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	Racism should be called as it is by David Forman Australia   February 2013   How many isolated acts of racism does it take before we recognise we are witnessing a pattern? Australia has an ugly racist undercurrent and weak political leadership is making it worse, says David Forman.   Even in these politically fractious times, you can be assured that there will be a bipartisan response to anyone who dares suggest Australia is a racist country.   We have recently seen allegations of racial profiling by police, vile attacks on people on public transport, acts of violence in the streets, venal talkback callers: yet apparently none of them provide evidence to our political leaders of an underlying social problem. Whenever anyone, be they from overseas or a local agent provocateur, says we have a widespread problem with racist attitudes in the community, the Government and Opposition can be relied upon to leap to the defence of Australians as "tolerant" and "decent" and to reject the most recent incident as ugly but isolated. And certainly not indicative of a deeper problem.   How many isolated acts does it take before we recognise we are witnessing a pattern?   How long can politicians and community leaders act as apologists for Australian "decency" before these very statements become a licence to forgive everyday acts of thoughtless racism?   Last weekend, my son met with a group of old friends in Sydney for a night out. They happened to be Indian. He is not.   They went to a succession of nightclubs where they were turned away at the door.   At a couple, they were turned away because they looked "intoxicated". They had not had a drink.   At others, they were turned away because the venue had reached capacity. Then watched as non-Indians were admitted.   At one, my son was offered admission because the doorman did not realise he was with the young Indian men who were simultaneously being refused entry.   Eventually, they found a sports bar with live music and had a good night.   The most disturbing element of the whole sorry incident for me was that the young Indian men seemed unsurprised and were content with the evening.   This was, it appears, the type of treatment they have come to expect in Australia"s largest city. A sea port city that prides itself on being cosmopolitan and a great gateway for migration.   In a land built on migration.   Australia is one of the few countries in the world where the word multicultural is not in immediate danger of becoming a pejorative term.   Can we really countenance the prospect of multiculturalism becoming a pejorative term, the way it has for so many in the UK and Northern Europe?   We celebrate diversity and are proud of our embrace of ethnic communities - our Little Italy, China Town, Greek Street. We play and watch footy together and manage, mostly, not to feel a need to punch each other in the head while doing it, despite different cultural backgrounds.   A survey released in 2011 found 87 per cent of us thought cultural diversity was a good thing.   Yet the very same survey showed that almost half of Australians have negative tendencies toward Muslims and almost a quarter have anti-Semitic tendencies.   Go figure.   Maybe what those results are saying reflects that most disingenuous of expressions; "I"m not racist, but …"   When it comes to racism, there are no buts, there is or there isn"t, and if Australia in 2013 is failing still to understand that, we have a deep, deep social problem.   The ugly truth of Australia today is that our political leaders are so busy trying to tell people in marginal seats in Sydney that they can relate to them, or even that they are just like them, that they are too afraid to lead them on issues that really matter.   So they reflexively defend the national attitude when there are accusations of widespread racism.   They have honed their political script so as to avoid calling out what is becoming blindingly obvious: sure, racism is bad, they say, but we "understand" that people aren"t really bad and aren"t really racist.   That video of the person vomiting abuse on another person who happens to be French and sharing the same Melbourne bus is just an aberration. Just like the video before it and the one before that. A series of aberrations; tut, tut.   Well, guess what? We have a large, ugly and probably growing racist undercurrent and weak political leadership is making it worse.   And until all our political leaders have the guts to stand up and call it for what it is, unequivocally and consistently, it will never end. Visit the related web page
