A royal wedding announcement is a great time to bury bad news about benefit cuts

Tuesday, 28 November 2017

A royal wedding announcement is a great time to bury bad news about benefit cuts

There is this from the Independent:

Government confirms freeze on working age benefits minutes after Prince Harry wedding news revealed

Freeze continues amid the longest fall in living standards for 60 years

"According to Clarence House, the wedding will take place in Spring 2018" — by which time many more parts of the UK will be experiencing the 'shock and awe' of 'Universal Credit full roll-out'. That in itself will be an opportunity to 'bury bad news'.

Meanwhile, there is this excellent Zoe Williams article from The Guardian:

Such is the poverty of Tory ideas that they deny poverty even exists

.... good intentions would manifest in curiosity about the lived experience of one’s policies, which would in turn entail figuring out what those policies amounted to in the aggregate. Failure to ask such questions is not born out of ignorance: it is critical to the Conservative narrative to deny, forcefully and sometimes gleefully, that anyone in the country is struggling.

The contrast between the royal wedding announcement and UK poverty reminds me of lines in a Harvey Andrews & Graham Cooper song, 'Targets' that was written to commemorate Margaret Thatcher's election as Tory Party leader in 1975:

We would have married long ago
And we're still hoping one day
Two up two down and a little lawn
And time to rest on Sunday.
I wish the ones who left us here
Could live like us and borrow
I'd place a pound for what it's worth
That they'd be gone tomorrow

We'd like a yacht, some rooms to spare
And horses in the stable
We might as well believe that we
Could buy meat for the table.

Call us equal, call us proud, call yourself a liar
No matter what the people do, they set the target higher

The Zoe Williams article even mentions nurses using food banks. So much for 'the pursuit of inequality'. Where has it got us?

Blog post by Dude Swheatie of Kwug

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Helping you feel at home: We meet weekly in the Small Hall at KingsgateCC and start gathering from 3pm, attempting to start the meetings at about 3:15pm and definitely before 3:30pm.

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The formal meetings start with firstname and what benefit we are on or a one-liner about what brings us to KUWG. (Pensioners and other allies welcome.)

We then ask for casework from those present, arrange who will help with what case, and go onto discussing campaigning leafleting and such outreach activities. We also arrange who will do the chairing or facilitating and note-taking for the following week. Rotating these roles helps minimise the risk of being dominated by one person and helps us build our skills as we share the workload.

Meetings actually finish at about 5:20pm to allow for putting tables and chairs back and leaving the kitchen facilities ready for the next group.

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Tuesday, 28 November 2017