A Christmas message to Amazon
You heard about Amazon in an earlier blog (see Amazon undercover). Please sign this petition, which demands the “Living Wage” for Amazon workers. I know the petition describes the “Living Wage” as a living wage, which you may find, as I do, very annoying indeed. But sign the petition anyway – Amazon deserves it. It also deserves to find its warehouses and offices occupied by its own workforce, who, if left to themselves, could run the whole show better than the current owners. But I suspect that’s not going to happen before Christmas!
So SIGN THE PETITION: https://www.change.org/en-GB/petitions/amazonuk-this-christmas-pay-the-living-wage-across-uk-operations
Immigration, the family & the archbishop
In the UK the right to family life (Art. 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights) has been increasingly refused through all sorts of rules and bureaucratic delays, refused even to refugees and other immigrants who have already gone through enough hoops to achieve British nationality status. “You don’t earn enough”, says the Home Office, “so your spouse will be a drain on the state.” “Your wife must do an English course,” it says, “even if she has to travel through dangerous areas of Afghanistan to Kabul for the classes.” “Your wife must go from Afghanistan to Islamabad for an interview,” it says. And on, and on, and on. People wait years for their applications to be processed, and it takes even longer when the UK Border Agency + the Consulate + the private companies (the last, of course, are “our partners”) who are part of the process lose the application, and then have the cheek to ask the applicants to start again.
It looks as if these refusals will be hardening up in future, according to legislation before parliament. One result is that Vincent Nichols, the Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, has written an article in today’s Guardian criticising the government’s policy on these matters. Before he wrote he did his homework, including talking to many of the victims of the policy. As a result, he says that the regulations now in place are anti-family, unsavoury and a scandal. He asks:
“… is it the government’s intention to penalise British citizens? To undermine marriages and to split up families? Other EU citizens are free to come and live in the UK with spouses from outside the EU. And yet British citizens do not enjoy the same rights. The feeling of being victimised by one’s own government is a bitter pill to swallow.”
Strong words from an Archbishop, and his article should be read in full. As might be expected of an archbishop, he ends with a pious hope: “I hope that parliament, in considering the current immigration bill, will take the opportunity to correct this clear injustice.” Amen to that, Archbishop, although snowflakes’ chances in Hell (if you’ll pardon the expression) do spring to mind.
But to help the process along, let’s all write to our MPs expressing our disgust at the government’s unsavoury, scandalous (and, not least, cruel), policies.
Here’s the archbishop: http://gu.com/p/3y7nx
Here’s some research suggesting that government statistics trying to justify the policy have been – er, well, cooked:
http://www.politics.co.uk/news/2013/07/09/revealed-the-financial-cost-of-theresa-may-s-immigrationl
Right in it with George: making the poor pay
I see George Osborne is preparing to make the poorest people pay even more for the mess capitalism has got us into. He told the Treasury select committee that “many billions” would need to be “shaved” from welfare to avoid deeper cuts in Whitehall.
Many billions? That doesn’t sound like a shave, George. That sounds like a major operation needing a general anaesthetic.
George wants us to know he finds some of these decisions “difficult”. The decisions only seem to be difficult, however, when it comes to cutting the Whitehall bureaucracy. In the case of cutting welfare, he can just go ahead and do it. Not that he mentions the bureaucracy. He indicates that any further cuts in Whitehall would endanger education and science. Well, that’s sliced-bread territory for sure – can’t touch them. So what to do? Let George explain:
“I don’t think all the savings need and should be made within the departments. I think we should make a balanced judgment about where government spends its money and, yes, we have got to make difficult decisions to save money further in Whitehall, but we should accompany that with savings in the welfare budget.”
So what are the results of these “accompanying” savings in welfare? They sound a bit like a piano in the background, soothing, encouraging, comforting. But it’s not quite like that. Just one example will do – and it affects some of George and Dave’s favourite people: the “strivers”, the people who are allegedly happy to work for low pay rather than claim benefits because, again allegedly, “they know it is the right thing to do”. Hidden away in two sentences in Osborne’s autumn statement are £600m worth of cuts to Universal Credit. The Guardian explains that the cut comes
“because Universal Credit work allowances will now be maintained at their current cash level for three years from 2013. The Office for Budget Responsibility forecasts inflation (CPI) of 8.7% over this period, meaning that the value of universal credit work allowances is set to fall significantly in real terms. During last year’s autumn statement it was announced that most working-age benefits and tax credits were to be uprated by 1% a year for three years from 2013. Taken together, the 1% uprating and the reduction in work allowances mean that by 2017 a single-parent household will be up to £420 per year worse off and a couple with children up to £230 a year worse off.”
No wonder Gavin Kelly of the Resolution Foundation calls it “a real blow to the working poor”. “It’s the sort of stealthy measure”, he says, “that often attracts little attention but still has a real impact.”
“Little attention” was George’s aim, of course when he hid this lot away in two sentences. The question for us all is: should someone as tricky as this be in charge of the public purse? Or, indeed, our welfare?
Some of the detail: see http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/dec/12/osborne-working-families-reduced-allowances-2017
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