	Politicians have taken the lead in blaming poverty on the poor by Guardian News & agencies United Kingdom   March 2013   Benefit cuts putting 200,000 children in poverty must be stopped, experts say.   Senior welfare experts have urged the government to reconsider benefit cuts coming into force next week that will disproportionately hit the poorest families and push a further 200,000 children into poverty.   In an open letter to British prime Minister David Cameron, published in the Guardian, more than 50 social policy professors warn that the welfare reforms, coupled with previous tax, benefit and public expenditure cuts, will result in the poorest tenth of households losing the equivalent of around 38% of their income.   They say the changes will undermine public support for the welfare state – which they call "one of the hallmarks of a civilised society".   "Welfare states depend on a fair collection and redistribution of resources, which in turn rests upon the maintenance of trust between different sections of society and across generations.   "Misleading rhetoric concerning those who have to seek support from the welfare state, such as the contrast between "strivers" and "shirkers", risks undermining that trust and, with it, one of the key foundations of modern Britain."   The letter argues that such rhetoric does not reflect the reality of a UK where families move fluidly in and out of work and in and out of poverty.   It adds: "In the interests of fairness and to protect the poorest, as well as to avoid the risk of undermining the consensus on the British welfare state, we urge you to increase taxation progressively on the better off, those who can afford to pay (including ourselves), rather than cutting benefits for the poorest."   The letter follows growing concern among charities, campaigners and local authorities about the combined impact on vulnerable individuals and households of welfare changes and cuts to local authority budgets.   A separate report compiled by academics from six UK universities concludes that Britain"s poorest are worse off today than they were at the height of the cuts imposed by Margaret Thatcher"s Conservative government in 1983.   The Poverty and Exclusion project reports that 33% of British households lacked at least three basic living necessities in 2012, compared with 14% in 1983. These include living in adequately heated homes, eating healthily, and owning basic clothing items such as properly fitting shoes.   "Despite the fact that the UK is a much wealthier country, levels of deprivation are going back to the levels found 30 years ago," says the report, titled The Impoverishment of The UK.   The report found: Roughly 4 million children and adults are not fed properly judged against what most people consider to be a minimally acceptable diet – meaning they do not eat three meals a day, including fresh fruit, meat, fish and vegetables. Over a quarter of all adults skimped on meals so others in their households could eat. One-third of all adults can"t afford to pay unexpected costs of £500 (such as if a cooker breaks down), 31% can"t afford to save at least £20 a month. About 11 million people cannot afford adequate housing conditions and nearly one in ten households are unable to afford to fully heat their home.   The project measures who and how many people fall below what the majority agree are "necessities for life" in the UK today. The list of necessities also includes consumer items such as a washing machine and a telephone, and social activities like visiting friends and family in hospital.   "The results present a remarkably bleak portrait of life in the UK today and the shrinking opportunities faced by the bottom third of UK society," said the head of the project, Professor David Gordon of Bristol University. "Moreover this bleak situation will get worse as benefit levels fall in real terms, real wages continue to decline and living standards are further squeezed."   http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/mar/27/benefit-cuts-poverty-stopped-experts   http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/04/martine-white-product-welfare-not-philpott   http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/pollytoynbee   http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/02/ten-lies-told-about-welfare   http://ourwelfareworks.com/ http://www.jrf.org.uk/   What we are witnessing is economic warfare by the rich against the poor, by George Monbiot.   Most of the world"s people are decent, honest and kind. Most of those who dominate us are inveterate bastards. This is the conclusion I"ve reached after many years of journalism. Writing on Black Monday, as the British government"s full-spectrum attack on the lives of the poor commences, the thought keeps returning to me   "With a most inhuman cruelty, they who have put out the people"s eyes reproach them of their blindness." This government, whose mismanagement of the economy has forced so many into the arms of the state, blames the sick, the unemployed, the underpaid for a crisis caused by the feral elite – and punishes them accordingly. Most of those affected by the bedroom tax, introduced today, are disabled. Thousands will be driven from their homes, and many more pushed towards destitution. Relief for the poor from council tax will be clipped; legal aid for civil cases cut off. Yet at the end of this week those making more than £150,000 a year will have their income tax cut.   Two days later, benefit payments for the poorest will be cut in real terms. A week after that, thousands of families who live in towns and boroughs where property prices are high will be forced out of their homes by the total benefits cap. What we are witnessing is raw economic warfare by the rich against the poor.   