Welfare? (2026)

Book Review from the October 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

No More Deaths by Welfare. By China Mills. Pluto Press, 2026

We’ve long argued two things that liberal society finds unbearable: capitalism will not be reformed into decency, and the Labour Party is and always has been a party of capitalism. China Mills does not set out to confirm our case, but confirm it she does, with forensic force.

The book’s subject is the lethal machinery of Britain’s social security system, which Mills shows is ‘violent by design’, a department whose founding logic is the policing of who is and is not deemed deserving. For decades, reformists of every stripe have assumed the welfare state was a fortress to be defended, and that its cruelties were aberrations to be lobbied away. Mills demolishes this. The system’s violence is not a malfunction but its function: to discipline the working class and enforce the labour market. A machine built to do that will not be petitioned into kindness, and whatever the author’s own politics, the book lands at a conclusion that socialists have long drawn: that begging for reforms is a dead-end, and a drain on working-class energies.

This is most visible in the people Mills documents. The book draws on more than a decade of activism led by disabled people and bereaved families: the Deaths by Welfare Project, DPAC, the Black Triangle Campaign, benefits defence workshops and campaigns like Joy Dove’s fight for an inquiry into her daughter Jodey’s death. What unites them is a hard learned realism. These are people who know that the state is not a neutral arbiter to be reasoned with. Sanctioned, assessed, driven to despair, many of them have neither the health nor the illusion necessary for reformist lobbying. Survival itself, mutual aid practised from bed, keeping each other alive, naming the dead, is their politics. In class terms, this is the working class relying on itself rather than on its alleged representatives. Yet self-organisation that stays within capitalism can at best hold the line, it cannot end the conditions that make welfare a weapon.

The book’s condemnation of the Labour Party is unsparing and correct. The sharpest edges of this regime have repeatedly been delivered not by Tory ‘villains’ but by Labour governments and Labour ministers, administering the demands of capital while wrapping them in the language of compassion. Mills situates this in its global context: the book documents how South American countries, as conditions of international loans, were forced to liberalise and open up their social security systems to private profit, using the same structural adjustment playbook that has handed British welfare functions to private contractors.

So read No More Deaths by Welfare as what it is: documentary evidence of a class war that never ends, being fought on the battlefield of assessment centres and computer terminals, by agents of the state, the DWP, private contractors, and the governments of both parties who enabled them. Mills ends by calling for the collective imagination of ‘welfare justice’. The disabled activists in these pages, who learned through bitter experience that they cannot rely on the state or its parliamentary managers, are closer to that understanding than any reform movement. Our task is to finish the argument.

A.T.