Letter: Second Labour Government (1993)

Letter to the Editors from the October 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Editors,

In the September issue of the Socialist Standard, the Editorial Statement called "Break the Link with Labour" says that the second Labour government cut Unemployment Pay. I have always understood that the Labour Cabinet voted for the cuts (although by a small majority) but the cuts were never made, as the Labour government resigned before implementation. It was the incoming National Government that cut Unemployment Benefit.

Bert Mayes, 

London SW18

Reply:

We should have said "when the Second Labour Government agreed to cut unemployment benefit". On 23 August 1931 the Labour Cabinet voted by 12 or 11 votes to 8 or 9 (the size of the majority is disputed) to cut unemployment benefit by 10 percent, but fell from power before they could implement this - Editors.

Capitalism is mental (2025)

From the August 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Tony Blair emerged from his coffin recently to declare ‘We’ve got to get the younger generation back to work’ and ominously warned against ‘medicalising the ups and downs of life. You’ve got to be careful of encouraging people to think they’ve got some sort of condition other than simply confronting the challenges of life’.

Anyone who’s been through a challenging period knows that of course it can impact your mental health. Yet Blair insists that too many young people are ‘choosing not to work,’ and calls for benefits reform. Now, Labour wants to cut Personal Independence Payments and has signalled it’ll tighten eligibility rules, with shadow ministers suggesting PIP ‘is not working as it should.’

Starmer’s proposed reforms to cut disability benefits provoked a rebellion by well over 100 Labour MPs who argued the plan would strip support from up to 800,000 people, deepen poverty for 300,000–700,000 more (including 50,000 children), and create a two-tier welfare system that abandons the most vulnerable. Critics, including grassroots movements like Disabled People Against Cuts and disabled constituents, warn this is a continuation of austerity, with MPs likening it to ‘the biggest attack on the welfare state since George Osborne’. Charities insisted cuts wouldn’t boost employment and demanded a pause, transparency, and genuine consultation with disabled people. Labour MPs were pledging to vote against and calling for alternative reforms like taxing the super rich instead of penalising those in need.

Since then, following public backlash and intervention by the UN, Parliament voted on 1 July to remove the clauses tightening PIP (formerly Disability Living Allowance) eligibility. These measures are now to be deferred pending a review led by ‘Sir’ Stephen Timms, expected in autumn 2026. Existing PIP claimants are said not to be affected by the current legislation. However, changes to Universal Credit remain in place: from April 2026, new claimants of the Limited Capability for Work Related Activity element will receive reduced support. Existing recipients will continue receiving full payments, adjusted for inflation through 2029.

The Rosenhan experiment

The Rosenhan experiment (1973) exposed flaws in psychiatric diagnosis. Psychologist David Rosenhan and seven others feigned auditory hallucinations to gain admission to psychiatric hospitals. Once admitted, they acted normally, but doctors still diagnosed them with serious mental illnesses and kept them institutionalised for weeks.

The study highlighted the subjectivity and unreliability of psychiatric labels, showing that once someone was labelled as mentally ill, even ‘normal’ behaviour was interpreted as pathological. In a follow-up challenge, a hospital claimed it could spot fake patients and identified several, only for Rosenhan to reveal he had sent none.

Colonisation of the mind

This is not just about a few misguided doctors. The Western medical model has long been, in part, a tool of oppression. Colonisers have always arrived with missionaries, medics, mercenaries, and merchants. Psychiatry was part of that arsenal, often pathologising indigenous cultures, crushing resistance, and justifying forced assimilation. Traditional beliefs and ways of life were conveniently labelled as madness.

Psychiatry helped run residential schools, enforced sterilisation, and packed institutions, all aimed at breaking indigenous communities. On occasion, psychiatric diagnosis was used to pathologise cultural difference, frame indigenous resistance as insanity and justify colonial policies of confinement and re-education. The same logic still operates today. Psychiatric labels are often used to control people rather than help them.

‘Mad bints’

Women have always been prime targets for psychiatry’s controlling hand. Those who refused to fit into patriarchal roles were labelled hysterical or locked away in asylums. Psychiatry became a handy tool to silence women who challenged capitalism, patriarchy, or both.

Colonisation made this worse for indigenous women who were branded insane for practising traditional healing or resisting colonial authority. Today, women—especially those who are neurodivergent or marginalised—are still dismissed, misdiagnosed, and overmedicated. Psychiatry continues to treat women’s distress as personal pathology rather than a response to social and economic oppression.

A true alternative would focus on community care, autonomy, and dismantling the structures that create suffering in the first place. But when the profit motive comes into play it stops being about helping and about making people useful.

Adaptive response to capitalism?

Humans are nothing if not adaptive; that’s how we’ve survived this long. Under capitalism’s relentless pressure, people, especially those who are marginalised, develop ways of thinking and acting that do not fit into narrow boxes labelled normal.

Neurodivergence is not purely created by capitalism; it has always existed and would exist under other systems. But the way it manifests today is shaped by the demands and pressures of this system.

Traits like hyperfocus, pattern recognition, and creative thinking can help people resist the nonsense of capitalism. Yet capitalism only values these traits when they increase productivity. Difficulties with executive function or sensory processing become disabling because of rigid, noisy, and punishing environments.

If we lived in a society structured differently—one that prioritised people instead of profit—neurodivergence might look very different, both in how common it is and how it is understood.

Class war in our minds

Capitalism is not just a class war; it is a war of the mind. It demands conformity, punishes difference, and uses trauma as a tool of control. Still, resistance keeps bubbling up. Neurodivergent people often develop ways of thinking that refuse to follow capitalist logic, question authority, and imagine new ways of living.

The pushback against capitalism is in many ways also a neurodivergent pushback—one that questions authority, re-imagines community, and refuses the dehumanisation that capitalism enforces.

Capitalism will always find new ways to divide us, control us and blame us for the suffering it creates. The only real cure is to get rid of the system making us sick in the first place.

The fight against capitalism must also be a fight for neurodivergent liberation. We need to see the links between capitalism, trauma, and neurodivergence if we want a world where all minds are valued, not just those that keep the profit machine running.

