Does the ‘government’ suffer from aporophobia?
Let’s look at the evidence:
- Social insecurity.
Would government ministers make the effort to bat their eyelashes, let alone get out of bed, for the pittance they expect people in receipt of state benefits to live on for an entire month? For every anti-poverty charity that has been campaigning on this issue for years, there will be a government minister who has opined about poor people merely needing to stop being so sick and incapacitated, or simply get a second or third job, or magically, somehow, just get paid more.
My theory is that they are convinced that — because they themselves are quite well off, and their immediate circle of colleagues and acquaintances are too – that no-one else [worth their time] could be that poor. It must therefore be that lefty, woke people (who eat tofu if I remember correctly) are hysterically making up these stories to tarnish the ‘nasty’ party’s reputation.
This is a government who took £20 per week away from some of the poorest during the pandemic – acknowledging of course, that there were a large number of ESA claimants that never got the uplift in the first place – because they weren’t struggling enough? Who could be ‘entirely happy’ with such a notion? Not a single jot of concern then?
Don’t just take my word for it. Take Olivier de Schutter’s: https://amp.theguardian.com/society/2023/nov/05/uk-poverty-levels-simply-not-acceptable-says-un-envoy-olivier-de-schutter
Or Philip Alston’s: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/nov/16/key-points-un-envoy-philip-alston-report-poverty-britain-uk
2. Benefit Sanctions
Ever-increasingly punitive sanctions for not looking for work regardless of physical or mental capability (or both). Here she is again.
Sanctions cause absolute misery and destitution. I’ve seen it first hand. Whether working or not working — all a sanction does is cut the amount of benefit being paid which robs a claimant of the ability to pay their bills and buy food. It’s punishment. It’s cruel. It’s aporaphobia and how the government demonises, chastises and bullies those that have committed the crime of not being wealthy.
3. Shafting the disabled population.
Year-long-plus waits for disability benefit appeals. Work capability assessments that don’t work. Even the incumbent (maybe) government talk over the heads of the chronically sick and disabled by always pledging themselves to be the party for ‘working’ people. Perhaps if they ignore the sick and disabled they will just go away? Perhaps they should ban disabled people from having electric aids and adaptations (like they tried to with rail ticket offices) so they don’t have to hear them complain that they can’t afford to run them. Then people could park their cars all over the payments with no need to worry about the wheelchairs that can’t navigate around them without risking death.
It can only be a matter of time before a Tory MP announces that being disabled is a ‘lifestyle choice’.
4. Homelessness.
Referred to by many as a Perfect Storm. This is the culmination of so many government policies that result in more vilification for those who do not even have the basic of a roof over their heads.
Local Housing Allowance frozen for 3 years. Rents now sky high for all properties, including the most rundown bedsits, and still they climb. Young people stuck with their parents because they absolutely cannot afford to buy or rent a house no matter how many avocado on toasts and Netflix subscriptions they forgo. There is not enough affordable housing despite well-to-do opinion writers proclaiming that we don’t have a housing crisis. Councils cannot afford to foot the bills to house families who would otherwise be on the street.
Your aporophobia has blinded you to the stark realities. The ‘choices’ for homeless people are possibly between an overcrowded hostel, a B’n’B on the other side of the shire, or the street. One Hundred Thousand families currently in temporary accomodation in England alone. And rising.
It’s November. Soulla Braverman doesn’t want to see homeless people in tents (aporophobia) because it’s uncomfortable to see things that a government cannot acknowledge out loud they caused with their own failed policies, hence they dogwhistle about ‘people from abroad’ and refer to utter destitution as a ‘lifestyle choice’.
Yes, we know that there is a visible section — one can only hope it’s a minority — of the population that would happily kick the homeless person, burn their tent and — if relevant— shout racist abuse at them, if only the Home Secretary would go that tiny bit further and announce that it’s OK to do so. But she stops short, merely sowing the seeds of division and demonisation, to people who have nothing. Maybe she gets a kick out of winding up ‘the left’ — but for those of us who are a bit closer to the people who are undoutbedly suffering, this feels like a direct kick in the guts.
