A dose of our own medicine

How dare she? What right has a foreigner, a Brazilian woman, to come and comment adversely on our government's policies? As The Daily Mail headlines said, "Tory fury at 'loopy Brazilian leftie' United Nations official who launched 'political' attack on government welfare reforms

• • Raquel Rolnik was sent to assess impact of changes to housing benefit
• • She said that so-called 'Bedroom Tax' is a breach of human rights
• • Furious Tory party chairman Grant Shapps slams 'outrageous' attack
• • UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon urged to launch an urgent inquiry". It is outrageous, isn't it - that we should be on the receiving end of what's our prerogative: pontificating on how others should run their countries?

If Ms Rolnik, the UN's special rapporteur on housing, has done nothing else with her considered initial comments on the effects the "spare room subsidy" she has at least given us a taste of our own medicine. As a nation we have an ingrained habit of condemning others, for example, for their "undemocratic" political systems or their human rights abuses. What we fail to do is to consider the way our interfering opinions are received emotionally. Maybe that's the reason why we're so often ignored - because of our "outrageous attacks" on them.  

In fact, should you care to read what Ms Rolnik really said and thought, look at her interview in the Guardian here. It's clear she's neither loopy nor out on a limb.

Photo from Martin Hunter/Guardian

"Rolnik, a former urban planning minister in Brazil, said Britain's previously good record on housing was being eroded by a failure to provide sufficient quantities of affordable social housing, and more recently by the impact of welfare reform.

"After speaking to dozens of council house tenants in Britain during her visit over the past fortnight, Rolnik said she was particularly concerned by the impact of bedroom tax, officially known as the new spare room subsidy. The policy was introduced by the government in April, and is designed to charge tenants extra for under-occupying homes that are supposedly too large for them.

"Rolnik said she was disturbed by the extent of unhappiness caused by the bedroom tax and struck by how heavily this policy was affecting 'the most vulnerable, the most fragile, the people who are on the fringes of coping with everyday life'."

Maybe we should be less hasty in sorting out other people's business - if we are so slow to accept the criticism of others. And wouldn't it be nice if we - and our politicians - led the way in good manners?

Family-friendly government

If you choose to stay at home to bring up your children or care for your aged parents or an ailing spouse, things don't look too good for you, after yesterday's Queen's Speech. They were already looking grim for you, in fact, as a result of the government's child care plans.

Should you choose to do anything as old-fashioned and quaint as to keep your children at home until statutory school-age or even forego employment so that you are there when the kids come home from school or available when they are ill, it will affect your state pension - for the worse. How come? Hitherto, when you were a stay-at-home mum up until your children finished at school (or aged 20 if they were still in education), you were counted in on your husband's national insurance contributions (in effect his salary counted as both his and yours, which of course is what it was). That meant that the years you were busily employed caring for your children counted towards your state pension. This could be worth up to £66 per week, plus pension for years when you had been in employment up to a maximum of £110 per week. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2013/may/07/pensions-bill-flat-rate-changes-married-couples)

The new scheme will discriminate against those who stay at home to care for their children, as the state pension will be based solely on your national insurance contributions from employment. It's yet to be announced what the minimum number of years' contributions will entitle you to any state pension (between seven and ten?). If it was seven, you'd get £28.77 pension a week. Less than that, you'd get nothing. To me this sounds as though the Government, for all its fine words, sets no value on mums or dads staying at home for the sake of their children. Certainly the usual pattern of family life has changed since the 1940s, but the jury is still out on the benefits or otherwise of that change for children. Incidentally I heard this proposal first mooted, leaked, poisonously on the BBC as a measure to prevent immigrants cashing in on our welfare system - no contributions: no pension.

This morning I heard Laura Perrins, barrister and stay-at-home mum, talking on Woman's Hour about the Government's discrimination against people like her. She hit the headlines in March taking the Deputy Prime Minister to task over the double injury inflicted on those in her situation by the new child benefit and childcare policies. As a barrister married to another barrister, she took a big cut in income to stay at home. Since her husband earns over £50,000, they are now no longer entitled to child benefit (Fair enough, they thought; times are tough), even though couples who are both out at work earning up to something over £90,000 are entitled to child benefit. To add insult to injury, the Budget introduced a provision for up to 15 hours' free childcare - but only where both parents are employed.

