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Gaza is not as I expected. Amid the terror, there is hope

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I can’t imagine how things are over there. Yet people carry on as best as they can

Powered by Guardian.co.ukThis article titled “Gaza is not as I expected. Amid the terror, there is hope” was written by Paul Mason, for The Guardian on Sunday 3rd August 2014 19.00 UTC

I have been reporting from Gaza all week, and, amid the stream of dead and injured civilians wheeled on trolleys before me, frantic people gesturing in my face, and nights spent in an unlit city under bombardment, I’ve come to a conclusion I did not expect: Gaza “works”.

What I mean is that, given resources, connections with the outside world, and time, this narrow political entity could function normally. With its smooth sand, blue sea and skies, it could even become a tourist destination. It already has a massive pool of trained and educated human capital – though, sadly, its most expert people are trauma surgeons. As it is, hotels stand deserted along the beachfront in Gaza City. Their embarrassed waiters struggle to boil coffee on single flames. The fishermen in the port sneak out maybe 20 yards in canoes, while hostilities are on, 100 yards in motor boats during the sporadic ceasefires.

Everyday life, even for those with money and friends in the west, is becoming impossible. Water queues form, petrol stations are empty. Equally unnerving, for the young, urbanised kids, the internet is sporadic. I met two women – educated professionals: the top floor of their apartment block had been demolished by an Israeli rocket. Now they, too, were in the world of queues, poor hygiene, homelessness. A decent handbag does not exempt you. The currency is the shekel, but the biggest concern is gold. Palestinians keep their wealth in gold and jewellery. Around 250,000 people have been displaced and moving into a packed and filthy school, to sleep alongside the donkeys of the poor, does not strike people with gold as any better than staying and waiting for the shells to hit.

Gaza works because of Gaza’s people. Since Hamas took control in 2007, the place has been run by a group designated as terrorist, and under Islamic rule. Unable to rebuild after the Israeli invasion of 2008-9, they instead built tunnels – nobody knows how long – in which the military wing of Hamas, the Qassam Brigades, live, store their rockets and fight. The tunnels are also used to bring in the essential supplies that have been banned during the seven-year siege of Gaza.

Strangely, then, for much of the day, you see the place as it might be if Hamas did not exist. Non-Hamas police keep order; women without hijabs move around as freely as the women in full veil; doctors returned from Germany and Canada saw the shattered bones of youths who have lived and may die in this small strip of land. And two-thirds of the population skip and play and wrestle – for they are children.

When this war is over, nothing good will happen in Gaza until the seige and blockade are lifted. Indeed, with 40% of the urban area unlivable because of the destruction, there will be a massive humanitarian crisis for months. Solving that crisis is not just a matter for NGOs. The way it is solved will dictate whether Gaza can survive. UNRWA, the UN agency for refugees that has opened its clean, blue-and-white schools to a dirty, chaotic surge of displaced humanity, says Gaza is “on a precipice”. The hospital I’ve just been in has 95 blast and bullet wounds to treat, with six intensive care beds.

Logic dictates that either aid flows inwards, on an unprecedented scale, or people will flow outwards – not tomorrow, but as the weeks roll by without sanitation or power. Palestinians fear that a humanitarian crisis will be used to move them permanently off the land captured by the Israelis, and ultimately into camps in Egypt.

I have been to Muslim countries where there is deep conservatism, low education and suspicion of the west. This is not one of them. I constantly meet highly educated people who speak English; cheerful and friendly people – which is amazing in itself, given the level of terror the night brings. The world is not so blessed with educated, resourceful people that it can afford to waste the lives of 1.8 million Palestinians behind the iron grilles and the concrete walls that delimit Gaza. I have lost track of how many times I’ve met a young guy, 18 or 19 years old, proud not to be a fighter, a militant, or a duck-and-dive artist on the street. When you ask what his job is, the common answer is “carpenter”. Working with wood – not metal or computer code – is the limit of what the blockade has enabled the skilled manual worker here to achieve.

Faced with such hopelessness, naturally, many become resigned: “Living is the same as being dead” is a phrase you hear among young men. It is the perfect rationale for the nihilist military organisation some choose to join. But its opposite is the resourcefulness that rewires a house after its front has been blown off; that sits on the carpet making bread on a hot pan after a home has been reduced to dust.