So the age-old question comes knocking: why does the decent majority allow itself to be governed by a brutal, antisocial minority? Part of the reason is that the minority controls the story. As John Harris explained in the Guardian, large numbers (including many who depend on it) have been persuaded that most recipients of social security are feckless, profligate fraudsters. Despite everything that has happened over the last two years, Rupert Murdoch, Lord Rothermere and the other conservative media barons still seem to be running the country. Their relentless propaganda, using exceptional and shocking cases to characterise an entire social class, remains highly effective. Divide and rule is as potent as it has ever been.   But I"ve come to believe that there"s also something deeper at work: that most of the world"s people live with the legacy of slavery. Even in a nominal democracy like the United Kingdom, most people were more or less in bondage until little more than a century ago: on near-starvation wages, fired at will, threatened with extreme punishment if they dissented, forbidden to vote. They lived in great and justified fear of authority, and the fear has persisted, passed down across the five or six generations that separate us and reinforced now by renewed insecurity, snowballing inequality, partisan policing.   Any movement that seeks to challenge the power of the elite needs to ask itself what it takes to shake people out of this state. And the answer seems inescapable – hope. Those who govern on behalf of billionaires are threatened only when confronted by the power of a transformative idea.   Seventy years ago, in the UK, the transformative idea was freedom from want and fear through the creation of a social security system and a National Health Service. It swept a Labour government to power which was able, despite far tougher economic circumstances than today"s, to create a fair society from a smashed, divided nation. This is the achievement which – through a series of sudden, spectacular and unmandated strikes – Cameron"s government is now demolishing.   Four nations and a funeral: the demise of the British welfare state, by Gerry Hassan.(Scotland).   Today sees the transformation of the British welfare system, combining crippling cuts to benefits with the full blown marketisation of England"s NHS. This is Cameron"s "compassionate conservatism". Scotland and the UK must find a different way.   The British welfare state is meant to be one of the ties that bind us together; along with the NHS and the BBC representing our common strands of citizenship.   Each has been remarkably eroded in recent years but on Monday April 1st huge changes will occur in the first two - the welfare state and NHS in England – which will have massive consequences for hundreds of thousands of people up and down this country already hard pressed and vulnerable, and for the very idea of Britain itself.   A host of benefit changes are about to occur: the bedroom tax, the abolition of Disability Living Allowance, the housing benefit cap and a real cut in most benefits. At the same time, there will be the biggest overhaul of the NHS in England in decades, with private health care providers the world over drooling at the prospect of getting their hands on the NHS billions.   This is not the mandate David Cameron and Ian Duncan Smith stood on in 2010. Cameron impressed on people that he was a different kind of ‘compassionate conservative’, stressing the perils of inequality and poverty, and citing the work of Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s influential ‘The Spirit Level’.   But everything the two have done post-2010 has been to return to type and worse.   The bedroom tax will affect 660,000 households across the UK. In Scotland, according to Scottish Government research, 105,000 households will be affected. Eight out of ten households which it impacts upon have a disabled adult; this when according to the recent Breadline Britain study 29% of Scots live in poverty and cannot afford the basic essentials of life.   The abolition of the Disability Living Allowance will see outsourcers Atos incentivised to remove 500,000 people from the new benefit: personal independent payments.   This is the climate in which this week the Poverty Alliance held their Poverty Assembly, bringing together hundreds of diverse, angry voices from the most disadvantaged and poorest parts of Scotland.   Hazel Ratcliffe are told of the anxieties and wearisome pressures of managing financially day to day on benefits with kids. She told of how she planned and budgeted, and then would be thrown by the unexpected happening, when her son’s shoes wore out and she had no means to buy replacements.   Scotland sadly isn’t as different from the rest of the UK as we like to think.. Margaret Burgess, Minister for Housing and Welfare Reform, addressed the Poverty Assembly on Monday, and told people that ‘Scotland was a rich country’. All fine, but when asked to do something she responded that ‘Scotland didn’t have that many wealthy people’ and so we couldn’t do something such as raising the council tax top levels.   