A letter a day to number 10. No 1,539
Wednesday 31 August 2016.
Dear Mrs May,
Within the DWP, as Iain Duncan Smith (IDS) casually informed us at a parliamentary hearing, people receiving social security payments are known as ‘stock’ and, infamously, David Freud said, “people who are poorer should be prepared to take the biggest risks” as they have “the least to lose”.
On tackling immigration, Iain Duncan Smith has announced that low skilled migrants should only be allowed to come here if there are no British workers to fill vacancies, emphasising, “You focus more at the lower-skilled areas.” Deal with the least wanted, the least valuable and the most useless first eh?
Isn’t it astonishing that low skilled workers are paid the least? So called low skilled jobs play a vital role in the smooth running of a nation, but they will certainly pay junk pay?
This narrative of low skilled workers and migrants coming over here and taking our jobs comes from government and the right wing press. The reality is very different, but only if you prefer facts over fiction, something which IDS and rags like the Sun, Express and Mail never aspire to. But that isn’t the point I wish to make.
What is important here is what’s missing and is always missing in the right wing world of authoritarian control and the brutal treatment of workers in which ‘other’ hatred plays such a vital role in maintaining people in their unquestioning misery.
Can you see any human beings here or anything that suggests any semblance of respect or dignity for people’s lives? If you can keep people dehumanised, you don’t have to worry about whether they can afford to live.
With some 13 million people in the UK living in poverty, more than half for them are in work, yet who among you cares? Where humanity is out of sight, increasing poverty doesn’t matter. 391 people died of malnutrition last year, but where are the headlines? In order to reach the headlines, people’s lives have to matter and as Freud and Smith have worked to so assiduously at and made so abundantly clear, they don’t! That is a crime against humanity which every sanction and every food parcel from a food bank and every eviction and every hungry child and every poverty related death screams out. That is Tory Britain.
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/blog/2013/dec/10/treasury-questions-politics-live-blog
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/nov/23/lord-freud-welfare-poor-risk
http://www.jrf.org.uk/data/work-poverty-levels
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/number-brits-dying-malnutrition-hunger-8611991
Fear and Loathing in Great Britain 
Reblogged this on sdbast.
Reblogged this on Social Action.