Smug: George Osborne knows he doesn’t deserve his huge
salary – but he also knows you can’t do a single thing to stop him increasing it
and, just to rub it in, he wants to add calamity to injury by cutting payments
to the very poor.
Osborne, who spent 50 minutes patting himself on the back for restoring the economy to growth with his austerity cuts – even though they had nothing whatsoever to do with what little improvement there has been, said he wanted to push people on benefits further into poverty in order to meet deficit reduction targets.
“You are going to have to find billions of pounds more in welfare savings if you want to reduce the deficit, eliminate the deficit and get our debt falling,” he told the Treasury Committee.
A BBC News report tried to suggest that if the Conservative Party wins the next election, welfare (that’s the Tory word for social security) may be cut to protect spending on public services.
But this seems completely implausible. He is proposing a cut to benefits like Jobseekers’ Allowance (£71.70 per week at current rates) while MPs are set to receive an average pay rise of more than twice as much (£145.75 per week) – and that’s just the increase!
Average MP pay will be £1,419 per week, up from £1,273 per week at the moment. The Chancellor, of course, receives far more. His pay will rise to £2,863 per week from £2,580 per week at the moment.
He takes home 36 times as much as a jobseeker gets on benefit; he wants 40 times as much; and he wants the jobseeker to take the brunt of his plan to reduce the deficit – a debt that was not created by the jobseeker but by rich bankers who, like Osborne, have sailed through the last five years of recession on a pillow of taxpayers‘ money.
That is the human cost of Conservative-led government.
It is a cost that this country simply cannot afford.
