As Some Day It May Happen That A Victim Must Be Found

As some day it may happen that a victim must be found,
I’ve got a little list, I’ve got a little list
Of society offenders who might well be underground,
And who never would be missed, who never would be missed.

So sings the Lord High Executioner in Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado. In 1992, Peter Lilley MP (whom I am ashamed to say is an Old Alleynian), suggested at the Conservative Party Conference that, among those society offenders who never would be missed could be included “welfare scroungers” and “young ladies who get pregnant just to jump the housing queue.” This belief pervades middle class opinion beyond all reasonable degree. The idea that people on benefits are simply scroungers and that the poor are poor because they’re lazy and therefore don’t deserve benefits has become almost axiomatic in British politics. Indeed, such a view has been one of the tenets of the Conservative Party ever since Mrs. Thatcher decided she didn’t like poor people. Worryingly, it’s starting to infiltrate that former bastion of Socialism and defender of working class rights, the Labour Party.

The Conservative Party have never really been comfortable with the government helping people. I’m not quite sure why they have an aversion to helping those in need, but they are perpetually on the lookout for ways to get out of giving money to the people that need it most. David Cameron, the allegedly ‘Compassionate Conservative’, recently announced a tough new policy on incapacity benefit. He wants to force all of the 2.64 million recipients of incapacity benefit to prove that they are actually disabled. As support for this policy, he cited the ‘fact’ that there are 200,000 people who are pretending to be disabled in order to receive the pittance that is incapacity benefit (about £80 a week at most, clearly a fortune). Where he got this figure, no-one is quite sure, although I have an idea that it may have come from an orifice not usually associated with good ideas.

This ridiculous pronouncement is hot on the heels of another, equally ridiculous one, that the Conservatives would follow the Wisconsin model for benefits. For those that do not know, the Wisconsin model entails mothers of infants being forced into work, the privatisation of social security (which led to incompetence, corruption and general lack of decency in welfare distribution) and, as if that isn’t enough, you were only allowed to claim 2 years of benefits throughout your whole life. No provision was made to enable the unemployed to be retrained and given skills that would get them at least acceptable jobs so that they didn’t have to resort to benefits. No, as far as the leaders in Wisconsin were concerned, the poor were worth precisely sod all.

Just to put things into perspective, receiving benefits is not a comfortable or good position to be in. Unemployment benefit (or Jobseeker’s allowance as it has been pointlessly renamed) is £46.85 a week for those between 18 and 24, and £59.15 for those aged 25 or over. As a guidance, the poverty line for 2005/2006 was £108 per week for a single adult (that is after tax and housing payments have been deducted). Obviously people don’t live on unemployment benefit alone, but even so, it does not provide anything like a comfortable amount of money for these so-called scroungers. Living on benefits entails living in appalling conditions in the most run-down, crime-ridden areas of the country. If you think this is a rare occurrence, think again. 13 million people in this country live below the poverty line, that’s a fifth of the population. It rips apart self-respect and leads to human misery on a scale unimaginable by the likes of the Conservatives who believe an estate is something with fields and a large house.

Yet this is the Conservative view of Britain. A nation where the upper and middle classes pay less tax and the poor suffer. A nation where the misery of poverty is compounded by a draconian welfare system. The further destruction of the welfare state started by Clement Attlee in 1945. He sought to build a New Jerusalem here in the UK, a new promised land where suffering was unknown and people could get the help they needed without being subjected to abuse and suspicion.

With 13 million people in this nation living in poverty, one would think that every political party would seek to help them out of it. Especially as poverty breeds the criminality that Middle England is so afraid of. But, instead of improving education, both for adults and children, instead of helping people raise their aspirations beyond becoming the most powerful drug dealer on the estate, the Conservatives want to get tough on the impoverished, probably because nobody ever lost an election going after the poor.

The day has come and the victim has been found. It is the British poor, and David Cameron is the Lord High Executioner.