The Brutality of the Bedroom Tax
by Chris Allen
The sanctity of the family has been a hot topic for Tory MPs opposed to gay marriage. These are the same Tory MPs that support the bedroom tax in the full knowledge of its likely impact on family life.
The bedroom tax is, essentially, a tax on people that ‘under occupy’ social housing. So a single person that occupies a two bedroom house in the social housing sector is deemed to be under occupying that property. This is because it would otherwise be occupied by a household that required two bedrooms. The party of the Family thinks that this is wrong so it has cut housing benefit payments to under occupiers in order to force them to move into smaller properties.
This shoe-horn approach to housing policy will apparently deliver two benefits. First, it will engender a closer fit between household size and the size of houses. Second, it will save the tax payer money because under occupiers will move to smaller properties which, it is assumed, will be cheaper.
If only: There is a dearth of single bed properties in many areas so people will be unable to move out. They will, instead, be forced even further into poverty by the bedroom tax because it will leave them needing to pay the same housing costs but with less money in their pocket to pay them. Thus they will have less money for food, heating and so on. But we need not worry because Cameron’s Big Society will ride to the rescue in the form of Food Banks.
Not everybody will be so compliant, of course. Campaigns such as ‘Combat the Bedroom Tax’ are encouraging tenants to pay in rent only what they receive in housing benefit. This is tantamount to a refusal to make up, from their own budgets, the difference between the rent payments they are obliged to make and the new reduced level of housing benefit that they will be in receipt of. But that can only lead to one thing: evictions. Yet should the non-payment campaign be successful, evictions would be on a mass scale and will thus result in scenes reminiscent of the Glasgow Rent Strike of 1915 when thousands of people came together to obstruct evictions. In other words, the government will not win.
But that is not the point. The point is that this brutal policy exposes the hypocrisy that lies at the heart of government. The same party of the Family that voted against equal marriage in droves this week, on the pretence that they were safeguarding the institution of the family, are now eagerly promoting a policy that they know will be damaging to the family life of some of the poorest people in our society. They are fully aware that the bedroom tax will impact on the family life of single people with children and grandchildren that are on low or no incomes from employment – and that are therefore reliant on housing benefit.
Such single people will no longer be allowed to keep ‘spare’ bedrooms for their children and grandchildren. So their children and grandchildren will now be subjected to the degrading experience of being non-persons (with no rights to personal space) in the homes of their own parents and grandparents. They will be required to sleep on the settee, the floor or whatever else is available. In other words they will share the same status as adults living in the same circumstances that - under the housing legislation - would be considered as ‘homeless’. The government should note, then, that their bedroom tax stands in contravention of the spirit of the Children Act which tasks the state with enhancing, not diminishing, the well-being of children. Such an observation – that the bedroom tax is effectively making the children of some of the poorest and most vulnerable people in our society homeless – might be sufficient to make a humane government stop and think about what it is doing. But this is not a humane government.
The defining characteristic of this government has been its success in rhetorically re-defining what is in reality a Crisis caused by the Greed of the Wealthy into a Crisis of caused by the Indolence of the Poor. The success of their discursive strategy has enabled Cameron and Osborne to vigorously promote the interests of the Global Super-Rich that want the kind of free-for-all market economy that, in reality, suits only the propertied and the powerful whilst simultaneously sucking the ethical lifeblood out of what is left of civil society. It has also enabled them to launch a brutal and vicious attack on what is left of the welfare state on the grounds that those thrown onto the slag heap of neo-liberal capitalism are, in reality, just welfare-dependent scroungers that are sucking the economic life blood out of what Clegg patronisingly refers to as ‘alarm clock Britain’. Suffice it to say that Zoe Williams recent Guardian article ‘Strivers versus Skivers: the argument that pollutes people’s minds brilliantly shows that such perceptions are based on a wealthy elites’ hatred of social security rather than actual facts about it: 93% of new housing benefit claimants are in work. I could go on about how decades of neo-liberalisation in the housing system have created the need for working people to rely on housing benefit but there is not the space.
The issue at stake today is this: The caricature and demonization of social security recipients as ‘not like us’ hard working types is designed to serve an important function for the government at this crucial time in their programme of cuts. It is designed to encourage ‘us’ to dis-identify with ‘them’ as fellow human beings. In other words, it is designed to dehumanise ‘them’ by creating situation in which ‘they’ are known only through the vulgar labels that have been attached to them by our self-satisfied and self-serving political elite. This is because it encourages ‘us’ to think of ‘them’ as beneath contempt which, in turn, makes it easy (in fact, obvious) for us to support the withdrawal of their rights to the kind of family life that the Tories so hypocritically claim to stand for. So they (and we) are fully aware of the impacts that this awful policy will have but why should we care?
The problem is that we do care as the proliferation of Food Banks and the growing protests against the bedroom tax testify. We vigorously oppose the bedroom tax, and the welfare cuts programme in general, because it is so fundamentally anti-Christian. Let us see just how anti-Christian it is:
This government vigorously and enthusiastically promotes the interests of wealth and power. Jesus confronted the self-indulgence of wealth and power and sought to throw it out of God’s house. Dare we now walk in the footsteps of Jesus and seek to throw the pernicious influence of wealth and power out of the houses of our fellow human beings?
This government has been ruthless in its demonization of ‘welfare scroungers’ and the like. Jesus challenged the labelling and demonization of the ‘unclean’. He saw only fellow human beings and he walked with them. Will we now challenge the government’s rhetoric and stereotypes that so dehumanise our fellow human beings and that are being used to justify the bedroom tax?
This government talks about the sanctity of the Family as though that is all that matters. They are hypocrites. But this is not really about families at all. Nor is it about giving to people only what they are said to ‘deserve’. The real issue is about neighbours and neighbourliness. That said I will leave the final word to Leonardo Boff (1978: 71): “The love demanded by Christ is superior by far to justice. Justice, in the classical definition, consists of giving to each his own …. In neo-capitalist systems it means giving to the magnates what is theirs [i.e. more and more] and to the proletariat what is theirs [i.e. less and less]. In the Sermon on the Mount Christ breaks this circle. He does not preach any such system of justice that signifies the consecration and legitimation of a status quo that has as its starting point discrimination between people. He announces a fundamental equality: All are worthy of love. Who is my neighbour? The question is fallacious and ought not to be asked. All are neighbours to each person”