It’s David Gauke and the government that need to change their behaviours, not poor people | Politics and Insights

The state of this:

We have been over this ground time and time again.

The Tories are misusing ‘nudge’ theory to justify their claim that people will do what they want, if given the appropriate… incentive.

But they have plenty of information proving that it doesn’t work in this case.

The only reason Tories continue to deny the evidence is: They want to.

They want people to suffer.

They want people to starve.

And they want people to die.

Why is this such a hard thing for voters to understand?

David Gauke claims that the government’s harsh sanctions regime is to ‘change the behaviours’ of people who need to claim support from the welfare state. This is the welfare state that everyone, including those needing support, has funded through the National Insurance and tax system. Gauke clearly thinks that starving people and making them destitute will somehow punish people into working more. He’s riding the fabled rubber bicycle.

A vast amount of empirical evidence indicates that when people can’t maintain their basic living requirements – fulfilment of basic physical needs for food, fuel and shelter, which every human being has – then they simply will not have the capacity to fulfil higher level psychosocial needs, and that includes looking for work.

Gauke tried to imply that more people are working and this is somehow linked to the punitive conditionality regime. However, he chose to completely ignore comments outlining how more people have become homeless, now face soaring debt and face more risk of experiencing mental health problems because of sanctions.

If Gauke was remotely interested in ‘getting it right’, he would have surely paid a little attention to this and other important research findings. However, he seems very happy to operate from within his own and his party’s state of perpetual confirmation bias.

It’s hardly surprising that an authoritarian government using psychological coercion on the poorest citizens by inflicting extreme punishments – in making food, fuel and shelter (basic survival needs) entirely conditional on citizens’ absolute compliance – is causing serious harm and psychological distress to those citizens.

Source: It’s David Gauke and the government that need to change their behaviours, not poor people – Politics and Insights


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4 Comments

  1. NMac December 20, 2017 at 3:24 pm - Reply

    I have never been able to and I still cannot understand why working class people support the nasty Tory Party.

  2. jeffrey davies December 20, 2017 at 4:14 pm - Reply

    oh dear aktion t4 rolling along without much of a gauke

  3. Pat Sheehan December 20, 2017 at 10:53 pm - Reply

    There’s another one for the long ‘list to go’!!!

  4. Prickly December 21, 2017 at 6:03 am - Reply

    John Cleese read a book on how to run a great hotel and used this to write the opposite for the successful Fawlty Towers.

    The Cons. read Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and decided that by forcing the opposite onto the people they could make them suffer, starve and die, and during this dying period torment them psychologically.

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