Why I fear for the country

or Why I fear for my kids’ future

I wrote a political post recently, which was a bit of a knee-jerk reaction to a particular news story. It didn’t get many comments, perhaps because it wasn’t especially well argued and, well, not everyone likes to talk about politics. But I wanted to write a more general post about my feelings on the current government, so that you know where I’m coming from and that if you ever make a comment suggesting that the ‘scroungers should be sterilised’, I’ll probably come at you with a metaphorical meat cleaver.

I’m generally a pretty nice person, I think. For the most part, if I’m shouting or swearing, it’s at inanimate objects, or pieces of software (and, OK, yes, sometimes it’s at my kids or my husband, but that’s a whole other post in itself). Over the last few months, though, I find myself shouting and swearing at the computer almost the moment I turn it on in the morning – as soon as I see the top headline on the BBC news website. Because, almost daily, there’s a new story about how the coalition government intends to penalise the people who need the most help. Penalise them, ghettoise them, punish them and generally degrade them. Almost daily there’s a new story about a piece of policy geared to get everyone up in arms about the damn scroungers and the benefit fraudsters who are stealing the hard-earned money of the working public. The government is basically doing the Daily Mail’s job for them – instead of having to dig around to find some way that the poor, the Europeans or the non-white are ruining the country, they just have to pick the government’s latest benefit-cutting policy and wax lyrical (or not so lyrical, really) about it.

The trouble is, though, it’s not just the Daily Mail readers who are talking like this now. I’m hearing it from surprising sources. I’m hearing complaints from the very people whose benefits are actually going to be cut. Because the government is publicising the cuts to the people they think no-one has sympathy towards more than any other cuts. The housing benefit cuts will be pretty much across the board (changing the way it’s calculated, for example), but everyone is happy because it means tax payers don’t have to fit the bill for anyone to live in Chelsea. Cuts to tax credits (which actually help people to work and stay in work) and freezing of benefits are ignored, because the long-term unemployed – those horrible scroungers who just sit on their arses all day and watch daytime TV, don’t you know – will be forced to go out and do manual labour to teach them about the work ethic. And no-one likes the thought of their hard-earned taxes helping people who won’t work, so the complaints are about them rather than thinking about ways to actually help people into work.

I’m used to glimpsing the headlines in the Daily Mail and getting angry – to the point where I try very, very hard not to look when I pass the newspaper stand in the local Co-op. But what is saddening me is seeing the internet and my parent blogging world littered with vitriolic commentary about scroungers and questioning of people who have more than 2.2 children, because clearly they must be in it for the money (what money?). Seeing comments on blogs I read suggesting that benefit claimants should be sterilised. People looking at the cuts just from their own point of view and how it’s going to affect them without considering how it’s going to affect the old lady on the corner, or the family over the road, or the guy in the wheelchair you see in the shop every day, or the park worker who always says good morning and gives you a smile, or the schoolchildren who will continue to be taught in a classroom with a roof that leaks, or the kids who will not get the swings repaired…

What I’m seeing, and what is making me very sad and very, very scared, is a return to the self-centred attitudes of the 80s. And I really, really, really hope that this government (or any of its constituent parts, for that matter) does not get another term and that my children don’t have to spend their formative years in a Tory-led country like I did.

So… what about you? Are you happy with the cuts? Are you worrying about how it affects you (and I do realise that people have to worry about how things affect them)? Are you worrying about your children’s future? Do you think about those less fortunate or do you find worrying about how you’re going to feed your own family takes precedent? Are you feeling the urge to dig out your Doc Martens and go out marching against the government like you did 20 odd years ago?