How I learned to stop worrying and love the benefits cheats

I’m sure everyone’s seen the adverts. They’re on TV, in newspapers, on bustops and on the sides of the buses themselves. The “We’re closing in” ones designed to make so called “benefit thieves” look like right villains. Anyone who’s claimed benefits in the last few years might know too how unpleasant an experience it has become now with a mix of intimidation and surveillance everywhere in the system. There’s even handy phone numbers so that you can grass your friends, families, neighbours, or even total strangers.

Alister Darling and those two brain caterpillars that control you. You are not going to enjoy this…

I fully support workers who cheat the benefits system! There! I said it! I’m not suggesting for one moment that I personally cheat the system. I’m paid by BACS, directly to my credit union account. The government, sadly, knows exactly how much I earn and in their infinite wisdom, believe that I £4k a year in wages is enough to live off without support other than £60 of my rent paying. More’s the pity.

Those that have found a way to fiddle the system. Good on you!

We in the UK have some real drains on our system. They don’t live in council houses on estates, or come from abroad (who are actually denied all state welfare, despite BNP propaganda saying otherwise). They live off us whether we like it or not and they’re taking hundreds of billions a year.

Drains like Fred Goodwin, ex-CEO of Royal Bank of Scotland and one of the biggest causes of the recession, that’s put millions of people worldwide on the dole. He’s only in his 40′s, but he’s retired with a £600k a year pension. We’re paying for that when against our will, the government bailed out RBS. Lord Ashcroft receives protection from the police and has the British Army fighting to keep him and his buddies in power, at the expense of the taxpayer, while he is not one himself. We’ve had MP’s who already “earn” over £60k a year, claiming for moat cleaning, duck houses and using their second homes as a property development company.

On a more everyday scale though, we are robbed every day by our employers. We provide the labour that customers want and pay for, while our bosses, take our money for it to pay themselves better than what we get. At the end of the day, a business can always run without a boss, or managers, but it cannot run without workers, which are the most vital part, yet paid the least.

These are our work-shy “sponges” on the system. Hopefully you agree with me that it is wrong that they take this money from us. However, it is perfectly legal. No doubt because these same people are the ones who dictate what the law is in the first place, either directly, or through funding the parties in power with the condition that the party pleases these rich funders.

Now, I know that the Daily Mail might tell us that people who smuggle away £65 a week extra in dole are somehow the scum of the earth, but lets actually think about this like adults for a moment. Job Seeker’s Allowance for a single person under 25 is £45 a week, over 25 it’s £65 a week. Housing benefit is capped at around £40 a week for under 25′s and £60 a week for over 25′s. These are what single people get, couples get even less.

Now, that gives you a grand total of £85 a week income for an under 25 to pay your rent, bills, eat, and try get a little entertainment in there to stop you going nuts. The grand total of £125 a week for over 25′s isn’t much better.

Consider for a moment whether you could live on that kind of an income. Forget about your Internet, credit card bills, running your car and phone and entertainment for a moment. Can you even pay your rent/mortgage, gas and electric and feed yourself on that? The answer is no.

Yet currently, nearly two million people on benefits in the UK are told to do just that. This doesn’t even include people, such as cleaners, like myself who’s wages are below this income! There is no question here that we are talking about peoples’ health and welfare here and in a world where the rich irresponsibly put a price tag on water, food, shelter and warmth, to deny those things means death.

So, I do not consider it wrong if somebody tops up their benefits with a bit of cash in hand work, or tops up their undeclared wages with a bit of benefits. This however is not only illegal, but also criminal. Break these rules and not only will the money be forcibly removed from you by sequestion and bailiffs, but you can also get jail time. I’m sure this comes as no surprise though that this double standard exists, as we as the poorest workers do not fund parties with large donations. Even if we wanted to fund the parties, we couldn’t match the donations of the rich, seeing as though “the richest 1pc in the UK hold some 70pc of the country’s wealth” . We simply can’t ever match that kind of political bribe and as a result it is the poor, not the rich, who are declared the outlaws for a far lesser crime.

