Letter: Benefits Street (2014)

Letter to the Editors from the March 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Editors,

Well done for attacking awful programmes like ‘Benefits Street’ (Socialist Standard, February).

Apart from profit, the aim of such programmes is clear: it’s to turn working-class people against each other, and try to discredit the welfare state. If you can get ordinary people to resent other workers, then the propaganda has worked.

The system we live under gets let off the hook, thanks to sections of the media. And some tabloid newspapers are even worse in misrepresenting the working-class. Compare this to the totally uncritical coverage of the Royal Family in the media.

During the 1970s and 1980s Birmingham lost thousands of jobs. And like most working-class cities, people have been hit hard by the latest recession.

Blame the system not ordinary people!

Graeme Kemp, 

Wellington, Shropshire

Fear, Hate and Greed (2014)

From the December 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Capitalism is riddled with fear. Fear of its ever present wars. Fear of crime and criminals. Fear of being alone. Fear of being consumed by personal debt. The divisive fear of immigrants. And the fear common to all who are compelled to work for wages – the fear of unemployment.

Fear and hate are frequent bedfellows and Josef Goebbels, the master of Nazi state propaganda, knew exactly where to exploit those emotions when he affirmed: ‘Think of the press as a great keyboard on which the government can play’. Where state benefits are concerned the media has peddled hate to the fearful – pounding the keyboard with glee. Cutting back on benefits when capitalism is in crisis is nothing new. During capitalism’s last depression those workers who had paid into the scheme received the dole for 15 weeks. The National Government, another coalition, cut the benefits of those on the scheme who were unemployed by 10 percent leaving them to rot alongside the other millions relying on poor law relief. In August of 1931 means testing the unemployed was implemented. Underpinning the poor laws and its sibling, the dole, are the deeply entrenched ruling class ideas of making claiming benefits so, ‘unpleasant that, people would not claim it, stigmatising relief so that it became an object of wholesome horror’ (wikipedia.org). Governments, whether claiming to be left, right or centre have been cutting benefits since the post-war boom of the 1970’s ended. And the reason why? Because they are a charge on profits, and thus detrimental to the real orchestrators of the tune and the owners of the keyboard – the capitalist class.

Handouts and handouts

The words benefits and scrounger have become conjoined. Goebbels would have been proud of the media hacks who have slavishly followed his guidelines: ‘The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly – it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over’. Thus the fearful have been given their slogan and its corollary is revealed in, ‘a YouGov survey which shows: Up to 212,000 have been physically attacked because they’re on benefits’ (mirror.co.uk, 8 September).

Benefits, dole, and handouts are what is made available to the unemployed, and those surviving on low wages. Subsidies, funding and support are invested by the state in corporations. A report written for the TUC entitled ‘The Great Train Robbery’ showed, amongst other things, that the, ‘train operating companies are entirely reliant upon public subsidies to run services. The top five recipients alone received almost £3bn in taxpayer support between 2007 and 2011. This allowed them to make operating profits of £504m – over 90 per cent (£466m) of which was paid to shareholders’ (tuc.org.uk, 5 June 2013). Publicfinance.co.uk can report that the total government subsidy to the railway businesses now stands at £4bn per year (16 April). With just a small slice of the subsidy benefitting ‘a top executive from Network Rail who will become head of construction. . . on an annual salary of £750,000, making him one of the country’s best paid public servants’ (ft.com, 17 January).

‘The private finance initiative (PFI) is a way of creating public–private partnerships (PPPs) by funding public infrastructure projects with private capital’ (wikipedia.org). Benefitting from this is a clique of banks, builders and service providers who build, and sometimes run, schools, hospitals and related public projects. And the benefits to the clique: state payouts over a 20 or 30 year period. However, ‘PFI has been controversial in the UK; though the National Audit Office felt in 2003 that it provided good value for money overall’ (wikipedia.org). Not so thought the disenchanted Treasury Secretary Vince Cable six years later: ‘The whole thing has become terrible, opaque and dishonest and it’s a way of hiding obligations. . . PFI has now largely broken down and we are in the ludicrous situation where the government is having to provide the funds for the private finance initiative’ (bbc.co.uk, 3 March). And the funds continue to flow to those that benefit: ‘As of 2013, it was forecast that 725 PFI contracts for public facilities across the UK, with a total capital value of £54bn, will cost the Exchequer more than £300bn by the time they are paid off’ (newstatesman.com, 20 February).

