Sanctions get Green grilling

IT HAS fallen to the Green Party to challenge the Department for Work and Pensions on how many jobseekers are being sanctioned.

Responses to parliamentary questions show over 605,000 people on jobseeker’s allowance were penalised in this way last year — an astonishing one in six, or three times the department’s previous claim.

There is no excuse for the DWP not to accede to the party’s demand that full annual figures be released.

But we should not be surprised at the DWP’s reticence. The stream of misinformation peddled by Secretary of State Iain Duncan Smith is such that he has repeatedly been rebuked for manipulating official statistics — including by former head of the UK Statistics Authority Sir Michael Scholar.

The aim is usually to claim there is evidence to back Mr Duncan Smith’s war on the unemployed, unwell and disabled — to present the ever more arbitrary conditions imposed on anyone dependent on social security payments as necessary measures which weed out “shirkers” and get people into work.

In fact, since the government has presided over the loss of close to a million public-sector jobs since the Con-Dem coalition came to power, there is no justification for such a claim. But the motive for hiding the number being sanctioned is different.

Sanctions are serious business. People who are by definition in need — or they would not be receiving social security in the first place — can lose all financial support, plunging them into poverty and debt.

Cases recorded by foodbanks to whose charity some of these desperate people turn present a grim picture of a savage and unfeeling regime.

People have been sanctioned for failing to sign on because they were at a job interview, and for failing to attend a job interview because they had to sign on.

They have been sanctioned for failing to apply for jobs in between getting a job and actually starting work.

Sanctions have been applied to people who missed interviews they were never told about, to people who missed appointments because they were in hospital and to people shocked by the sudden death of a loved one.

Sanctions can kill. It emerged just after the general election that of 49 people who had died while on benefits and whose deaths were deemed to warrant DWP investigations, 10 — more than one in five — had been sanctioned.

Naturally Mr Duncan Smith is not keen for this barbarity to be exposed to the public gaze.

If the extent to which the government is harassing and victimising the vulnerable was more widely known, the Tories would lose public support for attacks on “welfare” — support won by a campaign of systematic misinformation spread by the mainstream press combined with the poison-drip of hate-fuelled rhetoric from ministers about “scroungers.”

The Greens — restricted to a single MP in Parliament by an electoral system that is frankly unfit for purpose — deserve credit for calling Mr Duncan Smith out where the Labour Party has so signally failed to mount principled opposition.

There is a lesson here for Labour. Years of echoing Tory propaganda about an entirely fictional legion of workshy loafers did not win it the electorate’s respect.

It simply assisted the Tories in convincing large numbers of people to support attacks on benefits — and therefore to vote for the party carrying out those attacks.

If Labour wants to win again, it needs to expose the cruelty of the Conservative project and start arguing for the values the party was founded to fight for — solidarity and social justice.