A.T.

The Unkindest Cut of All (1996)

From the July 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is rather amusing for Socialists to listen to the various apologists of capitalism try to justify their support for welfare cuts on the grounds that it is either “immoral” for the state to impose high taxes (the source of state expenditure), or that it is in the interests of the “nation” that welfare payments are kept to a minimum

That the double-speak beloved by newspapers and economists is a key clement in the ideological battle waged by the ruling class against the workers should be evident enough to anyone with a notion at all of class and class struggle. It is hoped by the bosses that the drip-drip-drip of this Chinese water torture will unbalance even the most rational of minds. Sometimes the newspapers and economists join together in a combined offensive on a particular topic of concern to their paymasters—the capitalist class. Recently the object of their ire has been welfare expenditure.

Robert Skidelsky, biographer of Keynes, and ennobled for his services to bourgeois economics, wrote on this theme in the Sunday Times on 11 February. His key argument was summed up in the headline of the piece — “Cuts To Benefit the Nation”. Coming in the wake of Peter Lilley’s announcement of planned changes and cutbacks for the social security budget, Skidelsky aimed to demonstrate why welfare cutbacks and other reductions in state expenditure would benefit “the nation”. By this he did not, of course, mean everyone. In fact, he probably meant only a small number of people at all would directly benefit, though he did not specifically say this. But who could the beneficiaries be?

Nation or Class?

The “nation”—primarily the productive resources of a state like Britain— is not owned in common or on anything like an equitable basis. Britain, like every other country, is a state divided on class lines between those who own and control the means of living and those who do not. For instance, recent statistics from Social Trends, an official government publication, show that one out of every 20 adults has a stake in the means of living equal to the other 19 put together. The top five percent of the population own 53 percent of all financial assets. It is the capitalist class—those who do not need to work for a living—who by-and-large own “the nation”, setting their wage slaves to work to put more wealth in the form of profits back in to the capitalists’ hands.

Although lackeys like Skidelsky present it as such, cutbacks in welfare expenditure and the like are not designed to benefit wage and salary earners. Workers receive an amount sufficient to keep them and their families in a fit condition, with skilled or highly educated workers usually receiving more than the unskilled. Their wages, properly speaking, are a real amount intended for this purpose not a hypothetical sum, and so the burden of taxation (which finances welfare payments) ultimately falls on the capitalist class. Workers may pay some taxes, but the burden specifically falls on the surplus value accruing to the capitalists and not on the wages and salaries of the workers, hence the interest of the capitalists and their representatives in keeping taxation as low as possible. High taxation eats into profits and reduces the amount available for accumulation as new capital.

The state currently takes about 42.5 percent of Gross National Product in Britain, about a third of which is taken up by social security expenditure, currently a colossal £92 billion. This means a large amount of tax taken out of profits, and the proportion has been moving up in most advanced countries for decades, with the state stepping in to cushion the fall from market failures and being further burdened by demographic change.

State expenditure acting as a drag on profits and capital accumulation is the real bottom line for the capitalists, but Skidelsky has a more lofty way to justify the competitive money-grubbing of the capitalists:

". . . the main argument for slimming down the state is moral: it is wrong that governments should take 40 percent and more of our earnings and decide to spend it as they see fit".

Skidelsky goes on to declare himself in favour of cutbacks in state health and education services, on the ground that this can only benefit “our earnings”, but it is a strange kind of morality which has to go to these lengths to defend the wealth of the privileged and justify taking a few more crumbs back oft' the poor. But then when has the morality of capitalism ever been concerned with anything more than the sanctity of profit?

Britain already has some of the lowest benefit levels in the western world so savings made from the unemployed or single mothers will be minimal, though this in itself will not stop the government from trying to stop people claiming benefit or cutting back on payments, as recently with Unemployment Benefit. This is part of the reason why an even greater line of attack has been waged on pensions, with employees being encouraged to take out private schemes to supplement the state pension. Since the 1980 decision to link state pensions with prices rather than earnings the basic state pension has fallen from 22 percent of average male earnings to 15 percent and no government of capitalism in Britain is likely to be able to offer pensioners anything better. The number of those living beyond 75 is expected to double from 4 to 8 million over the next fifty years and this demographic change alone will put further pressure on government expenditure, particularly the social security budget.

Hard Labour

The apologists for capitalism—whether Lord Skidelsky or, for that matter, Tony Blair—see little wrong with attacking the poor when capitalist profit dictates it, and no one should be fooled that attacks on welfare are merely the preserve of the right-wing of capitalism’s political apparatus. The pressures on them from the competitive market economy are the same. The last Labour government from 1974-9 had an equally bad record with inflation eating away at benefits and savings, together with real cuts in wages and salaries. As with the Conservatives, unemployment also rose and along with it job insecurity.

Given his infatuation with private pension schemes and the welfare arrangements beloved in the Far East, Blair and his cohorts offer nothing really new from what the Tories offer now. All that has changed in the world of welfare reform has been some of the language used justify further attacks on a beleaguered working class— the “drip, drip, drip”, this time with an allegedly moral dimension. Skidelsky has in fact put the argument of those who wish to attack benefit levels most succinctly— how despicable of the poor to drain the capitalists of profit! What he—and they— conveniently overlook, though, is that the workers made the profits for the owning class in the first place.

Lord Skidelsky is actually chairman of the Social Market Foundation. A more bizarre title for an organisation could not be found, for given the class nature of capitalism and the attacks it unleashes on the poor, what could be more anti-social than the market? But then such is the double-speak of our times.

Dave Perrin

Slicing the pork barrel thin (2024)

From the December 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Labour Party’s new autumn budget, presented by Chancellor Rachel Reeves, has made notable changes to universal credit and other benefits. However, these updates have raised concerns for vulnerable communities.

We’ve been speaking with people currently on benefits, universal credit, and Personal Independence Payments (PIP) about their experiences in the UK today.

