Stop Universal Credit!

May's Tory government is bringing in Universal Credit (UC) by stages. It replaces Job Seekers Allowance, Income Support, ESA, Housing Benefit, Tax Credits and Working Tax Credits. At the moment there are 590,000 people on Universal Credit in England and Wales, with around 50,000 new claims each month.

The Tories have been planning this since the 2010 Election and have been slowly introducing Universal Credit since 2013 
Lies

·        The Tories say it will encourage more people back to work

·        It will be more efficient than previous benefits

·        It will improve people’s lives and raise their incomes

Facts 
More people back to work?- in minimum wage, zero hour contract or other unreliable jobs!

·     More efficient? You can only apply for Universal Credit online, and only get messages about UC online. But many don’t have the internet at home, and with the closing of many public libraries with free internet access, many a will be forced to pay to use a cybercafé.  Already, people have to wait six weeks or longer to receive their first UC payment. This causes hardship to many who have no savings to rely on.

Billions taken from the unemployed, the disabled, the needy

When fully implemented millions will be worse off. What this is really about is cutting social security.
Housing subsidy will be cut creating more homeless.
Disability elements cut or abolished
completely.
Some rates lower than current benefit rates.
Support for child care massively cut.
Easier sanctioning, forcing people off UC to live on nothing.
UC will be time-limite.

Facts

Many have turned to Citizens Advice - one in ten of those already claiming UC.
The six weeks already means referrals to food banks, many getting in arrears with their rent, resulting in evictions. One foodbank has said that its referrals have doubled. Two south
London boroughs have said that half of the claimants there have gone into further debt as a result.
“While the Universal Credit will in many cases increase the financial incentive for one person in couple households to move into some form of employment, incentives for many second earners will be weakened in comparison to the current situation…This will particularly affect women as they are more likely to be the second earners in households and they usually earn less than men and do more informal caring work. Worryingly, the Government finds ‘that any such risk of decreased work incentives for women in couples is justified.’ … this could mark the start of a return to a ‘male breadwinner model’ in which men do paid work and women stay at home to look after children and other dependants.” (Women’s Budget Group)

The Way Forward

Universal Credit could be the equivalent of the Poll Tax for the May regime. The Thatcher government’s very unpopular Poll Tax resulted in mass non-payment, riots and the eventual resignation of Thatcher.

This government is weak and fragile and mass resistance could topple it. But we have to turn the despair at worsening conditions into a positive anger and a determination to resist. But don’t rely on the Labour Party to help. All they can offer is not abolition of UC but a tinkering with it.

Already the Tories have been forced to climb down over the 55p a minute Universal Credit helpline charge. As well as that, twelve back bench Tory MPs are worried about a Poll Tax style scenario and about their seats and asked the Work and Pensions Secretary David Gauke to pause the roll out back in September 2017.

The message has to be NO! We won’t pay for your crisis!

London Anarchist Communists

The above text is for a leaflet for the Universal Credit demo this Saturday Jan 27th at 1pm, Trafalgar Square

London Anarchist Communists blog

Abolish The Monarchy!

The approaching royal wedding in May reminds us of the need to abolish the monarchy.
The Queen is at the tip of class society in Britain. She is Head of State, and indeed Crown and State are interchangeable.  The crown dominates the legislature- the system of law-making,- and the judicial system and is the employer of the civil service and the rest of State bureaucracy. It embodies the whole hierarchical and class system. The commentator Ben Pimlott talked about the “Queen in people’s heads” meaning the important role she plays as the perceived head of society. The myth of “national unity” is built around the role of the Queen, with all that that entails like privilege and deference, and “continuity”.
The monarchy itself feels under threat in the changing world. It has over the last few decades been forced to open Buckingham Palace to the public, decommission the royal yacht, and the Queen even had to submit to paying taxes. There is a growing awareness among its members, driven by fear, that the monarchy must “modernise” or perish. Both the Queen and her husband the Duke of Edinburgh are now in their nineties and must die within the next ten years. Whilst a myth has developed around the Queen as seen above, her successor Prince Charles is not so popular in British society and neither are other members of the royal family.
As the Queen said in 1997: ”despite the huge constitutional difference between a hereditary monarchy and an elected government, in reality the gulf is not so wide. They are complementary institutions, each with its own role to play. And each, in its different way, exists only with the support and consent of the people.That consent, or the lack of it, is expressed for you, Prime Minister, through the ballot box. It is a tough, even brutal, system but at least the message is a clear one for all to read. For us, a Royal Family, however, the message is often harder to read, obscured as it can be by deference, rhetoric or the conflicting currents of public opinion. But read it we must.”
Recent signs of a further modernisation of   the monarchy have been the giving up of all major duties in May 2017 by Prince Phillip (he will still, however, receive a £395,000 year annuity!). Prince Harry took over from him the important symbolic role of Captain General of the Royal Marines, a reminder that the monarchy is intimately linked with that other pillar of British class society, the military. Other signs of modernisation have been the handing over of Remembrance Sunday commemoration ceremonies to Prince Charles, and the dressing down of the State Opening of Parliament in June 2017 with the Queen no longer wearing her Imperial State Crown and robes and travelling by car rather than by carriage.
More importantly than that have been the pronouncements of Prince Harry on the monarchy. He is at the head of the moves within the monarchy to modernise. He went on record to say:  “We are involved in modernising the British monarchy. We are not doing this for ourselves but for the greater good of the people. Is there any one of the royal family who wants to be king or queen? I don’t think so, but we will carry out our duties at the right time.” Of course, the future and fortunes of the royals is at stake and Harry is desperately trying to position himself as an advocate of a “people’s monarchy”.
Remember £30 million is paid out to the royal family and none of its members wish to see these benefits disappear in a cash strapped economy. The recent revelations in the Paradise Papers revealed that the Queen and Charles were tax dodging, with their money ending up in Bermuda and the Cayman Islands. So now the Prince who once dressed up as a Nazi is putting himself forward as a popular icon. The forthcoming marriage to a commoner, (even though she has a personal fortune of £5 million) an American and a woman of colour are all part of this strategy.
However, despite these moves at modernisation  the monarchy is increasingly seen for what it is, a supreme symbol of privilege, reaction, snobbery, elitism and ridiculous ceremony. The monarchy as a major bulwark of the British class system must be swept away. We cannot rely on any incoming Labour government to carry this out. Corbyn, up until his election as Labour leader, was a staunch monarchist. Now he congratulates Prince Philip on his “clear sense of public duty” that had inspired people for more than sixty years. He told Jeremy Paxman that the abolition of the monarchy was "not on anybody's agenda, it's certainly not on my agenda."
No, the ending of the monarchy depends on mass distaste for a parasitic institution. The forthcoming media circus around the royal wedding, with all the lickspittle toadying that will involve, should not distract from that.
www.republic.org.uk