Thatcher’s funeral cost = £10 million. Latest ‘unavoidable’ cuts to Arts Council England = £11.6 million.

— Damien Walter (@damiengwalter) April 15, 2013

Margaret Thatcher’s funeral: 23 things you could pay for with £10m

Big Ben is silenced.

BONG BONG BONG BONG BONG BONG BONG BONG BONG BONG BONG BONG

— Big Ben (@big_ben_clock) April 16, 2013

The BBC refuse to play a song from the Wizard of Oz.

Five MSPs deny the Scottish Parliament a debate on Thatcher’s legacy.

There’s a strong possibility that the Metropolitan police will pre-arrest people whom they allege are going to take part in protests at the funeral: there has been an explicit threat that anyone who does protest along the funeral route will be arrested.

This is a huge, awful travesty: a massive waste of public money in a Bullingdon ritual trashing, done ostensibly to honour a prime minister who hated her own country, who – though no Bullingdon boy – trashed us, smashed our windows, was expelled from power by the men of her party, and spent twenty years in wealthy loneliness.

No party leader will stand up and speak out against this. In fact, most of them are going to take part: David Cameron and Nick Clegg, obviously, but also Ed Miliband and Alex Salmond. Tony Blair, doubtless hoping this presages the same travesty for himself, Gordon Brown and John Major: of course such international names as Dick Cheney, Newt Gingrich, Henry Kissinger, FW de Klerk. Jimmy Savile would doubtless have been an honoured guest at St Pauls as he was at Chequers, had he not predeceased her.

And the saddest most frustrating thing of all: there seems nothing that we can do. It does not matter to David Cameron that most of the country think this is a waste of money, that Thatcher does not merit a state funeral. He doesn’t care what we think: he can do what he likes. Though this is a £10M party political broadcast for the Conservatives, still Labour, Liberal Democrats, Scottish National Party, have all – their leadership at least – agreed to be co-opted: decided not to stand up and speak out for us.

Various protests are doubtless being privately planned to avoid police pre-arrests, and several have been publicly suggested (a flash mob shouting “DING DONG” on the hour when Big Ben should strike and is silenced: a party outside St Paul’s: static protests along the funeral route) but none of them seem as constructive as this, written by Kari Sperring (and is posted here with her permission):

This is long, but please read this. And, if you like it, please pass it on.

I have said this before: I have said this for years, if Baroness Thatcher is given a state funeral, I will leave the country for the day, because what her policies did, what her belief did, what her legacy did, is doing to this day are things that are anathema to me.

But we must not speak ill of the dead. (Not unless they are poor or powerless or long gone or far away. Not unless they are of no use to our masters, the oligarchs of wealth whose trans-national networks run our world.) And I did not, in her declining years, wish Baroness Thatcher harm — dementia is harsh enough. I wished her only obscurity. It was her legacy I wanted — I still want — to see dead.

And that legacy lives on, on blunderbuss, cudgel limbs, on heavy crushing feet marching one and on over the poor, the disabled, the disenfranchised, the outsiders, the misfits, those with mental health issues, the disadvantaged, the underprivileged, those without important friends or influence, women, QUILTBAG people, people without UK citizenship, the powerless. The hunger of holy free market capitalism for new flesh is limitless, and it has no feelings. It has no empathy. It has only the drive to acquire, to grow, to possess — and the devil take all but the winners.

Alive or dead, Baroness Thatcher doesn’t matter any more, because this great devouring ideology outlives her, infests the policies and actions of our masters on all sides of the political spectrum. It gave birth to the over-heated banking bubble and its consequences. It trailed our double dip recession on its wings. It lies heady on every word uttered by Cameron and Osborn and Gove and Duncan Smith, just as it pervaded those of Blair and Blunkett. It handed over utilities and hospitals, newspapers and infrastructure to the moneyed few and left them free to treat those things as simply sources of profit. It left them free to plunder, to cheat, to evade taxes and responsibilities — and to publish as truths self-serving (power-serving) lies about benefit claimants and immigrants, trans-people and asylum seekers, lone-parent families and people with serious mental health issues.

It tells us that there is no money for schools, to help the poor and those who are socially, physically or psychologically disadvantaged, though there is money to help banks. There is no money for compassion, for help, for support, but there is money for tax cuts for the rich. There is no money for low earners or the unemployed — and these groups must be pursued and measured and harassed to ensure they get even less, whatever the cost — but the cost of pursuing those individuals and companies who evade and avoid tax is far too high.

And there is £10 million available to pay for a ceremonial funeral for a multi-millionaire.

And we must not complain or protest, because we must not speak ill of the dead. We must accept censorship, because we must not upset or offend.

Though it’s fine to upset and offend the relatives of the dead poor, the dead weak, the dead powerless. It’s fine to upset and offend those who still live in the communities that Thatcher’s policies, Thatcher’s legacy have destroyed. It’s fine to upset and offend those who have suffered through care in the community, lost relatives to superbugs created by the outsourcing of hospital cleaning, lost people to poverty, seen sisters, daughters, mothers abused and killed because the refuges were closed. It’s fine to insult and offend victims of domestic abuse, asylum seekers, the homeless, the unemployed, those driven to illness through year-on-year ‘efficiency gains’ and institutional bullying in the public sector, those burdened with debt due to student loans and fees, to wages that are below the living minimum.
Those people don’t matter. They aren’t influential. They need to remember their place — which is in silent acceptance, without protest.

I am not downloading songs. I am not dancing in the streets. There is nothing to celebrate in this death. But I am protesting, loud and clear. But not about the memory of Baroness Thatcher. I’m protesting about the insult this ceremonial funeral represents to all those her legacy has harmed and still harms.

This is how.

I don’t have £10 million. I don’t have anything approaching it. But I can find some spare money, and, on Wednesday, when Cameron is trying to ensure he stays in power by pandering to the right, I’m going to make a donation to a charity that works to help those groups that Thatcherite economics and Thatcherite lack of compassion is harming, day on day. And I’d like you to join me. You get to choose your charity — there are many to choose from — Shelter, MIND, Help The Aged, women’s refuges, charities that work with underprivileged children, MENCAP, charities that help those with physical challenges, charities working with asylum seekers, any group anywhere that is fighting to undo or at least mitigate the effects of Thatcherite ‘I’m All Right Jack, Greed is Good, cut help for the weak and give more to the strong’ policies. I’m going to be donating to MIND, because Care in the Community was wrapped up as inclusive but turned out to mean little more than abandonment and abuse, because mental health services have faced 30 years+ of cuts and these cuts kill.

Please join me.

I’d add: Please tell the charity that this is why you’re donating today, and – if you use social media – please tweet or facebook or Googleplus that you did.

Ding Dong

Ding Dong the Wicked Old Witch is a jolly song. As Angry Women of Liverpool note in their feminist analysis of how to discuss Thatcher’s death “there are so few songs you can sing joyfully about the death of somebody thoroughly deserving”:

Tough one. The history of witch persecution is fraught with the very foundations of modern capitalist and patriarchal oppression, as anybody who’s read Silvia Federici knows. But there are so few songs you can sing joyfully about the death of somebody thoroughly deserving.
You want a proper argument in defence? Give me a minute.
OK, got one. The cultural connotations of “witch” in the modern day are so fragmented, having passed from fairy tale and myth through church/state persecution, a modern reinvention as “Wicca”, developing into a full-fledged sub-culture with often positive portrayals in TV drama and children’s literature, it could be argued that the word “witch” is now primarily a fairly neutral term for a female magic-user and serves only to denote the profession of the woman in question, not her moral status. After all, the song takes care to distinguish: “Which old witch? The wicked witch,” suggesting that wickedness is by no means assumed by the term’s use. If Glinda, the good witch, can allow the munchkins their song of triumph over the ruby-slippered menace that has oppressed them for so long, who am I to begrudge it?

Banning this from being played by the BBC is an inept bit of censorship, but the plain fact is, it will work as well as any kind of censorship ever does: the key thing that the Conservatives wish to avoid is any discussion between the people too young to remember Thatcher (it’s now over twenty years since she was evicted from 10 Downing Street) and those who remember her directly, about how greatly she was hated.

Kermit Gosnell

Amanda Marcotte, writing for Slate in January 2011:

What seems to not be in dispute is that Gosnell ran a crappy clinic, something that anti-choicers have been using as propaganda to advocate against legal abortion. But it doesn’t follow logically. There are 1,800 abortion providers in the country , and the vast majority run clean, professional operations. That there are a few shady characters in the bunch is unsurprising, and the pro-choice community exerts quite a bit of effort trying to improve the quality of abortion care, even under the remarkable constraints on provision.

