This Was Not Fair
By Emma.
The CSR was an attack on the most vulnerable in society along with the squeezed middle. It will completely redefine the welfare state not as an indicator of our civilisation, but as a Victorian squalor provider, hidden from the view of the rich who caused the problems in the first place.
Because it’s an area I know about, I will exemplify what I mean by talking about the cuts to social housing, which are appalling. a 60% cut to the budget for building desperately needed new properties is expected to be made up by charging new tenants up to 80% of the market rent. This is not affordable housing by any stretch of the imagination, particularly in areas where the market rate is ridiculously over inflated. There will then be a split in social housing providers between those who build and those who house the poorest, which will mean over time that we end up with ghettos rather than vibrant mixed communities.
This is just one way to examine what is clear. This budget is deeply unfair. When the budget for local authorities are cut by twice as much in percentage terms as the money given to the richest woman in Britain, that’s not fair.
When the poorest suffer as the second most impacted group (after the very wealthy who can – of course – bear the impact far better), that’s not fair.
A final thought for you. On the Guardian Website, they ran an interactive feature called You Make the Cuts. In the cuts options offered for the Department for Transport, one option is to privatise 10% of the road network and introduce charging. This would generate £75 Billion. Not a single other measure would have to be taken. Not a job lost, not a university place unfunded, not a social house unbuilt. There would even be money to invest in public transport to alleviate the suffering of those who would be worse off.
Not even considered.
Tags: comprehensive spending review, Condems, CSR, housing, tories
Wednesday, October 20th 2010 at 22:36
That’s wrong, and whoever made that Guardian thing fucked up- even aside from presenting it as a cut, the entire road network is valued at 75 billion, so it wouldn’t get you anywhere.
(Much like the privatised bits of our transport system SATIRES.)
Wednesday, October 20th 2010 at 22:41
and where’s the “burn the MOD, eat the rich, bye” button
Wednesday, October 20th 2010 at 22:48
I don’t know where the Guardian got the figs from, but I suspect the total was a combination of the profit from partial sale of the rail network and the profits from charging for road use.
I agree it’s not a cut, but maybe it doesn’t all have to be cuts!
Wednesday, October 20th 2010 at 23:03
actually i think i’m way wrong on that i think i misread a decimal point somewhere.
they’ll do it anyway at some point to buy a space helicopter or something, at which point it will turn out that running roads for a profit is a bad idea and we end up paying more than we from the sale back as a subsidy. TOOT TOOT
Wednesday, October 20th 2010 at 23:26
See, now I want a Space Helicopter…