Now Is The Time For Pointing Fingers – One Man’s Arrogance Is Behind The Foodbank Explosion

Today’s shocking news that the number of people using foodbanks has trebled in just one year comes just months after many of Iain Duncan Smith’s most brutal welfare reforms were introduced.

According to The Trussell Trust over 350,000 people received emergency food from the charity between April and September 2013.  This follows the introduction of the Bedroom Tax in April, the phased introduction of the Benefit Cap over the Summer and the demolition of the Social Fund which used to provide emergency loans and small grants to the destitute.

Alongside this a massive extension of workfare and benefit sanctions has taken place with both unemployed and sick or disabled claimants having money stopped for “seemingly illogical reasons” in the words of The Trussell Trust Executive Chairman Chris Mould.

Mould has called for an inquiry into hunger in the UK and insists this is not a time for pointing fingers but for finding solutions.   But no solutions will be found until Iain Duncan Smith’s wrecking spree at the DWP comes to an end.

And that is why this is precisely the time for pointing fingers.  Iain Duncan Smith’s messianic belief that he alone has the answers to poverty, along with his obsession that unemployed people are responsible for unemployment, has directly to led to the policies which are causing the present suffering.

Time and time again Iain Duncan Smith has been told that benefit sanctions do not ‘incentivise’ people to look harder for jobs.  Benefit sanctions demolish people’s lives.  For those left with nothing every second is spent worrying where the next meal will come from and there is simply no money for clothes, bus fares, hair cuts, stamps, phone calls and all the other things you need to be able to successfully look for a job.

Almost every organisation concerned with housing in the UK has warned that claimants hit by the Bedroom Tax or Benefit Cap cannot simply just move house.  There is nowhere to move to, even if those already in poverty can afford the expense of moving.  Instead claimants, often parents, have been left with a desperate choice between paying their rent or feeding their children.

Yet Iain Duncan Smith has chosen to ignore not just the so-called experts in the charity sector, or the views of claimants themselves, but the DWP’s own evidence that his policies are not working.  Even his obsession with work is shown to be bogus.  Work is not the best way out of poverty if that work is low paid and insecure.  Half the people who visit foodbanks have jobs.  And yet instead of confronting this reality, Iain Duncan Smith’s only answer is to use yet more benefit cuts and in-work benefit sanctions to try and force people to get better paid jobs.

And yet these jobs no more exist than a stock of housing exists to provide all those hit by the Bedroom Tax with a home.  All of these vicious policies have been based on a myth, a delusion that there is a well paying full-time job for everyone if only people would pull their finger out.

The shocking truth is that if every single vacancy in the UK was filled by someone unemployed tomorrow, there would still be two million people looking for work.  And that figure doesn’t include the hundreds of thousands of people who are sick, disabled, or single parents who the Government are now forcing to compete in the jobs market under the threat of benefits being stopped or sanctioned.  Neither does it include the millions strong army of part-time workers, people on zero hour contracts, or in precarious self-employment, who are all to be forced to endlessly look for ‘more or better paid work’ when Universal Credit is introduced.

Iain Duncan Smith often seems too foolish or naive to realise that all his reforms are achieving is a cut-throat competition for low paid work that will only ever benefit employers.  The most dangerous thing of all about the Work and Pension’s Secretary is that he genuinely seems to believe his own bullshit.  And throughout it all he has been egged on by toffs like David Cameron and George Osborne who know all too well what the real game plan is – and that is the destruction of the living standards of not just those unable to work, but every worker in the UK.  They are not interested in the slightest in child poverty figures or the number of people using foodbanks.  They are all too happy to have a few million people destitute as a warning to everyone else of what might happen if you don’t work hard, do what your boss tells you and take a pay cut every time a company director wants a new Jaguar.

But whatever his intentions were, it is Iain Duncan Smith who has been the architect of this brutal regime.  It is Iain Duncan Smith who insists that more of the same will fix the problems he is creating.  One man’s arrogance has led to hundreds of thousands of hungry children in one of the richest countries in the world.  So let’s point the finger.  Those families are queuing outside foodbanks because of the actions of just one man.  And that man is Iain Duncan Smith.  Let his name be spat with venom throughout history as he is remembered as the callous fool who brought homelessness, poverty and hunger not seen in generations back to the UK.

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Tesco Called on Government To Scrap Benefit Sanctions As Profits Dipped

Tesco claim to have called on the DWP to scrap benefit sanctions in a response to a letter asking them about their use of forced, unpaid workers.

In a humiliating snub to Iain Duncan Smith, the company set up their own workfare scheme outside of the Jobcentre system last year.  Tesco say that this scheme is entirely voluntary but add in the letter:  “I appreciate your concerns and can advise that Tesco have suggested to the Department of Work and Pensions that, to avoid any misunderstanding about the voluntary nature of the scheme, the risk of losing benefits that currently exists should be removed.”

Now unless Tesco are fibbing, if their scheme is outside of the various DWP workfare schemes, then it should be entirely voluntary.  The statement suggests that in order to avoid confusion Tesco would like to see all benefit sanctions removed.  Tesco want free workers without the bad PR, and have no doubt calculated that with youth unemployment soaring, they can easily manipulate young people into working for free.  The company have even stated that “going forward” young people “accepted for work experience with Tesco” will have the option of being paid minimum wage and those that complete a placement successfully will be given a real job.

Yet just 300 of those who worked unpaid at Tesco have been employed, despite around 1,400 people having ‘donated’ their time to support the company.  What Tesco really seem to be saying is that occasionally we might employ someone without making them work unpaid first.  How fucking big of them.

There is another reason why Tesco might oppose benefit sanctions however.  Whilst Tesco are far from the cheapest shop, they are often the biggest in areas where there are high numbers of benefit claimants.  A significant chunk of the UK’s social security budget ends up in the pockets of Tesco shareholders – along with small local businesses and the utilities companies – something George Osborne seems to have forgotten.

Every family queuing at a foodbank is a family that didn’t shop in Tesco that week.  The latest available figures suggest 680,000 benefit sanctions were handed out in the first 10 months of 2012.  During the same period Tesco’s profits fell for the first time in 20 years.

The bedroom tax, council tax benefit changes, housing benefit cuts and the raft of other vicious measures set to impoverish the already impoverished are also all about to begin.  These changes are big enough, and will affect enough people, that Tesco, along with ASDA, Poundland, Lidl, Aldi and other discount retailers are waking up to the fact that if their core customers have less money, then so will they.

Tesco have already taken steps to mitigate this problem.  Shortly before Christmas last year Tesco teamed up with the The Trussell Trust “to launch the biggest ever nationwide food collection for people in crisis.”

Customers in Tescos around the UK were invited to donate an item of shopping bought at the supermarket to their local Trussell Trust foodbank.  The company set up collection points in many of their stores to make this easier.  Claimants shouldn’t be fooled by this apparently charitable gesture.  Tesco make no real secret of the fact they are a bunch of cunts.  They are simply attempting to ensure that if people are getting their food from foodbanks, then that food was bought in Tesco first.

Join South London Solidarity Federation and others to protest against workfare outside Peckham Poundland tomorrow: https://www.facebook.com/events/631652860184840/

Follow me on twitter @johnnyvoid