That shady abortion providers get patients at all is something we can safely blame the anti-choice movement for. Most doctors in this country are pro-choice, and many would like to provide abortion, but as Slate ‘s Emily Bazelon demonstrated in the New York Times , the stigma of doing so makes it that much harder to do. Good medical care costs money, but very few women seeking abortion can get coverage, in no small part because of anti-choice initiatives like the Hyde Amendment. If you’re seeking an abortion but can’t afford it, going to a doctor who provides substandard care on the cheap is certainly going to be an attractive option.

Kermit Gosnell is the American doctor on trial for running a clinic in Philadelphia which – among other horrors – was the kind of profiteering abortion mill that flourishes under prolife regimes. Literally the only positive thing I can find to say about Margaret Thatcher was that she consistently voted to keep abortion accessible: prolife Tories found no support from her.

Women went to Gosnell because he was cheap and because, unlike the Planned Parenthood clinic a few blocks away, prolife picketers didn’t cluster outside Gosnell’s clinic to scare off patients. The woman who was killed by Gosnell in the course of ineptly performing an abortion was an immigrant who spoke little English and may not even have known that in the US, technically, she had a legal right to a safe abortion performed by people who would care about her welfare.

Since 1973, it has been unlawful for any state to outright ban abortion: the Supreme Court decision that year ruled that intrusion on a woman’s right to privacy as she consulted her doctor was unconstitutional. But since 1977, it has been unlawful for any federal money to be used to pay for abortion. (One of the consequences of this is that a soldier on active service must travel back from Afghanistan or Iraq to the US at her own expense to get an abortion at her own expense in a clinic outside a military base even – until this year – when she had been made pregnant by rape. The US military is not allowed to provide any help or support except allowing her to take personal leave in order to travel.)

The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania was one of the prolife states within the US which thus created Gosnell’s clinic. How could Gosnell have flourished with a Planned Parenthood clinic within walking distance?

The answer is simple: Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, when abortion policy was established, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania’s primary goal was to overturn Roe v. Wade and, barring that, impose as many barriers as possible to limit access to abortion. By and large, our policymakers have never viewed abortion as a medical procedure – instead placing it under the Pennsylvania Crimes Code — and therefore have not nurtured a system of abortion care that is woman-focused, readily accessible, and responsive to their medical needs. The Commonwealth’s focus has been on denying access, not protecting the health and safety of women who need this medical care. If the charges against Gosnell prove true, Gosnell was an outlaw who repeatedly violated numerous laws and should have been shut down years ago, but the state did not hold him accountable to its own laws and policies.

So why did women go to his clinic? Why not choose a legitimate, reputable provider of abortion care? During a Senate Public Health and Welfare Committee hearing on proposed abortion regulation bills, Tyhisha Hudson, a woman who had obtained an abortion at Gosnell’s clinic, was asked why she went to him. She testified that women in her neighborhood knew that Gosnell was the man you saw for the cheapest abortion.

Prolife policies – and prolife activists – were responsible for Kermit Gosnell’s clinic of horrors. No woman would have chosen to go to Gosnell for her abortion if she had had free access to abortion in a hospital or a safe clinic, where she would be decently treated: the prolife movement in the US has fought to deny just that access to women for thirty years.

In stories reminiscent of the abortionists who flourished in the US pre-1973, Gosnell is reported to have bullied women who changed their minds so that he could perform the abortion and collect the fee: whereas in the kind of clinics prolifers try to defund, and picket outside, a woman always gets to sit down alone with a trained counsellor who will ask directly “Is this your choice? Is anyone making you come here?”

Anyone genuinely concerned for women and girls would strive to ensure everyone who needs an abortion would have access to safe, legal abortion free on demand at a hospital or clinic where medical and legal responsibilities are taken seriously. Prolifers are not so concerned, and never were, and never will be.

Dozens of complaints had been made about Kermit Gosnell’s clinic. But the doctor prolifers loved to loathe was not Gosnell in Pennsylvania but George Tiller in Kansas. There was never a mass prolife/right-wing campaign against Dr Gosnell: there was no public hatred, no picketing, no attempts by prolifers to shut his clinic down or bring him to court. Kermit Gosnell is on trial, finally: but George Tiller was shot in church by prolife activist Scott Roeder.

So what is the prolife movement’s reaction to Kermit Gosnell’s case coming to court? Shame? Apologies? You’d think. Some kind of horrified realisation that all the while they were getting pissy over Planned Parenthood and George Tiller, they had ignored a clinic like Gosnell’s?

No. The prolife movement, never short of chutzpah, has claimed that the prochoice majority is responsible for Gosnell.

A huge thank you to everyone spreading the name #Gosnell across Twitter. We need every one of your voices. Keep up the momentum!

— Lila Rose (@LilaGraceRose) April 13, 2013

Wonder whether @irishfpa has same position as its affiliate @ppact when it comes to babies born alive in abortions? #prolife #ProChoice

— Cora Sherlock (@CoraSherlock) April 12, 2013

Margaret Thatcher

Younger LGBT Tories and other Conservatives have tried to pretend that Margaret Thatcher was no anti-gay hatemonger.

But this isn’t Meryl Streep giving a speech at the 1987 Conservative conference on how children being told “it’s okay to be gay” are being “cheated” of a good start in life – the reasoning of Section 28 which became law in 1988 – Labour and Liberals voting against – and was not repealed until 2000 in Scotland and 2003 in England and Wales. (The House of Lords, packed with former Tory MP peers and Conservative backwoodsmen, were able to block the earlier attempt by Labour to repeal Section 28.)

The hugely expensive display of political power by the Conservatives that will take place in London next Wednesday is £10 million spent to try to whitewash Thatcher’s memory: to pretend, despite the spontaneous party attended by thousands in Trafalgar Square yesterday, despite Ding Dong shooting up through the charts, despite all the protests of the majority in the UK, that the prime minister driven out of office by her own party, who was roundly loathed by most of us during her time in office, was deserving of this unique honour: no prime minister has received a state funeral since Winston Churchill.

There will be protests along the route. The police and the right-wing supporters of this travesty are especially afraid of insulting banners, jeering and booing – the more public the display of contempt, the more likely this is to appear on the public record. The BBC, televising this with narration by Bullingdon Boy David Dimbleby, will attempt to avoid getting these protests on film for the archives, but the more protests, the more public they are, the less likely they are to be able to censor them out of the record.

I have every sympathy with the frustrated desire of Margaret Thatcher’s immediate family to have a quiet, respectful funeral for their mother and grandmother. Carol and Mark Thatcher should have stood up to David Cameron and told him no. I appreciate how difficult this may have been, but it should be clear to them that it’s David Cameron’s desire to have this huge and horrible spectacle paid for by the public, that ensures they will have constant reminders that their mother was, as prime minister, a despised and rejected politician. (It would be crass to suggest their inheritance of a sixty-million+ estate, partly offshored to dodge tax bills, would console them.) This is not a family funeral: this is a public statement by the Conservative party that they are in power and can do what they like. Protests against it are a civic obligation.

Disrupt Thatcher funeral by turning it into a fascist military death parade of enforced grief where non-grievers are enemies of the state.

— Sabine (@B1uEYE) April 14, 2013

Other events on 17th April:

• Twenty years ago, the pit at Easington Colliery, County Durham, closed, and on Wednesday former miners will hold a commemoration party to mark the anniversary.
• The Scottish Green party has been alloted debate time on Wednesday 17th April and has decided this should be – appropriately – on Thatcher’s legacy: ‘There is still such a thing as society’. For some reason, Scottish Conservatives think publicly debating Thatcher’s legacy in the Scottish Parliament on the day of her funeral is disrespectful.
• The Aberystwyth Arts Centre is performing Eight Songs For A Mad King. Make of that what you will.

Historical revisionism

David Cameron decided when he was elected leader of the Conservative Party that there were no votes in being the Nasty Party. His support for LGBT equality is essentially a recognition that whipping up anti-gay hate is now a vote loser. But, that does put him on the right side for that at least – however corrupt his motives, lifting the ban on same-sex couples getting married is a good thing. We cannot ignore his previous anti-gay voting record, but we can acknowledge that LGBT equality is becoming so mainstream that even the Conservatives realise – for the most part – that they can’t afford to continue relying on the homophobic vote. That makes David Cameron smarter than Mitt Romney, if no more ethical.

