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?

Yes, it sounds like quite a mouthful, doesn’t it?

How can help not be help, or when is help not actually help, do also sound like trick questions too. As help is always help, isn’t it?

Well, actually no. Help really doesn’t help anyone, if that help isn’t something that the recipient actually needs.

The point that help isn’t help unless it is needed is relevant, because those that can help others who do need help today, are, instead of giving the help that others need, only giving the help that they want to give, or what they believe that help should be.

Oddly enough, this blog isn’t an attack on anyone prepared to help another because they don’t do exactly what anyone needing help has asked them for. Because in many cases, even this isn’t a question of the help that those people need, but actually just a statement of the help that those people ‘want’.

Want and need are two very different things. Our needs are very basic and revolve around being happy, healthy, safe, secure and being able to function as any human being should, self sufficiently and without then requiring any further help. Whereas our wants could go on forever and regrettably, once fed, may never ever really be met.

Help isn’t help at all, if its only based on wants, rather than what anyone genuinely needs the help they receive to be.

We often hear or read comments about the Conservative Party and current government not being conservative, with the inference or suggestion that if they were to be conservative once again, all of the problems that they are having would evaporate and that the result of the General Election that we are all expecting in 2024, would see them with a majority and returned.

As a former Conservative Party Member who was elected as a Borough Councillor twice and either fought or campaigned in a range of different elections besides, I simply don’t believe that to be the case. The Conservative Party and their politicians have no idea who they politically are.

Whilst it may now be obvious to anyone looking on that the Party in power today isn’t in any way ‘conservative’, my own experience – and a key reason I walked away from frontline politics myself – is that whatever disparate philosophy it is that drives the top of the Conservative Party today – the mixture of philosophies and self-interests is a million miles from being anything near ‘conservative’.

The situation isn’t something new, and hidden from view, it’s probably been decades since the Conservative Party functioned in any other way.

The Conservative Party ‘value set’, today

It’s important to understand that the Conservative Party that we recognise nationally and locally today, does not function with anything recognisable as being a conservative philosophy at its core.

If it were possible to pin down what the philosophy driving the Conservative Party – at least in Government, really is, then it would be an economic based philosophy called Neoliberalism.

The giveaway or tell of just how ingrained and important this economic and selfish ideology has become to ‘Conservatives’ is demonstrated by the obsession with growth, and the idea that growth is the only thing that can solve any of the UKs problems.

It is very important to note that you will hear just as many Labour Politicians chuntering on about growth. Because since the Blair era and the arrival of New Labour in 1997, the Labour Party has fully embraced and been driven by Neoliberal ideas and practices too.

The problem is that growth, or rather the kind of growth that politicians are using as a way to measure economic success, simply keeps on filling the coffers of the same people who are already very rich, whilst everyone else gets poorer and poorer, with increasing numbers at the bottom now unable to pay for enough food to eat.

Despite the many protestations and words of very credible people, ‘Free Markets’ and ‘Deregulation’ does not lead to a situation where everyone can thrive and where industry takes care of public need.

Neoliberals only take care of themselves. They do so at the expense of everyone else.

Neoliberalism has lead to every problem that normal people are experiencing now – and without an alternative to all of the political parties we currently choose from at election time, things can only get progressively worse!

In fact, the deregulation and market freedom they talk about is the removal of the regulations that protect normal people and small businesses from exploitation, whilst the market freedom is the freedom for big companies and those with money to pay for the best lawyers to create their own system of rules or the threat of court actions that amount to the same thing, that mean money runs everything, rather than what is in the best interests of the general public and our communities – as it always should be.

This might all now be ringing some bells and striking a few chords regarding the behaviour and decision making that we now continuously see from so-called ‘Conservative’ politicians – who not unlike any of the others with elected seats in parliament and in councils up and down the land, are basically there, in public office, for no other reason than themselves.

To be clear, there is NOTHING conservative about Neoliberalism. Just as every good Neoliberal Socialist also knows.

What is Conservatism or to be Conservative in the genuine sense?

Free enterprise is not the same thing as free markets – no matter what anyone says and private ownership is not the same thing as ‘let’s accumulate as much of everything as possible – no matter the cost’. And as far as socially traditional values are concerned, taking a traditional approach or rather one that respects our cultural values is at the polar opposite of what the conservative government is helping cultural idealists to impose.

The real meaning of being a conservative

My interpretation of what it is to be a conservative in the genuine sense is to be a traditionalist, respectful of history and the journey(s) that brought us here, proud to maintain our core values and not afraid to stand up to or reject any form of thinking that would bring our identity or that of our community into question or to deal in compromise that will result in the same.

