This rhetoric is nothing new. Disabled people have faced an ongoing onslaught of negative headlines over the past few months.
The Prime Minister has previously spoken about ‘[squeezing] benefits to fund more tax cuts for workers’, pitting disabled people against the rest of society. Commentators, too, have taken to arguing that our benefits system ‘invites abuse’.
And this harmful attitude towards welfare is not partisan; Labour too have implied that there are too many people claiming disability benefits.
But disability benefits are not a problem that needs to be ‘controlled’. At its best, our welfare system enables disabled people to lead more independent and meaningful lives, offering them vital support to overcome the barriers they face. That is something people across the political spectrum should celebrate.
Labour announced this week that it will renationalise the railways, if elected. The party referred to the move as the ‘biggest overhaul to our railways in a generation.’
Under Labour’s proposals, train companies would be brought back into public ownership and run by a new body, Great British Railways, as their privatised contracts expire.
While the announcement has been broadly welcomed, with RMT general secretary Mick Lynch saying a publicly owned rail network is in the “best interests of railway workers, passengers and the taxpayer,” public ownership campaigners We Own It warn it doesn’t go far enough.
Following Labour’s announcement, Johnbosco Nwogbo, lead campaigner at public ownership campaign group We Own It, said it was time to “decommission the gravy train.”
“With delays and cancellations rife and some of the most expensive fares in Europe, polls show that over two thirds of us want our railways to be brought into public hands. Labour have rightly identified that the ownership of our public services will be a key issue for voters at this election.
Prem Sikka is an Emeritus Professor of Accounting at the University of Essex and the University of Sheffield, a Labour member of the House of Lords, and Contributing Editor at Left Foot Forward.
The UK government is taking statutory powers for unlimited snooping on bank and building society accounts connected with receipt of social security benefits and the state pension, even when there is no suspicion of fraud. This is the latest chapter in the right-wing coup that began in the 1980s.
Millions of individuals, landlords, charities, clubs, voluntary organisations and companies will become subject to 24/7 surveillance. No court order is needed and you won’t be told anything about the information extracted and how it is used or abused. There is no right of appeal.
The source of latest rush towards totalitarianism is the misleadingly titled Data Protection and Digital Information Bill. It has been passed by the House of Commons where the government used its big majority to stifle debate. It is now going through the House of Lords.
The attack on civil liberties is dressed up as a fraud prevention measure, but the government is unable to provide relevant data. The government claims that mass monitoring is needed to check benefit fraud, estimated to be around £6.4bn a year or 2.7% of the total benefit payments. Under the Social Security Fraud Act 2001, the government can request information from bank accounts on a case-by-case basis, if there are reasonable grounds to suspect fraud. This is being replaced by mass surveillance of bank accounts. A Minister told parliament that “proportionately fraud in the state pension is very low”, and was unable to provide any financial numbers but the government will place 12.7m retirees under surveillance.
Financial institutions will be paid unspecified millions to conduct mass snooping and look for cash flow sources and patterns or the level of savings, and flag people exceeding thresholds for benefits. There is a danger that gifts to loved ones to buy clothes or a new bed could be counted as income, and result in loss of benefits. The inherent assumption in the Bill is that information generated by IT systems would be correct. The Post Office scandal shows that computer generated information isn’t necessarily correct, and can lead to injustices. Neither financial institutions nor the Department of Work and Pensions will owe a ‘duty of care’ to any injured party.
One of the many occasions climate destroyer and UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak uses a private jet.
Under Rishi Sunak, government transparency has reached an all time low with new government data revealing 2023 was the worst year for granting freedom of information (FOI) requests.
The Prime Minister has been accused of presiding over the most secretive government ever, with only 34% of resolvable FOIs granted in full, down 5% from 2022. Investigative journalist Peter Geoghegan said this drop matched the previous largest ever drop in a single year, in 2014.
This is the lowest figure since monitoring began in 2005, the government’s own data analysis has said, and reflects a growing drop in the granting of FOIs under the Tory Party.
In comparison the figure was 41% under Boris Johnson, 46% under Theresa May, 56% under David Cameron and 60% when Gordon Brown was Prime Minister.