To quote Laura in her exchange with the oleagenous Nick Clegg:

"Well, Mr Clegg, child benefit was a fair way of recognising everybody's legitimate choice either to work outside the home or to work inside the home. You've essentially abolished that for families like me and replaced it with this, which applies only to mums who want to go out to work.

"I've absolutely no problem with mums who want to do that – there are plenty of my neighbours who do that and I support them fully. But they also recognise that I do a difficult job at home, and by taking away our child benefit and not replacing it with anything you are clearly discriminating against us.

"And then, secondly, in relation to the 15 hours of free childcare or the free early-years education, which I knew you would say ... that doesn't just help stay-at-home mums, that is as you know a universal education provision that is for the children, not for the parents. That's like saying free primary education helps mums, or free secondary helps stay-at-home mums

"There is absolutely no provision within the tax system to help families like myself, and our family is no doubt a net contributor to the Exchequer.

"I just feel that this provision is to bump up the GDP numbers, because if I was looking after someone else's children that would count as a GDP number, which is all that I think the Treasury care about. They know the price of everything and the value of nothing." (Stay-at-home mother, Laura Perrins, talks to Nick Clegg)

I seem to remember Mr Cameron trumpeting his intention to lead "the most family-friendly government Britain has ever had". Well, it seems to promote the model of family of its leaders, where both parents go out to work and "delegate the care of their children to paid strangers" (Milli Hill, Letter to Nick Clegg), and to penalise the alternative. So much for the espousal of "choice" that we hear so much about. Choice - but it will cost you dearly. Of course it won't cost our PM or his deputy or his cabinet for whom state pensions and childcare costs are irrelevancies.

Squeezing the PIPs

Well, today sees the beginning of DLAs (Disability Living Allowances) being replaced by PIPs (Personal Independence Payments), the moment that disabled people on the whole have been dreading, largely because we're entering unknown territory. To be frank, none of us believe that it is not a cost-cutting exercise. We suspect that the PIP assessors will have been told to be "rigorous" (wink, wink, know what I mean?) and even given reduction targets to aim at. That impression isn't helped by reports that George Osborne refused to face Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson, the disabled Paralympian, on TV (News report).

(Stop press: Just heard that Margaret Thatcher has died. Her PA who used to live in Stanford was an equally redoubtable woman. She found the young vicar somewhat tiresome but tolerable.)

I have just completed a survey for the MND Association which was asking about how we'd been looked after from before diagnosis and how we'd like to be cared for until we die. It occurs to me that this is at least one disability which usually is so rapidly changing that PIP assessors could no more keep up with it than the hard-pressed health and social care services. You see my brand of MND, Primary Lateral Sclerosis, is astonishingly unusual. It's over ten years since I received my diagnosis. The average life expectancy for MND patients from diagnosis is 14 months, i.e. from the time the doctor tells you what's wrong you're on this dizzying helter-skelter of losing your abilities until you die. The great thing about Disability Living Allowance was that assessing yourself with your doctor's advice you got access to a non-means-tested benefit quite straightforwardly. It was quite early on that I couldn't walk unaided, even with a stick. So I receive the highest mobility allowance, which enables us to lease a bigger car which I can get into and out of and we can fit my disability equipment in. It has considerably enhanced my quality of life.

Now imagine someone with a more normal rapid form of the disease. She's diagnosed. The PIP assessor comes round and our patient is still mobile and able to function reasonably at home, but within weeks she's losing her mobility and having falls round the house. Will the PIP fellow drop everything and come and reassess her? What do you think? Will he take her GP's or specialist's word for it? What do you think? On the present performance of assessors such as ATOS (the American multinational IT giant subcontracted by the government to assess suitability to work), it appears that on principle they discount the opinion of those who know the patient and the condition best. (See the Parliamentary Debate). As it is, I have had friends whose motability vehicles have arrived too late, and whose last months of life have been rendered harder than they were already by the slow delivery of service. Many of us fear that with the introduction of new, improved and supposedly more "flexible" system, even more will lose the crumbs of comfort to which they might have had access. And of course MND is not the only condition that involves rapid degeneration.