Claire, 35, who transitioned from ESA to universal credit and works part-time in administration in Sheffield, is disabled due to genetic and autoimmune conditions. She also receives PIP. Claire says ‘The job centre is horrible; it’s not set up to support disabled people properly. They lack time, resources, and training.’

Toni, 44, is self-employed in events management in London, but her part-time universal credit isn’t enough. ‘I was fine when I worked in Europe; my business thrived for nearly a decade. But since Brexit, the cost of living crisis, and COVID, my business has tanked. Event venues are closing, and there are no opportunities for those without access to Europe. I have no options unless I retrain at my age!’

Starting in April 2025, benefits including universal credit will rise by just 1.7 percent. This means only a few extra pounds per month for claimants who have been struggling to make ends meet from one capitalist crisis to the next.

Claire believes the support is inadequate for disabled individuals wanting to work, saying it falls short of previous options like disabled tax credits, which provided more effective assistance.

Reeves announced a cap on universal credit deductions for debt repayments, lowering it from 25 percent to 15 percent of the standard allowance. This aims to ease financial pressure for over a million households, potentially saving them around £420 a year.

‘It’s disheartening,’ Claire reflects, on her feeling of alienation from society. When asked about the impact on her mental health, she added, ‘Yes, the challenges of universal credit deepen my sense of isolation.’

Toni feels society has abandoned her: ‘I worked hard for years and paid into the system, but when COVID hit, my business got no help. I was dumped on the dole and left to fend for myself, which only makes me feel more alienated’.

Claire adds ‘They’re just continuing the previous government’s policies. I didn’t agree with them then, and I still don’t. The system doesn’t support disabled people or consider different levels of disability.’

They’re also concerned about the new measure allowing the DWP direct access to bank accounts. This approach to combating fraud feels like a surveillance tactic that will erode trust among unemployed workers. What they feel they need are real job opportunities, not increased government intrusion into their lives.

Labour will uphold the Conservatives’ reforms to the work capability assessment, making it harder for disabled workers to qualify for the highest level of incapacity benefits. This could affect over 420,000 people, resulting in a loss of about £5,000 in annual support for many.

A new £240 million ‘Get Britain Working’ initiative aims to provide work, skills, and health support for people with disabilities and long-term health conditions. This includes the already controversial idea of sending job coaches into mental health wards to push the severely ill back into work.

The earnings threshold for carer’s allowance will rise to £10,000 a year, allowing more unpaid carers to qualify for support. However, we note that the broader social care system remains underfunded and profit-driven.

Labour has also decided to keep the two-child limit on benefits, which denies extra support for families with more than two children and pushes many deeper into poverty.

Claire expressed her concerns about no longer receiving cost of living payments and the reduced eligibility for the Warm Home Discount, making it harder for her to heat her home amid rising costs.

The budget fails to adequately address the financial strain on the UK’s most vulnerable. Small increases, targeting the working poor with threats of prosecution and debt recovery measures, don’t meet the real needs of those struggling, especially when many families rely on food banks or multiple jobs just to get by.

Claire remarked, ‘We will struggle even more than before.’ She envisions a truly socialist society prioritising adequate material support and holistic health care for everyone.

Neither the Labour Party nor the Tories can solve these issues. The current government may offer minor increases, but they remain trapped in a system that prioritises market whims over people’s needs. ‘The market giveth, and the market taketh away.’

Names have been changed to avoid potential targeting or sanctions.

A.T.

Voice From The Back: The madness of capitalism (2010)

The Voice From The Back Column from the November 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

The madness of capitalism

Capitalism is an insane society. Millions die with easily prevented or curable diseases whilst millions of dollars, pounds, euros and yens are spent on new ways to destroy human beings with ingenious methods of military mayhem, but surely capitalism has reached the epitome of madness when some children are trying to exist on less than £1 a day and we can read of the following insanity. “It’s simple, but no less appealing for that. Celine’s classic box bag may cost a pretty penny but its sleek lines make it among the most wanted bags of the season. Price: £2,150″ (The Independent, 20 September). Yes, the equivalent of years of nourishment for a child spent by some parasite as a gift of a handbag to his latest girlfriend. Mad, mad, mad.

Pay cheque to pay cheque

The media constantly reminds us how lucky we are to live in an advanced capitalist economy. We should be grateful to our masters that we don’t live in a backward third-world economy. The United Kingdom, the USA and Canada must surely be free from the poverty of those third-world nations according to the media – but what is the reality? “The recession may be officially over, but six in 10 Canadians are still surviving from paycheque to paycheque, a national survey showed Monday. Fifty-nine per cent of Canadian workers say they would be in financial trouble if their paycheque was delayed by just a week – the same proportion as last year when the economy was still mired in a downturn, according to a poll of 2,766 people by the Canadian Payroll Association. The survey comes as the OECD today warned that record high debt levels have left many Canadians vulnerable to any future adverse shocks” (Globe and Mail, 13 September). Like our fellow workers in Canada and the USA we in the UK live from pay day to pay day. That is how capitalism operates.

Dollars and democracy

One of the illusions that supporters of capitalism like to boast of is the notion that whatever the failings of the profit system at least it is thoroughly democratic. This is a complete fabrication as by the expenditure of million of dollars, euros and yen the owning class completely distort any pretence to democracy that capitalism may possess. A recent example of this manipulation by the power of money has emerged in the USA. “It likes to present itself as a grassroots insurgency made up of hundreds of local groups intent on toppling the Washington elite. But the Tea Party movement, which is threatening to cause an upset in next month’s midterm elections, would not be where it is today without the backing of that most traditional of US political supporters – Big Oil. The billionaire brothers who own Koch Industries, a private company with 70,000 employees and annual revenues of $100bn (£62bn), used to joke that they controlled the biggest company nobody had ever heard of. Not any more. After decades during which their fortune grew exponentially and they channelled millions of dollars to rightwing causes, Charles and David Koch are finally getting noticed for their part in the extraordinary growth of the Tea Party movement. The two, 74-year-old Charles and David, 70, have invested widely in the outcome of the 2 November elections. One Koch subsidiary has pumped $1m into the campaign to repeal California’s global warming law, according to state records” (Guardian, 14 October). Like Bob Dylan once wrote “Money doesn’t talk, it swears.”

