A letter a day to number 10. No 1,319
Monday 18 January 2016.
Dear Mr Cameron,
There was a comment on yesterday’s letter, No. 1,318, that the poor shouldn’t breed, that they are irresponsible and don’t care for their kids or their education. It’s a growing trend once again started at the top and fed down for lazy commentators to repeat without thought. It’s originator was Iain Duncan Smith who proposed limiting child benefit to the first two children which would ‘help behavioural change’, a deceitful way of laying the blame for poverty firmly on the poor who all behave irresponsibly or they wouldn’t be poor in the first place.
This is lazy eugenics suggesting that the worst ‘stock’ (the poor) needs dealing with to improve the genetic quality of the human population, as if the poor are feckless scroungers who don’t want to work, preferring to live a life of luxury on benefits, drinking, smoking and doing drugs and neglecting their children.
Of course, as you know very well, poverty is capitalism’s dirty secret. A cheap labour force is very good for business and profits. Regardless of the product cheap labour creates wealth. The worst companies exploit cheap labour under appalling working conditions sometimes with disastrous results as we saw in Bangladesh when a factory collapsed killing 1,129 people. Legislation is hard won and slow to implement and resisted by those whose interests are served by cheap, insecure, labour.
Your own attacks on our Unions speak volumes, an organised work force is bad for profits, attacking employment protection as mere red tape and scrapping the human rights act creates an ever more insecure work force which you want to control and dominate under the guise of promoting growth. That growth clearly does not include the poor with more than half of those in poverty in work.
To suggest that the poor shouldn’t breed or have their breeding restricted and need behaviour modification imposed on them is utterly despicable. Labour is the bread basket of the nation yet is consistently reviled by those who benefit the most from keeping people poor. Whilst capitalism benefits the most from the poor, their exclusion from the fruits of their labour doesn’t matter as long as there are enough in the middle and top who do benefit.
As the Independent revealed the poor lose the highest percentage of income to overall taxation, direct and indirect. Those who complain about the poor should perhaps shout a little less loudly and hold back on all that righteous indignation and consider the benefits they enjoy from those stuck in the imposed violence of poverty.
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/dec/14/child-benefit-limited-two-children-iain-duncan-smith
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-31743031
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/01/31/iain-duncan-smith-child-poverty_n_2588731.html
https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2011/06/07/the-working-poor/
Fear and Loathing in Great Britain 
Reblogged this on sdbast.