Self-help support vs ravages of 'welfare reform'. Never attend anywhere official alone!
This blog currently focuses on national policy matters that impact upon KUWG members.
Kilburn Unemployed Workers Group as a group focuses primarily on combating benefits injustices locally through advocacy in individuals' benefit claims, and demonstrations that emphasise that there is hope when we come together. We are more angry than frightened.
'Right to buy' extension: David Cameron is for workers? Or is it 'David Cameron is for wankers'?
By Dude Swheatie of Kwug
The Labour manifesto stuff about 'fiscal responsibility' and 'hard working families' was nasty to a decades long disabled jobseeker, but today's launch of the Tory manifesto with its extension of 'right to buy' and housing extensions selling off social housing homes once tenants have been moved out is something I find potentially gut wrenching at a time when I should be nursing an injured finger from an accident this morning.
A
Conservative government would extend the right-to-buy scheme for
housing association tenants in England, David Cameron will say, as he
unveils his party's general election manifesto.
The PM will say up
to 1.3 million tenants could buy their homes at a discount as a result,
insisting the Tories are the party of working people....
The photographic backdrop to to the photo of David Cameron delivering the Conservative manifesto proclaims:
STRONG LEADERSHIP A CLEAR ECONOMIC PLAN A BRIGHTER, MORE SECURE FUTURE
The biggest problem there is that the 'clear economic plan' is built upon lies and half-truths and it includes a plan for the privatisation of what remains of the UK's social housing stock and placing it in the clutches of global billionaires.(2)
Clearly a 'corporatist' economic plan
The 'right to buy' extension is the 'carrot'. How much will taxpayers including those of us who don't pay income tax but do pay VAT be subsidising that instead of investment in green energy and home insulation against global warming and fuel poverty? But of course, according to the currently prevailing ideology, anyone who is not in waged employment or 'financially independent of the state' is a 'useless eater', aren't we?(3)
The 'stick' is more a stick extension really. The Cameron-Clegg coalition Government tightened the financial screws on 'social landlords' to the point that they were already keen to 'up stakes' in 'more desirable areas', selling off properties there and shipping poorer tenants out to areas where there were even fewer work opportunities.(4) (We now have school teachers priced out of living in Camden where they teach commuting in from Folkestone!(5))
The Conservative 2015 UK General Election manifesto — if accepted by the electorate — would
"force councils to sell properties ranked in the most expensive third of their type in the local area, once they become vacant."(6)
In conclusion for now, the UK's media and the majority of mainstream politicians have allowed the property market practices that were the real cause of the 2008 banks crash to get away with murder,
not only of poor people through disability benefit eligibility testing, benefit sanctions,
but also of truly civil society while hoodwinking people in waged employment to despise jobseekers and people incapable of anything like a 16 hour working week as undeserving.
David Cameron is for workers? Or is it 'David Cameron is for wankers'?
(Actually, the song video chorus line says 'David Camerson is a w@nker'.)
(2) 'Right to buy' is a means of privatisation very much in line with neoliberalism or 'corporatism's' 'holy trinity' as exposed by Naomi Klein in her incisive book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
(3) 'Useless eaters' is the term Nazis used to describe disabled people. And their extermination of disabled people was firstly through denial of services, secondly through forced sterilisation, and thirdly through making parents so desperate that a parent writing into Hitler's 'bright ideas' mailbag' was so desperate that he asked for the 'mercy killing' of his learning disabled son, and Hitler thought: "What a great idea!" (Memorised from a TV documentary viewed on daytime tv.)
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