Behind the rhetoric

Politicians’ stock in trade is pretending to represent the whole of society when in fact only representing the owning class. Thus we have Nick Clegg of the Liberal Democrats claiming that he is concerned about the poor and exploited at election time, but in power forced to declare his real aims. “Poor must accept benefit cuts: Clegg on collision course with own party by backing welfare axe. Nick Clegg has waded into the row over welfare reform by warning that benefits should not be there ‘to compensate the poor for their predicament’. On the eve of the Liberal Democrat conference, the Deputy Prime Minister backed the Coalition’s programme of welfare cuts and dramatically shifted his party’s policy on the subject” (Daily Mail, 16 September). If you represent the owning class, despite your glamour TV image, you sometimes have to tell the truth. You are poor? So what, we are not here to “compensate” you, declares this politician once in power.

Cooking the Books: “Mass unemployment” (2006)

The Cooking the Books column from the September 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

The government’s Welfare Reform Bill is currently going through Parliament. It provides for people on incapacity benefit and single mothers to be harassed to take some crap job or have their benefit cut. New claimants are to be treated even more harshly. This is par for the course. Cutting back on welfare payments has been the policy of all governments, whether Labour or Tory, since the post-war boom came to an end in the 1970s.

The Green Paper which preceded the Bill, bearing the Orwellian title of “A New Deal for Welfare: Empowering People To Work”, sets out the problem as seen by the government:

“In the 1980s and 1990s the welfare state failed those who most needed its help, instead of combating mass unemployment, the welfare state alleviated its worst effects and diverted people onto other benefits.

Instead of helping people into work, it locked them into long-term dependency. By 1997, there were almost 5.5 million people on benefits, 3 million more than in 1979. The number of people claiming unemployment benefits had risen by 50 per cent, while the number claiming lone parent and incapacity benefits had more than tripled.”

This assumes that, if only they had tried, the (Tory) governments of the 1980s and 1990s could have combated “mass unemployment” by somehow creating new jobs as an alternative to paying unemployment and incapacity benefits. But governments can’t create jobs at will.

The Green Paper says that total employment in Britain is now at a record high “having risen by 2.3 million since spring 1997” (when Labour took over). This is indeed what the statistics show but “employment” doesn’t have the meaning which the unwary might assume of full-time employment. It includes part-time employment however short (even one day a week), the self-employed and family members who help them, and people on training courses.

The statisticians divide the population of working age (16-64 for men, 16-59 for women) into three groups: people in employment, the unemployed and the economically inactive. The latest figures, released by the Office for National Statistics on 12 July, show that in the three months to June there were 28.9 million (74.6 percent of working age population) in employment, 1.65 million (5.4 percent of economically active working age population) unemployed and 7.85 million (21.1 percent of working age population) inactive.

The government has set itself the aim of achieving “an employment rate equivalent to 80 percent of the working age population”. A look at the above figures shows that this would be the equivalent of reducing unemployment to zero. But this is not how the government aims to achieve this.

Their plan is to reduce the number of economically inactive by at least 2.3 million:

“To achieve our aim, we will reduce by 1 million the number on incapacity benefit; help 300,000 lone parents into work; increase by 1 million the number of older workers.”

This is all very well but where are the jobs to come from? The latest ONS figures give the number of job vacancies in the three months to June as just under 600,000. Gordon Brown believes that by encouraging “enterprise culture” the Labour government has created the conditions which have allowed businesses to expand and take on more workers and that, if it continues this, more jobs will be created.

What is more likely to happen is that the employment rate will go up a little (with a contribution from people going on government-funded training courses) but not to 80 percent. Instead, the unemployment rate will go up as a result of people on incapacity benefit being transferred to “job seekers allowance”. The government won’t be too displeased with this as they will have saved on welfare payments, since unemployment benefit is lower than incapacity benefit. But it will also, unintentionally, reveal that the “mass unemployment” of the 1980s and 1990s never really went away.

Political Notes: Rats and twisters (1985)

The Political Notes Column from the June 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

Rats and twisters

The Tory government looks set to clobber another vulnerable section of the working class — the elderly — by abolishing the State Earnings Related Pensions Scheme (SERPS). This is part of Norman Fowler's Review of Social Security which, he claims, is intended to ensure that expenditure on Social Security is "targeted" at the most needy groups in society. The truth is that the capitalist class is beginning to panic at the cost of providing for the increasing number of old age pensioners in the population and are looking for ways to cut public expenditure on social security including pensions. (The Tories are also planning to end the death grant and maternity grant and to cut housing benefit.)

The alternative to SERPS being offered to workers is that they top up their basic state pension (insufficient on its own to provide even the basic necessities of life) by paying into private pension schemes during their working lives. This of course assumes that we have jobs that pay enough that we can afford to do this.

When these changes were aired in the House of Commons recently the Labour Party leadership s criticisms of the new measures were largely confined to gripes about the Tories "ratting'' on an election pledge leading to the accusation by that model of political integrity, Neil Kinnock, that Thatcher was a "twister". Clearly this display was intended only to discredit the Tories in the eyes of the electorate. No one in the Labour Party or any other party present in the House of Commons during this exchange questioned the system of society in which elderly workers who have outlived their usefulness to capitalism are then forced to suffer the indignity of poverty in their old age.

Any capitalist government, whether Tory. Labour or Alliance, will only pay the minimum in social security benefits and pensions that it can get away with without their electoral fortunes being adversely affected. The Labour Party, that self-appointed champion of social justice, is clearly far more concerned to show up the Tories in the worst possible light and so damage their electoral chances than to ask fundamental and urgent questions about the nature of capitalist society.

Young, jobless, homeless . . .

At the beginning of May this year new rules governing payment of board and lodging allowances to young unemployed people came into force, which will make the plight of these particular victims of capitalism still worse. Under the new rules Supplementary Benefit claimants under the age of 25 and living in hostels, lodgings or bed and breakfast accommodation are likely to have their benefit cut unless they move to another area or return to their parents’ home.

