Indira Kartallozi explains why the introduction of the universial credit system, or changes to benefits enitlements will not lift people out of poverty

The Welfare Reform Bill 2011 represents the biggest change to the UK’s welfare system in over 60 years. Most crucially, it includes the introduction of a universal credit system, as well as a wide range of changes to social benefits, all with the intention of making the welfare system fairer and simpler.

I welcome the policy’s objective to simplify the benefit system. However, I do not believe that the new system will be fairer or that it will improve work incentives for a household. The policy states that the “universal credit should support all people to participate fully in society, including remaining in or returning to work; it will encourage families to get a job”.

So how is this going to work? The universal credit will replace current means-tested benefits. As from October 2013, all benefits – including income support, income based job seekers allowance, income related employment and support allowance, housing benefit and council tax benefit, child tax credit and working tax credit – will be abolished. These, together with crisis loans, community care grants and budgeting loans, will be replaced by single payments to each beneficiary’s account, subject to an overall cap or maximum benefit.

The employment minister Chris Grayling states that in “the households that are likely to be affected by the cap, approximately 30% of them will contain somebody who is from an ethnic minority.” Since the government has projected a maximum of £500 per week it is clear that large families will be affected.
When the government’s child poverty strategy was unveiled earlier this year it claimed to have a new approach to tackling poverty by “strengthening families, encouraging responsibility, promoting work, guaranteeing fairness and providing support to the most vulnerable”. Yet, at the same time, the government has cut crucial funding of services that provide support to the most vulnerable families, such as the closure of Children Centre’s across London.

The child poverty strategy highlights support that the government will offer parents to find work tailored to the particular barriers they face. Yet, they later introduced changes to benefits entitlements that will affect access to key support services, such as the right to free English classes. Specifically, all those in inactive benefits (such as income support, housing benefits) are expected to pay 50 per cent of the cost of their courses.

In an article for the Daily Mirror, CPAG Chief Executive Alison Garnham states: “Poverty for Britain’s children is now predicted to rise in the coming years and the £18 billion of benefit cuts will help drive this. The cuts to services will hit the poorest hardest too. It is grossly unfair to target children and families facing hardship when the bankers are back to their bonuses and tax cheats are costing us billions. This bill means too many vulnerable people are set to be losers, and too many people will find the promise to make work pay is not being kept.”

As an advice worker, working with homeless families, I cannot help but feel uncertain for the future welfare of the families I support and advise. I don’t see how the Welfare Reform Bill 2011 and the introduction of the universal credit system, or changes to benefits entitlements will lift people out of poverty

How will it support the families to achieve financial independence when further barriers are created? How can the same government that wishes ethnic minorities to integrate into the society and wants parents to find a job proceed to cut crucial services and the support in place to help alleviate poverty?

Indira Kartalozi is the Senior Advice and Outreach Worker for CARIS Haringey working with homeless families, migrants, refugees and asylum seekers.

Muslims and migrants are being used to distract people from the planned chaos implemented by this unpopular coalition. It is politicking of the worst kind, says Yasmin Alibhai-Brown

Not many dawns have passed since the sparky Tory chairwoman Sayeeda Warsi spoke up about the "dinner table" libelling of all Muslims, now routine, normalised, unremarkable, intimate, uncontested. I see and hear it, too – prejudices passed around with the balsamic vinegar or ketchup. Some Muslims deserve castigation and worse for the terrible things they do. I frequently denounce them in my columns. But sweeping, indiscriminate execration of any collective is abhorrent and must be confronted. Warsi did that, knowing her words would infuriate right-wing Tories who can't stand the brown little upstart.

Now, how will she react to her leader, who has amplified the small talk of bigotry and boomed it through a megaphone, perhaps to slap her down? I found Cameron's speech in Munich indefensible even though I completely agree with some observations and policy ideas. We discussed these two years back when we met in his office for over an hour. Self-exclusion, special pleading, women's rights, community oppression, anti-democratic attitudes, terrorism, the spread of Wahhabi Islam are serious problems and growing. Laissez-faire multicultural policies do not serve our times. State institutions should fund shared spaces, crossover ideas, openness and modernity. Many of us Muslims would be with David Cameron if his speech hadn't shown him to be selective, hypocritical, calculating, woefully indifferent to Muslim victims of relentless racism and chauvinism. He was speaking the words of white extremists but in posh. There was so much that was objectionable – where he spoke, what he said, the timing, the purposes loitering behind the fine façade of his personality.

