Universal credit & domestic abuse

[QuarksandLeptons]

Good article in the Financial Times

www.ft.com/content/aaaaf2fa-4c63-11e8-8a8e-22951a2d8493

Brief summary:
10% of the households receiving the benefit are couples. The new system puts it all into one account which means that in the event of it going into the account of a controlling & abusive partner, the abusive partners can end up not sharing the money, leaving women and children vulnerable. There are cases documented of women and children going hungry and not having money for nappies or sanitary items.
Worse, women & children end up being forced to stay in dangerous circumstances because they don’t have the money to leave.

How can changes like these be made to the system without thinking through the real life consequences to huge numbers of women & children? Surely, this would have been flagged up if relevant women’s groups had been asked to comment on proposed changes

Of course they know that this is more expensive. They are investing the money in it deliberately in pursuit of their ideological aims.

They are aware that by the time people get upset with it and vote them out it will be around the same time that society is bearing the costs and they can spin it as ‘labour profligacy’.

People, stupidly, don’t understand that there is a delay between the change and the costs being paid.

One of the biggest most short term idiocies of blair and new labour was allowing Tory narratives to dominate the public consciousness unchallenged and in many ways actively promoted.

The ‘hardworking’ stuff is just another one of these lies that the public have bought as a consequence.

Of course what counts as ‘hardworking’ is a very specific kind of ‘work’ which is actually code for ‘being rich’... You see that when the amount of work you need to be actually doing is proportional to how poor you are. Laziness and profligacy are actually prized attributes for the rich.

But surely, what most politicians want is to oversee positive economic outcomes and want to lauded for doing so. Hence the obsession with easily digestible / understandable policies that can be compressed to one line for news headlines.
Wouldn't a one line headline about making the country make billions of more pounds a year be a vote winner regardless of your political ideology.

Yes, but their ideas about what a ‘positive economic outcome’ is are different.

Cutting everything may result in headlines about saving money during the time they are in power but in the long term these policies will massively increase the costs.

All governments understand that they need to spend money, they decide what to spend it on and this is guided by their political ideology.

In the case of the tories they spend money to make poor people more insecure so rich people can exploit them as a resource.

Labour has traditionally been about everyone (men in reality as they were the only people) in society having a level of basic security and this is the measure of ‘positive outcome’.

The cycle of terms in government means the tories are able to associate the costs of their policies with labour’s ideology... quite successfully it seems.

I think the vast majority of people are quite vulnerable to believing that the only way of measuring ‘positive outcome’ is equity. That’s because it’s the way they broadly think of it. That’s why the tories need to spin things to the public using words like ‘merit’ ‘hardwork’ ‘getting on’ etc etc etc.

The unpalatable truth is that their ideological model for the economy is predicated on inequality.

That’s what leads to this thing of people believing these outcomes are ‘unintended effects’ and ‘they know not what they do’ and they will be convinced by evidence ‘if only we can get them to see’....

The only thing we can do IMO is just never ever vote for a representative of a party that subscribes to this ideology. Even if they are well meaning, even if they’ve bought the spin themselves, even if they don’t fully appreciate the ideology they are representing, even if it is ‘just local politics’... Just never vote for them.

This is why I did not vote at all during the new labour period where I was eligible to vote.

Out of interest who did you vote for? Because surely not voting for Labour was effectively a way of voting for the Tories?

Not passing any judgement at all (as I am in a similar position now as find Labour's stance on women and brexit intolerable and I couldn't vote for them at the moment)

I didn’t vote during that period. When there was a green candidate I voted green (once).

I know there is an idea that not voting at all equals a vote for the tories but I think that’s a logical fallacy TBH.

The tories get in if people don’t vote labour. That’s true but that’s not actually a reason to vote for another party that subscribes to Tory ideology is it?

If a party has policies that broadly represent what I believe is right then I will vote for them. I’m not going to vote tactically or vote for the sake of voting because I feel it causes huge issues with the political system when people do that.

A case needs to be made that it is the fiscally sensible thing to do to support people when they are down on their luck.

The same case needs to be made for supporting people (90% of them women) who have caring responsibilities. Unpaid labour is the great unsayable in economics. The case must be made that care labour is of equal value whether or not it contributes to GDP via child minders and social care providers. And, when it is abdicated, the costs far outweigh the costs of even relatively generous support.

