Monday, 05 August 2013

Surprise! The bedroom tax might just be a scam

This morning the Indy published evidence that the bedroom tax is what they call a ‘big lie’.

‘The Government’s justification for its controversial “bedroom tax” has been debunked by new figures showing that up to 96 per cent of those affected have, in effect, nowhere to move.

The figures published today in The Independent expose the false argument behind ministerial attempts to spin the move as ending the “spare-room subsidy”, and confirm campaigners’ claims that it merely penalises poor people...

More than 19 out of 20 families hit by the bedroom tax are trapped in their larger homes because there is nowhere smaller within the local social housing stock to take them.’

No surprise there. Once again we have the prime minister and the minister for work and pensions exposed as deeply unpleasant people, more concerned to demonstrate their readiness to make things worse for people in poverty than to come up with policies having some kind of rational justification to improve our society.

But this still constitutes news and good journalism. The important point about this story is that you are likely to have missed it. I haven’t carried out a wide search, but it’s striking that there is no mention of it on the BBC website.

The Beeb, inevitably cowed by accusations of anti-government bias, is not going to carry a story like this, any more than the right-wing press will do. And so this inventive government is allowed to carry on with its evidence-free, grotesquely malicious and repressive policies, because most people don’t really notice, and some even believe them to be doing their best.

The bedroom tax is a device whose unambiguous effect will be to increase and deepen social exclusion in a pretty straightforward way. That's never been in doubt. Unfortunately the perpetrators of this bizarre legislation apparently do not have the intelligence to understand that inequality is much more expensive for a society than is equality. What they do have is a stupefying arrogance that enables them to ignore and deride people who would point that out to them.

 

5 Aug 2013 20:14:41 | Social exclusion, Social policy

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Kevin Harris

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