By speaking out in Munich he allied himself with the ghastly Angela Merkel who delivered a similarly provocative sermon last autumn. Racism is rife in both countries; in both nations, millions of their own natives rigidly hold on to their languages and cultures. Think of those Germans who go abroad on holiday and stay in walled-off camps where only German is spoken. Countless Britons are similarly against integration with the people of unfamiliar countries they visit or migrate to. I would rather have my tongue chopped off than lose my mellifluous home languages. To learn and love English shouldn't mean the destruction of world languages, most of which we are lucky enough to have on our isles.

Remember the PM was at an international security council when he let rip – an outrage. Diversity is one of our greatest assets, an antidote to militancy not its cause. A new study by the Runnymede Trust in Birmingham shows young citizens are more bonded and at ease with difference than their elders in that multifarious city. As the speech progressed, you realised that Cameron's problem isn't cultural difference. It's the people whom marauding Christian Crusaders called "curs", wretched Mohammedans. Cameron isn't troubled by Hassidic enclaves, Orthodox Jewish dress codes, or their religiously sanctioned gender inequality and stubborn self-removal from mainstream societies. I have been rebuffed by a veiled Muslim woman and a Hassidic Jewish one when I tried to talk to their children. And the other day a young white mum told her daughter to come away from me, the "Paki". Moreover, those who only want to live with their own in white heartlands are thought to be no threat to integration – they are only doing what comes naturally. Little official concern is expressed about crimes committed by various non-Muslim ethnic groups against each other, against Muslims or white Britons. Even more disgracefully, Tories ignore racists who terrorise people of colour. How unfair is that?

Our PM, in effect, identified himself with the abominable English Defence League when he spoke up a day before the league marched through Luton shouting abuse. Are these the laudable British values we must embrace? Hot-headed Muslims will be even more convinced they are not wanted in the land of their birth.

The next charge: hypocrisy. This Government is enthusiastically funding schools for separatists – from snooty white middle-classes, to pedantic, purist Hindus, nutty, evangelical Christians, and introverted, uncompromising Muslims. How does that foster integration? Michael Gove has just been accused by Bradford City Council of encouraging segregation by funding a new free school started up by Ayub Ismail, who wants to ensure his pupils are not "absorbed into the dominant culture". Saudis are allowed by our Government to brainwash Muslims who are then despised. The Tory party's right and left buttocks move in different directions. Not clever nor consistent with the PM's Big Message of the week.
So why is he doing it? When politicians are in trouble they pick on "outsiders", put them into stocks so the people can turn on them and relieve their feelings of frustration. Andrew Lansley, now in charge of health, said shamelessly in 1995 that they were using the anti-immigration card because it played well with voters. Recently he blamed migrants for a rise in TB in Britain, a link that used healthcare concerns to whip up xenophobic panic. Cameron himself designed the disgraceful anti-refugee campaign for Michael Howard in 2005.

The German Marshall Fund has just published a comparative survey of attitudes to migrants in Western countries. Britons, noted The Economist, are shown up as a "mean-minded lot" – negative, hostile, paranoid. I don't believe that is the full picture. Britain is also uniquely receptive – which is why so many of us would not live elsewhere. But it is going through a seriously bad mood and Cameron is exploiting that.
I accept our citizens are unnerved by those British Muslims who make endless demands, are full of wrath and murderous plans, or choose ghettoisation. However, the widespread national unhappiness is created by policies pushed through by this Government. Muslims and migrants are being used to distract people from the planned chaos implemented by this unpopular coalition. It is politicking of the worst kind. Which is why it must be opposed vehemently. As the daughter of a survivor said to me at the Holocaust Memorial Day in January: "We Jews must look to our failings and crimes. But when outsiders try to use that for their devilish reasons, we know where we must stand." Me too.

Courtesy of The Independent