Welfare Reform debate secured in the House of Common on the 27th February 2014

A House of Commons debate on welfare reform, secured by sick and disabled people via the WOW petition, will be held on Thursday 27th February 2014.

The WOW petition, called for a cumulative impact assessment of welfare reform as it affects sick and disabled people, and an end to the disastrous Work Capability Assessment.

Iain Duncan Smith’s claim that welfare reform is making work pay, and supporting those who need support, is becoming increasingly untenable, as sick and disabled people hit by multiple cuts fall into poverty and debt, and turn to foodbanks in increasing numbers.

In December 2013, Claire Nurden from the MS Society said:

“The combined impact of the changes to the benefits system will be nothing short of devastating for many disabled people. It’s extremely worrying that disabled people are already being forced to rely on food banks. With many of the cuts yet to kick in, the situation can only get worse from here.”

On Wednesday 19th February, forty-three Christian leaders including 27 Anglican bishops have signed a letter in the Daily Mirror Newspaper denounce David Cameron’s welfare reforms for creating a “national crisis “and urging him to ensure people get enough to eat.

They argue that "cutbacks and failures" in the benefits system are forcing thousands of people to use food banks.

The Secretary of State overseeing these changes is a Roman Catholic, and has famously compared his welfare reforms to the abolition of slavery, so it was highly significant when the Archbishop of Westminster, Vincent Nichols, recently called his policies ‘a disgrace’, saying:

"The basic safety net that was there to guarantee that people would not be left in hunger or in destitution has actually been torn apart. It no longer exists and that is a real, real dramatic crisis."

As Mr Duncan Smith has from the outset seemed uninterested in how sick and disabled people would be affected by his reforming zeal, the think tank Demos did its own research and it concluded:

“Our research reveals that disabled people are bearing the brunt of the austerity measures, losing an estimated £28.3 bilion by 2017/18. 

While striking, these calculations will invariably be an underestimate of the true impact of the cuts – as we opted for the most conservative estimates on the more unknown elements of reform".

 Claudia Wood, Deputy Director of Demos said:

“What’s shocking is that the Government doesn’t assess the likely combined impact of these changes – only the impact of each change individually. However, many disabled families are being affected by combinations of four, five and even six changes, so we’re asking the Government to change tack, and start to publish cumulative impact assessments.” .

Carers UK says carers, who are surely ‘hardworking people’, will also lose £1 billion.

“The Government heaps praise on carers as ‘heroes’ at the same time as it is slashing their support. Worse still, carers are being hit repeatedly by cuts which the Government says are designed to move people into work and penalise people who are ‘not contributing to society," says Helena Herklots of Carers UK.

Incredibly, it seems possible that many coalition MPs do not understand their own policies when it comes to welfare reform. 

Dame Anne Begg MP, Chair of the Work and Pensions Select Committee, recently said that Government MPs actually believe that disabled people are exempt from the bedroom tax, yet this is simply not the case.

If coalition MPs are so ignorant of the disastrous impact of welfare reform on disabled people it is vital for them to attend the debate and listen. 

One would hope that many would find their consciences pricked once they understand that some of the poorest and most vulnerable people in the country have shouldered the heaviest burden of austerity.

Having worked for over a year to secure this important debate, sick and disabled people are now trying to ensure that as many MPs as possible will attend. 

Please contact your MP and ask him or her to attend the debate and listen with an open mind. It is not much to ask when cancer patients are being forced to go to foodbanks to survive.

The WOW team have made it very easy for you to help, all the tools you need can be found here. 

You can also promote and follow the debate on Twitter using #WOWFeb27 and help ensure that sick and disabled people are not abandoned to poverty and despair.

The Church of England and Women Bishops

If the Church of England debate on Tuesday 11th February in the morning and afternoon about women bishops told us very much at all, it was to do with what happens when pragmatism and popularity becomes confused with principle.

This post isn’t a comment on the rights and wrongs of women bishops - it’s about how you arrive at the positions you hold, and how you argue for those positions.

I’m not an expert on the ins and outs of how the Church of England’s General Synod works, but here are, as reported in the media - eg: here and here - the three main reasons why the church needs female bishops, and needs them now (or at least within the next year).

Outsiders think the church is out-of-date, old-fashioned and bigoted

1.    There may well not be enough men who would make good bishops.

2.    The church has already made up its mind.

3.    These all sound great. But none of them are good.

Firstly, since when did non-Christians’ view of Christians shape what Christians do? The whole mission of a church is to be both a beacon of and a spotlight on God. That is, local churches are saying to those living in spiritual darkness - look at the light. It’s really very different to the darkness, isn’t it?

Our society may think that the church is out of date because it has (or, has had) different views on what it means to be a man and a woman.

But, that does not make those views wrong. It does not make them right. It is what God thinks that is meant to inform what we think and it is better to be in line with him than popular with others; better to offend others than to offend him.

Secondly, since when did we make decisions based on pragmatics rather than principles? If it is right to have female bishops, it’s right because the Bible says it’s right - not because there aren’t very many good guys around. If it’s wrong, it’s wrong - even if there aren’t very many great guys around. The church is called to do what’s right, not what works.