Mindfulmoney.co.uk’s headline asked the question, ‘What is the cost to the UK taxpayer of supporting our banks’? It answered itself by referring to The National Audit Office’s estimate: ‘it peaked according to the NAO at £1.162 trillion’ (17 July, 2013). Support? Obviously, this isn’t the same as Income Support, which currently is awarded, after means testing, to a couple aged over 18 at £113.70p per week. Some commentators are more impolite and call it a bail-out. One of the main beneficiaries in the UK was the Royal Bank of Scotland which is labelled by the media as ‘our bank’. ‘We’ own 82 per cent of it after the state invested £37 billion of its funds in October 2008. But, dear oh dear, ‘our’ investment has lost a few quid even after more funds were invested. That scourge of the benefits scroungers The Daily Mail could run the headline, ‘RBS has lost all the £46bn pumped in by the taxpayer’. The editor got out his calculator to let his fretful readers know that, ‘In total, the lender has since paid out £4.6 billion in bonuses – £1 billion for every £10 billion it has lost’. Also included in the £46 billion was, ‘a £3.8bn bill for customer mis-selling’ (27 February). Note the word bill. That couldn’t be a fine like those slapped on a benefit scrounger and imposed by the state law courts could it?

Swindlers and swindlers

Such as the case against, ‘ a mother of three who was jailed for five months for swindling more than £70,000 in benefits… DWP Minister Lord Freud said: In addition to the sentence imposed by the court, the department always seeks to recover the benefits falsely obtained, to ensure that fraudsters do not benefit financially from their criminal activities’ (Bristol Post, 6 June 2011). Or a man who gained notoriety via the BBC news site for ‘falsely claiming £28,332 in disability benefits. . . Judge Recorder Richard Booth said the offences were disgraceful and so serious that a prison sentence was necessary (3 November). Or, ‘a man who stole to eat after his benefits were stopped. . . admitting stealing three packets of casserole steak. . . after changes to his benefits left him hungry. . . he pleaded guilty to stealing the food, worth £12.60, and was sentenced to six weeks in prison (The Northern Echo, 22 October).

RT.com on the 28 October reported on a speech by the BoE Deputy Governor, Nemet Minouche Shafik who, ‘denounced the actions of UK traders in foreign exchange, currencies and bonds markets, warning financial misconduct in these sectors goes well beyond a few rogue financiers. . . the BoE’s deputy governor said the tired argument that financial misconduct relates to the behaviour of a ‘few bad apples’ is no longer credible. Shafik suggested UK financial regulation lacks efficacy and robustness, and a regulatory overhaul is needed to fix the barrel and to get rid of the bad apples’. This statement acts as a sop to a very long list of so-called financial misconducts amongst an elite that has made the news, albeit unsensationally, since 2008. Misconduct such as the extremely beneficial practice amongst banks of mortgage selling about which Dean Baker, economist and director of the Centre for Economic & Policy Research said, ‘Knowingly packaging and selling fraudulent mortgages is fraud. It is a serious crime that could be punished by years in jail’ – However – ‘No senior bank executive has faced criminal charges following the mortgage crisis’. William D. Cohan, a former senior mergers and acquisitions banker, wrote in the New York Times that ‘not only has the government barely punished those on the hook for Wall Street crimes, the Justice Department has also offered ‘sanitized’ versions of events that led up to the crimes in its accounts given to the public following investigations (rt.com, 22 August). So Nemet, looks like there might be a few barriers in place when it comes to fixing the barrel. Or maybe that’s just on Wall Street?

It’s easy under capitalism, given all of its contradictions, to see the whole thing as some sort of lunatic asylum. But a better comparison is a prison run by the most proficient thieves. The media is utilised like the pickpocket that directs your attention elsewhere whilst another robs you. One of the things that is stolen is your capacity to think like a human being. Fear, hate and greed permeate the prison walls. But the prison isn’t escape-proof. All it takes to get out is to decide that is what you want to do, and join with others working to bring down the prison walls.

