Mark Steele on Question Time Highlights attacks on the Poor

Mark Steele, has a way of just getting to the bones of an issue and sending it up. he did this on Question time this week. Watch the video above to see him in action, however the comical points are feathered with some very important points.

Mark Steele hits the right note and asks why so little effort is being made to stop tax avoidance, and so much to attack the poor

There is an attack going on, directed at the "Working Poor", we all know that welfare needs reform and that scroungers need to be found out and dealt with. I and I feel most of you will agree this is a good thing, but surely not universally, taking away benefits from everyone just to get at the few is surely wrong. This much discussed £26,000 cap sound huge as an amount until you realise that this money actually goes in the main directly into landlords pockets, what we need is rent control not benefit control. This Cap on benefits is designed purely to make the poor in the cities move away to cheaper areas, so again the landlords can clear the ground re-build and sell on for millions of pounds profits, who would have thought that we would still in 2012 be advocating "Slum Clearance".


Hang on a second!, why then are we targeting ALL benefit claimants and painting them ALL with the scrounger brush, why are we treating all claimants as people who are in some way taking advantage of the welfare state?. The reason is, I think, is  that we have over the last 2 years been conditioned to think that way, by a government who wants this on the agenda, it is only now that the policy is under some considerable belated scrutiny that people can see that this government is trying to take away the safety net for ALL of us. If things go wrong and we loose our income, under the new proposals, ordinary people will be turfed out of their family homes as the State will not be allowed to help to a degree to allow you to stay in residence. This despite the fact that you have continually paid your taxes, paid into the system, you will be forced quite quickly to sell up, use savings, move to affordable rented accommodation, before you even have the chance to get back into the work place and resume paying taxes, you will have the uncaring banks at the front door and the inadequate benefits system at the back door and nowhere to go.

Spare a thought also for the massive amount of research, policy development, reports, parliamentary time, bill drafting and media commissioning which underlines the welfare reforms. Ian Duncan Smith MP has become a "Welfare Czar" all knowing and all wise on the needs and the benefits of what he is proposing.

Hang on a second! where is the "Getting the Rich and business to pay taxes CZAR" where is the man who has spent 5 years in opposition looking at the problems of why over £130billion annually is not collected by HMRC in tax from these people. Why did HMRC in one set of meetings in one day write off £25Billion for Vodaphone and many others. If we had this tax collected within the current law, as it exists today in one parliament we would clear the deficit completely and then the cash we eventually got from the banks would also be a bonus, the Queen could have her Royal Yacht for her Jubilee, the Olympics would be a Global extravaganza, growth would return to the economy as we could invest in jobs and re balancing of the economy, unemployment would fall, benefits would be sustainable and we could invest in helping the poor out of the benefits trap . It would be the equivalent of having one years GDP for the whole country extra to spend, some £650Billion in a lifetime of a parliament. Margaret Thatcher said to Denis Skinner in parliament on her last day when he said she should become the governer of the ECB "What a good idea" "I hadn't thought of that".

This government is placing much effort and time in reforming how the "Working Poor" are managed within the economy. It is now time the people of this country started to see them working hard to ensure that the "Tax Avoiders" have nowhere to hide.

Some reading this will be shouting into your "Daily Mails" but these people are the wealth creators we need them they provide jobs.

Hang on a second! Business need a lot of things that in many ways they get for free. They need roads, rail, infrastructures of all kinds building land and car-parks, all interconnected to the world via a multitude of interconnected systems. People often forget that the Telephone system in place today was paid for by the tax payer, the roads and railways paid for by the tax payer. Business tax subsidised by the tax payer. Take HS2 essentially for business £34 billion being paid for by the tax payer. The government setting up regional development funds, business being subsidised by the taxpayer. The supermarkets paying extremely low wages being topped up by benefits, subsidised by the tax payer. I could go on, the government who develops business links is paid for by the tax payer. As already mentioned HMRC letting business off with billion of tax is then subsidised by the tax payer. Business do well out of the general taxation pot at the expense of the rest of us. Is it too much to ask them to provide work so they can make even more money, and pay taxes if they have to struggle on by on a couple of million less in their off shore tax haven.

This is not only the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, but Labour as well who have abandoned the poor, the disabled and the disadvantaged in society, demonising them all as scroungers, allowing the few who are taking advantage, to be used as a reason to dismantle the safety net we all need in times of unexpected hardship. Labour who are the official opposition seem to be agreeing with everything the government is doing, and where they oppose it seems to be just a half hearted "Tut".

An essential service for many - their budgets slashed - feel the government have broken promises to protect the poorest families

I was outside the Citizens Advice Bureau, speaking to an NHS nurse who had recently finished 4 years of training, who has never been unemployed and worked long hours. She was in a car accident, and is now unable to walk, the benefit cuts will make her loose her house and she is being forced into much smaller unsuitable slum landlord property and she is forced to sell her home. She is confident she will work again but not many employers want to take on disabled people, so with the cost everything going up and her benefits being cut by £86 per week,  £344 per month she is now in poverty and struggling to get into town to get help.

Food Handouts to ordinary families have doubled in the last 12 months, executive pay increased by 49%

I am not against welfare reform, or reform of the NHS, of course we need to continually renew the vigor of its scrutiny to make sure that people who need it get the support and help they need. However when it is becoming abundantly clear that this is the fig leaf being held up to mask the Conservative dream of NHS privatisation, ending the "free at the point of need for ALL", and the smashing of the welfare state as we know it today, smashing the schools system which have produced some of the finest brains of our times, and exposing the state system to wholesale outsourcing to private companies with no real regard to quality and safety of services, where the cost of everything becomes more important than the value of anything. All these things I didn't vote for and no-one else did either, because if they did say this was what would happen at the last election, if they had said what they were proposing clearly and unambiguously they would have lost.

Single Mums being targeted as scroungers - The children however are innocent but 330,000 will suffer under these cuts

The poor are being discouraged from getting well educated, University is becoming only a playground for the rich. The Poor are being robbed of aspiration, and increasingly because of accumulated debt the lower middle classes are being sucked into a new "Working Poor" category. 85% of all housing benefit claimants ARE WORKING this was just 20% a decade ago. Inflation and VAT rises have robbed many of that little disposable income that made life just about bearable. Disabled people now trapped in their homes as daycare centres are shut and DLA is slashed. Young carers are becoming more and more "24 hour unpaid nurses" for their families robbing them of their childhoods and adequate schooling. A generation of young people left unemployed because of the governments mishandling of the deficit, wasted talent, will lead to years of misery and burden on the welfare state, as finding work when you have no skills becomes more and more difficult as every month goes by. Single Parents being targeted being forced into bed and breakfasts with their children, 330,000 children loosing out because of benefit changes. All because the Banks were greedy, and still are, all because too many people and businessmen don't pay tax.


ALL BECAUSE THE PEOPLE OF BRITAIN ARE LETTING IT HAPPEN

What can you do, its simple just talk about it, tell the truth, let people know you care and point them in the right direction. Write to your local MP, council member and complain find out for yourself don't take anyone's word for it. Ask questions and more importantly question replies.