Green Party Open Meeting : Inequality : Monday April 13th

The next open meeting of Colchester Green Party is tomorrow (Monday April 13th) and the topic is 'Inequality'. There will be a presentation by Colchester Green Party Political Education Officer Howard Metler, followed by a discussion. All welcome. The time is 7.30pm - 9pm and the venue is the New Inn pub, Chapel Street South.

Please Support UNICEF's Campaign To End Violence Against Children

With UNICEF Children's Champion David Wiltcher

UNICEF ( The United Nations Children's Fund) http://www.unicef.org.uk/ has launched a campaign to end violence against children worldwide. 2015 is a critical year as in September the UN Heads of Government are due to meet in New York in order to review a set of goals established in the year 2000 and to set new goals and targets. In that year a target proposal was drawn up which was never adopted in the final set of targets. It was:

16.2: End abuse, exploitation, trafficking and all forms of violence and torture against children.

UNICEF is campaigning to get the 16.2 target adopted this time round in 2015. I shall be writing to Green Party leader Natalie Bennett asking her to champion this cause. I would ask Green Party members to tweet support for the UNICEF campaign, using the hash tag 'End Violence'.

The figures on violence towards children are truly disturbing.
Worldwide UNICEF advises that a child dies every five minutes as a result of violence which is around 100,000 per year. Countless more experience violence in war zones and within the UK there are examples such as trafficking, the Rotherham child abuse scandal, the death of Baby P and many more.
Around 120 million girls under the age of 20 have been subjected to forced sexual acts at some point in their lives. More than 125 million women have been subjected to female genital mutilation/cutting, mostly in childhood or early adolescence. Child prostitution in Thailand involved 800,000 children under the age of sixteen in 2004. According to Unicef there are 40,000 child prostitutes in Sri Lanka and 6.4% of the country's child population gets pregnant.
The charity War Child http://www.warchild.org.uk/estimates that there are 250,000 child soldiers in the world (often forced into fighting) and that 40% of them are girls.
Nigeria has the largest number of young homicide victims, with almost 13,000 deaths in 2012, followed by Brazil with approximately 11,000.

Therefore the UK should ensure the target proposed to "end abuse, exploitation, trafficking and all forms of violence and torture against children by 2030" (16.2) remains in its current form in the final post-2015 development framework.

 

My Challenge To David Cameron Regarding Obesity & Benefits.....

I'd like to know from Mr Cameron whether or not he thinks that his colleague Eric Pickles should have to go on a diet or lose the right to part of his MPs expenses.

For anyone who isn't aware of the background to this question, Mr Cameron announced earlier today that people who cannot work because they are obese should either seek medical treatment and diet or have their benefits cut. Mr Cameron describes this move as a "moral crusade" and has further stated:

"People have problems with their weight that could be addressed, but instead a life on benefits rather than work becomes the choice. It is not fair to ask hardworking taxpayers to fund the benefits of people who refuse to accept support and treatment".

What Mr Cameron is doing here is pandering to the view that obesity is somehow an ethical issue, that being overweight is a symptom of laziness, fecklessness or even greed. Aside from the obvious offensiveness of such assumptions, they take no account of the fact that there may be underlying health issues surrounding the obesity which no amount of treatment will easily sort out. Moreover it is the politics of the schoolyard bully equating obesity with notions of 'lazy scroungers' who 'stuff their faces with burgers at our expense' and so forth. It reminds me of a recent article by the Daily Mail columnist Richard Littlejohn, who described Deidre Kelly ('White Dee') who featured in the TV show 'Benefits Street' as: "a hideous obese slattern". Clearly these prejudices are very embedded in certain quarters and boil down to the essential view that obese people are lazy gluttons and people on benefits are feckless.

One of the most disturbing aspects of this issue is the ongoing problem of sizeist bullying in our schools. According to research by http://www.youngminds.org.uk/ around 1 million children still experience bullying everyday in our schools and one of the most pernicious forms of it is obesity related. I'm not suggesting that Mr Cameron is advocating the bullying of overweight children, however politicians have to be very careful in terms of the language that they use and the attitudes which they pander to. Suggesting that obesity is somehow a moral issue or linked to fecklessness is not only ignorant but gives out all the wrong signals in terms of social attitudes.

Of course what Mr Cameron is really doing is trying to put forward a 'populist' excuse for further benefits cuts. However he needs to be very careful what he says, given that there are a number of Conservative MPs who are themselves on the large side and who no doubt receive taxpayer-funded expenses assistance. Therefore my challenge to Mr Cameron is.......

Given that you see the reduction of obesity as an ethical issue in which the tax and benefits system has a role, do you Mr Cameron think that your colleague Eric Pickles should lose access to MPs expenses should he refuse treatment?