Actually, Scotland could act if it wanted: we could unite to prevent evictions from the bedroom tax, and we could implement our own version of the mansion tax, asking the better off to contribute more at this time of crisis.   Part of Scotland doesn’t want to act but just grandstand. Other parts are even worse. One very senior health professional told me that ‘there was no interest in Scotland in structural change’ and that we should all just look to inner change: effectively a voice of complacent retreat and passivity.   People are facing hardship, demonisation and an ideological onslaught.   Adrian Sinfield reflected at the Poverty Assembly that ‘the welfare state as we know it’ is effectively dead, the Fabian good news story of the march of progress is over and now in reverse gear.   Britain has become a land of harsh judgements, punitive measures and decisions towards those most vulnerable, with a narrow, nasty populism on welfare which mixes the worst of human emotions about insecurities, people getting benefits they don’t deserve, and immigration fears.   The British welfare state came of age in that moment of the Second World War where the British people collectively decided to create a different future, and as the fate of the war perilously shifted from the Germans and Japanese to Allies, affirmed in the Beveridge Report and subsequent debates, that we wished to define ourselves by how we looked after each other.   That was a long time ago and those principles and attitudes no longer seem to shape Britain. Instead, we now have an increasingly fragmented, bitter, divided country, and the slow, painful demise of the British dream of the welfare state and, in England, the NHS.   We have to take a stand against this now, and where we can in Scotland, mitigate, oppose and present a different way. That means challenging our politicians, political debate and public services to do better and rise above the ‘business as usual’ or, even worse, business model of development. This is a defining point for Scotland and the four nations of the UK.   * In the UK, the government has cut £10 billion from pensions. At the same time, it delivered a £10,000 tax cut to the 300,000 richest people in the country.   Feb 2013   Politicians have taken the lead in blaming poverty on the poor, by Barbara Ellen.   How long would it take for "poor-shaming" to embed itself in the national psyche as borderline normal? Or perhaps it has already done so? The Methodists, the United Reformed Church, the Church of Scotland and the Baptist Union have joined forces to publish a study called "The Lies We Tell Ourselves". It highlights myths surrounding people and poverty.   The report argues that the government is "deliberately misrepresenting" the poor, blaming them for their circumstances while ignoring more complex reasons, including policy deficiencies.   Moreover, they feel that this scapegoating is the result of collusion between politicians, the media and the public.   It didn"t seem so long ago that most people would think twice about denigrating fellow citizens who were having a hard time.   These days, it appears to have been sanctioned as a new national bloodsport, regularly slipping under the PC-radar as little else manages to.   Nor is it just coming from politicians such as Conservative Works and Pensions Minister Duncan Smith, though he could be termed "Poor-Shamer General" for his absurd apocalyptic visions. A politician is one thing but these attitudes are spreading and hardening among ordinary people too. Indeed, poverty seems a trigger to inspire hate speech that would be quickly denounced if it related to race or gender.   Only recently, there were startling amounts of venom levelled at a woman with 11 children, who needed a bigger council house. The fact that this woman had a notable number of children seemed to be a convenient hook for the more generalised abuse and resentment directed at pretty much anyone in need of council accommodation, or any help whatsoever.   Is this our new default setting – that the needy are greedy? This chimes with a slew of government policies making no allowances for circumstances or sheer bad luck. Meanwhile, the more fortunate are invited to pour scorn upon anyone who fails.   How does this kind of thing escalate? That"s easy. At the risk of stating the bleeding obvious, the poor are poor. They have no money, no voice, no representatives, and no means to establish their own public profile. Poverty is a big domino – once it falls, everything goes. In such circumstances, if a group of people are "deliberately misrepresented" then there"s precious little they can do about it. The churches got it right – if anything, the truth seems so much worse that it must surely be time to put the shame back into poor-shaming. Poor-shamers are bullies, and right now they"re getting away with it.   * Access the PDF report "The Lies We Tell Ourselves" via the link below.   http://www.jointpublicissues.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Truth-And-Lies-Report-smaller.pdf Visit the related web page
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