The budget of fear

Sharon McCourt from Birmingham Left Unity writes ahead of budget day.

I used to think I knew what being afraid meant.

But I didn’t know fear… I didn’t know how it feels to be genuinely afraid you won’t be able to feed your children or keep a roof over their heads. ‘Austerity’, the new word to strike fear into all those who are not rich enough to be able to pay for any service their family may need. The country has ‘overspent’ and obviously it was our fault so we must pay the price.

So the budget approaches and they tell us £12 billion is to be cut from the welfare budget…£12 billion from the very people who are budgeting their last £12. They didn’t need to say where from – it didn’t matter, after all, we are all just scroungers, not important.

Announcements are made, things are ‘leaked’, which is true? The benefit cap was going to be £23,000, now its £20,000 outside London. Tax credits are to be cut. The education Maintenance Grant may be scrapped altogether. Housing benefit is now going to be on a contribution basis that everyone will have to pay – how much? No one knows. Are there going to be further cuts to sickness and disability benefits?

Again, we’re told, just wait till tomorrow, till we stand in Westminster and reveal your fate. Then we will play our game of booing and cheering and laughing at each other as we justify how hard we work for our 10% pay rise that it would be wrong not to take!

We have seen scenes of disability protesters trying to storm into parliament being forcibly dragged away by police. Do people think they were doing this because they are greedy? No: that was a last ditch attempt to save the Independent Living Fund, the clue being in the name, a payment to allow a person to live independently. This was just scrapped and responsibility handed to local authorities without any concern for whether those local authorities will continue to pay it. There are people in genuine fear that they will be further disabled from society and left to exist trapped in their homes or in institutions, all hope of independence taken away. It doesn’t matter in the rhetoric of the politicians, who only value those ‘hard-working families’.

Only rumours also abound that a lot of those very same ‘hard-working families’ are about to find out they’re not working hard enough, with an attack on tax credits. Under Universal Credit if you are working under 35 hours you will find that you are not and will be subject to conditions of job search for better employment – conditions of course means sanctions, the removal of people’s only form of money to buy food and essentials including keeping a roof over your head.

We are hearing that we shouldn’t be paying top-ups for employers to pay low wages. Indeed we should not, so will we look forward to an announcement that all their friends in big business are now going to pay a living wage? I won’t hold my breath. In fact will big business just stop using free labour in the form of workfare and work experience and offer to pay people for a real job? Stop the use of zero hour contracts, make them enough hours so people can actually take them and not need welfare?

What about housing? What will they announce next? We now live in a country where having a roof over your head is a luxury not a right, having a spare room is just not acceptable and you must pay, according to MPs who have an extra house as just a perk of the job. A mansion tax is ‘unfair’, but now there will be a limit on how much your household budget is to live in social housing?

All these ‘incentives’ to make us do the right things are punishing the most vulnerable in society. Austerity kills, it hurts, it damages and it is especially hurting the children, our future. The toll on people’s mental health, including our future generation, should not be underestimated. The answer to the number of children that are going to be forced into poverty is not to redefine how we work out poverty so you can now just wipe them away with the sweep of a pen.

So tomorrow, when you begin your pantomime in Westminster and you guffaw at your jokes and swipes at each other, we will finally find out where the cuts are going to fall. We will address them to our real lives and at least have a focus of what to fear and try and plan how to survive them. We will apply those cuts to what we have to budget, luxuries like food and clothes and heat. We will work out how we keep our ‘luxury’ of a roof over our heads. We will wonder at a country that allowed a government to be elected on a promise to cut £12 billion from the very poorest and they didn’t even have to say where from.