Less than a decade after Labour repealed Section 28 (and yes, David Cameron voted to keep this anti-gay legislation, accusing Tony Blair of being against family values) over a hundred Conservative MPs voted for equal marriage in the House of Commons: some, yes, because they knew it would now be career death to refuse, but some honestly on principle. We can celebrate, honestly, that the Conservative Party is moving on from its knee-jerk homophobic past.

But denying that past existed, pretending Margaret Thatcher was universally respected, is pure revisionism – on a scale equivalent to the prolife movement holding up its collective hands and complaining that the abortion mills their movement creates are nasty places and it’s all our fault.

This is the MP I want to lead the Opposition. Because today, she did.

‘When I made my maiden speech a little over two decades ago, Margaret Thatcher had been elevated to the other place but Thatcherism was still wreaking, as it had wreaked for the previous decade, the most heinous, social, economic and spiritual damage upon this country, upon my constituency and my constituents.

Our local hospitals were running on empty. Patients were staying on trolleys and in corridors. I tremble to think what the death rate for pensioners would have been this winter if that version of Thatcherism had been fully up and running this year.

Our schools, parents, teachers, governors, even pupils, seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time fundraising in order to be able to provide basic materials, such as paper and pencils. The plaster on our classroom walls was kept in place by pupils artwork and miles and miles of sellotape. Our school libraries were dominated by empty shelves, very few books, and those books that were there were being held together by ubiquitious sellotape and offcuts from teachers’ wallpaper used to bind those volumes so that they could at least hang together.

But by far the most dramatic and heinous demonstration of Thatcherism was certainly not only in London, but across the whole country in metropolitan areas, where every single shop doorway, every single night, became the bedroom, the living room, the bathroom for the homeless. They grew in their thousands. And many of those homeless people had been thrown out onto the streets from the closure of the long-term mental hospitals. We were told it was going to be called Care in the Community. What in effect it was was no care at all in the community.

I was interested to hear about Baroness Thatcher’s willingness to invite those who have nowhere to go for Christmas. It’s a pity she did not start building more and more social houses after she entered into the right to buy, so perhaps there would have been fewer homeless people than there were. As a friend of mine said, during her era London became a city Hogarth would have recognise. And indeed he would.

But the basis to Thatcherism – and this is where I come to the spiritual part of what I regard as the desperate, desperately wrong track that Thatcherism took this country into – was that everything I had been taught to regard as a vice – and I still regard them as vices – under Thatcherism was in fact a virtue: greed, selfishness, no care for the weaker, sharp elbows, sharp knees. They were the way forward …

What concerns me is that I’m beginning to see possibly the re-emergence of that total traducing of what I regard as being the basis of the spiritual nature of this country, where we do care about society, where we do believe in communities, where we do not leave people to walk by on the other side. That is not happening now. And if we go back to the heyday of that era I think we will see replicated again the extraordinary human damage that we as a nation have suffered from.’

Glenda Jackson is the Labour MP for Hampstead and Kilburn.

Glenda Jackson on the Conservative/LibDem budget, 28th June 2010:

Perhaps that is one of those areas-this was briefly touched on in an earlier contribution-that, like our health service, has increased so much because we are all living longer, so that people who might have died many years before are still living, but justifiably claiming disability living allowance because they are disabled. The hon. Gentleman should forgive me for giving him a tiny history lesson, but I would just point out to him that when his party was last in total government-as opposed to being propped up by the “30 pieces of silver” party-it massaged the unemployment figures by putting people on incapacity benefit, and that ran for years.

The hon. Member for Peterborough is also suffering from selective amnesia. Those of us who lived through the first Thatcherite era remember well the levels of unemployment, the destruction of communities, and the throwing on to the scrap heap of the greatest national resource that this country will ever have: its people. Their talent, their ability, their creativity and their capacity for hard work were all thrown away for the same reason that they are being thrown away now. “You can’t buck the markets” was the litany then; it is exactly the same now, even though it has been dressed up and presented in a very different way.

We hear massive arguments from Conservative Members that the Labour party created this fiscal downturn, yet they are all intelligent enough to know that that is grossly untrue. It is easy, in the blame culture that we live in today, to make threats to bankers and to say that they are the most blameworthy people, yet they have not been punished in the Budget at all.

How Glenda Jackson voted on key issues since 2001.

During that time she destroyed much of the heavy industry in the UK, especially in Scotland and Wales, primarily because she didn’t like trade unions: she set the trend to privatisation going which led to the high prices and inefficiency in our public transport, our gas and electricity, our water, our post-office, and our health service. She supported Section 28, the cold cruel legislation which made it unlawful for teachers to stand up against homophobic and transphobic bullying. She abolished the rates, fattened landlord’s pockets with the poll tax, and said bluntly that she “didn’t believe in society”. The only thing I can think of she did that I ever liked her for was voting pro-choice (and causing lots of Tory MPs to trot after her like lambs into the No lobby) whenever anti-choice legislation was proposed.

Next week in St Paul’s Cathedral on Wednesday 17th April, Margaret Thatcher will have a ceremonial funeral, one rung below a state funeral, to be paid for by us. The only noticeable difference is that the gun carriage bearing her coffin will be drawn by horses, not sailors, and the significant difference is that as no Parliamentary vote is required, MPs will not be teased by their constituents for voting yes, no, or abstaining. In effect Margaret Thatcher, the chemist who wasn’t a chemist, is to be honoured as if she were another Princess Diana, or a Charles Darwin, or a Winston Churchill.

She does not deserve that honour, and those in power who have authorised this know it. Oddly enough it was a supporter of Thatcher and of her politics who saw why. Writing in the Daily Telegraph a year and a half ago, Peter Oborne quotes a letter from David Farham, who says he would stand on a picket line to stop Thatcher having a state funeral, and notes:

But Mr Farham – who accurately states in his letter that there are “hundreds of thousands like me” – has every right to believe what he does. He is a British citizen just as much as the most ardent of Thatcher fans, with the proviso that, as a miner, he probably worked harder and risked more for his country than they did.

So many people wanted the day off work to see Princess Diana’s funeral – so many people flocked to Green Park, Hyde Park, St James’s Park and Trafalgar Square to watch the service on huge screens – so many people lined the road down which the car bearing her coffin was driven: can anyone imagine this happening for Margaret Thatcher? You didn’t have to share the emotional feeling many people had for Princess Diana to see that this was a genuinely national event, that many ordinary people felt connected in some way to her and wanted to say goodbye.

Benjamin Disraeli and Florence Nightingale were both offered state funerals and both refused: the honour does not have to be accepted if the family – or the individual – do not wish it. Carol and Mark Thatcher may be the only two people in the UK with the power to prevent this travesty, and it appears they do not wish to do so.

Tim Chipping wrote this the day Thatcher died:

What I feel about Thatcher as a politician is how I feel about any adult who harms others. That might be what’s making tears gather just behind my face, deciding what they want to do with themselves. The person that has died today was my abuser. Good riddance. But not just mine. The people who suffered under her ideology and actions were the victims of a national abuse. A sustained campaign of relentless cruelty because the way we wanted to live was not the way she wanted us to live. Our lives didn’t suit her purpose. And so she crushed us.

Margaret Thatcher and her Conservative government crushed workers in every conceivable vital industry. They crushed the poor, the sick, the elderly and the unemployed. They crushed immigrants and the children of immigrants. They crushed gay people. They crushed asylum seekers. They crushed protestors. They crushed us all. All of us.

And again the tears regroup and think about the quickest exit.

There will be protesters at her funeral, of course – just as in Brixton and in Glasgow, in Leeds and Liverpool, there were parties the night she died.

Unemployed Kiki Madden scrawled “you snatched my milk and our hope” on a fence and said she felt slightly guilty taking delight in Thatcher’s death, “but in the end I can’t deny the fact that Thatcher made me so unhappy when I was a kid. I grew up in Liverpool and all my friends’ dads lost their jobs on the docks under Thatcher. It was an awful time.”

In Leeds a group gathered handing out “Thatcher’s dead cake”, singing and cheering at one of several street parties. In YouTube footage a man is seen chanting ‘If you all hate Thatcher clap your hands’ into a megaphone. While in Liverpool, where many reviled Thatcher for her role in the closure of the city’s docks and her perceived role and views on the Hillsborough disaster, there was a gathering lit by red flares on the steps of Lime street station. Police said they had not been called to any disturbances in the city related to the former prime minister’s death.