These rule changes have come about as a result of revelations last year that seaside bed and breakfast establishments in the south of England were advertising in areas of high unemployment like Merseyside, in the belief that if they attracted claimants as residents they could charge high rents which would then be paid by social security. The impression given by the press was that large numbers of unemployed were living in luxury in hotels at the seaside at the expense of the state.

In fact most bed and breakfast establishments which cater for claimants are grossly overcrowded and of a very low standard — whether they are situated in Brighton or Toxteth, and no unemployed person would choose to live in them if they had an alternative. These owners are not acting altruistically by providing "free" holidays for claimants but are merely exploiting a lucrative loophole in Social Security rules.

The new rules mean that young unemployed people forced for whatever reason to live in this kind of accommodation. will only be able to claim the full cost of their lodgings for a limited period after which time they will be forced either to move or try to manage on still less money. (And these changes will not just affect those living at the seaside.) The intention is to force them to return to the "family home". Of course this assumes that not only is there a "family home” to return to but also that they are welcome there and that the family is in a position to support an additional adult member of the family. Most people living in hostel or bed and breakfast accommodation are there precisely because such an alternative does not exist for them.

These callous new rules for lodging allowance are likely to increase homelessness, vagrancy and poverty among a section of the working class that is surplus to capital's requirement and therefore particularly vulnerable.

Wasted, minister

The government, following the recommendations of the Commons Trade and Industry Committee's report The Wealth of Waste, has appointed David Trippier as minister with responsibility for recycling waste. It might have been thought that this job would fall within the jurisdiction of the Department of the Environment. However, the fact that the new "Waste" minister is to be located instead within the Department of Trade and Industry gives us some clue to the real purpose behind the new appointment (that is. besides the obviously political one of being seen by the increasing proportion of the electorate who are concerned about ecological issues to be "doing something about the environment").

Clearly it is believed that there might be some money to be made in the recycling of waste. All the evidence, however, suggests that in fact the opposite is true: ecologically sound production and recycling of waste products cost more, which is why there is so much resistance to them. Despite the fact that the value of materials "lost" to industry is estimated to be £750 million (The Times, 16 April 1985), the cost of reclaiming such valuable resources as paper, glass, aluminium and copper is prohibitively high. To produce recycled paper, for example, can cost more than producing new paper.

Given the nature of capitalist production for profit it is therefore simply idealistic for people like Jonathan Porritt (director of Friends of the Earth) to express the hope that the government will make "a substantial and unequivocal commitment on recycling” (The Times, 16 April 1985). So long as profit is the purpose of production even the most well-intentioned, ecologically minded government will encounter serious resistance to ecologically sound but expensive production methods.

Greasy Pole: Learning a Lesson (1998)

The Greasy Pole column from the February 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

It was not so long ago when no Labour Party rally was complete without a nostalgic reference to the likes of Keir Hardie and George Lansbury, those dead leaders whose spectres could be called up to prove that Labour was true to its faith. Whatever the Party—or sometimes a Labour government—might do, there was always the memory of people like Hardie and Lansbury to reassure the doubters that their party’s heart was in the right place, and that one day they would bring us all to the Promised Land. This usually provoked a few tears and lots of applause. It sounded good, stifled any awareness of reality with a blind faith.

There were some other Labour leaders who were never mentioned in those circumstances. Among these were Ramsey MacDonald and Philip Snowden, Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Labour government of 1929-31. The reason these men were kept in the background was that, although holding the two most powerful jobs in that government, they had not made any progress towards the Promised Land; they did not inspire any confidence in the staunchness of Labour’s principles. After a short spell of confused impotence in the face of an economic crisis MacDonald had sacked all his ministers and taken back only those who promised to behave themselves in future—which meant join in a government with the Liberals and Tories, who until recently were supposed to be Labour’s sworn enemies.

That crisis sprang from the effects of an international slump on British capitalism, causing unemployment to climb steadily, up towards the three million mark. Due response was to set up Committee on National Expenditure, presided over by George May who (like Peter Davis, who now heads the Blair government’s drive to force welfare claimants into work) was a big noise in the Prudential. When the May Report came out, towards the end of August 1931, it recommended, among other measures, that unemployment benefit should be cut by 20 percent.

Laziness

This attack on the fragile conditions of the poorest workers was not in itself a new idea. Nor was it accompanying justification, that people who are poor and unemployed are like that because they want to be, through laziness or ignorance. It is exactly the kind of propaganda we are being subjected to now, as the Blair government push through their policies of depressing the living standards of the lowest and most vulnerable people. Those who accept these arguments, often on the flimsiest anecdotal “evidence”, have to explain why so many people, all at once, all over the world, become suddenly afflicted by this idleness and stupidity and why this always coincides with economic recessions—and why so many become energetic and sensible as the recession eases.

But for the moment the significant thing is how some elements in the Labour Party reacted to the suggestion that British capitalism’s fortunes should be protected by assaults on the unemployed.The two Labour members on the May Committee issued a dissenting report—which disappeared almost without trace. When the Cabinet met to decide finally to cut unemployment benefit and by how much (ten percent) they were almost equally divided, with ten of them opposing the cut and 11 supporting it. So it was that MacDonald became Prime Minister in a “National” government, supported by Conservatives and Liberals.

It is worth remembering that sorry example of Labour’s futility and cynicism in order to compare it to the conduct of the lot who now occupy the seats of power in the name of introducing a new, more humane and equal society. As the Blair government, through the hapless Harriet Harman, bulldoze through their plans to cut the benefits of single parents and the disabled (with much more to come) there is nothing worth the name of opposition in the Cabinet.

Cigarettes

There was, of course, one brief and feeble coded protest from David Blunkett but that soon died away and in any case, Blunkett was always careful enough to avoid making it a resignation issue. It was almost the same story among Labour MPs, with only the usual veterans of dissent like Livingstone, Skinner and Benn and a few others sticking their heads over the parapet. Among the new MPs, ecstatic at finding themselves in this new important powerful job, there was overwhelming obedience to the whips and the spin doctors.