What next? Banning warm jumpers and sleeping bags? How far along the scale do we go before we get to ‘just shoot them’. It begs the question ‘what the f*ck do you want them to do?’ Does Braverman speak the Government’s mind on this subject? Where is the Prime Minister? Well, he’s busy gazing, starry-eyed at billionaire entrepreneurs while he considers the future of Artifical Intelligence, and is apparently too dazzled to see the real, horrible, ugly destitution and waste of opportunity and life on our streets right now.
5. Debt.
Debt isn’t a problem if you’ve got so much surplus money that a doubling or even trebling of your energy bill amounts to a little less pocket change for 5 minutes. You probably made it back in interest in the time it took you to check your overseas portfolio of investments anyway.
Does the Government understand the concept of ‘warm spaces’? This is for people who cannot afford to heat their homes and are encouraged therefore to go out (into the cold) to a communal warm place to avoid death by hypothermia. Do ministers break out in a cold sweat when they consider a poor pensioner unable to adequately heat their home and themselves? Should we ban warm spaces too, Mrs Braverman, and pretend they’re not needed so the government doesn’t have to think about the shameful way it treats older poor people?
6. Foodbanks
You’re a conservative MP who takes a selfie and you are pleased to announce the opening of a new Foodbank. As though it’s a good thing? You’ve done your bit, the symptoms of aporophobia are temporarily assuaged. But when you lie in bed at night – in one of your comfortable, well heated homes, having enjoyed a decent dinner, doesn’t it worry you that a family somewhere is staring at tins of processed food and long life milk, wondering how they are going to persuade their kids that this is the very best they can do for them?
Don’t they worry at all about the generation of children growing up in a society that appears to have already forsaken them? They really should. Or do we ban them too? I heard recently of a school that sent a disabled child home because she was wearing white shoes – not black. This is the child of someone who has indeed come from overseas. (So obviously, we should hound them out of the country let alone admonish them for having the wrong shoes). Maybe the family doesn’t have much. What would this government have them do? The level of dystopian cruelty plummeted to is beyond anything my fairly hardened heart can stand. What on earth have we become? Is having the wrong-coloured shoes a lifestyle choice too?
7. Household support funds
Just why? Why don’t you give this money to the people who really need it by uplifting social security benefits to a level that will sustain them adequately? We are inundated with calls to our ‘cost of living helpline’ from people from ALL walks of life, and yes, many homeless people asking for money to buy tents and sleeping bags. We don’t get many ‘people from abroad’ ringing up for it though because of the language barrier. No, it’s mostly British people who can’t make ends meet. Last night I spent 30 heartbreaking minutes talking to a woman whose husband has left, after having abused her for years. She is scarred and broken. This is someone who has recently landed in the state’s so-called safety net, and the panic is real. How does she pay the massive mortgage, the colossal Council Tax, the enormous energy bill – already in debt - and buy food for the kids and actually just exist? And what good will the £80 voucher I issue do when we both know it won’t touch the sides? She’s in tears – it’s not fair, she tells me, where is the help from government? I have no answer.
I’ve been saying for some time that we have no safety net and week in and week out we see people who have fallen straight though the tattered remains.
For every strand of destitution and poverty permeating and rising like damp through the fabric of our society, there is a Tory MP taking to Twitter/X to tell their fanatics that there is no crisis; it’s all just a lifestyle choice, or it’s those people coming here on boats, or it’s the workshy shirkers, the benefit cheats, the lazy and feckless, the disabled who just need pushing and shoving into any job that is currently vacant no matter what. There’s nothing to see here, they say. But we see you — we really do.
If I believed in such things, I’d think that William Beveridge must be spinning in his grave. I don’t know what happened to this country to enable a Government like this one into power. It’s not just the incompetence and cruelty, it’s the fact that they are amateurs! Bullshitters, if you will. To me, it’s obvious, it’s frightening, it’s bewildering. Not a statesman-or-woman-like persona to be found anywhere among them.
And…I’m not sure we can take another whole year of this.