While the right-wing press will rage and the left-wing press will condemn people protesting a funeral, the fact is: a state or a ceremonial funeral is not a private event. If Thatcher’s family and friends were holding a private funeral – no matter how many guests came, no matter how important those guests were in public life – I would agree that it would be appalling to picket it or protest it. But a public ceremonial funeral is a public statement by the government, and if people disagree with that statement they have the right to protest it. That is democracy.

Nonetheless, my guess is this will be policed like the Olympics or like the royal wedding: we will see arrests on the day before merely on the grounds that people are prospectively likely to take part in a protest. Riot police attacking protesters at Thatcher’s funeral is a prospect that should shame the nation – not because the protesters are disrupting a funeral, but because the government is imposing this hugely divisive funeral as a civic event.

Margaret Thatcher is not getting a ceremonial funeral in St Paul’s Cathedral because anyone imagines a unified nation wishes to do her honour. This funeral is a public statement of naked government power. In a way, that makes it a horrifyingly appropriate memorial.

No state funeral for Maggie Thatcher

IDS claimed he could live on benefits:

Interviewed on BBC Radio 4′s Today programme, Iain Duncan Smith was challenged on whether he could live on £7.57 a day, which was said to be the lowest rate of jobseeker’s allowance given to adults under 25. In fact the current rate is £56.25 a week.

“If I had to I would,” he replied.

Alex Hern rightly points out that for a very rich man married to an even richer woman, with a huge expenses account, temporarily cutting your spending is easy enough:

But when the next week comes round; and the next; and the next; and still £53 is all you have to live on, it gets harder. Do you give up social events entirely? What happens when your TV license runs out? You may have some books lying around the house now, but you’ll finish them soon enough. And cooking cheap tasty food is easy when you have store-cupboard essentials; it gets harder when you not only have to factor in the cost of them, but also the cost of the electricity you use to cook. That’s not even beginning to examine whether Iain Duncan Smith would be eligible for Housing Benefit in his hypothetical example, or if he’d still be able to happily live rent-free in a £2m house. It seems doubtful that he’d move out to fulfil the example.

Iain Duncan Smith last signed-on and lived on unemployment benefit after he’d left the Scots Guards thirty-plus years ago: he spent some months on the dole (back then no one asked him to do workfare) looking for the right job to advance his career as a man with no qualifications.

When Iain Duncan Smith was on the dole, in 1981 – the UK was suffering a recession that year, GDP fell by 2.2% and unemployment was over 2.5 million – unemployment benefit for a single person was £22.50 a week.

Iain Duncan Smith might get a nasty shock if he thinks he remembers being able to live on £22.50 a week as a young ex-Guardsman. If benefits had been raised in line with inflation, the current rate would be £76.05 a week – nearly £20 more.

Thanks to Iain Duncan Smith and George Osborne’s relentless cuts, the poorest family will lose on average about £17 a week compared with their situation in 2010.

Patrick Jenkin, Iain Duncan Smith’s long-ago predecessor as Secretary of State for Social Services, said in the House of Commons on 11th March 1981:

I am glad to be able to announce, in the International Year of Disabled People, a substantial increase in mobility allowance—from £14.50 a week to £16.50. That is an increase of nearly 14 per cent. and it marks the importance that we attach to that allowance. We are especially anxious to continue to make it possible for as many disabled people as can to lease or buy cars from Motability, and that increase will help to ensure the continuing success of that scheme. The VAT relief on adaptation to cars for the disabled and the other VAT concessions announced yesterday will also be welcomed by disabled people.

I turn to invalidity benefit. The Chancellor made it clear yesterday that it will not be possible to bring that benefit into tax next year, but I am anxious to make a start towards the restoration of the value of that benefit in advance of taxation. I therefore propose to restore the value of the invalidity allowances this November. Those allowances are the sums paid on top of the invalidity pension and depend on the claimant’s age when incapacity begins. The cost of restoring the allowances and of the increase in real terms of the mobility allowance, will be met from the contingency reserve. Our pledge to restore the value of the invalidity pension itself when it comes into taxation now stands unqualified.

Iain Duncan Smith and George Osborne in the Telegraph today:

Of course, if you listened to the shrill voices of the Left you’d think that every change to the welfare system, and any attempt to save money, marks the beginning of the end of the world.

In reality, we are just restoring the original principles of the welfare state: that those who can work must work, and a life on benefits must not be more attractive than working. That is why this month we are starting to introduce the benefits cap.

The British public do not believe that benefit claimants should receive higher incomes than families who are in work – in some cases more than double the average household income. This is about fairness.

Equally, it is not fair that out-of-work benefits should rise faster than the incomes of those in work. So we’re increasing discretionary working-age benefits by 1 per cent, starting this financial year, and for the next three years. This decision has not been taken lightly. However, given the current difficult economic times, the decision is a necessary one. It will save more than £2 billion pounds a year.

Sue Marsh, one of Iain Duncan Smith’s “shirkers”, “workshy”, someone who in George Osborne’s view should be struggling to get by because she can’t hold down a paid job:

We always have a choice. Always.

However bleak things seem, however academically and clinically surgeons and medics make their textbook proclamations, we ARE masters of our own bodies and masters of our own destiny.

Will I succeed? Well, it seems to be going OK so far. It hurts. Whoaaaa it hurts. And it’s a little hard to hold a conversation down when my lazy, recalcitrant bowel decides to move into reverse, but it’s a billion times better than the alternative.

As for Mr Gloomy, I have a plan. It sustains me through the pain and vomiting and makes me giggle. At my next appointment, I will march into his office on stronger legs and in the nicest possible way, flip him the finger. I will be shinier, fatter, stronger and vindicated. I WILL.

And perhaps he will learn something too. Perhaps he will learn that the human spirit is full of miracles. That there really is no such word as can’t.

But what do the Tories and LibDems care, if by cutting her support they can save money? Can they?

I’d like to see Iain Duncan Smith trying to live on £20 a week less than he survived on as a young man. For a year. But we never will. Iain Duncan Smith will disappear into the House of Lords after May 2015, Lord Smith of Workfare, magnificently satisfied with himself.

Update: George Monbiot: Fine, our IDS petition is a ‘stunt’ – a stunt to shame the oblivious aristocrats

When I signed the £53 pw petition it had 381,770 supporters and seems to be going up at 3,000 per hour. So may reach half a million before the weekend….

Michael Gove used to work for Rupert Murdoch as a journalist at The Times, until he was selected as the new Conservative candidate for the safe seat of Surrey Heath in the 2005 election.

Gove and his wife Sarah Vine, had bought a nice house in Kensington for £430,000 in 2002.

Between December 2005 and April 2006, Michael Gove used the Additional Costs Allowance (meant for an MP to claim for their second home) to claim more than £7000 for furnishing this house:

Around a third of the money was spent at Oka, an upmarket interior design company established by Lady Annabel Astor, Mr Cameron’s mother-in-law.

Items claimed by Michael Gove for his “second home” – which was not in his constituency and which he and his wife had bought before he was selected by the Surrey Heath Conservative association – include:

• A Chinon armchair: £331
• A Manchu cabinet: £493
• A pair of elephant lamps: £134.50
• A Loire table: £750
• A birch Camargue chair: £432
• A birdcage coffee table: £238.50
• A dishwasher: £454
• A Range cooker: £639
• A fridge-freezer: £702
• A Kenwood toaster: £19.99
• A cot mattress from Toys ‘R’ Us: £34.99
• 8 coffee spoons and cake forks, £5.95 each

Then in 2006, Michael Gove bought himself a house in his constituency for £395,000. He charged us £13,259 for the move, plus over £500 for a night at the Pennyhill Park Hotel and Spa:

Within 123 acres of rolling Surrey parkland lies a luxury country house hotel accompanied by the UK’s Most Excellent Spa.

Wonderfully located between Ascot, Sunningdale and Wentworth and only 45 minutes from the centre of London, our spa hotel in Surrey offers everything from tennis and unmatchable five-star spa breaks to its own golf course, superb dining and impeccable service.

He then flipped his second-home allowance to the house in his constituency, and routinely claimed the maximum amount MPs were entitled to claim from Additional Costs Allowance: £22,110 in 2006-2007, £23,083 in 2007-2008.