The intention of making benefits so unpleasant is to encourage us to accept substandard working conditions and pay and even to scab, join the army, or police, or do other such things that in the end only harm our other workers more. If benefits were fit for purpose, to support those who have been forbidden to work by the rich, then maybe there’d be a slight case for having a pop at “benefit thieves”, but at the end of the day, there’s not and there’s far bigger fish to fry before you do that anyway.

The lesson here is to understand that what is right and lawful and what’s wrong and illegal are not allways one and the same. Justice and the law are not the same thing.

Taken from And cleaners shall inherit the Earth!

The real benefit cheats? The Stasi ranks of Hard Labour

I’d love to see the benefit cheat ­advertisements remodelled, to target public sector expenses fraud. You could have a lord, ­pegging out the washing, and then big, scary writing … “You in the wig! We’re on to you. Your mother’s house in Carmarthenshire is not your primary residence … You do not spend £174 a day in legitimate expenses … One day soon, we’re going to be very peeved.”

Of all the cheats civilisation can conceive – from MPs through dodgy tax-domicilers, insider dealers and hedge-fund scamsters to cheats so rotten with bad faith that they nearly brought down global finance before anybody stopped to think whether or not they should be illegal – nobody gets it stuck to them worse than the person who did a night cash-in-hand in the pub, as well as claiming jobseeker’s allowance.

Benefit cheats might account for 6,000 prosecutions a year, but their cost to society – an estimated £1.1bn annually – is considerably less than the combined loss, to the benefits office, caused by honest mistakes (£1.1bn in punter-error, £800m in mistakes committed by the Department for Work and Pensions). It’s interesting, isn’t it, that the DWP makes that many errors in its own system: it must be pretty complicated. In fact, it’s so complicated that means-tested benefits, combined with means-tested tax credits, go unclaimed to the sum of £16bn.

For every pound you spend, ­taxpayer, on the dishonest underclass, you save nearly £16 by virtue of bureaucracy so complicated that neither the underclass nor the overclass can understand it. What a result! It’s all so obvious, it sounds like 1980s agitprop. I’ll be on about single mothers next, and how most of them are doing a really good job.

It’s not, however, so obvious that Labour’s manifesto team isn’t re-examining the issue, really trying to think outside the box of human decency and push the envelope way past out of order, all the way to “are you kidding?”.

Jim Murphy, the Scottish secretary, has suggested to Ed Miliband, Labour’s manifesto co-ordinator, that people who inform on benefit cheats should get a share of any cash saved. This probably won’t even make it as an election promise: they just leaked it so they could sound like tough guys, talking turkey with the Tories. “Huh! Remember that soppy liberal you couldn’t stand? We binned him! Adios old Labour, goodbye New – hello Hard Labour. Feel my pecs.” I’ve heard nothing from any party that sounds more like the Stasi. How much more old Labour can you get?

Since it probably isn’t serious, should we even bite? But this kind of “initiative” is not just a short cut to an image makeover. Critics have said already that, were this measure to be introduced, it would unpick social cohesion and encourage neighbourly mischief rather than meaningful snitching. But this is to pass over the social dissonance that is created even before policy is drafted, when politicians engage in this coarse, wilfully ignorant rabble-rousing.

Numerous studies have established that people greatly overestimate the cost of benefit cheating, both absolutely and compared to white-collar crime. It has been found that people across the political spectrum are more judgmental towards the very poor than they were 20 years ago, often inaccurately assuming them to be lazier and more fiscally ­coddled than in fact they are.

“The extent to which people manage to fiddle the system to their own advantage is greatly overstated in popular imagination and fed by the tabloid press. But you only need one well-documented case to damage confidence.” That was John Denham, the Labour MP for Southampton Itchen, commenting just before the Labour conference last year. It’s not just the tabloids, though, is it? They get quite a lot of help from the top ranks of the party in government. And it’s not really one well-documented case. More like an amorphous mass of feckless, poor people that Hard Labour is going to get really, really tough on.