Andy Matthews

Filing a Complaint (1987)

From the April 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Access to Personal Files Bill which is going through Parliament at the moment, is intended to give individuals the right of access to files which contain personal information about them. However, the extreme reluctance of the state to loosen its grip on information has meant that the Bill has been steadily diluted as it has gone through Parliament. It is not a government Bill and so cannot command the automatic support of a majority in the House of Commons as a result of MPs being told how to vote by the Party Whips. So although the Bill is supported by back-bench MPs from all parties, its sponsor. Liberal MP Archie Kirkwood, has had to do a deal with the government to ensure Tory support and the Bill's safe passage. As a result, the legislation will only provide right of access to housing, education and social work files and not medical, employment and immigration files or credit records, as was originally intended. It is proposed to establish, in addition to access to paper records, the right to amend files where information is shown to be incorrect and to provide payment in compensation for any hardship which might have been caused by the holding of the inaccurate information.

For anyone concerned about the use and abuse of information this must represent a (very small) step forward. However there are good reasons for believing that the impact of the new legislation will be even less than is commonly thought. Firstly, in order to gain access to information about yourself you must be aware that a particular agency has a file on you. This is by no means always the case. For example, some employers pay money to a right wing organisation called the Economic League which provides information about prospective employees. In particular they will inform the employer of a worker's trade union activities and political views. If an applicant for a job. whose name is passed to the Economic League for vetting, is thought to be "subversive" or an active trade unionist, then the League will recommend to the employer that that person should not be employed.

Where does the Economic League get its information from? Some of it is passed to them by police in the Special Branch; some is rumour and hearsay; much of it is inaccurate, defamatory and highly damaging. In most cases people will be completely unaware that an organisation like the Economic League has a file on them. They might simply be mystified at their continual failure to get jobs that they apply for. But even if they did know such a file was being held they would have no right of access to see that file, since the Economic League is not covered by the new legislation.

Some computerised files containing personal information are already covered by the Data Protection Act which comes into operation later this year. This Act. passed under duress in order to comply with European standards on data protection, provides minimal access to computer files on payment of a fee. (The Access to Personal Files Bill also requires individuals seeking access to files to pay a fee to the local authority holding the information). It was partly to plug the gaps left by the Data Protection Act that the new legislation was introduced. If not. the absurd situation would have existed where, if a housing authority had computerised its filing system then individuals would have a right to see their files (under the Data Protection Act) whereas, if records were kept on paper they would have no right of access. However, because of the limited categories of files covered by the Access to Personal Files Bill, such anomalies will continue to exist especially in relation to medical records.

Why should this be of any concern to workers? Why does it matter that the state and various private agencies collect information on us which they put into files? After all much of the information collected is intended to benefit us: by enabling the NHS to give us better health care; to enable a local authority to assess our housing needs; to allow a social security officer to assess our entitlement to benefit. It may be true that much of the information which we pass on about ourselves is collated by agencies whose main purpose is apparently benign — providing welfare, education. health care and so on. But this is not the only reason it’s collected. After all, just think for a moment how much information about yourself you are obliged to provide simply in order to claim housing benefit for example: how many rooms there are in your home; who lives with you and what the relationship is between you. details of your income and employment; what kind of heating you have and so on. Why is it all necessary?

It's necessary because housing benefit, like many other benefits, is means-tested. This means that you have no right to benefit but instead you've got to prove that you are a genuinely ' deserving'' case —that you fall within a certain category of claimant. It's not enough for you to say that you don't earn enough to pay the rent; you've got to prove it. So that's one reason why state agencies collect so much information — so that they can ration benefits in such a way that only certain groups get it. In other words giving all this information about yourself might help you to get benefit, but on the other hand, if you give the "wrong" answers then you will get nothing.