When asked about this after the expenses leaked in 2009, Michael Gove said he would repay the £34.99 for the cot mattress, as items for children are explicitly not allowed under the Commons allowances. But:

The other items bought for his London home “were all, with one exception, below the acceptable threshold costs for furniture”.
“The items were bought from a mainstream retailer and when I was informed that they fell outside the range of allowable items I accepted that ruling without complaint,” he added.
The £13,259 moving costs were necessary, he said, so that he could have a home in the constituency “to effectively discharge my parliamentary duties”.

So when Michael Gove says he thinks people should live within their means, let’s consider his own record. Is this a man in the slightest bit interested in saving taxpayer’s money or living within his means? Is this a man who looks ethical or reasonable?

What kind of man gets elected to Parliament and promptly spends £7000 to buy luxury goods for a house he moved into three years earlier?

The lonely Opposition in the House of Commons this afternoon:

Is it not the reality that this is a multi-billion pound failed flagship scheme, which was condemned by the Public Affairs Committee as extremely poor? Having lost a case and fearing that they will lose the appeal, the Government, instead of respecting our justice system, are abusing our emergency procedures to fix the consequences of losing? Does that show not a shocking disrespect both for our courts and for the principle that workers should be paid the minimum wage?

Read Seven Reasons Why You Should Stop Bitching About People On Benefits. Today’s debate – from Tory, LibDem, and Labour – was for the most part just bitching about people on benefits, who – sanctioned unlawfully of the money they were due – might be so impertinent as to want the money taken away from them unlawfully given back.

The idea that a day’s work deserves a day’s pay has become an ideal for radicals.

The idea that Labour ought to be the party of the left, standing in opposition against cheap-work conservatives, has … just gone, for a clear majority of Labour MPs.

The Guardian’s estimate was that the payout due to claimants unlawfully sanctioned of their benefit would be on average between £530 and £570.

You could hardly have asked for a better trial run of helicopter money – a few hundred pounds to a few thousand of the very poorest households, people who so desperately need the money that they are likely to promptly spend it. Quantitative easing for the people, as Anatole Kaletsky has it:

One such radical measure is too controversial for any policymaker to mention publicly, although some have discussed it in private: Instead of giving newly created money to bond traders, central banks could distribute it directly to the public. Technically such cash handouts could be described as tax rebates or citizens’ dividends, and they would contribute to government deficits in national accounting. But these accounting deficits would not increase national debt burdens, since they would be financed by issuing new money, at zero cost to government or to future generations, instead of selling interest-bearing government bonds.

Giving away free money may sound too good to be true or wildly irresponsible, but it is exactly what the Fed and the BoE have been doing for bond traders and bankers since 2009. Directing QE to the general public would not only be much fairer but also more effective.

But instead, Liam Byrne and most of the UK Labour MPs opted for the shabby pleasure of knowing they wouldn’t look like the kind of nasty socialists who think employers should pay their workers: that they could let a bill pass which formally sets the government up as above the law, beyond justice. Retrospective legislation to make the DWP’s unlawful actions on workfare lawful, passed with the declared intention of preventing a few thousand of the poorest people in Britain have the equivalent of an MP’s lunch money.

Some MPs voted against only at the second reading (which began at 1.59 pm – the Committee began at 5.10pm), some more only at the third (6.43pm).

Roll of Honour: MPs who defied the Labour Whip to vote against the DWP’s appalling Bill

David Anderson, MP for Blaydon
Nick Brown, MP for Newcastle Upon Tyne East
Richard Burden, MP for Birmingham, Northfield
Katy Clark, MP for North Ayrshire and Arran
Michael Connarty, MP for Linlithgow and East Falkirk
Jeremy Corbyn, MP for Islington North
David Crausby, MP for Bolton North East
Ian Davidson, MP for Glasgow South West
Jim Dobbin, MP for Heywood and Middleton
Bill Esterson, MP for Sefton Central
Paul Flynn, MP for Newport West (second reading)
Mary Glindon, MP for North Tyneside
Roger Godsiff, MP for Birmingham, Hall Green (second reading)
Paul Goggins, MP for Wythenshawe and Sale East (second reading)
Fabian Hamilton, MP for Leeds North East Clp (third reading)
Dai Havard, MP for Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney
John Healey, MP for Wentworth and Dearne (second reading)
Kate Hoey, MP for Vauxhall (second reading)
Kelvin Hopkins, MP for Luton North (second reading)
George Howarth, MP for Knowsley (second reading)
Ian Lavery, MP for Wansbeck
Mark Lazarowicz, MP for Edinburgh North and Leith
Fiona Mactaggart, MP for Slough
John McDonnell, MP for Hayes and Harlington
Jim McGovern, MP for Dundee West
Michael Meacher, MP for Oldham West and Royton
Ian Mearns, MP for Gateshead
Austin Mitchell, MP for Great Grimsby
Madeleine Moon, MP for Bridgend
Grahame Morris, MP for Easington
Sandra Osborne, MP for Ayr Carrick & Cumnock
Teresa Pearce, MP for Erith and Thamesmead
Linda Riordan, MP for Halifax Clp
Steve Rotheram, MP for Liverpool, Walton
Jim Sheridan, MP for Paisley & Renfrewshire North
Dennis Skinner, MP for Bolsover
Graham Stringer, MP for Blackley and Broughton (third reading)
Gerry Sutcliffe, MP for Bradford South Clp
Derek Twigg, MP for Halton (second reading)
Joan Walley, MP for Stoke-On-Trent North
David Winnick, MP for Walsall North
Mike Wood, MP for Batley and Spen Clp

So much for those who voted No to retrospective legislation on workfare. Duncan Hothersall at Nation Better attempts to defend the indefensible. Labour’s roll of shame follows.

MPs who abstained as instructed on the DWP’s retroactive legislation
MPs asterisked are on the payroll vote.

*Diane Abbott, MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington
Debbie Abrahams, MP for Oldham East and Saddleworth
Bob Ainsworth, MP for Coventry North East
*Douglas Alexander, MP for Paisley and Renfrewshire South
Heidi Alexander, MP for Lewisham East
*Rushanara Ali, MP for Bethnal Green and Bow
Graham Allen, MP for Nottingham North
Jonathan Ashworth, MP for Leicester South
*Ian Austin, MP for Dudley North
Adrian Bailey, MP for West Bromwich West
*Willie Bain, MP for Glasgow North East
*Ed Balls, MP for Morley and Outwood Clp
*Gordon Banks, MP for Ochil and South Perthshire
Kevin Barron, MP for Rother Valley
Hugh Bayley, MP for York Central
Margaret Beckett, MP for Derby South
Anne Begg, MP for Aberdeen South
*Hilary Benn, MP for Leeds Central Clp
Joe Benton, MP for Bootle
*Luciana Berger, MP for Liverpool, Wavertree
Clive Betts, MP for Sheffield South East
Roberta Blackman-Woods, MP for City of Durham
Hazel Blears, MP for Salford and Eccles
Tom Blenkinsop, MP for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland
Paul Blomfield, MP for Sheffield Central
David Blunkett, MP for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough
Ben Bradshaw, MP for Exeter
*Kevin Brennan, MP for Cardiff West
Lyn Brown, MP for West Ham
*Russell Brown, MP for Dumfries and Galloway
Gordon Brown, MP for Kirkcaldy & Cowdenbeath
*Chris Bryant, MP for Rhondda
*Karen Buck, MP for Westminster North
*Andy Burnham, MP for Leigh
*Liam Byrne, MP for Birmingham, Hodge Hill

“it’s a principle we support and that’s why we won’t block the restoration of a general power that has always been in place.”
Liam Byrne is the Shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions: so much for any hope that Labour will end workfare when they win in 2015.

Ronnie Campbell, MP for Blyth Valley
Alan Campbell, MP for Tynemouth
Martin Caton, MP for Gower
*Jenny Chapman, MP for Darlington
Tom Clarke, MP for Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill
Ann Clwyd, MP for Cynon Valley
*Vernon Coaker, MP for Gedling
Ann Coffey, MP for Stockport
Rosie Cooper, MP for West Lancashire
*Yvette Cooper, MP for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford Clp
*Mary Creagh, MP for Wakefield Clp
*Stella Creasy, MP for Walthamstow

I abstained for a very good local reason. Don’t expect you to believe me of course but happy to explain…
The very obvious and very local reason for Stella Creasy to obey the Labour Party Whip is that if she refused the Whip and voted against workfare, she would have been obliged to resign as Shadow Minister for Crime Prevention.

