Winning power for the Liberal Democrats to form the next Government will depend on three main policy platforms.
First, ‘Making Poverty History’for the individuals and families in this country. Second, an effective NHS that delivers healthcare where it is needed and when it is needed; not a gravy train for employing administrators. And third, to maximise the freedom and security of our citizens while being in effective control of the country. Paradoxically, this will entail dismantling our 19th century bureaucracies and scrapping unnecessary regulation.
These policy platforms directly impact on peoples’ lives, unlike the issues of climate change and whether or not to renew Trident, important as those issues are.
As an individual – which for the government is the primary source of all data and information – passes through the health system, the education system; gets a job and enters the taxation system; loses a job and enters the benefit system; gets ill, and back into the healthcare system; starts a business, and gets more involved with the taxation system; retires and becomes part of the pension system: no wonder our government systems are overloaded. You have to multiply that one citizen by 60 million!
I have spent most of my life in poverty. By this I mean I am unable to take up pastimes and interests that I would want to do, such as sailing or gliding. Or travel once a month from North Devon to Birmingham to visit my mother in a nursing home. Or visit my grandchildren. It costs too much in fuel if I drive, or too much in time if we go by coach. Or afford a holiday every year.
Here are some issues which help to keep people in poverty: first, the benefit trap. The minimum wage is approximately £5.60 per hour. For a 37.5 hour week that comes to £210, out of which National Insurance contributions and income tax has to be deducted: say £175 net.
If one is on benefit and has children, and you want to keep everything ‘above board’, you have to notify your local council. This means your housing and council tax benefit is stopped until they work out what proportion of benefit you are entitled to. And they cannot do that until you provide them with at least three payslips. While you are waiting, you have to pay the full rent and the council tax. If you don’t, you get letters threatening court action and eviction.
If there is a partner on pension credit, like myself, all but £10 is deducted, so my £181 pension credit is reduced by the amount my partner earns. Plus paying full rent of £80+ per week. Of course, you can then apply for working tax credit… What a nightmare scenario!
All this is because we have muddled benefit system. On one hand it is based on individual need; on the other it is based on a couple’s income. In a sense, the whole benefit system should be scrapped. Either you are employed by a business or non-profit organisation, or you are “employed” by the state to earn your benefits.
People should be required to do voluntary work of their choice, Or study for their GCSE’s if they have not got them. Or undertake to attain a minimum standard of cardio-vascular fitness. In other words, the benefits system is not ‘a charter for dossers’. This could, of course, go hand in hand with the Liberal Democrat policy of empowering people. The smallest democratically elected, and funded, apolitical unit should be, in my view, the local residents’ association. Forget about grandiose regional assemblies: let each residents’ association have its own post office, hold community competitions for the areas with the best front garden, being litter free, the least vandalism.
If you want people to be resposible citizens, let us give them responsibility. Democracy depends on trusting the people.
I will write about the NHS in my next article. [Update: now posted here.]
* Bob Wootton blogs at A Lib Dem Vision.
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17 Comments
Hmm, what do they call involuntary employment again? Oh, yes:
“slavery”
So very liberal.
Also:
People should be required to do voluntary work
If it’s required then it’s not voluntary, is it?
There’s a really easy, really liberal way to end the benefits trap, it’s called a “Citizen’s Income”. Paying a subsistence-level income to every person in the UK is fundamentally empowering, would shut down several government departments, and is easily affordable by taxing those with better-paying jobs the additional income that they would gain through a CI.
CI is the answer; LVT the means to fund it. A brace of complementary Liberal policies in want of a party to take them forward!
Re “required to do voluntary work.” One does not have to claim benefit. But I believe benefits should be earned. If one is able to work. But living in a developed and civilized society does not repeal the law that “if you don’t work, you don’t eat.” What I meant was that you should be automatically employed by the state. If an individual can choose the work he/she wants to do, is that slavery?
Make it so that if someone manages to get a day or two of freelance work, that can be dealt with by the benefit agency without stopping my benefit and having to reapply. Streamlining intermittent work’s effects on benefits should be a liberal priority.
Ark’s Ark
Bob, if the government wants a supply of below-minimum wage workers, then it should consider abolishing the minimum wage, instead of forcing the destitute into pittance-paying make-work.
If, on the other hand, it has jobs it needs doing, it should hire people for a fair wage. That’s how employment works, innit?
If you want to give people responsibility, stop labelling the poor who are caught in the benefits trap as slackers, give them a subsistence income and the responsibility to do with their lives what they will.
Anyone who supports a workfare-style scheme as described above is, in my view, not a liberal.
Does anyone have any advice about whether there is a way to replace a lost voting slip? (which, annoyingly, was filled in and ready to be posted)
Im guessing the chances of getting another one are unlikely at this stage??
The premise that climate change will not affect people’s lives is false. We are seeing an increase in Extreme Weather Events (EWE) that scientists put down to global warming. This summer people were forced out of their homes due to flooding. It is possible that even those affected do not link climate change to the flooding, but we as Liberal Democrats should make sure that they do!
