Didn’t I say a couple of years back that a depression’s only official when the middle classes start complaining about benefit rates? Job Seekers Allowance is currently just over a measly sixty quid a week and even Guardian journos are struggling.
A commenter wryly commiserated:
23 Mar 09, 11:45am (about 19 hours ago)
I am unemployed. It is impossible to live on £60 a week. Luckily I discovered that I was able to claim £14,000 a year for the house my parents live in. I use it for job seeking and have made over £60,000 .
Neighbours call me a benefits cheat and point out that a couple were recently given a 6 month jail sentence for a £40,000 fraud. I call them a bunch of jealous peasants.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/mar/23/tony-mcnulty-allowances.
Heh.
The brass-necked, greedy dishonesty and sheer hard-faced gall of Employment Minister Tony McNulty, who’s been highly visible in the Guardian’s pages and elsewhere demonising non-existent cheats and scroungers with his hateful ‘no ifs or buts’ anti benefit fraud campaign, beggars belief. Talk about rubbing the faces of the 2 million unemployed in it.
Understandably it’s been front-page news all over the UK and a hot topic on blogs of all political flavours; corruption’s corruption after all, however inured we’ve become to it since the advent of New Labour.
But not at the Guardian, though being a supposedly leftwing paper you’d think they’d find the irony delicious. But while the tabloids and broadsheets scream condemnation the Guardian’s appeared oddly muted on McNulty and strangely quiet on the corruption and greed of the Labour establishment in general. I’m amazed that comment got through CiF’s notoriously harsh moderation.
Another irony the Guardian seems to have missed in light of the up to 150 journalists and others the Guardian Media Group (Editor Alan Rusbridger, salary £355,000 pa including 17,000 benefits) is itself about to make redundant on sixty pounds a week (£3,120 pa)is that it should then publish a comment decrying the low benefit rates that it is itself condemning its own employees to. Talk about rubbing the faces of the unemployed in it.
Comment is Free‘s a very popular Guardian section that appears to rely mostly on insecure freelancers, cheap recent graduates and user generated comments for content and must already be – compared to a fully staffed print newspaper – cheap to run.
It would be interesting to know, therefore, exactly how many Guardian journalists and CiF columnists already rely on the benefits system to feed their families and underpin their struggling and insecure writing careers – and conversely (how like so many other British companies) how many and which newspapers offering low-paid parttime or freelance employment rely on state benefits to underpin their business models. Without Tax Credit support for freelancers how many newspapers would fail entirely, I wonder?
I see now why the Guardian, wants unemployment benefit rates to rise. It’s potentially vital to it’s new shiny 24/7 online business model.
Tell me again, who’re the welfare scroungers exactly? No wonder the Guardian has such a discreet empathy with McNulty.