What is more worrying than the use of information to ration scarce resources is the fact that in many cases you may think you are supplying information for one purpose — getting a driving licence for example — when in fact that information is also being passed on to other agencies without your knowledge. So the information which you supply to the DVLC to get your driving licence may well find its way back on to the Police National Computer or Special Branch files and then on to the files of organisations like the Economic League. Similarly information given to the NHS or a housing authority might be passed to immigration officials looking for people who they believe have stayed in the country longer than for the period stipulated on their entry visa. So, while it is extremely difficult for us to gain access to information about ourselves held on official files, there may be few qualms on the part of state agencies about passing on personal information to others without our knowledge.


More information could lead to better provision of services designed to meet our needs. As anyone who has tried to claim housing benefit will know, this is very far from the case at the moment since the aim of the system is not meeting people's needs but rationing resources. The fact that countless officials collect information about us to which we have no right of access is worrying because we know that it can be used in such a way as to enable the state at least to control us and at worst to coerce, threaten or punish us. This is not surprising. In capitalism much of this information is collected by the state, and the main function of the state is to protect the interests of the capitalist class. One way of doing this is to exercise social control through apparently benign state agencies — schools, social services, social security. . .  A necessary precondition for the exercise of social control is information — knowing what the working class is up to, especially those labelled as "deviant " or “subversive". If effective control cannot be exercised through these "soft" control methods then there are still the more punitive methods of the police, prisons and security services. There is nothing new about these forms of state coercion. What is new is the effectiveness of information technology and surveillance methods which permit more people to be controlled in more areas of their lives. Neither the Access to Personal Files Bill, nor the Data Protection Act will do anything to alter the fundamental inequality of power that exists between individuals and the state in capitalism.

Janie Percy-Smith

Bleak age — 1983 (1983)

From the April 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

Answering questions recently in Parliament about Conservative intentions towards the Welfare State, the Prime Minister spoke of government determination to give individuals and their families more choice and freedom to exercise responsibility. According to the proposals drawn up by senior Cabinet Ministers, this means encouraging families to reassume responsibilities taken on by the state. The idea that the Welfare State takes care of all our needs is in stark contrast to the suffering of the growing numbers of people forced into dependence on social security, for at least part of their income. If a figure of 140 per cent of the supplementary benefit level is taken then around a quarter of the population is living in poverty or close to it. For those in doubt there is the evidence of the DHSS final report on deprivation.

In 1972 Sir Keith Joseph, then Secretary of State for Social Services, made a speech in which he expressed concern that, despite the growth of “affluence” since 1945 there was still widespread prevalence of personal and social problems. He suggested that a lack of appropriate parenting skills might be partially responsible. As a consequence of that speech the Social Science Research Council and the Department of Health and Social Security set up a Joint Working Party to carry out a programme of research into transmitted deprivation. The final report by Muriel Brown and Nicola Madge was published last July. Despite the Welfare State is the result of nearly ten years of enquiry involving 37 studies and including surveys of existing statistics and literature. (There are 17 pages of references.)

The original subject was problem families but the scope was widened to cover many aspects of deprivation and ways it might be transmitted across generations. Various “separate" states of deprivation affecting many families were studied including low income, bad housing, unemployment, poor health and family problems. People experiencing an overlap between these states are suffering multiple deprivation! One estimate gives over one million families in this condition. Not surprisingly “those individuals or families who are deprived in income or occupation are most likely to have other deprivations”. Inadequate living accommodation contributes to ill health, which in turn adds to the difficulties of coping with family relationships. People on low incomes have no alternative to seeking help from state social agencies. Studies failed to reveal a common identity for "problem” families.

The measurement of social deprivation is both inexact and controversial but “quite definitely substantial in amount”. The Report gives a conservative estimate of roughly ten million people suffering poverty, four million of those in families with children. About one-quarter of the workforce hold unskilled or semi-skilled jobs “with attendant deprivations of insecurity and poor work conditions”. 1.8 million households are living in physically unsatisfactory housing conditions in terms of overcrowding, shortage of amenities or general unfitness, and "a small minority” (about 50,000) are officially regarded as homeless in any one year.