I would argue that most issues in politics are important in some way, I wouldn’t reduce it down to 3.
Advice needed: contact [email protected] with full details as soon as possible. I’m not quite sure what the rules says on this, but that’s the way to get the definitive answer.
The housing benefit system makes it virtually impossible for anyone who is not in permanent paid employment to get work on a temporary, contract or casual basis. Dealing with housing benefits bureaucracy is a total nightmare and forces people into the black economy. The system was explicitly created by Margaret Thatcher to transfer money into the pockets of private landlords, a sector which was not of any great significance for housing provision prior to her ‘Right to Buy’ legislation which devastated local authority provision of housing. I don’t know what the Party’s solution to this aspect of the poverty trap is, but I would be delighted if we had one.
About abolishing the minimum wage. I was informed many years ago that the Swiss government did not /would not have a minimum wage because it would encourage employers to pay the minimum. But I think a sort of “economic ju-jitsu” might be more effective in making employers pay a “fair days pay for a fair days work”. If businesses had a lower rate of corporation tax or institutional shareholders paid less tax on dividend income on companies where the differential between the highest paid and the lowest paid was 10/20 to 1. This may help to bring excessive pay for directors down and raise the wage of the low paid. The argument that you need high pay to attract and keep high quality company directors applies also to hospital cleaners. Which are generally employed by contractors….. mrsa and all that.
About just three policies. All the policy areas are important. I just selected the three that I think will be of most importance to getting enough votes to form a government.
Giving people money is not going to end poverty.
It is essential to get New Labour out of Downing Street. They are the most corrupt, incompetent, shocking government I have ever seen at the helm of my country.
Under this awful government, so-called asylum seekers and other foreigners are flocking to Britain. They don’t claim asylum in other European countries because they all want to come to soft touch Britain where they will get put to the front of the queue before British people for housing, people who have paid into the system for years! In addition, they walk all over us: mosques are springing up like never before and Muslims suicide bomb us and call us evil – but they’re only too happy to claim the full range of benefits available! I’m sick of the loathsome lefties eroding our culture and way of life and will definitely be voting for the BNP at the next election as I see them as the only hope for claiming our country back. Currently, white British people are made to feel like second-class citizens in their own country. There’s no freedom of speech either unless it’s for the foreigner.
Next, there are services which are in chaos. Water shortages in summer are becoming far more common and migrants breeding like rabbits will double our population reportedly by 2080. We have hosepipe bans in the summer – people are going to die because of all the extra people! What about the rising burden on the NHS? How about the fact fifty different languages will be spoken in schools and the impact on communication and education? There’s also going to be far more houses needed. Think of all those extra houses having to be built on floodplains – because of demand by foreigners. For Goodness’ sake, we’re heading for Muslim Sharia law in this country.
“They don’t claim asylum in other European countries”
Which is of course why Britain has one of the lower rates of asylum claim per capita in Europe, right? So, um, actually, “they” do.
“the front of the queue before British people for housing”
Social housing is assigned strictly according to need. However, I’ve never had a problem finding accommodation within the private rented sector, even when I was unemployed, so not actually sure what your point is here, apart from to repeat a factually innacurate trope.
“I’m sick of the loathsome lefties eroding our culture and way of life and will definitely be voting for the BNP at the next election”
You’re sick of “loathsome lefties” so you’ll vote for a party whose economic policy is pretty much a return to the state socialism of the 1970s? Nice coherent plan there. You tell us this on a thread about a different topic because?
Oh, wait, you’re spamming so many different sites with the same comment to bore us all to death. Copy/paste astroturfing is incredibly dull you know, try and actually discuss the actual issues?
@ Admin, comment appears in exact text on this Oxford Mail article, and doubtless elsewhere as well, BNP using spambots now?
“white British people are made to feel like second-class citizens in their own country”
Weird, I’m both white and British, and I don’t feel second class, didn’t even when I was completely skint between jobs. Maybe because I didn’t try and blame everyone else for my own problems and instead worked at solving them?
The rest of your regurgitated copy/paste is pointless and futile, and I hardly see how 5% of the population at most are going to impose a different legal system on the rest of us.
Go away little spammer.
Out with HARD labour for the british tax payers, out with subsidising immigrants and spongers, including politicians spending. IN WITH BNP!
Citizen’s Income is an interesting idea to solve poverty, but LVT is not going to provide adequate funding for it, is not it the fairest method of doing so, nor could it answer questions of hypothecation.
Using taxation as a method to redistribute wealth as income fails to address the perpetuation of an unjustifiably unequal distribution of value across the economy, as well as opening up the possibility for those with the means and motivation to abuse the inevitable loopholes.
I think this is a strong article but a couple of points.
1. i think adopting the “Make Poverty History” motif for UK residents is a bit crass.
2. I don’t accept that Climate Change and Trident don’t effect ordinary people.
3. compulsory work isn’t “voluntary”. I think you run the danger of creating hundreds of thoasands of in effect state employees dig holes and the half filling them in again.