One after-thought: the disabled are often painted in the media and by ministers as "on the cadge". Of course you may be able to track down one rogue in a thousand. But the 999 would far rather be fit and healthy, able to live a healthy life and be able, like the Chancellor of the Exchequer, to park in disabled bays illicitly. By contrast, I know one driver with a disabled passenger who will actually refrain from using a blue badge, if the passenger is not disembarking. Integrity is not unknown among the disabled community. And what strange official mind dismisses the professional expertise of those who know best? Well, PIPs roll out in Oxfordshire in June. Perhaps then I'll be saying, "I told you so," - or will it be, "I was wrong"? It would be nice if it were the latter.

Keeping religion out of politics

It's commonly claimed that religion should be kept strictly private. There's a long tradition of that view stretching in this country at least back to Thomas à Becket whom Henry II famously called "a low-born cleric" or a "turbulent priest", because he would not put the King's interests above divine ordinance, leading to his assassination in Canterbury Cathedral in 1170. In more recent times it was echoed by the Thatcher government when Robert Runcie prayed both for British and Argentine casualties after the Falklands' conflict and then put his name to the 1985 Faith in the City report (a government "source" rubbishing it before publication as Marxist propaganda). It was particularly puzzling and galling that former Scot's Guard and Military Cross winner, favoured Tory choice for the archbishopric, should be so turbulent as to suggest that the individualistic policies of the government might have contributed to poverty in the cities of Britain. And of course Rowan Williams got up the nose of successive governments, including Mr Blair's, with his rigorous questioning. And now David Cameron must be having similar thoughts to Margaret Thatcher concerning Old Etonian, Justin Welby. Of all people, the former oil executive, "within a month", questioning how benefit cuts would affect the poorest children - what is it about the post of Archbishop that suddenly turns sound men into bleeding-heart liberals? Certainly arch-conservative columnist, Melanie Phillips, who sometimes talks good sense, is at a loss to explain it and can only vent her spleen on such meddlesome men.

Strangely enough I heard her on The Moral Maze last week maintaining, I think, that belief in God was needed to underpin ethical behaviour; I recall her mentioning "conscience". It might occur to her that the way we treat the vulnerable, such as children, in our society is, or should be, a matter of conscience. I guess it certainly is for Justin Welby and his 44 merry colleagues. It seems to me that they are doing no more than their Christian conscience demands, as paralleled in the early equivalent of a welfare state. "They only asked us to remember the poor - the very thing I was eager to do." In this case, the Children's Society, because it is that admirable charity which has, I suspect, enlisted the bishops' and other church leaders' support, is asking for the welfare uprating bill to be amended in the House of Lords next week in order to protect children in particular from the ravages of inflation, which the financially robust are able to ride. The letter written by the bishops and published by the Sunday Telegraph seems to me a justifiable request to a still well-off government to remember the poor. And it seems to me that faith without a public conscience is dead. So I am glad that the new Archbishop has already indicated his intention to follow Jesus in being "on the side of the poor" and powerless.

Having said that let me add a postscript concerning the plight of politicians. It is all too easy and all too frequently done to indulge in government-bashing. After all the High Court of Parliament is adversarial, and it is right that governments be held to account. However on Saturday I was talking to someone who has had the closest contact with the highest ranks of government, and he said that ministers have an impossible job; their days are filled with meetings and briefings from civil servants and advisers. They really have no time for quiet reflection about the big issues. Once in power they hardly have time to think. The implication of what he said, I take it, was, "Have some sympathy for these people. They're trying their hardest with impossible jobs."

On Saturday, the Home Secretary, Theresa May, who's not a politician I readily warm to, gave a speech looking to the next General Election. It was mischievously cast by the media as a leadership salvo. For me, more interesting because I suspect more genuine, was what she said at the outset: "It’s often said that politics is about public service, and of course it is. But to me, it’s about much more than that. Politics is a passion. A passion to make a difference. To change lives for the better. To stand up for people who work hard and want to get on in life. To help people to help themselves and their families. To help those in genuine need." I do appreciate that there's a bit of coding about strivers and skivers in those last phrases. Nevertheless the phrase "a passion to make a difference" does, I reckon, reflect the initial and fundamental motivation of the majority of those who enter the risky front line of politics, with its minefield of corrupting power. I guess that's why St Paul urged, "Pray every way you know how,... especially for those in power to govern well".