*Jon Cruddas, MP for Dagenham and Rainham
John Cryer, MP for Leyton and Wanstead
Tony Cunningham, MP for Workington
Jim Cunningham, MP for Coventry South
Alex Cunningham, MP for Stockton North
*Margaret Curran, MP for Glasgow East
Nicholas Dakin, MP for Scunthorpe
Simon Danczuk, MP for Rochdale
Alistair Darling, MP for Edinburgh South West
*Wayne David, MP for Caerphilly
*Huw Irranca Davies, MP for Ogmore
Geraint Davies, MP for Swansea West
*Gloria De Piero, MP for Ashfield
John Denham, MP for Southampton, Itchen
Frank Dobson, MP for Holborn and St Pancras
Thomas Docherty, MP for Dunfermline and West Fife.
Frank Doran, MP for Aberdeen North
Jim Dowd, MP for Lewisham West and Penge
*Gemma Doyle, MP for West Dunbartonshire
*Jack Dromey, MP for Birmingham, Erdington
*Michael Dugher, MP for Barnsley East
*Maria Eagle, MP for Garston and Halewood
*Angela Eagle, MP for Wallasey
*Clive Efford, MP for Eltham
Julie Elliott, MP for Sunderland Central
Louise Ellman, MP for Liverpool, Riverside
Natascha Engel, MP for North East Derbyshire
Christopher Evans, MP for Islwyn
Paul Farrelly, MP for Newcastle-Under-Lyme
Frank Field, MP for Birkenhead
*Jim Fitzpatrick, MP for Poplar and Limehouse
*Rob Flello, MP for Stoke-on-Trent South
*Caroline Flint,MP for Don Valley
*Yvonne Fovargue,MP for Makerfield
Hywel Francis, MP for Aberavon
Mike Gapes, MP for Ilford South
Barry Gardiner, MP for Brent North
Sheila Gilmore, MP for Edinburgh East
Pat Glass, MP for North West Durham
*Helen Goodman, MP for Bishop Auckland
*Tom Greatrex, MP for Rutherglen and Hamilton West
*Kate Green, MP for Stretford and Urmston
*Lilian Greenwood, MP for Nottingham South
*Nia Griffith, MP for Llanelli
*Andrew Gwynne, MP for Denton and Reddish
Peter Hain, MP for Neath
David Hamilton, MP for Midlothian
*David Hanson, MP for Delyn
*Harriet Harman, MP for Camberwell and Peckham
*Tom Harris, MP for Glasgow South
Mark Hendrick, MP for Preston
Stephen Hepburn, MP for Jarrow
David Heyes, MP for Ashton-Under-Lyne
Meg Hillier, MP for Hackney South and Shoreditch
Julie Hilling, MP for Bolton West
Margaret Hodge, MP for Barking
*Sharon Hodgson, MP for Washington and Sunderland West
Jim Hood, MP for Lanark and Hamilton East
Lindsay Hoyle, MP for Chorley
Tristam Hunt, MP for Stoke-On-Trent Central
Glenda Jackson, MP for Hampstead and Kilburn
Sian James, MP for Swansea East
*Cathy Jamieson, MP for Kilmarnock & Loudoun
*Dan Jarvis, MP for Barnsley Central
*Diana Johnson, MP for Kingston Upon Hull North
Alan Johnson, MP for Kingston Upon Hull West and Hessle
*Kevan Jones, MP for North Durham
*Helen Jones, MP for Warrington North
Graham Jones, MP for Hyndburn
Susan Elan Jones, MP for Clwyd South
Tessa Jowell, MP for Dulwich and West Norwood
Gerald Kaufman, MP for Manchester, Gorton
Barbara Keeley, MP for Worsley and Eccles South
*Elizabeth Kendall, MP for Leicester West
*Sadiq Khan, MP for Tooting
David Lammy, MP for Tottenham
*Chris Leslie, MP for Nottingham East
*Ivan Lewis, MP for Bury South
Tony Lloyd, MP for Manchester Central
*Ian Lucas, MP for Wrexham
Khalid Mahmood, MP for Birmingham, Perry Barr
*Shabana Mahmood, MP for Birmingham, Ladywood
Seema Malhotra, MP for Feltham and Heston
John Mann, MP for Bassetlaw
*Gordon Marsden, MP for Blackpool South
Steve McCabe, MP for Birmingham, Selly Oak
Michael McCann, MP for Kilbride, Strathaven and Lesmahagow
*Kerry McCarthy, MP for Bristol East
*Gregg McClymont, MP for Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East
Siobhain McDonagh, MP for Mitcham and Morden
Pat McFadden, MP for Wolverhampton South East
Alison McGovern, MP for Wirral South
*Anne McGuire, MP for Stirling
Ann McKechin, MP for Glasgow North
Iain McKenzie, MP for Inverclyde
*Catherine McKinnell, MP for Newcastle Upon Tyne North
Alan Meale, MP for Mansfield
*Ed Miliband, MP for Doncaster North
David Miliband, MP for South Shields
Andrew Miller, MP for Ellesmere Port and Neston
Jessica Morden, MP for Newport East
Graeme Morrice, MP for Livingston
Meg Munn, MP for Sheffield, Heeley
*Jim Murphy, MP for East Renfrewshire.
Paul Murphy, MP for Torfaen
*Ian Murray, MP for Edinburgh South
*Lisa Nandy, MP for Wigan
Pamela Nash, MP for Airdrie and Shotts
Fiona O’Donnell, MP for East Lothian
*Chi Onwurah, MP for Newcastle Upon Tyne Central
Albert Owen, MP for Ynys Mon
*Toby Perkins, MP for Chesterfield
Bridget Phillipson, MP for Houghton and Sunderland South
*Steve Pound, MP for Ealing North
Dawn Primarolo, MP for Bristol South
Yasmin Qureshi, MP for Bolton South East
Nick Raynsford, MP for Greenwich and Woolwich
*Jamie Reed, MP for Copeland
*Rachel Reeves, MP for Leeds West Clp
Jonathan Reynolds, MP for Stalybridge and Hyde
*Emma Reynolds, MP for Wolverhampton North East
John Robertson, MP for Glasgow North West
Geoffrey Robinson, MP for Coventry North West
Frank Roy, MP for Motherwell and Wishaw
Lindsay Roy, MP for Glenrothes
Chris Ruane, MP for Vale of Clwyd
Joan Ruddock, MP for Lewisham, Deptford
Anas Sarwar, MP for Glasgow Central
Andy Sawford, MP for Corby
*Alison Seabeck, MP for Plymouth, Moor View
Virendra Sharma, MP for Ealing, Southall
Barry Sheerman, MP for Huddersfield Clp
Jim Sheridan, MP for Paisley & Renfrewshire North
*Gavin Shuker, MP for Luton South
*Andy Slaughter, MP for Hammersmith
Andrew Smith, MP for Oxford East
Nick Smith, MP for Blaenau Gwent
*Owen Smith, MP for Pontypridd
*Angela Smith, MP for Penistone and Stocksbridge
*John Spellar, MP for Warley
Jack Straw, MP for Blackburn
Gisela Stuart, MP for Birmingham, Edgbaston
Gerry Sutcliffe, MP for Bradford South Clp
Mark Tami, MP for Alyn and Deeside
*Gareth Thomas, MP for Harrow West
*Emily Thornberry, MP for Islington South and Finsbury
*Stephen Timms, MP for East Ham
*Jon Trickett, MP for Hemsworth Clp
Karl Turner, MP for Kingston Upon Hull East
Derek Twigg, MP for Halton
*Stephen Twigg, MP for Liverpool, West Derby
*Chuka Umunna, MP for Streatham
Keith Vaz, MP for Leicester East
Valerie Vaz, MP for Walsall South
Joan Walley, MP for Stoke-On-Trent North
*Tom Watson, MP for West Bromwich East
Dave Watts, MP for St Helens North
Alan Whitehead, MP for Southampton, Test
*Chris Williamson, MP for Derby North
Phil Wilson, MP for Sedgefield
*Rosie Winterton, MP for Doncaster Central
Mike Wood, MP for Batley and Spen Clp
*Roberta Blackman-Woods, MP for the City of Durham
John Woodcock, MP for Barrow and Furness
Shaun Woodward, MP for St Helens South and Whiston
*Iain Wright, MP for Hartlepool
David Wright, MP for Telford

It’s entirely possible that some of the non-asterisked people on this dreadful list would have voted against the retrospective bill for workfare if they’d been able to attend. If so, I’m happy to move them to a third list.

