‘London is becoming the tale of two cities – the poor are capped, the rich are protected’. Photograph: JoeFox/Alamy
We are all in it together. This is the message the government wants to give about austerity. Everyone has to shoulder a part of the load. Each of us must do our bit. We are the “big society”, knitted together by a common project of national togetherness in the face of adversity.
This has become the familiar rhetorical window-dressing of a massive and unprecedented assault upon the most vulnerable people in our society.
The big society is a lie.
From later on this year, the sum total of a family’s benefit entitlement will be capped at £500 a week.
For those who have larger families and are living in places like London, where rents are ridiculously high and rising steeply, this is not nearly enough to get by.
Even without the cap on benefits, ordinary people are being forced out of central London by escalating costs.
In Westminster, housing benefit claims have gone down 20% since March 2010, while in places like Barnet and Newham, they went up over 40%, demonstrating clearly how the poor are being squeezed out.
Soon London will look like Paris, with rich people living in the centre and poor, often immigrant, communities hidden out of sight beyond the Périphérique.
The consequence of this mass deportation will be that outer London boroughs will not be able to cope and will cook up ways of shunting the vulnerable further afield, cutting people off from their traditional communities and forms of informal support.
Inevitably, homelessness, both in the form of rough sleeping and sofa-surfing, is massively on the rise again.
According to the government, this benefit cap is absolutely necessary. So too is the cap of 1% on any increases in benefit until 2017-18, which means that benefits will rise well below the rate of inflation. But when it comes to capping bankers’ bonuses, the Tories and their Lib Dem sidekicks have been screaming blue murder.
This week, the EU proposed that bonuses ought to be no more than 100% of bankers’ annual salaries, or 200% if sanctioned by shareholders. Someone earning £1m could thus get an extra £2m if their work is deemed of sufficient value to the firm. But apparently, this is not nearly enough. This cap is unfair, they say. Bonuses should be unlimited. And if these pin-striped übermensch don’t get what they want, they will have a tantrum and stomp off to Singapore. Well, let them go.
We do not want a London set up simply as a playground for the super rich. If immigration is a problem, the problem is that of international jet-setting billionaires forcing up house prices by investing in property portfolios and Docklands penthouses they rarely live in, thus creating mini glass and steel ghost towns, gated off from the real world, and forcing up the overheated market beyond the reach of ordinary people.
How can the government keep on talking about us all being in it together with a straight face?
The bankers were substantially responsible for creating this financial mess, yet whenever there is talk of limiting the bonus culture that incentivised all the absurd risk-taking that got us into this trouble, the government steps in to side with the wealthy.
No, the opposite of the big society is now the case.
London is becoming the tale of two cities – the poor are capped, the rich are protected.
From my parish at the Elephant and Castle, we can see the City; but it might as well be a million miles away. These are different worlds where different rules apply. And when a society gets so out of kilter with itself, social disorder is not far round the corner.
Remember the riots? I suspect we haven’t seen the last of them.
Twitter: @giles_fraser
This article titled “We cap benefits but not bonuses. How on earth are we ‘all in this together’?” was written by Giles Fraser, for The Guardian on Friday 1st March 2013 19.29 Europe/London