For the families concerned poverty means an actual shortage of necessary goods, including food. Not starvation but limited diets, going hungry and missing meals. “Many surveys” indicate severe shortages of furniture, especially beds. A smaller proportion of those on low incomes own or have use of fridges and washing machines. Among poor people a drop in income level is a major cause of debt. Failure to pay fuel bills and keep up with hire purchase payments can mean the disconnection of electricity supply and the loss of goods. Rent arrears are a factor in homelessness. There is chronic anxiety and despair with the added fear, especially for single parents, that the consequence of debt or acute financial difficulties may mean children taken into care. Approximately seven out of ten families whose children were fostered, adopted or placed in residential homes "had been judged to have a precarious or very precarious financial situation at the time of reception into care”.

In summarising the studies made by the Joint Working Party Brown and Madge deal sympathetically with the deprivation and disadvantages suffered by several million people. They are unable to fully explain it. finding that there is no single form of deprivation and no single cure. They believe that “there will always be some worse off than others”.

Everyone on a low income is not considered to be suffering special hardship. All those in low-skill occupations, unemployed, in the “worst of housing”, with large families, single parents, do not have problems which make them turn to the social services for help. (Not being “problem families” they are really outside the areas considered by researchers.) This does not mean that they do not have problems or that the difficulties of “problem families" are not the result of poverty.

All forms of deprivation occur most frequently within the lowest “socio-economic groups” but similar problems are experienced by families not in low-skilled occupations. This does not invalidate the relationship between income and life-style opportunities and expectations. But looking at problems in relation to individual families and classifying people into separate socio-economic groups according to occupation and income level, ignores the common economic identity of these groups. People who need to work, no matter how their skills and payments differ, all belong to the same class.

The working class does all of the work of society, produces the social wealth, but does not own the means to produce that wealth. On the other hand the capitalist class which owns the means of production, and therefore what is produced, does not need to work — or to claim social security. The motive for production is sale and profit and for the working class access to what is produced is limited by the amount of their wages — or social security benefits. This fact restricts choice for the majority in all areas of life. It hardly needed a ten-year programme of enquiry to discover that people on the lowest incomes are likely to have most problems coping with life, and the greatest difficulty in improving the position for their children. Whether or not particular deprivations are transmitted across generations of individual families, poverty-based problems are certainly experienced by successive generations of working class families.

All the aspects of deprivation and disadvantage investigated by the DHSS Joint Working Party are related to the role of the working class, in a social system which lacks the motive to provide for human wealth, dignity and contentment. Capitalism needs a varied workforce, people to do all kinds of work, including menial unskilled work which requires little training. It is not necessary for everyone to be qualified to do the highest paid jobs. And while there is “a great shortage of trade" some 3½ million people are unemployed.

Members of the working class unable to work, whether through unemployment, sickness or old age, are dependent on the state social security system. The hardship which they may face is an aspect of the relative poverty of the whole class. Workers looking at the deductions on their own payslips, for income tax and national insurance contributions, are far from sympathetic to any increase in their contributions as a means to improve social security benefits for others. Myths about the generosity of state welfare provision, and its abuse, are widely accepted, together with the idea that the poor have only themselves to blame — or they are not poor at all. When David Donnison was Chairman of the Supplementary Benefits Commission, complaints about supporting layabouts and scroungers, which arrived by the hundred each month, were "rarely on headed notepaper from leafy suburbs" but were mostly from “ordinary voters and taxpayers" (The Politics of Poverty).

If the DHSS report is not enough the mass arrest of claimants, during the infamous Operation Major at Oxford, further revealed the opportunities for "getting rich" on social security: 175 people were accused of drawing £67.20 board and lodging allowances, by giving bed and breakfast addresses at which they were not staying. In March a judge dismissed the case against one man who had changed to cheap accommodation which did not include breakfast. According to the DHSS his money should have been reduced to £52.75! Who would turn to the DHSS, in the hope of getting meagre and qualified help, if they had another option?

Government exploration of possible changes in the welfare state is not concerned with remedying the failure to end poverty, but with finding cheaper ways of running welfare services. About £2 billion has been cut from benefits affecting pensioners. families, the sick, disabled and unemployed, but social security now accounts for 29 per cent of all government expenditure. During a debate in the House of Lords last November Lord Trefgarne (Under Secretary of State for Health and Social Security) said that the government was committed to protecting the needs of those who relied on social security benefits, but that the success of the economic strategy meant limiting the growth of social security as far as possible. (The Times, 25 November 1982.)

