If the average U.K. wage isn’t enough to live on, the minimum wage certainly isn’t enough. So, anyone on the most basic level of DWP benefits must be going through a living hell.
Benefits are being used by the government to pretend that the cost of living in the U.K. today is something that most people can afford.
Yet the reality is rather stark. The most recent figures available show that at least 22 Million people in the U.K. receive benefits of some kind.
That’s just under a third of the population or one in three of us. And that’s before we even begin thinking about the people who, in receipt of benefits and whether working or not, are holding everything together by dipping into savings or taking on unaffordable debt.
Not knowing if you can afford to eat or pay the bills that can be planned for will challenge the mental health of anyone after a relatively short period of time. Yet the experience of unforeseen expenses destroying that downward equilibrium can create a level of pain and uncertainty that for anyone who hasn’t experienced it, is simply unimaginable.
The confidence of anyone falling dependent upon benefits, credit or charity of some kind is quickly diminished. But the system still treats anyone in this situation as everyone’s guilty bastards – just because they haven’t got enough, or they don’t the same as everyone else.
Not having enough to live on and being able to enjoy the peace and security that it gives anyone, is far from being the ideal stepping off point to secure work. Even if that job would remove any reliance the applicant would then have upon benefits or help, and provide the opportunity to pay off any debt they had accumulated until then.
Anyone who can appreciate the reality of the experience that so many people living in Poverty face – when even people who are working don’t have enough income ‘to live’, will quickly realise that the way to get people out of this dreadful situation is to help them in the ways that will actually help them. And to help anyone who genuinely needs help, you really do need to understand and appreciate what they are going through first.
It certainly isn’t helping to create an additional set of circumstances where those needing genuine help will suddenly find their remaining privacy destroyed with their financial conduct being policed at every turn too.
Yet that’s what public sector access to the bank accounts of anyone in receipt of benefits could now actually mean.
The strangest and most incomprehensible part of plans to legalise government access to the bank accounts of benefit recipients, is the fact that in the majority of cases, those receiving benefits only receive them because they are the victims of an economic system that functions, abuses and exploits them for no other reason than to service some other persons greed.
If the infliction of poverty on anyone was recognised as the form of abuse that it is, just like any of the others that society now refuses to tolerate, the government would not even have the option of playing the role of corrupt jailer for those imprisoned by Poverty, with the ability to abuse their own power to make the experience of the prisoners they control even worse.
But that is exactly where we are.
Whether wrong or right, the decisions and actions taken by politicians in response to the Covid Pandemic demonstrate just how much power our Parliament has – IF they choose to use it.
So, the real question we should be asking, is why politicians aren’t using that power to make life affordable for everyone, with the added bonus that doing so would automatically funnel a significant number of benefit recipients – who want the peace and security that comes only from self-sufficiency – back into work?
Adam Tugwell 