There are only two economic routes for life to flow back into Gaza and, given the bitterness of this conflict, the route from Israel will not be the main one. Egypt holds the key to Gaza’s economic integration to the rest of the global economy. Open the Rafah crossing, and the need for the tunnels disappears. To the world this forlorn, impoverished and totally battered society has become a byword for impossibility and despair. But nobody has told Gazans. I found them full of hope.

• Paul Mason is economics editor of Channel 4 News. Follow him @paulmasonnews

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Personal independence payments are a punishment of the poor and ill

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This bloke gives me nightmares he really does…

Powered by Guardian.co.ukThis article titled “Personal independence payments are a punishment of the poor and ill” was written by Polly Toynbee, for The Guardian on Friday 11th April 2014 05.00 UTC

She calls it: “Heartbreaking, truly astonishing, I’ve never seen anything like this.” Emma Cross is a senior Macmillan Cancer Support benefits adviser, and she says delays in Iain Duncan Smith’s new personal independence payments (PIP) leave the sick utterly destitute. “Does anyone know how many people are struggling?”

Macmillan’s mountain of PIP cases includes a mother being treated with chemotherapy for bowel cancer, whose operation left her with a colostomy bag. She gave up work and, with no other family to help, her husband gave up his job to care for her and their two-year-old child, taking her to frequent hospital appointments. They claimed PIP last September – and they have heard nothing since. No-one answers queries, lost in the gigantic backlog.

Until registered for PIP, which pays from £21-£134 a week, they can’t claim other crucial benefits: carers allowance, severe disability premium, escape from the bedroom tax, a bus pass, taxi cards to get to hospital, or a heating grant (she feels intensely cold). With credit cards maxed out, they have no idea what they’re due as PIP has tougher criteria: if this woman can just about walk more than 20 metres, she may get nothing now for mobility. Macmillan says people in this backlog are missing chemo appointments for lack of a bus fare.

“I wish this couple were an exception,” says Emma Cross. “But this is happening to so many.”

PIP replaces the disability living allowance, which Duncan Smith cut by 20% and abolished for new claimants; old claimants are being moved over. It used to pay out quickly, but PIP is an administrative calamity. The public accounts committee (PAC) queried why Atos won the contract to run it with its record of failure: Sue Marsh’s latest Spartacus report says 43% of appeals against DWP decisions based on Atos tests for employment support allowance are upheld. Margaret Hodge, the PAC chair, unearthed Atos’s tender for the PIP contract and found it had been “grossly misleading”, pretending to have hundreds of test centres inside hospitals, when in reality it had very few.

The last figures from the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) show that 220,000 made PIP claims, but less than a fifth were processed. Ask any MP about PIP cases piling up in their surgeries and all parties tell tales of woe.

After he appeared on the Andrew Marr show this week, I challenged Duncan Smith over the PIP backlog. He waved it away airily. Oh, it’ll all be sorted by the autumn, he claimed. Nothing to worry about. That’s highly unlikely – but if so, why not pay claimants the old DLA until it’s fixed? Why should sick people pay the price for his maladministration? He batted away the idea with a shrug.

This is exceptionally monstrous, as Macmillan say people have died waiting. The 5% of cases dealt with as priority under “special rules” are those with a doctor’s letter certifying they’ll die within six months. Macmillan says it’s hard to know when people will die – six months or two years. Doctors rightly can’t write such a letter for someone who hasn’t asked for a specific death date. People need the money right now, regardless of the ghoulish prognosis demanded by DWP.

Labour’s Rachel Reeves and her team have been protesting, but the PIP story hasn’t become a national scandal. Why not? They say, glumly, that only the Mirror and the Guardian are interested, the rest turn away. Google PIP and you get myriad stories on breast implants. This reflects how much more tribal the rightwing press has become. The Guardian, as did I, covered Labour’s failings in power. The PIP saga is a “good” story. Where – yet again – is BBC news, which should be following the DWP with laser-accurate analysis?

Forget civil service factual information: Duncan Smith has just hired a Murdoch managing editor from the Sun and Sunday Times as DWP communications director. Perhaps he helps hone Duncan Smith’s terminological inexactitudes [see footnote].

On Sunday’s programme IDS claimed, again, that his bedroom tax simply followed Labour’s rules on restricting the number of bedrooms claimable on housing benefit in the private sector. Not so, says the House of Commons library, it was the Tories in 1989 who cut the number of eligible bedrooms – and only for new rentals, never turfing people out of homes they already occupied.

