The Tories are fucking bastards

The Sunday Herald has reported that Benefits Agency staff are now being given special training so that they know what to say when a claimant threatens suicide. The social security system, the safety net that is supposed to supply the basic needs of citizens who have nowhere else to turn, is killing people. Think about that for a moment. The very system that is supposed to provide succour instead sucks the life from the weak. The only means left to those who have been marginalised to drag themselves back to relevance, instead it tosses them off the edge of the world. We live in a country which points accusingly at those it has betrayed, and condemns them for its own failure.

The means of salvation is the road to death, the sign above the Job Centre tells you to abandon hope, abandon dignity. Your humanity is left at the door and you become a statistic to figure in poverty porn on Channel 4. The comfortably off tsk their disapproval of your poverty. It’s all your own fault for being poor. Perform tricks, jump through hoops like a trained dog. Learn how to sit up nice and beg like a good boy or girl. And then you’ll get your welfare biscuits.

We’re not supposed to call it social security any more. Social security might make the poor think that they have a right to dignity. We’re supposed to call it welfare – a weasel word that reeks of charity and the kind bestowal of privilege by the powerful. Bugger that. We should not allow ourselves to be complicit in the murdering of language by the state, in its abuse of words in an attempt to hide the establishment’s own shame and disgrace.

In one of the richest countries in the world it’s not a privilege to have food in your stomach. It’s a right. It’s not a privilege to have a roof over your head. It’s a right. It’s not a privilege to have warmth in your home. It’s a right. In a country with an embarrassment of energy resources our political masters should be embarrassed and ashamed that there are people who cannot afford to heat their houses in a freezing winter. But the privileged look to their investments, they look to their directorships, they look to their wealth and they don’t look the poor in the eye.

Every homeless person, every begging outstretched hand, every paper cup proffered on a pavement, every sign scrawled in sobs, every tin of beans given in a foodbank, is a direct consequence of the refusal of the rich to accept that they have a responsibility to the society that has allowed them to amass their wealth. The rich in the 21st century tell the masses the solution lies in Victorian charity, while they squirrel their wealth away in tax havens. Those who suck wealth call themselves wealth creators, and we’re all impoverished as a result.

According to the Black Triangle group who campaign for disability rights, by March this year at least 80 people had committed suicide after being let down by the safety net that strangles, the safety net that kills. Almost 50 others had died as a direct result of benefits sanctions. Ponder that for a moment, and weep. Weep and grieve for the dead, howl in rage for the thousands more driven to desperate measures, to begging in the street, to trudging to food banks.

Claimants threatening suicide is now considered a likelihood. It’s now such a commonplace occurrence that policies and plans are put in place to deal with it. It clearly hasn’t occurred to the politicians who have ultimate responsibily for the system that the best way to deal with people who have been driven to suicide by the benefits system is to change the system so it supplies people’s basic needs and then the question of suicide would never arise.

The barbarities of the bedroom tax have driven disabled people from their homes. Bankers enjoy their bonuses on the back of a disabled man who has to bathe in a blow up pool because the state says it’s too expensive to allow him to remain in a house adapted for his needs.

When you’re poor, you’re not allowed to have human dignity. This is modern Britain. This is the state that Scotland remains in thrall to, a state of disgrace, a state of despair, a state of desolation.

I try hard to think of elegant and expressive words, to craft the perfect phrase. But then sometimes I just think – the Tories are fucking bastards. And the passionless appeasers who suck the soul and spirit from the Labour party are every bit as bad. The Tories and the Labour right condemn us to live in a society where consumerism consumes conscience, where avarice eats altruism, where capitalism craps on care and compassion. There is no place for the humane or the human in modern Britain. All there is left is the stultifying merry go round of trivialities of the Great British pat on the back, the Great British self-regard, the Great British blindness, the Great British PPI rip off. Like the wizened victim of bad plastic surgery this decrepit caricature of a state looks at itself in the mirror and thinks it looks damn fine. It can’t see what we see. It’s too far gone up its own arse. This is not a state that can be reformed. It can only be begun anew.

There is no more to say, only a righting of wrongs to seek, only a settling of scores to pursue. I can weep, weep weep because in the jaggy leaves of the thistle there is no more a Scotland where I was born like you. But I’m done weeping. I will grieve no more. I will stand arm in arm with my sisters and brothers and get angry, get organised, get even. I will live to see a new Scotland, a land where dignity has value, not a price.

Our day will come. There will be another independence referendum, and next time it’s personal.

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