Social Security or Welfare - loaded words

 

In the supplement to yesterday's Guardian, there was an article by Zoe Williams about the false "skivers v strivers" arguments peddled by Ian Duncan-Smith and other Coalition Ministers.

The comment was made that everyone now talks about welfare benefits rather than social security payments. I, too, did this in my piece the underserving rich earlier this week. Therefore, I have resolved that in future I will always refer to social secuity benefits.

Like most of the neo-liberal agenda and propoganda, talking of "welfare" as a derogatory term comes from the USA. It is used to demonise those who do not have a job or cannot work. It infers that there should be no sense that anyone should be entitled to financial support from the state. A few years ago, there was the abusive term "welfare mothers" applied to lone parents.

British politicians have anbandoned the historic term "social security", because it suggests that working people have an entitlement to benefits when they lose their jobs or become unable to work. The whole post war-settlement Welfare State, created by Labour, is being unpicked piece by piece.

I having heard that certain MPs, mainly Tories, are saying in private that they should have a 32% pay increase. As many people consider MPs to be skivers rather than strivers, I wonder how they would explain their sense of entitlement to their constituents?

The underserving rich?

How much longer will we tolerate the underserving rich?

 

I am dismayed that the Victorian notion of "the undeserving poor" is featuring in the current debate of the planned capping of welfare benefits. Even more sickening is that this slur is being made by millionaire Cabinet Ministers and the mouthpieces of the billionaire, right-wing newspaper proprietors.

 

Sadly, the whole "strivers not shirkers" rhetoric began when Labour started talking about "hard working families". Regrettably, this was taken from the same New Labour lexicon as "Middle England" and is just a code for the middle classes, designed to appeal to their prejudices. The underlying claim is that only professional, managerial and middle-income people - the Middle Class- are hard working.

 

Under the neo-liberal policies that have been pursued by governments since the 1990s, a virtual war has been declared on any sort of safety net of welfare benefits, through means testing and actual cuts. The post-war concept of universal benefits is a complete anaethema to neo-liberal politcians.

 

In today's world of tightly controlled media (controlled by the very rich and their apologists) there is no possibility of  a mature and rational discussion of the distribution of wealth, let alone the redistribution of it between rich and poor. I would throw in the concept of the underserving rich, and particularly their manifestation in the Cabinet of the Coalition Governement. How many of those currently on the Government's payroll are truly hardworking?  Is the inherited wealth enjoyed by many of the Cabinet actually deserved?

 

How does the practice of tax avoidance fervently pursued by the very rich, the use of tax havens and the off-shoring of their companies, make these individuals deserving. Of course they are all hardworking if we believe the lickspittle ring-wing press.

 

It puzzles me that supposedly 'progressive' Liberal Democrat Party supports this disgraceful state of affairs. I am at a loss to name one example of where their Ministers and MPs have reigned-in the malice of the Tories. Their collusion in the current round of benefit cuts is truly diabolical. I hope that they have signed their own electoral death warrant.

 

There is also the question of what the working classes can do defeat the Tories and Lib-Dems. A general strike by trade unions could force a change of government and policy, but this looks more and more unlikely by the week. The Labour Party is still in the hangover of the Blairite aspirational, fantasy politics. Ed Miliband's attempt to claim the "One Nation" tag is also a misjudgement, because the Tories always supported the rich man in his castle and keeping the the poor man at his gate. Labour Party members should start putting pressure on the Leadership to abandon their tacit support for the policies of austerity.