Typical of this was the passionate advocacy of the cut in single parent benefit from one MP who just after May confessed himself astonished to be in Parliament, let alone with such a large majority and a dizzying swing. When the Parliamentary Labour Party met to discuss the proposed cut this MP distinguished himself—and perhaps booked himself a very minor government job—by ranting that the cut amounted to only the price of a packet of fags a day.

This contribution to the debate—if we can call it that—fulfilled a necessary condition for such arguments; to blame the poor for being that way. It used to be that the poor would not leave a bath unfilled with coal; now it is that single parents make themselves a present of struggling to bring up children on their own and simply can’t be trusted not to smoke their benefit away.

Friends

The odious creep who talked about the price of cigarettes had obviously learned his lesson because he was once a prominent and ardent member of a local council which in the 1980s supplied a lot of copy to the gutter press about their policies as so-called loony lefties. One effect of this was that the local Tory MP bounced back to Westminster with a hugely increased majority—and stayed there until he was defeated last May. Obviously, the point went home; to win votes it is necessary to be willing to say anything, at any time and to be flexible in what you say so that you always pander to every popular prejudice. It is a lesson which the Labour Party at large has absorbed, since those days of MacDonald and Snowden, and in Blair they have found a relentless teacher.

Blair’s support is not confined to the Labour Party. In a letter to the Sunday Times of 28 December last Madsen Pirie who is president of the Adam Smith Institute—which is a longstanding proponent of Thatcherite policies—said:

"Your leader last week supporting welfare reform was most timely . . . Tony Blair has shown commendable resolve by his insistence that the system must be changed . . . so far the signs are encouraging.”

With friends like that does Blair need enemies—especially among those whose lives are an endless grind on the lowest level of poverty—of hunger, sickness, despair?

Ivan

The Greasy Pole: Trust Me, I'm A Labour Politician (1998)

The Greasy Pole column from the January 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

New Labour. New government. New ruses. New lies. It takes us back to those times—not so long ago—when John Major put on his King Canute act, as the tides of sleaze washed all around him, denying that he was drowning in corruption or, if he was drowning, there was nothing wrong in that.

When Tony Blair was confronted with the evidence which suggested that, in response to a £1 million donation from the Formula One millionaire Bernie Ecclestone, the government had changed its mind over banning tobacco advertising on the racing cars, his response was to say that it was just crazy to even think that Labour ministers could be guilty of such a thing. When it was put to him that there was a little—how do we put this— inconsistency between government taxation policies and the way the Paymaster General manages his considerable wealth, Blair’s response was again to describe such an allegation as scandalous, incredible. So that’s all right then—except that in neither case did Blair’s apparent indignation allow him to answer the question.

During Prime Minister’s Questions on 10 December Blair’s comment to an intervention from William Hague about Tory and Labour MPs voting together to cut single parents’ benefit was “I’m sorry (which is not to be taken as meaning that he actually was sorry) but he is simply wrong. “ And when Hague gave examples of the assurances given by some ministers, before they got into office, that they would not implement the cuts designed by the Tory government, Blair snarled that, again, he was “sorry but that is simply not correct".

Women MPs

In fact, both Blair and his Social Security Secretary Harriet Harman went on record against the cuts in lone parent benefit when the Major government decided to implement them in November 1996. Labour’s election manifesto New Labour Because Britain Deserves Better had one brief paragraph on lone parents which set out plans to help them get jobs, which sounded very caring and supportive but forgot to mention about making them even poorer in the process. Of course there are other Labour MPs whose behaviour has been equally cynical. Chris Pond, for example, made his name as Director of the Low Pay Unit and in those days he was never backward in making scathing, well documented comments on Tory proposals to make the lot of poorer workers even worse. Pond was quite clear about the proposal to cut single parent benefit: — “particularly spiteful “ he called it and, just in case we had missed the point, “[the cut] will make it much harder for families to make ends meet “.Well since then Pond has become a Labour MP and he has voted for the cut in benefit which he labelled as “spiteful “.

Another Labour MP—a woman, and we all know how enthusiastic the Labour Party was about getting women into Parliament so that they could run capitalism more humanely and sensitively than men—was anonymously quoted in the Observer of 23 November, spouting the kind of unfounded bigotry about poverty which is supposed to be confined to the shriller kind of saloon bar Tory:

“These [single mothers] aren’t desperate people. Most of them have got men somewhere in the background. “

Without pausing to supply evidence of the existence of the high-living benefit scroungers, this architect of Labour’s New Britain showed what value she puts on election promises and how she regards the people who elected her party to power:

“There were some people who voted for me who thought we could make a difference.They didn’t understand.”

Perhaps this is the kind of attitude Tony Blair had in mind when he wrote, in his preface to Labour’s manifesto, that it was “hardly surprising” that “People are cynical about politics and distrustful of political promises.”

Scroungers

In fact the cut in lone parent benefit is not likely to be the end of the matter.The signs are that this government has more plans to eradicate these scroungers who threaten to undermine the very foundations of this country so that people like Bernie Ecclestone will not be able to invest so much in Formula One races and others like Paymaster-General Geoffrey Robinson will have to think twice about involving themselves in offshore trusts. Perhaps we may soon have special fraud squads to question anyone found by themselves pushing a pram.

Meanwhile there is Frank Field, who also came up through the poverty lobby and who is now Minister for the ominously titled Welfare Reform, refusing to rule out plans to impose further benefit cuts on single parents who don’t knuckle under to the government’s pressure to find a job—any job, no matter how bad the conditions or pay. Then there are all those other bloodsuckers like old-age pensioners who at present can backdate a benefit claim for a year but who, under Tory plans which Labour will implement, will now have to do it within one month—a measure described by Age Concern as “mean and certainly not in the spirit of Labour’s pre-election pledges’’

Of course it could be that the benefit rates are so generous that the people who live on them are emerging as a newly enriched privileged class, living in luxury while the likes of Ecclestone, Robinson and Blair scavenge in dustbins for their next meal to give them the strength to plan further benefit cuts. The organisation Justice, a human rights group, recently compiled some figures about conditions in this country. Justice says that the benefit for lone parents are £23 a week less than is needed; that one-in three children and 65 percent of disabled people live on or below the poverty line; that nearly 1.5 million homes are unfit to live in. And so on. Take your pick of the evidence, both statistical and anecdotal. It tells the same story and it is different from the one told by that Labour MP, who said the voters didn’t understand when they elected a Labour government.

