Lindsey Morgan, Bristol South Socialist Party
422,000 households went to bed last night affected by the two-child benefit cap. Many of those households will have parents who have skipped meals, spent a summer trying to keep children entertained when they only get benefit for two of them, exhausted with stress due to their finances.
Some of those children will go to school this September knowing that their parents are struggling, unable to concentrate on schoolwork due to lack of food, and themselves developing mental health problems due to poverty. With all that pressure on families, worsening pressure on services and all the workers trying to keep them going, you’d hope that they may be helped by the New Labour government. Many of them had said how disgusted they were with the cap – wringing their hands when they were the opposition. The message from the government so far has been that they’re ‘very sad’ about it.
But politicians feeling sad doesn’t pay the bills, feed families, clothe them or pay for nappies. We’re expected to settle for the sadness of politicians on £91,000 per year plus expenses – they really feel our struggles! And now Keir Starmer has warned that things are going to get worse before they get better! People are angry.
The two-child cap itself has been cynically used by some on the right to argue that ‘we can’t afford any migrants if we can’t afford benefits for British-born children’. But as ever, this rhetoric is being used to force us to fight among ourselves for scraps from the table rather than looking at the real thieves in society – the super-rich.
The idea that we can’t afford to pay for decent benefits for all families and children is a nonsense, based on the lie that there isn’t enough money. Britain is the sixth-richest country in the world. The money is there to pay for all the things we need: council houses, fully funded NHS, winter fuel payments for pensioners and more. An immediate wealth tax on the super-rich could fund it. If the worry is the rich running away with their cash, then we should nationalise the banks and pay compensation only on the basis of proven need.
Labour has nationalised banks before. Maybe this time it could be to our benefit rather than the bankers and shareholders.
The fightback can’t wait! Trade unions, community campaigners and all those willing to fight now for what we need must build a new workers’ party – of us to fight for us. At every step we need to fight for what we deserve by putting all the wealth and resources in society under democratic working-class control.
