Tory war on the poor will cause rise in support for independence

People living in poverty are everywhere – serving in shops and restaurants, cleaning offices, getting the nation to work. What a limiting and controlling word ‘poor’ is – like shackles – as if poverty must and should be a permanent state. ‘He’s poor’. ‘She’s French’. ‘They’re ugly’.

Unless you’re born rich, poverty can get us all – and all of us have the capacity and talents to escape poverty if we’re given a fair chance in life.

Millions of us experience poverty. I grew up poor, so did half the so-called ‘middle class’ people I know. Middle class just means you’re working class but with a mortgage.

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Poverty is scarring, it stays with you – you remember how bad it was; if you’ve even the suggestion of a soul you’ll not want others to experience it – which likely explains the inexhaustible capacity of spoilt, £15k-a-term private school Tories for inflicting misery on millions struggling to survive on low incomes and state support. I detest the words ‘benefits’ and ‘welfare’ – condescending, Dickensian sneers intended to measure and fix a person by the depth of their pocket; to humiliate, dehumanise and categorise.

But we were all meant to love ‘the poor’ post-pandemic – remember? We were meant to emerge from Covid into a utopia where we’d learned the lessons of the past and wanted to lift up those who’d carried us through the plague: the shop workers, bus drivers, cleaners and carers.

Self-deluding lies. We knew it back then when we spun ourselves phoney egalitarian tales – and we sure as hell know it now as the Tories turn the screw on the unemployed and folk on low wages. Chancellor Rishi Sunak – a multi-millionaire married to a woman richer than the Queen – is withdrawing the extra £20 in Universal Credit received weekly during pandemic.

Now £20 may mean nothing to a man who could clean his behind with bank notes, but to families on Universal Credit it’s the difference between going hungry and keeping warm. Such blind cruelty would make any atheist wish for an omnipotent judge in the afterlife.

Sunak has just got the go-ahead for a gym, tennis court and swimming poor at his £1.5m manor house. He also plans a 'wildlife area in the paddock'. Two businesses in which Sunak’s wife, Akshata Murty, is a major investor have gone into administration owing money to HMRC. One borrowed £1.3m from the government-backed Future Fund which Sunak launched last year. Not that any of this is a personal blow - Murty’s stake in her family’s global business empire is reportedly £625m. So what’s twenty quid?

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Mortality rates for poor people in the most deprived communities are twice as high as affluent areas. This is a war on the poor - wars kill people. Government policy is killing people - they’re dying before they should.

Prices are rising, as a consequences of Brexit - the fantasy of the very people cutting Universal Credit. Douglas Ross, Scottish Tory leader, accused the Greens of being ‘anti-families’. Is there anything more ‘anti-family’ than leaving parents no option but to go hungry so their children eat?

Citizens Advice predicts more than two million people will be driven into debt and towards food banks because of the Universal Credit cut.

Meanwhile, vultures circle the poor. Not just loan sharks and pay-day loan companies - a fifth of all betting shops are in the UK’s poorest areas, ten times more likely to be found in the most deprived towns than the richest. Yet only 10% of supermarkets are located in poor areas. So if you’re poor you have to get a bus to buy groceries, but there’s a bookies round the corner.

Big banks have closed four times as many branches in poor areas as rich areas. The poorest now have to trek miles for free ATMs or face paying rip-off prices at cash machines charging fees.

Homelessness grows. There’s around 60,000 families with children currently living in temporary accommodation across Britain. Throughout lockdown it was the lowest paid who had to contend with bosses bullying them over furlough and forcing them to endure dangerous conditions. It’s the poorest who are still being paid less than the minimum wage by crooked employers and forced to jump through hoops on zero hours contracts.

None of this affects the middle class. It’s out of sight and out of mind - over that hill where the poor belong with the other outsiders.

None of this lets the SNP off the hook for its abysmal record in government. But here’s the rub - not only can, and does, the SNP hide behind Westminster’s failures, as it’s Westminster that must shoulder the biggest burden of blame (it’s Westminster cutting Universal Credit after all, not Holyrood), the SNP also reaps a dividend at the ballot box because of the war against the poor. To most decent Scots voters, anything is better than what’s being done in London.

Constitutionally, though, there may well be a price to pay for this. Poverty drives anger; anger drives change. Poor voters backed Brexit - because what did they have to lose? Who can blame them? In Scotland, there’s strong support among poorest voters for independence. Again, what do they have to lose? If the status quo has failed you, then to hell with the status quo - try something different.

As Boris Johnson sticks the knife into the poor, each turn of the blade creates another possible Yes voter. It’s the simple logic of political blowback. But Johnson is a fool - a wealthy fool - who’s too blind to see that, just as he’s too blind to see the poor in their millions around Britain.

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