Why the Green Party's Citizen's Income Would Benefit Us All

Given that it is almost impossible to pick up a copy of one of the tabloids without reading some or other article about 'scroungers', 'dole spongers' or 'benefits cheats', it might seem that the Green Party's promise of a guaranteed income for all is a hard policy to sell to the voters. However, despite the context of condemnation of the disadvantaged and the 'Benefits Street' poverty porn demonisation of the poor, its high time to shout as loud as we can about a policy that will actually bring positive advantages to everyone. Green Party policy states:

EC730 A Citizen's Income sufficient to cover an individual's basic needs will be introduced, which will replace tax-free allowances and most social security benefits (see EC711). A Citizen's Income is an unconditional, non-withdrawable income payable to each individual as a right of citizenship. It will not be subject to means testing and there will be no requirement to be either working or actively seeking work.

It may seem on the surface that offering a universal basic income to everyone, including those who do not seem to be making the effort to look for work, will just encourage people to put their feet up and live off the taxpayer. This is what the tabloids would shout from the rafters. However this superficial emotion-based argument completely misses the point about how to encourage people into work. It is not whether or not people have an income or not that counts it is whether work pays ie whether you earn more if you work than if you don't. It is the gap that matters. At the moment we have thousands of people stuck in what is termed the 'poverty trap', meaning that their various benefits give them a higher income than getting a job would. This is indeed untenable and needs to change. However the primary cause of it is not generous benefits but the fact that we live in an economy based on low pay ie a minimum wage that is not a living wage, zero hours contracts with no guaranteed income and the importation of the cheapest labour from the EU in order to keep wages down. As a result, the taxpayer has to fork out millions to top up the earnings of the low paid in order to subsidise their exploitative employers and private landlords who are making money out of this crazy situation. Meanwhile for many facing a choice between working for a non-living wage or living on benefits that are slightly higher, the latter is the obvious choice.

The Citizen's Income however would be a major step to solving this. For a start, in order to attract a workforce, wages would have to rise to a higher level than the income. The higher the Citizen's Income is then the higher the minimum wage would have to be, its as simple as that. Clearly it would have to be paid to EU migrants as well (and the tabloids would howl) or free movement of labour in the EU curtailed, however the result would be that wages for those in work on the lowest incomes would have to rise as a result of the guaranteed income. Without the ability to keep a pool of people in total poverty as a means of threatening the poor into accepting the lowest of wages, and without the ability to use people from Eastern Europe to work for next to nothing then wages in general would have to go up. And this benefits us all.

It benefits us all in less obvious ways. For a start it would reduce crime. The main reason why it benefits the middle classes to have a benefits system for the poor is that you are less likely to get your house burgled or your car stereo pinched. If people have no income then their choices are crime, charity/food banks or prostitution. Threatening to remove the benefits of those, 'not actively seeking work' always was a tabloid headline grabbing fallacy that is causing far more social problems than it solves. Who wouldn't rather burgle a house than starve? The Citizen's Income would guarantee everyone a basic income without any moralistic caveats or attempts to distinguish the 'deserving poor' from the 'feckless' and as such would mean that there is less need for not but food banks but also petty crime. I'm not suggesting that it would solve all petty crime, where people have already built up patterns of behaviour, but it would surely have some effect. Coupled with a serious attempt (backed up with serious government spending) to get people off hard drugs, I suspect it could have a major effect.

The Citizen's Income would benefit the taxpayer in the long run by reducing the need to subsidise the wages of the low paid with umpteen other benefits because their wages themselves have risen, especially when coupled with the Green Party policy of raising the minimum wage to a living wage. It would reduce the need for food banks and the constant fear of petty crime which exists in certain areas of our major cities. Above all, it would ensure that wages in general would have to increase and that brings benefits to far more people than those at the very bottom of the pile.

Natalie Bennett Announces Living Wage Policies at the Green Party Autumn Conference

The Green Party of England and Wales autumn conference is underway and our party leader Natalie Bennett has announced plans to create a 'living wage' by raising the minimum wage to £10 per hour by 2020. At the moment the minimum wage (as of next month) is £6.50 for those over 21, £5.13 for those aged 18-20 and £3.79 for those under 18. The problem is that with the cost of living rising due to increasing rents and utility bills, among other costs, the minimum wage is often not a 'living wage' which is defined as the amount needed to meet the basic cost of living in the UK ie food, clothing and shelter. Currently the living wage in the UK is calculated as £7.65 if you live outside London and £8.80 inside London.

How the policy would work is that the minimum wage would rise in stages by £1.15 to £7.65 an hour next year and then in further stages until reaching £10 in 2020. To help pay for this, those with more than £3million in assets will pay an annual levy of between 1% and 2%, amounting to £30,000 - £60,000 a year.

In addition to this, Natalie Bennett also promised to abolish zero-hours contracts in her speech to conference. She said:

"We’re also backing a complete ban zero-hours contracts. No employer should be able to hold their staff captive in a life of uncertainty and fear, subject to the whims and favouritism of managers, with no way of planning how to pay their bills. The zero-hours contract is the return of the Great Depression’s street corner queues for work – and we say NO!"

As for rent costs, she outlined plans for both rent capping and an end to short-term contracts:

"And we’ll ensure that private landlords are NOT allowed to continue to charge extortionate rents for rabbit hutches. Our smart rent cap, combined with long-term rental contracts, will keep rent rises down. And we’re demanding a living rent commission, to work out how to bring rents back in line with incomes."