Conservatism should be all about encouraging free enterprise in the sense that any one who is enterprising (or entrepreneurial) can achieve whatever they aim to do so, as long as they are not exploiting others in any way or at any level, whether they are conscious of doing so or not.

In genuine conservatism, ownership does not confer entitlement as it does now. And whilst the money-centric nature of the paradigm or system we are currently experiencing tells us the complete opposite, conservative leadership is to lead against temporary tides, not to surrender to tides and to be led in a way that makes their impact permanent, bearing no relationship with what has been good for us all, before.

Genuine conservatism has people, community and values at its heart.

I neither see nor recognise any form of people-centric values in the selfish and self-serving forms of government that we seem so powerless to remove.

A return to or a renaissance of genuine conservatism in the UK could result in politics and our experience of life being very different to what it is today.

I realised a long time ago that the Politicians running the UK today work on the basis that unemployment and poverty are synonymous, or exactly the same thing.

Some politicians have even built a public platform by trading on it and the arguably heartless policies that people have trusted to look after the  UKs poor and vulnerable tell us as much as we need to know about where the so-called Conservative’s priorities lie.

It wouldn’t be anywhere near as much of a problem if the ‘poverty isn’t real’ approach was only a message.

However, the idea that poverty isn’t a problem has gone way beyond being just a message. It is the basis of how today’s public policies are formed.

Today will see the Chancellor’s Autumn Statement – where the ‘Official’ announcement will be made to Parliament, that amongst a new range of sanctions against those on benefits (the punishment for the poor and vulnerable who don’t behave), the National Living Wage will rise in April 2024 to £11.44 (the gift to all the poor and vulnerable who behave and do as they are told).

For those in low paid jobs earning the current National Living Wage of £10.42 per hour (or less if they are too young), an uplift of over £1 an hour does sound great.

But £11.44 is still nowhere near enough to live on. And that was a month ago.

In October, I worked through the figures in an attempt to work out how the UK’s elected parliamentarians could be so confident that they are correct in their analysis of what it costs to live. Whilst those actually living the experience of being poor know that they are not.

At the moment I discovered that using the average costs for all of the important things that a single person, working a 40-hour week would need to earn per hour came to £9.41 per hour, I admit that I did genuinely wonder if everyone other than the Politicians had got this all wrong.

However, as I then went on to consider, averages only tell a helpful story to anyone who will benefit from presenting a story in that particular way.

Facts are, that when we consider the real world cost of everything a single person needs – including the ‘poverty premium’, which is the overcharge too many people are forced to pay, because being poor is perceived as being ‘a risk’, the real minimum hourly wage required – for ANYONE working a 40 hour week – just so that they can live WITHOUT SUPPORT – is a MINIMUM £14 per hour!!!**

Again, that was IN OCTOBER 2023 – without adding in the rapid rises in the cost of living. An inflation rate that might have halved, but is still running rampant at 4.7% or more.

It should be a basic human right that people be able to provide fully for themselves on a weekly wage. That’s even before thinking about the realities that married couples and people with family commitments have to contemplate.

Requiring anyone to work for a whole working week and then paying them any less than what it will cost them to cover the cost of meeting all of their basic needs, without subsidy from government, having to take out loans, or having to seek help through charities (such as food banks) is nothing less than sanctioned or legitimised slavery.

Just think about that for a moment. You cannot fend for yourself on what you earn but are being forced to work. Doesn’t that mean you being treated as a slave?

Yes, being honest with ourselves and seeing poverty and how Politicians ‘interpret’ it doesn’t make comfortable reading. Especially for all the small business owners who will already be wondering what the hell they are going to do to cover the upsurge in costs when wages rise – not only by £1.02 per hour in April 2024 – but with all the additional costs that the employers will then be forced to pay afterwards too.

However, all those business owners who couldn’t (or wouldn’t) pay a minimum £14 per hour (Plus the on-costs) in October 2023, should also be asking themselves the very troubling question ‘WHY?’

It won’t take long to realise that none of this adds up for anyone. Other than those who have already got more than they should ever need.

The world does not exist to do business or make money for those who have already got too much of it.

An economy should function purely to support and sustain happy and healthy lives that are humane for every one of us, above all else.

**It may be worth considering that with the average UK annual wage for all workers is currently at 27,756.00, even this realistically low figure sits way below the annual wage of what I am suggesting EVERYONE needs as a minimum of £14ph – which is £29,120.00. It is perhaps telling that only this week, the announcement was made that Foreign workers coming to the UK will need to earn at least £30K per year. Does someone working for the Government know something?