FORUM: ‘Fringes’ resettling is unsettling

Main Image : 

Published: 3 June, 2011
by ANDRE ROSTANT

MY wife, our eight young children and I have been told that, before January 2012, we must move to “the fringes” of London or further afield, as a letter from Westminster Council benefits puts it: “to make sure that people on benefit are not living in accommodation that would be unaffordable to most people in work”. 

Our rent is £2,000 a week for an ex-three-bedroom council house. David Cameron and Westminster councillor Philippa Roe say we need to be “realistic”.

To any reader who already has their pen out, let’s make something clear: under the new housing benefit rules a “normal” married couple with two children, earning £48K a year between them and paying the median £530 a week for a privately rented, two-bed, Westminster home will receive as little as £1.7K a year in housing benefit – leaving them to pay over £25K a year rent – 80 per cent of their take-home wage each week. 

That is: the average rent for a two-bed home in Westminster is now more than 80 per cent of the combined net income of two normal working people on typical wages which, apparently, is realistic.

Rent levels have nothing to do with housing benefit: landlords have told me that the market is “buoyant” and  rents will not go down when benefits are cut, and official research suggests it is “unlikely rents in inner London will drop significantly”.

What’s going on is Cameron’s Big Solution: a policy of ethnic and social cleansing that slithered in over the back of the sparkling propaganda coup of holding up to scorn and ridicule a handful of confused refugees – placed by chance in expensive accommodation by councils, describing these refugees as “asylum seekers”. They also highlighed stories about benefit cheats and “scroungers” who in reality make up a small minority of those on benefits and whose motives and reasons are actually far too diverse and complex to lump into any meaningful category. 

As Mr Cameron tritely says: “immigration and welfare reform are two sides of the same coin”.

Propaganda is wont to ignore inconvenient truths: UK benefit rates are not fabulously more generous than those of many other European countries and the bulk of refugees are put in far from salubrious accommodation.

Mr Cameron asserts that immigration has put “real pressures on communities... on schools, housing and healthcare... significant numbers of new people… not able to speak the same language...  not really wanting or even willing to integrate…” and, he says of the unemployed and working poor: “if they’re out of work, or on a low wage, and living in an expensive home in the centre of a city [that] the decision to go back to work, or take a better paid job could mean having to move to a cheaper home, in a different part of the city, in order to escape benefit dependency.” How is a poor manual worker going to simply make “the decision” to take a better paid job?

The combination of benefit “reforms” will force poor people to move. People will die: not least unsettled pensioners, those whose medical treatment is disrupted. Already disadvantaged people will be rendered destitute because of the reality that hard work counts for nothing while the money you have counts for much. Of course, black people and other minorities will be disproportionately afflicted, because we are, in reality, more likely to be poor.

So, Mr Cameron will fix “undesirable” immigration, welfare dependency and parasitism by resettling us all, somewhere out of the way of “hard-working taxpayers”.

I do work, as it happens, as do more benefit claimants than are unemployed – the OECD predicts that without rent subsidy low-paid workers “will be restricted to poorer areas with few jobs” where we will “become locked in a cycle of worklessness” in other words: ghettoes.  

Where to from there? Well, barring a miracle, thousands of us are on our way to “the fringes of London” or further afield, for a start. Perhaps the government might offer to lay on trains for us.

• André Rostant, a former adviser at the Financial Services Authority, now works as a hypnotheraptist