poor will result in “debt destitution and forced migration”.

Then there is the “bedroom tax” through which the government plans to claw back £500m a year from the housing benefit bill. People in council homes who are said to be “under-occupying” will charged £11-£20 per week unless they move to a smaller home. The financial and psychological effects of such a deeply intrusive measure is of course not acknowledged by the government’s “impact assessment”.

In areas like Derby, the housing support budget is being cut by 83% per cent over the next two years. Local charities describe it as “catastrophic”. Homelessness is rising, particularly among vulnerable young people who will no longer quality for services. (Cameron has famously proclaimed that no one under 25 years of age will qualify for housing benefits of any kind.) In 2012-13, five out of ten homelessness services had their funding cut.

The most vulnerable people in the firing line are the disabled. Building on the policies of the previous Labour government, people with disabilities are being subjected to horrendous tests by Atos. Last week former Labour Minister Michael Meacher said that 3,500 have died during the assessment process itself and another 7,100 died after being judged to be entitled to unconditional support because they are too ill or disabled to work.

Chief executive of Citizens Advice, Gillian Guy, has said Atos has given grounds for concern: “Last quarter, Citizens Advice bureaux had more than 100,000 inquiries about Employment and Support Allowance – a rise of 76%. More than 21,000 were appeals against decisions based on Atos assessments, mistakes that are subsequently overturned and have cost the taxpayer £60m over the past year.”

For many all the future holds is thus a spiral of deepening poverty and debt. The failure to increase benefits in line with inflation means there is a massive transfer of wealth going on. Cuts in benefits to reduce the budget deficit are essentially the price paid to the bankers to help pay for the financial crisis they created. This is austerity with a class vengeance at the heart of it.

A corporate-driven market state has replaced the old welfare state. It will take a complete transfer of power to ordinary people before we can even think of a future better than the one the mainstream parties have laid out before our eyes. 

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win secretary