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 

Notes

1. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/benefit-freeze-working-people-typical-family-300-real-terms-cut-inflation-a8079196.html
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpsSb8AHIQ4
3. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/nov/27/poverty-tory-ideas-budget

LGA info toward questions for 2015 General Election candidates

Local Government Association info toward questions for 2015 General Election candidates

By Dude Swheatie of Kwug

While it might be difficult to facilitate real safe contact between some parliamentary candidates and benefit claimants through getting candidates to stand with us in our solidarity visits to jobcentres and such places where poor people are not properly served, Revd Paul Nicolson of Taxpayers Against Poverty has written Lord Heseltine regarding what is really going on. A brief extract from that letter in response to Heseltine's argument that Church of England Archbishops have spoken out unwisely against UK poverty may help to inform and provide food for parliamentary candidates' thought.

The Local Government Association recommended in January 2015 that the next government;

1. Fully fund council tax support, acknowledging that the scheme to date has taken millions of pounds out of funding for council services, and has increased the cost of living for some of the poorest.
2. Analyse the combined impact of all welfare reforms, including council tax support, at a local level, publish the results of this work, and take this impact into account in any future welfare reforms, and future local government funding settlements.

Trying to extract any tax from £72.40 adult unemployment benefit was doomed to failure from the start so; it results in a cut in local authority funding because it cannot be collected. All unemployed adults receive £72.40 or less while Children’s and disability benefits are added; when a disabled person fails the Work Capability Assessment their income is reduced to £72.40; there are 4.1 million benefit claimants affected (3). Since April 2013 many benefit claimants have had to pay rent and council tax out of that £72.40; (3)

— To Lord Heseltine who said Archbishops “Factually wrong” and “out of touch” about poverty and inequality in the UK