As my friend Neil Foster tweets: "The small design firm I
worked for survived the crash but hit hard by huge cuts to public sector
clients. Austerity is anti-business."
On the Autumn Financial Statement, see, just for a start, here, here and, especially, here. As Mark Serwotka put it on Any Questions, this must be the
"only recovery in history where people's wages are falling, and tax revenues
aren't rising."
Meanwhile, with Universal Credit piling chaos upon disaster, Michael Meacher
If a society leaves some people with no means of feeding themselves except by theft, and that is what the IDS sanctions regime is doing (no benefits, not a penny, for filling in a form slightly incorrectly, or if the late-running bus made you five minutes late for a meeting with the DWP, or what have you), then those people have the moral right to steal food at least from those, such as the supermarket chains, who can easily afford to bear the loss.
The sin, rather, is social, and thus cultural and political. It consists in having made possible the existence of such deprivation, and in failing to rectify it.
That is where we now are.
If a society leaves some people with no means of feeding themselves except by theft, and that is what the IDS sanctions regime is doing (no benefits, not a penny, for filling in a form slightly incorrectly, or if the late-running bus made you five minutes late for a meeting with the DWP, or what have you), then those people have the moral right to steal food at least from those, such as the supermarket chains, who can easily afford to bear the loss.
The sin, rather, is social, and thus cultural and political. It consists in having made possible the existence of such deprivation, and in failing to rectify it.
That is where we now are.
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