Benefits

Tories assault disabled benefits

The government Autumn Statement announced changes to benefits which are cruel, vindictive and won’t help people return to work. The government claims to be addressing long term economic inactivity as 2.55 million people are off work due to chronic illness. The changes announced are to the Work Capability Assessment (WCA) starting from 2025. The WCA is a test in which disabled claimants, if assessed as unable to work, are put in the category of LCW or LCWRA — Limited Capacity to Work or Limited Capacity for Work Related Activity. People in the LCWRA group receive an extra £390.06 a month and...

Labour leaders sit in Tory trap

After a year in which the NHS and other public services have crumbled as never before, the Tories’ 22 November Autumn Statement responded by tax cuts for big business and no relief for public services. Even before winter starts, the NHS waiting list (on latest available figures , September 2023) is still rising, and at a record level of 7.8 million in England. It was a bit over two million before the Tories came to office in 2010. Most patients (57.6%) on the waiting list in September 2023 had been there for more than 18 weeks. 391,122 cases had been waiting more than 52 weeks and some for...

Labour, democracy, and Rosebank

Activists from Workers' Liberty and supporters of Solidarity will be at Labour Party conference and women's conference, 7-11 October in Liverpool. We'll be there to help the efforts of Free Our Unions, the Labour Campaign for Free Movement, the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign, India Labour Solidarity, and other campaigns; to sell literature, seek discussions and contacts. There will be demonstrations for the NHS and for abortion rights on Saturday, for free education on Sunday. And agitation for a block on new North Sea oil and gas fields, following the Tories' decision to "max out" licences in...

Abolish benefit sanctions

Jeremy Hunt has changed the benefits system for lead parents, most of whom are women. Hundreds of thousands of parents who rely on Universal Credit will be discouraged from providing day-to-day care for their children. The changes affect 800,000 parents or carers. About 300,000 people with young children will face a greater risk of sanction (having benefits docked), according to estimates from the Work Foundation. The government says it could dock benefits unless parents: • Are available for work up to 30 hours a week once their youngest child turns three, up from the current requirement of 16...

DWP cover-up fails

For the best part of a decade disability rights activists have been battling the management of the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) to prevent the burying of information about deaths of benefit claimants.

Tax the rich to repair wages and NHS!

Nadim Zahawi, chair of the Tory party, last year Chancellor of the Exchequer, famously claimed public money to warm his stables. The same entrepreneurial spirit inspired him to try to avoid paying tax on £20 million he made selling shares — at a time when many, forced onto pre-payment meters, literally cannot afford to heat their homes in the freezing cold. Zahawi should resign, and corruption and tax avoidance should be rooted out. But the much bigger issue is the spiralling wealth of the rich per se. That spiralling, and the bad situation huge swathes of the population find ourselves in —...

Raise benefits, ban pre-payment meters, public ownership of energy!

The UN’s International Labour Organisation has described the level of benefits in the UK as a “policy of keeping [people] below the absolute poverty line... using social security as a means of economic compulsion to labour”. Universal Credit (UC) rose only 3.1% in April 2022. After a year of falling way behind inflation, in April 2023 it will rise by 10.1%, to £85 a week. For people under 25 and couples it’s even less. £85 is still lower than the rate before the Tories cut UC, in October 2021, from £95 to £75. The standard rate of UC is equivalent to about 16% of workers’ previous earnings. In...

Campaign to raise benefits!

Liz Truss’s government may backtrack on cutting benefits. Truss and Kwarteng had implied most working-age benefits, including Universal Credit, would rise in April 2023 in line with earnings, not inflation — producing a real-terms cut of 4-5%. Now public outrage at the Tories and jitters in their parliamentary party may have pushed them back. If Truss and Kwarteng’s original plan goes ahead, it will increase the numbers in poverty by 450,000 at a stroke, including 200,000 children. 350,000 of those will be in households where someone works. But maintaining benefits at their existing poverty...

Women's Fightback: Not shock absorbers, but fighters!

My mother’s mental arithmetic was second to none, and her management skills were astonishing, in the days before Excel spread sheets, her accounting skills were fine tuned to the penny on the back of brown envelopes. Despite having little time for hobbies, but perhaps with a secret desire to run away with the circus, she perfected plate spinning and juggling. She was, during the 1970s, a domestic poverty manager. The pay for this relentless work was exhaustion. The sort of exhaustion that comes from constantly putting a brave face on things, of traipsing from shop to shop to save pennies here...

Fight back against Sunak's inequality push

After the 23 March Spring Statement from Rishi Sunak, the UK’s richest MP with personal wealth of over £200m, the government’s own Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR) predicts that average real household incomes will fall 2.2% over the next 12 months — “the biggest fall in living standards in any single financial year since ONS [Office of National Statistics] records began in 1956-7”. Meanwhile, the latest gross rate of return (profits) for private non-financial corporations was 10.8% (Q2-3, 2021), up on the rate in 2019 Q2-3. The FTSE share index, a measure of capitalists’ expectations of...

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