Piecemeal reform, within the existing social services, is seen by the authors of Despite the Welfare State to be the only realistic solution to deprivation. Even without a recession reforms cannot end working class poverty. But there is an alternative.

Pat Deutz

Crack down on the fraudsters! (2001)

The Greasy Pole Column from the February 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

The queen's speech is when she dresses up in large, heavy and expensive clothes and rides in her carriage to the Houses of Parliament—but only to the House of Lords because, as a result of something which happened a few hundred years ago, she is not allowed into the Commons, who have to be brought to the Lords to listen to the queen by Black Rod, who is called that because he carries one. The MPs go to the Lords with each minister walking beside their opposition shadow, often sharing a private joke but presumably not about the queen because they have all sworn loyalty to her.

When they get to the Lords they hear the queen telling them about the work which is planned for them in the next session, which is a bit boring for the ministers because they know it already. The speech is punctuated with the phrase "My government will . . ." as if the queen is telling the government what to do when really it is the other way around. Some people sneer at all this as a mess of outdated flummery. Others regard it as essential to our way of life and think that without it civilisation as we know it would crumble into the dust.

In December, for example, the queen told us that her government is going to crack down on Benefit fraudsters—people who claim state benefit when they are not legally entitled to. The government certainly thinks this is important because they say it costs between £2 billion and £4 billion a year and some ministers have been known to hint that bloated claimants roll up in posh cars to sign on at the dole office, or skim up a ladder to clean windows when they are claiming disability benefit for a bad back.

Campaign

Some months before the queen had told us about the crack-down it had been publicised in the DSS Xpress, a magazine which announces itself as "For all staff throughout the DSS" so does not have any Page Three girls or racing tips or agony aunts. But what it does have is no more relevant. The front page of Issue No. 2 (June 2000) is dominated by a piece "Tackling the fraudsters". Based on an interview with Charlotte Abrahams, one of a team running a campaign to expose and prosecute people who make illegal claims for state benefit, the article crackles with teeth-grating quotes like "What fraudsters are doing is unfair" and "We need DSS staff to 'buy in' to the idea and give us their support”—which make Page Three and tipsters and agony aunts seem rather less objectionable. Charlotte tells us that benefit fraudsters ". . . are taking public money—our money—that is meant for the vulnerable". She highlighted a recent TV campaign which depicted the Social Security "cheats" as greedy cynics who are willing to stoop to scrounging drinks off their mates. Anyone who felt their gorge rise when they watched these ads could have gone out to get away from them, except that if they did that they might have come across the same message, plastered across the backs of buses.

But the DSS Xpress is not content stop at hunting down illegal benefit claimants. On the back page there is a piece about another anti-fraud campaign—this one against Social Security staff. The hunter-in-chief is one Tony Edge, who has worked for the DSS for over 30 years and is now a man with "a special interest in fraud and compliance issues". He is not one to mince his words: "This is an important matter with potentially serious consequences in terms of the loss of public funds and the public's confidence in us". (After 30 years, it seems to have escaped him that there are very few organisations "the public" have as little confidence in as the DSS). The burden of Tony's campaign is to encourage staff members to spy on each other and to report anyone they suspect of defrauding their employer in any way. This can't be healthy for what is called staff relations but in case anyone fails to understand what is expected of them there are three touching stories about how this has worked in individual cases, one of fiddling expense claims, another of claiming benefit while working, and another of using unauthorised software in the DSS computers. So far, no stories of anyone smuggling the odd paper clip home but presumably Tony is working on it.