From the Department of Work and Pensions website: Home \ Advisers and intermediaries \ Updates \ Universal Jobmatch:

Universal Jobmatch is the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) online service which is radically changing the way people look for and apply to jobs. It’s one of the biggest changes to the labour market in 27 years.

Universal Jobmatch is open to all jobseekers, regardless of whether or not they are claiming a benefit.

But if you are claiming a benefit, DWP can make you use it.

The service will make it quicker and easier for jobseekers to find a suitable job and for companies to find the most suitable candidates. DWP does not charge for this service. More than 2 million people looking for work have already registered and set up an account and over 550 million job searches have been undertaken.

It works by matching jobseekers to jobs based on their skills and CV. Matching skills to jobs also allows jobseekers who might be unable to find jobs in their chosen profession, see what alternatives might be available in their local area.

That loophole so publicly exposed, the DWP would have instituted means of blocking it, especially as JSA claimants can now be required to register with Universal Jobmatch and search for jobs on it, or risk losing their benefit.

After all:

Universal Jobmatch is a valuable tool for helping jobseekers find work. We expect the majority of claimants who are genuinely looking for work will want to willingly use the service themselves.

Where this is not the case and where appropriate, we may require some Jobseeker’s Allowance (JSA) claimants to create a profile and a public CV in Universal Jobmatch.

JSA claimants must do all that can be reasonably expected of them to find work and must apply for any jobs that an adviser deems suitable.

This website to which everyone claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance can be made to upload their CV, is very, very secure.

This job was posted on Iain Duncan Smith’s Jobsearch Direct website on 4th March, for I.D.S. Pest Control Services:

Pest Control Trainee

Job Description

Pest control trainee responsible for dealing with pests and vermin and driving them out of properties in London and south east England. Working closely with local authority departments to resolve problem pests.

You will need to become proficient in the use of baits, traps and snares and other techniques for evicting and excluding pests from properties including restricting access to food supply, blocking access to properties and humane dispatch.

Full training will be provided and you will receive benefits cap and uniform.

You will need to deal with a wide variety of pests and vermin.
Jobseekers, School Leavers, Apprentices etc – Apply today using the Apply Now button.

You see,

Universal Jobmatch will provide access to a wide range of vacancies, so using the service will be an important part of actively seeking work.

If after the Jobcentre Plus adviser has explained the benefits of the service to them, the claimant still refuses to use Universal Jobmatch, the adviser may then consider whether it is reasonable to issue a ‘Jobseeker’s Direction’ to mandate them to create a profile and upload a public CV on Universal Jobmatch.

Job ID: 1268661
Posting Date: 04/03/2013
Company: I.D.S. Pest Control Services
Location: UK-London-London
Industries: Business services – other
Job type: Full time
Career level: Entry Level
Education Level: CSE or equivalent
Salary: 18,000.00 – 18,000.00 per year

The direct URL for this job is jobsearch.direct.gov.uk/GetJob.aspx?JobID=1268661.

Before issuing a Jobseeker’s Direction the adviser will take a claimant’s individual circumstances into account, including whether they have access to the internet or not.

Jobseeker’s Directions require JSA claimants to take specific actions which will help them to find work, and failure to do so without good reason may result in a benefit sanction being applied.

Because there’s no imaginable good reason why anyone would refuse to upload their CV and look for work on a website where there is so little security that people can easily post fraudulent jobs.

After all, who would allow job ads to be posted that hadn’t been reviewed by someone responsible for making sure they were valid jobs, posted by a proper employer?

Save time with job applications. Do it online with #universaljobmatch – visit gov.uk/jobsearch

— Lincoln Jobcentre (@LincolnJCP) March 18, 2013

I wonder what kind of scam will be opened up with “My Benefits Online”?

My Benefits Online enables claimants to check details about claims, awards and payments for JSA, Employment and Support Allowance (ESA), Income Support (IS), DLA and Attendance Allowance (AA).

Should we assume that the scammers posting fake jobs to defraud benefit claimants will have retroactive legislation passed to make their actions legal?

Screencap of the fake job ad on the Department of Work and Pensions website:

Iain Duncan Smith became Secretary of State for Work and Pensions in May 2010 – a role he has held ever since, despite efforts by David Cameron to unseat him in the 2012 reshuffle. He has virtually no further-education qualifications and spent several months on the dole after leaving the Scots Guards in the recession of 1981. But the next year he married a very wealthy woman, the daughter of a very wealthy man, and he and his wife and four children still live in a house rented from his father-in-law on his wife’s father’s estate: he became an MP in 1992, inheriting Norman Tebbit’s safe constituency of Chingford. Whatever Iain Duncan Smith’s experience of unemployment thirty-two years ago, it’s safe to say that in thirty years he hasn’t had money worries – except when he became Leader of the Opposition and it was discovered he’d given his wife one of those plum “assistant” jobs which used to be a bonus for the spouse or child of an MP.

Betsy Fremantle Smith was paid £18,000 from Parliamentary Staffing Allowance. The Commons Standards Committee, investigating the situation in 2003, found that she was doing non-constituency work which should have been paid for out of Short Money. IDS was acquitted of deliberate wrong-doing and was not sanctioned of any MP benefits: but while his Department of Work and Pensions actively makes use of tip-offs to catch people claiming money they are not entitled to (whether they are doing so deliberately or out of the same honest confusion that led IDS to pay his wife money he was not entitled to claim) Iain Duncan Smith still harbours vindictive feelings towards the two officials who uncovered his own wrong-doing.

The difficulty with Iain Duncan Smith is not how to expose his hypocrisy, but how much of it can be fitted into a few hundred words. He has four children, yet argues that families with more than two children ought to be sanctioned: in 2009 he took six months paid leave without notice to care for his wife when she was desperately ill, yet has instigated changes in benefit to ensure that neither sick people nor their carers will be supported. In 1981, jobless and unqualified, he took full advantage of the welfare safety net to claim benefits for months while looking for suitable work, yet in a recession as bad as that of thirty years ago he claims graduates are “snooty” if they don’t agree to work for Poundland for free. While attending further education for two short periods, IDS gained no qualifications, and asserts that shelf-stackers are more valuable than scientists. While benefiting hugely from MP expenses, Iain Duncan Smith tells many untruths about the cost of people claiming disability and welfare benefits.

[Note: Iain Duncan Smith claims he did not claim benefits in 1981, but lived off the bounty from the Scots Guards and stayed in his girlfriend's bedsit without paying rent.]

Iain Duncan Smith has made many speeches in favour of law and order. Yet when IDS’s workfare sanctions were ruled unlawful by the courts, instead of accepting that millions taken unlawfully would have to be repaid and that people unlawfully made to work for commercial organisations for free had a claim to minimum wage for their hours (or, if determined to fight lawfully for welfare, proceding to the Supreme Court for a further appeal) IDS decided to have emergency legislation passed making his unlawful sanctions retroactively lawful.

Iain Duncan Smith lives in a large and comfortable home which he does not own and which it’s doubtful he pays market rent for, yet has instigated the bedroom tax. The idea behind the “bedroom tax” is that the housing shortage can be remedied not by building more social housing or by preventing bankers from gambling on house price rises, but by forcing people who live in social housing and have a “spare room”, to move out into private rented accommodation of a more suitable size. This won’t save money at any level. (Iain Duncan Smith calls this the ending the spare-room subsidy.)

In the UK, most homes are built with two or three bedrooms: family accommodation, built on the assumption that the average family has two or three children and same-sex siblings will usually share a bedroom. There’s flexibility in this: families where one person is disabled may need more rooms than average for equipment or an overnight carer or other special accommodations: parents may have children serving overseas or be the non-custodial parent whose children stay only at weekends or use their “spare room” for foster children.

Even where none of these apply, the idea that everyone who lives in a council house can easily find a new place to move to is itself false: even if it were true, moving home is expensive and disruptive: being evicted for non-payment of rent still more so. Most people whom the bedroom tax affects are in work – being forced to move house to a location not of their choice will massively disrupt their childcare, their travel costs, and their children’s education.

But Iain Duncan Smith calls the £14 per week that on average families in social housing claiming housing benefit will lose “the spare room subsidy” and complains that the term bedroom tax is inaccurate. To IDS, one of the Cabinet’s millionaires, living in subsidised housing for thirty years and earning over £130K a year with a £90K a year expenses budget, £14 a week may seem a trivial subsidy. As trivial as the £18,000 which he accidentally paid to his wife.