Perhaps the voters did not understand; they didn’t understand that the real issue was not whether British capitalism should be run by the Conservative or the Labour Party but the urgency of replacing capitalism by socialism. One thing is certain: a proper understanding of what is at stake and how we can authentically change society can only be helped by the exposure of the contemptible creeps who tell us that under Tony Blair things can only get better.

Ivan

These Foolish Things: “Bosses want change of Government” (1997)

The Scavenger column from the June 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

“Bosses want change of Government”

Britain’s company bosses are deserting the Conservatives.

Nearly three quarters say splits in the Tory party are damaging trade with Europe, according to the 73,000-member Institute of Management.

And the majority believe Tony Blair is in tune with the needs of business.

An loM poll of directors and managers found that:

• 73 per cent think education is underfunded
• 65 per cent think the Tories have not improved standards
• 55 per cent think they would be worse off under the Tories or were not sure
• 56 per cent believe it is time for a change of government’’(Devizes Labour News, Spring 1997.)

The capitalist gem

Three months from Chinese rule, Hong Kong was yesterday given a last colonial budget, its coffers bursting with cash but its distaste for the welfare state undented by a widening gulf between the affluent and an impoverished underclass . . . Average incomes in Hong Kong exceed those in Britain. The island boasts Asia’s richest man, property developer Lee Shau-kee, and more Rolls Royce cars per capita than any other city. But, according to a survey by the City University of Hong Kong, 600,000 people out of a population of 6.3 million live in deprivation. Only 200,000 receive public assistance. A report by the Society for Community Organisations said 10.000 people were living in "cage homes”—filthy single-bed accommodation often surrounded by a metal cage. This is nearly four times the number acknowledged by the government. (Guardian, 13 March.)

Bash Street Kid

How it can be argued by politicians and the media that there is no connection between crime and the environment, between violence and childhood poverty, I do not know. In Mr Collins’s story each move in his progress appears inevitably to follow what went before, in the manner of a classic drama .. .The true issue of the book is whether, if you are reared in fear which only violence can apparently relieve, it is possible to be habilitated into a different sort of home life. Judge Steven Tumim, reviewing Autobiography of a Murderer by Hugh Collins. (Guardian, 27 February.)

Booming Britain

Booming Britain is turning the rich into the super-rich, creating more billionaires and multimillionaires than ever before. In the latest guide to wealth in Britain, published today . . . 16 people emerge as billionaires—six more than last year.

The top 500 in the new list, which has been expanded to include 1,000 entries saw their wealth increase by 23 percent in a year. Those 500 are now worth more than £86 billion. (Sunday Times, 6 April.)

Workfare

A heart patient whose benefit was stopped after he was ruled fit to work collapsed with chest pains as he was quizzed at an appeal hearing.

Ralph Melville, 59, of Gateshead, Tyne and Wear, was rushed to hospital and is awaiting an urgent bypass operation. “They made out I was workshy and on the fiddle. It was an insult," he said.

A Benefits Agency spokesman said: "If he is dissatisfied we have a complaints procedure.” (Mirror, 10 May.)

The Scavenger 

Running Commentary: Cheap at the price (1988)

The Running Commentary column from the May 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard 

Cheap at the price

The latest figures for crime in London — or at least that part of it which the police get to hear about —offer encouragement to neither the hangers and floggers nor the carers and tolerators. Overall, recorded crime in the capital fell by four per cent last year although violence against the person (not the sort committed by the police) street robberies and other robberies rose by between 11 and 13 per cent. Parliament's refusal to re-introduce the death penalty, even with the offer of the then Tory MP Peter Bruinvels to be the public hangman in his off duty days, did not set London's killers on the rampage; murders fell from 210 to 195.

The Metropolitan Police, despite its self-image as the elite force compared to which the rest are bumbling wallies. manages a detection rate of only 16 per cent. As there must be an intrinsically high rate of detection for some offences, such as murder and rape, this means there is a strikingly low clear-up rate for other crime. Obviously, the Met. will not be in the running for the Sherlock Holmes Trophy for 1987.

The figures for London, like those for other areas, provide no evidence to support the claim from all types of reformers to have a policy for the elimination of crime. The hangers and floggers argue that harsh punishment would stamp out the problem, ignoring the fact that it did not work that way in the past, when the crank, the treadmill, the quarries and the Pentonville style of repression brutalised prisoners rather than reformed them. The do-gooders look for the cause in social or personal disabilities, blind to the fact that this social system must always produce such problems and they have no idea of what to do about that.

Crime is an aspect of capitalism's basic conflicts and inadequacies; while this society lasts it is inescapable. The property rights of capitalism — which is another way of saying its denial of access to wealth to the majority — are so comprehensive that it is practically impossible not to offend against them. With the majority denied free access to the wealth we have produced, while the privileges of possession are extolled as the ultimate social cachet, it is not surprising that there should be a widespread effort to grab some of the wealth in ways not legitimised by capitalism.

The privileged hold their position legally; the laws say that their right to the wealth and their right to exploit the rest of us must be protected and enforced through a system of police, courts and prisons. So every day courts throughout the land are crowded with people who have been restrained after offending against capitalism's laws, to be dealt with according to the whims and prejudices of whoever happens to sit in judgement on them that day.

This is a hugely cumbersome, hugely expensive, affair (it costs an average of around £250 a week to keep someone in prison — an experience unlikely to re-build their respect for capitalism s morality). But for the job it has to do — to assert, defend and emphasise the fact that this is a society divided into the exploiters and the dispossessed — it is cheap at the price.

