Resolution

Happy New Year?  It's hardly likely to be any such thing if you live in the UK and depend for all or part of your income on Social Security benefits. 

If you aren't familiar with the main issues facing claimants and their communities in the coming year, this excellent article by the Guardian's John Harris explains them with commendable clarity.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2013/jan/01/welfare-a-war-over-benefits?intcmp=122

Today, the news is still full of Ian Duncan-Smith’s latest pronouncements on the ‘dependency culture’ that he chooses to believe is encouraged by what he perceives to be an over-generous welfare benefits system.  His current target is tax credits, almost certainly simply a smoke screen to divert attention away from growing concern at the haste with which Universal Credit is being imposed.

I have spent almost thirty years working in Welfare Rights and Housing, listening to comfortably well-off politicians of all persuasions decrying the negative effects on society and public morals of giving people ‘something for nothing’, but the rhetoric from the present Government is the most hysterical and reactionary I can ever recall.  What disappoints me is the lack of a robust defence, particularly of the unemployed, from the Opposition. 

Unless they intend to be complicit in the systematic dismantling of the complex but still fundamentally humane system that exists at present, in favour of an ugly and judgmental ‘one size fits all’ alternative, riddled with stigma and overbearing conditionality, it is time Labour started to promote their own clear alternative vision. 

In this blog I plan to pitch some suggestions of how this might be done, and to dispatch some of the myths about Social Security that are so easily accepted by much of the media and many of the very people who might soon need to rely upon it.