That whole ‘not voting is a vote for the tories’ and believing poor turnout is a problem of an individual with flaws is entirely lazy and idiotic political culture.

The work of politics is fundamentally about inspiring and convincing people so they will vote IMO.

Yy Lang.

I think it’s convenient that people choose to forget that what is paid and what isn’t is almost entirely arbitrary.

I think it’s convenient that people choose to forget that what is paid and what isn’t is almost entirely arbitrary.

Yes. And that the synthetic modelling used by economics is completely blind to the dynamics of the care economy because it is split between paid and unpaid labour. This is an important reason why policy is both inappropriate and self-defeating.

twitter.com/Sectioned_/status/1000052925325078528

This Twitter thread focuses on the implications of the UC claimant commitment as it may, or may not, apply to disabled people - but similar will also apply to women in part-time work ("underemployed") who also have caring responsibilities.

It's a heartbreaking thread. This benefit is going to destroy the mental health of claimants.

Offred Thanks for your explanation. I totally understand your position regarding voting. I’m always conflicted. I look at what happened in America in 2016 and feel like voting tactically has its merits. That said voting tactically makes it difficult to understand what the people who voted actually believe in and want politically. I.e it deforms the original purpose of a democracy. Mind you first past the post does that too, I suppose.

LangCleg I agree that caring work should be paid for on the same basis. It’s morally the right thing to do and it’s the fiscally logical thing to do too.

Unite union had a protest against Universal Credit yesterday
www.unitetheunion.org/campaigning/stop--fix-universal-credit/

LangCleg that thread is heartbreaking
It’s a cruel, inhumane system

It’s a cruel, inhumane system

And what money will it save? How many people will get behind on rent, lose their homes and end up costing fortunes in bed and breakfasts? Or will need the NHS for induced anxiety and depression, or for other poverty-related illnesses such as malnutrition? How much criminal justice crime for things like non-payment of council tax and TV licences or shoplifting?

It's ridiculous.

metro.co.uk/2018/05/25/woman-jailed-six-months-caught-begging-50p-7577918/

I am 71 and grew up with an alcoholic dad and my mum suffered terribly to protect us, and because I was the oldest child I was picked on for whatever reason and even as a young boy I felt guilty because I couldn't protect my mum or the younger siblings. I can't believe that this policy has been passed into law, it make me shake with anger that what was common place then is still going on and there is no easy way out for abused partners and it seems to be a postcode lottery as to what services are in place in any given area. I don't think that there will be a quick resolution to this situation in my lifetime, it's enough to make you weep.

The New European paper have an article on Universal Credit and its disproportionate effect on single parents - 90% of whom are women.
Hopefully more publications will bring this issue to the forefront.
www.theneweuropean.co.uk/top-stories/single-parents-suffering-from-universal-misery-1-5541902

Yet the unfair burden on single mothers exposes a grim truth at the heart of the Conservatives’ benefits freezes and welfare overhaul, which Paula sums up passionately at the end of our phone call. “The government should stop making decisions without consulting us,” she says. “They have to know the true story of how people are living. They represent us, so they have to talk to us. They make decisions on what works for them, not for us. I don’t think they really care about less privileged people.”

Yes, again... Everyone is missing the glaringly obvious.

It frustrates me so much.

They know, this is not unintended consequences. This is what UC was designed to do. IDS was not ‘out of touch’ or misguided, he is not thick or incompetent. He brought in reforms which the Tory party had been dreaming up throughout the new labour years.

They had been thoroughly researched and comprehensively planned, designed to do precisely this.

I cannot stress enough that, just like with an abusive husband, these people do not need to have this explained to them ‘in the right way’. This is what they intend to achieve with these policies.

Research into the negative effects, articles about it, it’s all pointless re changing their minds. This is the true face of Conservative ideology.

The more often people attribute it to accident the longer they will get away with it. Vote them out and hope to God that labour has learned lessons from bloody Blair.

www.politics.co.uk/comment-analysis/2018/06/07/punishment-beatings-by-public-demand-the-truth-about-welfare

Good article - although "parent" I think could be more usefully replaced with "mother" or at least the differential impact pointing out - about public consent for all this.