Thirdly, the church, according to its own way of doing things, has in fact not made up its mind on women bishops and the General Synod did not vote with the necessary majority to open the possibility for women to be bishops.

The church’s own rules necessitate a waiting period, a time for reflecting and listening and checking your own conscience is being informed by Scripture. 

The church, according to its own practices, made up its mind to take its time and it’s worth taking the approach being adopted in Synod and applying it to the earthly ministry of Christ.

If Jesus had been governed by what was popular, and by what worked pragmatically, he would never have told the truth about who he was, never have challenged our hearts, and never died on the cross.

He would have been a God who didn’t speak, a Saviour who didn’t rescue, a Lord who didn’t rule, and a Shepherd who didn’t lead - An empty Jesus, a blank slogan for anyone to write their own personal opinions and views onto.

And an empty Jesus is exactly the Jesus you’re left with when you put your own popularity or your own pragmatics ahead of recognising his Person and following his principles.

Regardless of whether you think, on biblical principle, that female bishops are right or not, surely that’s a bad place for the Church of England to be

Floods, spending cuts and taxation

As the nation’s attention is increasingly focused on the plight of people in flood-affected areas, one strand of political opinion, usually quite vocal, has remained noticeably silent.

Advocates of low tax and low public spending have had little to say faced with a situation which demands a huge response from the full range of public services.

Organisations like The Taxpayers Alliance (TPA), which never usually misses an opportunity to appear in the media, and boasts of being highly influential on government policy, has no reference to the floods on their website.

The TPA has issued only one press release so far this year, on 6^th January urging George Osborne to make further spending cuts.

On 7^th February however, as Somerset residents grew ever more desperate, Twitter revealed that the TPA was out campaigning on an issue which affects the South West their members were "fighting for a cut in Cider Tax".

As for UKIP, its policies are in a state of flux since its 2010 manifesto was recently disowned by Nigel Farage, and dismissed as ‘almost 500 pages of junk’ by new Head of Policy Tim Aker.

A discussion paper by Godfrey Bloom on the UKIP website asserts, ‘Taxation needs to be drastically reduced but only alongside equally drastic cuts in public spending’.

A flat rate tax of 25 per cent is proposed as fair: if implemented this would mean a big tax cut for the wealthy. 

UKIP’s suggestion as to what could be done for flood victims is to redirect money from the overseas aid budget and it seems following a question in the House of Commons on Tuesday 11^th February that Shipley MP, Philip Davies is also of the same opinion.

Meanwhile, the Environment Agency (EA) became a political scapegoat, as having first slashed its budget the government proceeded to blame it for the floods.

On 2^nd January, before the full force of the storms hit, the Telegraph reported ‘Officials working on flood risk management will be sacked as Environment Agency (EA) sheds about 15 per cent of its workforce to save money, potentially placing ability to cope with floods at risk’.

As the waters rose on the Somerset Levels, local Conservative MP Iain Liddell Grainger resorted to childish personal abuse of the EA head Lord Smith, despite having been a keen supporter of spending cuts and having opposed a flood prevention scheme on grounds of cost in 2010.

Lord Smith eventually responded, writing the Guardian:

"It's not only the overall allocation for flood defence work that limits what we can do. There is also a limit on the amount we can contribute to any individual scheme, determined by a benefit-to-cost rule imposed on us by the Treasury”.

“Take, for example, the highly visible issue of the dredging of the rivers on the Somerset Levels. Last year, after the 2012 floods, we recognised the local view that taking silt out of the two main rivers would help to carry water away faster after a flood”.

“The Environment Agency put £400,000 on the table to help with that work – the maximum amount the Treasury rules allowed us to do. The additional funds from other sources that would be needed didn't come in."

We are three years in to a programme of public spending cuts and the cuts were apparently justified by the need to reduce the deficit, but the philosophy of the politicians who dominate the Coalition is intrinsically hostile to public spending and in favour of low taxes.

For them, the financial crisis provided the opportunity to implement cuts they would have wished to make in any case.

They advised that we would have to "do more with less", but it is difficult to see how we can face the increasing challenges of climate change and extreme weather events with a shrinking public sector.

Doing more with less has already proved impossible in many areas, and those who suffer the consequences are usually the weakest and most vulnerable.

Take just one example, that of adult social care

We have now reached a situation where ‘almost 40 per cent of those who would have had some help with basic tasks such as washing and dressing less than a decade ago are now left to fend for themselves’.

This quietly rising tide of human misery, unlike the floods, is virtually invisible, but is no less serious for the people affected. 

No politician would openly call for care to be removed from sick and elderly people, but they openly advocate policies which inevitably lead to this.

It is perfectly legitimate for people to argue for low taxes and low public spending, but they should in fairness be much clearer about what this would mean for society in practice.

When a politician makes a spending promise they are almost always asked where they will get the money from, or if they will raise taxes.

In future, politicians who advocate lower taxes or spending cuts should be obliged to spell out much more clearly just what the consequences will be.

Taxation is the price we pay for a civilised society, and those who object to paying tax should be clear just what part of that civilised society they wish to forego, and what areas of the country or sections of the population they are prepared to abandon.