Update: Please sign: We call for a Cumulative Impact Assessment of Welfare Reform, and a New Deal for sick & disabled people based on their needs, abilities and ambitions and No freeze or cut to minimum wage. Thanks!

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Appendix: From the written evidence to Parliament it appears that although the scandal was called Betsygate, the problem seems to lie squarely with Iain Duncan Smith:

The other item I raised for discussion with Mr Paterson was an apparently cavalier attitude with which we appeared to be treating our most regular donors—those with private planes who frequently lent them to Mr Duncan Smith if requested. These issues were considered once again to be so sensitive that Mr Paterson was delegated to raise them with the Leader. It was against this background and these on-going concerns that I felt obliged to send my email at all.

With hindsight, the response was perhaps predictable. Although the email had been marked ‘high importance and sent to the most senior people at CCO, it was passed to Mr Duncan Smith first thing the next morning. I received a telephone call before leaving for work from Mr Duncan Smith who was extremely agitated and requested that I go to see him. I consulted Mr MacGregor by telephone and placed a call to Mr Baverstock who did not return my call. It transpired that it was Mr Baverstock who had raised the email with Mr Paterson who subsequently passed a copy of the email to Mr Duncan Smith. I eventually saw Mr Duncan Smith at approximately midday on Friday 31st January. After inviting me to sit down he became very angry and expressed his irritation at my raising the subjects in writing in the email. I accepted unreservedly his rebuke for committing the matter to written form but he advised me that he had already instructed the IT Department at CCO to expunge the email from the central server.

Mr Duncan Smith did not ask me for an explanation. He did not ask why I was concerned. Indeed, besides my own apology for having formalised the matter in the form of an email I did not utter another word as Mr Duncan Smith spoke without break. I was so distressed by his manner and conduct that I was reduced to tears in the meeting. He advised me in the strongest terms that I was to send out an immediate response and asked me to bring my own copy of the email into his office for his attention. He then in effect dictated exactly what the email was to say. I did not and could not agree with what he had asked me to write but it was absolutely apparent within the context of the meeting that I had one of two alternatives—I either wrote the email as he had instructed or I could draft my own letter of resignation. (Select Committee on Standards and Privileges Written Evidence, 13. Written statement by Dr Vanessa Gearson, 16 October 2003, In the matter of the investigation into the employment of Betsy Duncan Smith)

• Memorandum to Dr Vanessa Gearson from Mrs Christine Watson, 24 October 2002
• Written statement by Miss Annabelle Eyre, 18 November 2003

While Vanessa Grearson never became a Tory MP (she stood for the Cheltenham constituency in 2005, but it was a LibDem hold) and despite Iain Duncan Smith’s animosity and vindictiveness towards her, she does seem to have been well taken care of by her party.

Ever since I started working in IT I’ve been told that I make less than a man with the same skills. I chose to ignore that and focus on doing an awesome job, figuring I’d be paid what I was worth. I chose to believe that employers wouldn’t take me for granted and would reward my skills and abilities. In fact, I once had a boss who coached me to always ask for a pay rise and log my successes to ensure I always kept pace with the men in the company. I thought he was the norm – I thought all bosses wanted everyone to be equal and succeed.

Boy was I ever wrong.

While sexist conditions on work affect the average woman’s pay compared to the average man’s pay – when women take a couple of years off to have children, the work world is arranged so that this affects her promotion and pay prospects: the structure of work and career is fundamentally arranged to suit a man with a wife: a woman with childcare responsibilities may have to take part-time work or look for a job dependent on location and childcare affordability – the overriding factor is just as clear: women get paid less for being female. A women entering full-time work as a graduate will get paid less than a man who has also just graduated.

A man may be more likely to negotiate a rise in salary or a higher salary – but a woman who tries to get higher pay will be regarded as overly aggressive and uppity.

A pair of studies conducted at Carnegie Melon illustrate the problem: In one, male graduates of the school’s management program were four times as likely to negotiate their first salaries out of college than their female peers; in another, women who did attempt to negotiate were seen as overly aggressive, unless they “conformed to feminine stereotypes”—smiles and nods—when asking for more.

Men are more likely to feel able to ask for a rise in pay based on their success and their abilities because they are more likely to have learned since childhood that praising themselves and asking to be rewarded will be met with a positive response, whereas both men and women have been taught that women shouldn’t praise themselves or ask for rewards:

“Girls and women intuit that speaking up can be dangerous to your reputation — that asking for too much can be viewed as conceited or cocky,” says Rachel Simmons, co-founder of the Girls Leadership Institute and a creator of the Leadership for Rebels program at Smith. “This may begin on the playground, but it extends all the way into the workplace.”

Research by the Harvard senior lecturer Hanna Riley Bowles and others has found that women who negotiate are considered pushy and less likable — and, in some cases, less likely to be offered jobs as a result.

But a woman who appears too feminine will likely not be offered a job either.

Cultural images of women don’t help:

A recent Women in Journalism report examining the front pages of newspapers found women wrote just 22% of front page articles.

Employment patterns within journalism may go some way towards explaining the relative lack of women’s voices in the news. Over the 15-year time period of the GMMP, the visibility of women as producers and subjects of news media has improved steadily, but relative visibility of women to men remains at a ratio of 1:3.

And men’s voices are generally privileged as being more authoritative when it comes to being used as “expert” sources. Women’s voices, views and expertise are restricted.

The Women in Journalism report found that women account for just 16% of those mentioned or quoted in lead stories on the front pages of newspapers and three quarters of “expert” voices were male.

Hollywood film schools literally teach scriptwriters to focus on men and have women only as subsidiary characters:

Only to learn there was still something wrong with my writing, something unanticipated by my professors. My scripts had multiple women with names. Talking to each other. About something other than men. That, they explained nervously, was not okay. I asked why. Well, it would be more accurate to say I politely demanded a thorough, logical explanation that made sense for a change (I’d found the “audience won’t watch women!” argument pretty questionable, with its ever-shifting reasons and parameters).

At first I got several tentative murmurings about how it distracted from the flow or point of the story. I went through this with more than one professor, more than one industry professional. Finally, I got one blessedly telling explanation from an industry pro: “The audience doesn’t want to listen to a bunch of women talking about whatever it is women talk about.”
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According to Hollywood, if two women came on screen and started talking, the target male audience’s brain would glaze over and assume the women were talking about nail polish or shoes or something that didn’t pertain to the story. Only if they heard the name of a man in the story would they tune back in. By having women talk to each other about something other than men, I was “losing the audience.”

Consistently, steadily, across industries and professions, in the public sector and the charity sector, when people are making salary decisions they “just happen” to decide that women employees are worth less money than men.

If you accuse these people of being sexist, they’d get affronted. There is seldom if ever just one factor in deciding an employee’s salary. It’s not like they line up all of the men and make sure they get more money than the women who’ve been working there as long or as well. It just happens. It’s just like that.

And since employees are usually strongly discouraged from sharing information about how much they get paid, it could take a long time before a woman discovers she’s getting paid less than men who have less experience and expertise.

Pay discrimination is a silent offense. Women know when they’re being harassed and abused, of course, and they can often tell if they’re being discriminated against in hiring and promotion—all they have to do is count the men with lesser skills and credentials doing jobs they still aspire to. But in many workplaces, discussing pay is frowned upon; in some, it’s a dismissible offense.

When a trans man who has employed while presenting as a woman, transitions to becoming a man, you’d expect (and of course in some instances this happens) that he would face discrimination and prejudice that would affect his income. But many trans men report that, as men, they find themselves receiving more authority, reward, and respect in the workplace than they received as women, even when they remain in the same jobs. Sexism trumps transphobia.

A few years ago a freelance writer adopted a pen name.

Instantly, jobs became easier to get.

There was no haggling. There were compliments, there was respect. Clients hired me quickly, and when they received their work, they liked it just as quickly. There were fewer requests for revisions — often none at all.

Customer satisfaction shot through the roof. So did my pay rate.

And I was thankful. I finally stopped worrying about how I would feed my girls. We were warm. Well-fed. Safe. No one at school would ever tease my kids about being poor.

I was still bringing in work with the other business, the one I ran under my real name. I was still marketing it. I was still applying for jobs — sometimes for the same jobs that I applied for using my pen name.

I landed clients and got work under both names. But it was much easier to do when I used my pen name.

The freelance writer was a woman: the pen name she adopted was James Chartrand.

Men get paid more.