Who are the Scroungers and Tax Dodgers?

Apart from the more helpless asylum seekers, nobody is as constantly pilloried as the benefit claimants. The government perpetuated the stereotype by calling in the credit agencies as bounty hunters to crack down on “welfare cheats”. Entirely dependent on the largesse of the taxpayer, subjected to every manner of means test, experimental course and vacuous reforms.

In addition to the millions of unemployed people (reserved army), many graduates are added to the numbers of benefit claimants. Despite being well educated they have had the pleasure of claiming income support and the instructively named jobseekers’ allowance. After university they were intermittently unemployed between such casual jobs as being on minimum wage to working on coffee (bars) or shop assistance.

To claim jobseekers’ allowance, you must be available for work at all times. The point was to get unemployed people into work by remedying their confidence and social graces, the alleged obstacles that led to being unemployed for a long period of time. The government repeatedly stressed that “anything you want to do, you can do it” was the philosophy, a bizarre mismatch with the data-entry painting all benefit claimants that awaited most of the unemployed.

The managerial evangelists are taking their stick from above. When they want to get tough, politicians of all hues go for the claimants. Harriet Harman did the same for labour in 1997, Cameron’s railings against cheats, scroungers at least the virtue of being unsurprising.

So far, everything is geared to make the ordinary people suffer the cuts and hardships. David Cameron’s war on welfare cheats is drop in the ocean compared with the billions stolen by the bankers and other capitalists who have off-shore accounts. Let’s hope Cameron will be equally vociferous when it comes to encouraging eligible applicants to apply for the billion of benefits that go unclaimed each year.

It is not unusual that the government to attack the unemployed and the sick people on benefits. The routine pieties of the modern political age are to talk about “helping people” out of the “benefit trap”, and back into work, the reason why these problems never go away is because they are caused by the very system that puts the politicians in power, and which they cannot resolve without destroying themselves and their own elevated status.

Being the tough rhetoric, as even with the Tory government, is the same old fashioned like the last new Labour government style reforms; plans to make the benefit system “a ladder to self reliance” and to give assistance with training and finding to people who are on incapacity benefits. The government’s new deal like previous other schemes is supposed to “help” the unemployed back to work by badgering them and managing them into beingfull time professional jobseekers, of course, this destroys counter toany notion that they can quickly cut costs. To assist more people through such structures will actually increase the cost of encouraging the benefits, not decrease it, as massive expansion would be required.

Doctors warn that, attempts to force the long term unemployed and sick benefit claimants into work are doomed to failure (David Rose and Sam Coates Times 18 August 2010) that the government could face a financial black hole of billions of pounds.

An estimated one million people in Britain are off work or unemployed owing to mental health problems. Those who have been absent for more than six months are likely to remain unemployed for many months, years or even for the rest of their working life because of depression or anxiety, which might have been treated at an earlier stage, research suggests. The researchers found no evidence that GPs were signing people off sick inappropriately or without good reason.

All governments, past and present, have been caught with a real problem beyond their control, trapped by their eternal propaganda of cost-cutting. Ministers from all political parties try to be seen doing something usually by trying to portray the people who are dependent on benefits as somehow capable and at fault for the whole of the costs of the benefit system.

Politicians are struggling to define the typical benefit recipients, to legitimate the idea of welfare so they can attack it and reduce costs and also increase downwards pressures on wages and the labour market.

By Michael Ghebre