The PIP catastrophe is just the most extreme of Duncan Smith’s disasters. Nothing – not one of his programmes – has worked as planned. It hardly matters that universal credit (UC) is years late, but last month the PAC demonstrated UC will never do what Duncan Smith claims, its work incentives shot to pieces. With council tax, housing benefit cuts and national insurance, many on UC will lose almost all of every extra pound earned, while most lose 65p or more. The very rich down tools over a loss of 50p in the pound. At first, it might have been ignorance, but now IDS knows his claims for UC are untrue.

After IDS’s most recent interview on the Today programme with Evan Davis, the Child Poverty Action Group analysed his facts. Will he meet his child poverty targets? “I believe we will”, Duncan Smith replies. “But you’re not on target to do that.” “I believe we will.” “So frustrating!” exclaims Davis. Duncan Smith makes this claim: “Since I’ve been in power we’ve seen child poverty fall by 300,000.” He knows that’s just from the first year when Labour’s increase in child tax credits kicked in: since then, it’s all downhill.

Duncan Smith likes to mislead on the relative measure of poverty: “Actually upper incomes fell, so the idea of a relative income measure doesn’t make any sense.” But relative poverty has nothing to do with what happens to top incomes. It’s measured against the median – the middle point, not an average nor the top. Stupidity or duplicity? Take your choice.

“The last Labour government spent £175bn in tax credits chasing a poverty target they failed to meet,” he said. But that was over 11 years and it did hit two-thirds of the target, while IDS plunges ever downwards.

If your eyes glazed over, that’s what he counts on. Bamboozling voters who don’t have graphs to hand is how he gets away with it. When challenged, he resorts to “I believe I’m right”. But the Institute for Fiscal Studies, Royal Statistical Society and scores of experts stopped him moving his goalposts. The IFS predicts he’ll put 300,000 more children into poverty by next year, up nearly a million by 2020. In 2011 IDS claimed his was “the party of the poor” – that’s a promise he has kept. Of all his calamities, PIP is probably the worst.

• Comments on this article will be launched later this morning (UK time)

• This article was amended on 11 April 2014. The earlier version said incorrectly that “Atos, the firm contracted to deliver it [PIP], has walked away”. Atos’s contract to deliver PIP is to continue as planned; it is Atos’s separate contract to administer work capability assessments (WCAs), used to determine qualification for employment and support allowance, from which the company has announced it will be exiting early. The article also referred to “appeals against Atos tests”. To clarify: the appeals are against DWP decisions based on WCAs.

• The following correction was published on 15 April 2014: A Comment article about the treatment of disabled people by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) stated: “Forget civil service factual information: Duncan Smith has just hired a Murdoch managing editor from the Sun and Sunday Times as DWP communications director. Perhaps he helps hone Duncan Smith’s terminological inexactitudes.” We are happy to accept that Richard Caseby, the strategic director of communications at the DWP, carries out his duties in a thoroughly honest, diligent and professional manner. He was not hired by Iain Duncan Smith, the secretary of state for work and pensions, but works as a civil servant. We apologise for any misunderstanding. In addition, the writer of the article said that “PIP replaces the disability living allowance” (DLA). To clarify: DLA is still available for children up to the age of 16.

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Osborne wants to take us back to 1948. Time to look forward instead

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Powered by Guardian.co.ukThis article titled “Osborne wants to take us back to 1948. Time to look forward instead” was written by Will Hutton, for The Observer on Sunday 8th December 2013 06.20 UTC

It is an incidental sentence, but it brought me up short. By 2018, general government consumption will be proportionally no larger than it was in 1948. So declared the Office for Budget Responsibility in its report accompanying the autumn statement. The work of three generations in building the sinews of a state that support systems of health, transport, education, environment, policing, science and the rest is to be summarily withdrawn over the next five years. It is a landmark moment in our national life.

Next year the coalition – deputy prime minister Nick Clegg supporting Cameron and Osborne – is aiming to legislate that the reduction of the deficit on this scale and speed should be a statutory obligation. Stunningly – apart from some allegedly effective new measures against tax avoidance, and asking non-residents to pay capital-gains tax on the sale of their homes – all of the work is to be done by cutting spending, by a cumulative £75bn in ways yet to be specified.