Manifestos

We might have expected that the Labour government, ever alert to any opportunity to exploit popular neuroses, would come up with a policy to bash the Social Security fraudsters. The policy announced in the queen's speech had already been flagged up at Labour's conference in September, when we were told about plans to take new powers to trawl through bank accounts and insurance policies, to check telephones and electricity and water meters of people suspected of making false claims. Tony Edge must have been quite excited at the prospect. The government can claim to have a mandate of sorts for this, for their election manifesto used militant words like "crack down . . . clampdown . . . maintain action against benefit fraud of all kinds". Which was not new or different because the Tories were making the same threats: "Social Security fraud," they screamed in their manifesto, "must be stamped out". They had already started on this: it was Peter Lilley who began hunting down the fraudsters when he was in charge of Social Security; in 1994 he set up a Benefit Review, partly to measure the scale of false claims. It should not surprise anyone that New Labour are enthusiastically carrying on where the man they once hated, as the most implacable representative of Thatcherite policies, left off.

In places where the real world of poverty and survival operates, the estimate that fraudulent claims run into billions of pounds every year does not go unchallenged. The Royal National Institute for the Blind has examined how the Benefit Review decided that the claims for Disability Living Allowance were potentially losing £499 million a year through projected fraud. They concluded that the Review arrived at this figure by adding the amounts involved in "suspected fraud" (which were not in any way proven) to those in "confirmed fraud". When we take into account the fact that of 1,200 interviews carried out by the Review the number of cases of "confirmed fraud" was only 18 we see the matter in a rather different light. In fact, if each of those 18 people had been receiving benefit at the highest level the loss would have amounted to £77,000. Set against this, the Review projected underpayment of benefit, due to under-reporting or to mistakes by Benefits Agency staff, of a little over £230 million. To put a human face on their findings, the RNIB listed cases in which blind, sometimes elderly, people had had their claims, which were quite within the rules, refused and who won their case only after a long and stressful appeal. Of course it would once have been quite proper for these people to be scourged by Peter Lilley—and now by his successors in the Labour government—as scroungers and fraudsters.

Poverty

The assault on so-called fraudsters is popular with politicians because it has a number of elements crying out to be exploited by anyone with ambitions to climb the greasy pole. The victims of the assault are often among the more deprived and vulnerable people. It is easy to depict them as calculating, cynical scroungers when they are often simply desperate about how to survive, and not doing this as efficiently as they might. In many cases when they have made false claims they have overlooked the fact that they could have applied legitimately for some other benefit, except that nobody at the DSS went out of their way to tell them and the forms were too long and complicated. They are typical of the human casualties of this social system in which workers are judged by the degree of their availability for profitable exploitation. In terms of their access to the wealth which their class produces they are in the lower reaches, where poverty means sickness and premature death. In June 2000 researchers at Glasgow University found that women from poorer backgrounds are three times more likely to contract cervical cancer. In September the Joseph Rowntree Trust stated that two million children in Britain are in conditions where they lack at least two "basic" amenities, things like a damp-free home, an annual holiday or usable furniture. Yet these people are among the class who produce all the wealth of capitalism. The fact that they allow themselves to be deprived of proper access to what results from their labour is a fraud on a scale which historically dwarfs the most lurid of what happens down at the Social.

Then we must ask what are we to think about the assurances from political leaders, that the problems of society can be ameliorated, or even eliminated, by a few simple measures. Blair's Labour Party is particularly eager to try this deception. That is why they make so many speeches denouncing some uncomfortable aspect of working class life, as a prelude to churning out yet another new law to reassure us that nothing more is needed to settle the problem. In this way we get a law against the so-called yob culture, which is defined, not as the boorishness of MPs in what they call their debates but as disruptive behaviour in city centres by alienated youngsters. Or a law which slaps a curfew on teenagers, on the grounds that if a young person is on the streets after a time approved by Jack Straw they are bound to be planning to burgle an old person's home. And a law clamping down on Social Security fraud. Get rid of problems like these, we are informed, and we shall benefit enormously from the existence of a working class which does not rebel against the repression of its social position. All of that argument is fraudulent.

And finally, Blair's Labour Party won millions of votes by persuading people that they are a proper alternative to the Tories and that under their government capitalism in Britain would be run in a different, more humane and progressive way. There is a mounting pile of evidence to expose how untrue this is, including the government's assault on people who practice a kind fraud which is unacceptable to capitalism. Which makes the Labour Party among the worst of fraudsters, whose exposure should be a priority.

Ivan