Britain’s Chancellor George Osborne has announced legislation that will penalise and force into destitution hundreds of thousands of the poorest people in Britain, who are dependent on welfare benefits...
Stating that £5.2 billion was being lost from the welfare budget due largely to fraud, Osborne said the government planned to implement “a very tough set of proposals to impose new sanctions.” These include the introduction of new American-style “three strikes and you’re out” legislation. Anyone found guilty of three or more occasions of “welfare fraud” will have their benefit entitlement removed for three years. For a first conviction, loss of benefits of three months will be imposed and six months for a second...
Further measures were detailed Monday by Minister for Welfare Reform Lord Freud, another Cabinet multimillionaire, in a report entitled “Fraud and Error Strategy”. Under its provisions, cautions as a penalty for fraud will be abolished. A new “minimum penalty” will be imposed, in which those proven as “fraudsters” will be subject to four weeks loss of benefit payments. In a parallel with the medieval practise of putting people in the stocks, “Naming and shaming fraudsters in local areas” will be implemented.
The measures announced will be enforced by a new squad of 200 inspectors. These spies will include a “mobile task force” empowered to go into areas with “high rates of fraud” in order to check every claim individually. Public and private agencies will be authorised to track financial transactions, and extra powers are to be granted to enforcement authorities allowing them to seize assets of the poorest accused of fraud.
The issue of “welfare fraud” has been highlighted in the most sensationalist way for years by the right-wing media in order to scapegoat the poorest layers. It has been pursued in order to create a climate in which vast cuts in public spending can be imposed...The majority of the £5.2 billion is accounted for, according to the government’s own figures, by “official error” (£1.1 billion). “
ustomer error” by the claimant accounts for £1.1 billion. Errors made in the tax credit system account for a further £2.1 billion. Whilst the report castigates the perpetrators of “fraud”, the underpayment of benefits, which is estimated in the report to total £1.3 billion (a figure higher than that cited as fraud), is relegated to one brief throwaway sentence...
In the same week that Osborne was preaching about taxpayers being robbed “in the street” as a result of welfare fraud, he was at the centre of “tax dodging” claims along with two other Cabinet millionaires, Transport Secretary Philip Hammond and International Development Secretary Andrew Mitchell. They are to be the subjects of a Channel 4 Despatches programme this week. The Daily Mail commented Monday, “The programme is expected to claim that the men have used a variety of ‘wealth management’ techniques to protect their fortunes.”
Today, we have the obnoxious spectacle of a government, comprising at least 38 “millionaire ministers”, imposing barbaric cuts that will lead to many of the poorest people being forced onto the streets and into destitution...
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/oct2010/osbo-o20.shtml
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