On the same day as this supergrass wheeze was leaked, a Populus poll, commissioned by the Times, found that 70% of voters believe Britain is now broken; three-fifths of respondents said they “hardly recognised the country they’re living in”; and 42% would emigrate if they could.

In fairness, much of this “broken” rhetoric was started by David Cameron. You can tell because, when you bite it for authenticity, like a jeweller from the olden days, it turns out to have no meaning at all. But a more courageous government wouldn’t even get into this landscape the Tories insist upon, where the feral unemployed run riot in town centres while their unmarried babymothers leech bennies off the state to spend on cigarettes and Diamond White.

A government of integrity and coherence would insist upon sticking to the facts: that the cheats are offset by the people who don’t claim, so the benefits bill is nothing like the spiralling cashfest it’s made out to be; that benefit cheats are not the scourge of the economy, their numbers are not huge, and their crimes are not major; and even the real eye-openers – the football referee on disability benefit, the couple claiming housing benefit for numerous addresses – are notable for their perversity, not to mention rarity. This is Primark policy-making: it looks cheap, and it is cheap. But it’s not free and it’s not victimless.

Taken from guardian.co.uk

Where are the headlines about the billions unclaimed in benefits??!!

There’s usually fanfare, hype, sensationalist and screaming headlines in the right-wing press when it comes to benefit fraud. And the journos wait with baited breath when the official statistics are released so they can apply the same old reactionary stereotypes and phrases… ‘Britain’s sicknote culture’, ‘benefit cheats’…and so on. Of course, as well, the screaming headlines will pass into the collective consciousness and memory of the readership. The lazy assumptions between claimants and fraudsters. These headlines and stories make good copy albeit lazy journalism.

But where’s the screaming headlines over this? Where’s the indignation from the Tory press along with continually indignant Theresa May? Where’s the shock and horror over this? Or does this just slip past them because it doesn’t correspond with the right-wing populism that the media likes to peddle?

Well, here it is ….Charities challenge government over £16bn unclaimed benefits

Yes, over £16bn of benefits are unclaimed…. No fanfare over this.

The charities point to glaring examples where take-up is falling far short. Latest official figures show that:

* as many as four out of five low paid workers without children (1.2bn households) miss out on tax credits worth at least £38 per week – a total of £1.9 billion
* as many as half of all working households entitled to housing benefit (worth an average £37.60 per week) do not claim it – that’s up to half a million households.

Other benefits showing signs of significant under-claiming include council tax benefit and pension credit. Up to three million households are missing out on an average £13 a week in council tax benefit, while as many as 1.7 million pensioners are missing out on an average of £31 a week in pension credit.

Take-up of housing benefit and council tax benefit have both fallen over the last decade, while take-up of child tax credit is far lower in London than in other parts of the country, and generally 10% lower among families from minority ethnic backgrounds.

Just how will Yvette Cooper respond??!!

Why is this? The benefits system is one massive bureaucratic Kafka-esque nightmare and that other minefield known as means tested benefits. And surely the impact of the bureaucracy, increased conditionality, difficulties and stigmatisation will push people out of the benefits system as they will be inevitably put off from applying. Hence more deprivation and more poverty…if you try to climb out through working claiming Housing Benefit and Council Tax Benefit can turn your life into a bureaucratic nightmare. It is a choice between going hungry or having your nerves torn to shreads.

And what about non-means tested benefits, how much is unclaimed there?

But the message is all about the benefit scrounger. Where are the posters and adverts advertising about benefits people aren’t claiming. Can you just see the strapline, “Claim it, you’re entitled”..something like that. Except no… that just goes against the ideological grain. Let those benefits go unclaimed more money for NL to spend on bailouts for the financial markets and illegal wars…

The spotlight falls on the poor in this society, and also the amount of money lost due to ‘error and fraud’ with lots of trumped up tabloid hyperbole never mind that this is a drop in the financial ocean when comparing it to tax evasion and avoidance (something in the region of between £97bn and £150bn is lost in tax theft).

Taken from Happymarx