The IMF, after assessing the experience of 107 countries between 1980 and 2012, recommends that, after a credit-crunch deficit, there should be a balance between tax increases and spending reductions. In Osborne-land over the next five years more than 95% is to come from spending cuts – a global first in self-harm.

I worried in my column last week that the principal risk of the recovery – induced by Osborne actually introducing measures contrary to those he is supposed to believe in – was that his apparent economic success would seduce him into actively damaging prescriptions. So it has come to pass. The OBR shares my view that all we are witnessing is a cyclical snapback of the economy driven by a recovery of demand. This should not be the excuse to shrug off the calamity of irrational total austerity, and hack away at the state with abandon. But sure enough that is what is now promised. It is a deliberate challenge to the Labour party, but importantly also to the Liberal Democrats. I am not sure that, once the enormity of what is proposed is grasped by his party, Clegg will be able to persuade it to sign up to such a dark vision. He had to take the coalition agreement to a special conference of party members before he could formally agree to it. Already key figures aware of what is proposed, I’m led to believe, feel the whole party, as in May 2010, must be involved in another decision of parallel importance. I don’t think he can win any such vote. And what future would there be for the coalition – or indeed him – if it did come to that? Osborne’s calculation is that he and his party are on the right side of the argument. A jihad against government, backed by a rampant centre-right press, is capturing the popular mood. For alongside the proposal to create a 1948-scale state is another highly toxic proposal, at least for any Lib Dem worth their salt: to introduce a cap of just over £100bn on welfare spending, excluding pensions and the jobseeker’s allowance. Any last element of Beveridgean underpinning to the British approach of supporting the least well-off is to be removed. All there will be is a limited pot into which the needs of Britain’s disadvantaged will be shoe-horned. No Lib Dem can support this, surely.

The story is that this is all in support of “hard-working” people, as the Treasury declares on its webpage – bizarrely reducing a great state institution into a mouthpiece of Tory central office. The assumption is that the public and social institutions built up over the last 70 years are unnecessary and held in the same contempt by “hard-working” people as a highly ideological Tory party. It is a bet that only politicians insulated from the reality across Britain could make.

Some of the intense pressures on government departments are already surfacing. Leaked papers from the Department for Business show its cumulative spending cuts are at least £1.6bn, with more unspecified for 2018/19. Two proposals are privately under active consideration: one is to turn £350m of grants to students from less well-off households into loans, which I doubt will be cheered by their “hard-working” parents. The other is to cut the science budget. Indeed any ambition to lift research and development spending from its current 1.8% of GDP to the 3% benchmark spent by the world’s best can be abandoned. We are to stay in the second or even third division.

It will be the same across the board. From flood defences to class sizes, from the capabilities of our regulators to the effectiveness of our police, from assistance to the elderly or the scale of our performing arts – everything is under threat. And this is unrelieved by any attempt to look for tax revenue to mitigate the impact, as every other country does and is advised to do. Instead, more asset disposals are proposed. The east coast mainline, generating £209m of surplus on £700m turnover, will be sold despite its fabulous returns to the taxpayer. The same will take place with EuroStar. To give up such great financial returns along with the benefits of ownership is daft. The new owners will demand even higher returns on their investment, with only enfeebled regulators left to protect “hard-working” people from being skinned. Ownership matters.

As the IMF argues, the knock-on depressive effects of spending cuts on such a scale is much higher than a more balanced approach involving tax increases, especially when the banking system is still palpably weak. The next 18 months will see a clawback of some of the ground lost over the last six years. There could be a substantive follow-through for the rest of the decade. Instead growth will be much more subdued as the next wave of the jihad kicks in, all to create a 1948-scale state and a giant leap backwards to a 19th-century system of poverty relief. Is this the civilisation, and wider economy, in which “hard working” people want to live and work – and where so much risk is transferred from social institutions to the individual.

The autumn statement is a seminal event. The obligation is on the Labour party, and the Lib Dems, to make the counter case. Great politicians must have vision, and back it with argument and evidence. Miliband and his shadow cabinet must be brave enough to set out what kind of state and social settlement they want, and how best to lift the stagnating productivity of British workers, which is at the root of the “cost-of-living crisis”. Lib Dems need to ask themselves if they really want to be allies in creating the regressive, punitive civilisation Cameron and Osborne have in mind. Back to 1948? Or onward to something smarter, fairer and more generous? It’s decision time.

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