Fortresses

Social Security offices, which have never been friendly places where one could enjoy a confidential, therapeutic discussion of one's financial embarrassments over a relaxed cup of coffee with a helpful counsellor, threaten to become like fortresses amid bedlam as the new DHSS regulations take effect.

The Thatcher government will always be remembered for the sleight of hand with which they have distorted the current reality of poverty. The unemployment figures, for example, can easily be reduced by drawing up regulations which force out-of-work youngsters into what the government calls training but what the youngsters call sweated labour. State benefits for the unemployed, the elderly, the sick and the disabled can be cut by rearranging the rules which govern them and then calling the whole thing by a different name.

So it comes to pass that what was once Supplementary Benefit is now Income Support; what was once a Single Payment is now a loan from the Social Fund. The intended effect, with time, is that many workers who depend on state benefits for their survival, will have much less to survive on.

Another effect — unintended but foreseeable — will probably be that violence against DHSS staff, already running at an alarming level, will get worse. If this happens, the government's response will be to call conferences where bureaucrats will gravely discuss the stresses which their underlings are subjected to; to fortify the offices even more; and to provide for stiffer punishment for those who. in their impoverished frustration, go for the staff, smash the windows, kick in the doors. . .

The government are hoping that charities will fill the gaps opened up by the new regulations. Some people may think this is taking Thatcher's version of Victorian morality too far; in any case what happens when the charities are unable to help? Will they too have to bolt down the furniture, install toughened glass, erect protective screens around their workers?

The loud protests which the poverty lobby launched against the new set-up was understandable, for benefit-dependent workers, at the lowest end of the poverty scale, need a cut in their payments like a hole in the wallet. In spite of their valuable work of research and indictment, the poverty lobby draw the wrong conclusion — that the workers' poverty is rooted in an inability to be employed and that it can be eliminated through higher state benefits.

Poverty afflicts the working class whether they are in work or out; it is an unavoidable consequence of the class ownership of the means of life. A working wage keeps a worker generally at the level of reproduction of their energy; not to be able to get a wage can mean falling below even that miserable standard.

This is the fundamental social condition which must be dealt with. Then the poverty lobby can stop pummelling the statistics — and the claimants can stop taking it out on the DHSS clerks.

Run out?

With the passing of time — with a widening waistline and narrowing achievements — Ian Botham has changed from everyone's Boys' Own hero into a rip-roaring public villain. Headlines no longer boast of his deeds with bat and ball on some sun-soaked cricket field; the preoccupation now is with his offensive behaviour in public places and fights in dressing rooms.

But of course Botham has always been what the media hacks love — a sporting character. Nicknamed Guy after the gorilla — he was always ready for pavilion japes like placing his hot spoon on some team mate's arm just after stirring his tea.

Most of his feats, which have been written into cricket history, have been inspired by Botham's all-consuming ambition always to be on the winning side. Now this sort of drive is among the most prized of personal attributes in a society which esteems nothing higher than a determination to get to the top no matter whose neck gets trampled on the way up. In industry, commerce and social standing the equivalents of Ian Botham receive respectful adulation while the rest are of little consequence.

Capitalism glorifies its heroes and heroines as examples to us all, as living proof that anyone who is an insignificant member of the working class has only themselves to blame for their situation. Of course the heroes and heroines sometimes misbehave — or rather behave in a way to be expected of someone under the constant stimulation of the media spotlight. But that need not be a disadvantage since it often serves to heighten public interest, sell more newspapers, push up the ratings and box office receipts.

It requires a super-powerful effort to resist these pressures — to act like an everyday worker while all the expectations of capitalism demand otherwise. That is why the entertainment and sporting business is littered with examples of the Ian Botham disease. the principal symptom of which is the realisation that headline-hogging behaviour has reached the depths of tedium.

This brings a pathetic conclusion to what set out as famously glorious. Botham's sacking by his cricket employers in Australia may have its repercussions in this country, for it is said that he is too disruptive an influence for any team to want to have him. Who would be to blame for this sorry end of the golden boy of English cricket? The man himself? Or the interests which depend on building up prima donnas in order to attack them for it?

50 Years Ago: Another Anti-Strike Bill (2021)

The 50 Years Ago column from the May 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Bill also provides for the families of men on strike to be reduced below the government’s own poverty line, at the moment £8.50 plus rent a week for a married couple. (…) The extra suffering this will cause should please employers like Lord Stokes who from their well-upholstered boardrooms have been complaining of strikers being featherbedded. Extreme poverty will once again become an important factor in weakening the workers’ side in strikes. How useful financial hardship amongst the strikers can be to the employer was well shown during the Post Office strike and the postmen would undoubtedly have had to give in earlier had this new Bill been in operation.

The government’s Social Security Bill is a vicious anti-working class measure which is intended to hurt the wives and children of workers in order to discourage strikes and force strikers back to work. Like the Industrial Relations Bill, it will strengthen the overall position of the employing class in its struggle with the working class over wages and conditions. For this reason the Socialist Party of Great Britain is opposed to this Bill.

But in doing so, we have no illusions about the role of governments in capitalist society. We do not really expect them to subsidise strikes against their masters, the capitalist class, and are not surprised that the present government is taking advantage of working class apathy and ignorance to cut back on some social reforms which, however marginally, favour the working class. This apathy and ignorance is partly the result of the failure of reformist parties like Labour and of the propaganda of the capitalist press. The old socialist saying that the best way to get or defend reforms (if that is what you want) is to build up a strong revolutionary Socialist movement remains true. That is our policy for dealing with the current Tory attacks on long-standing social reforms.

(Socialist Standard, May 1971)

These Foolish Things: Wage Slave (1996)

The Scavenger column from the April 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Wage Slave

“I went to my bank three days before Christmas expecting that about £170 had been paid into my account, but I found only a fiver had been put in . . . "The man (who does not wish to be named) claims he told the agency of the long-standing engagement (to attend his pub soccer team’s Christmas party).

When he failed to report for work, ASC invoked clause eight of the contract: “Should you fail to turn up for any assignment without giving reasonable notice . . . your remuneration will be reduced to £1 per day for any work carried out previously and not yet paid, irrespective of hours worked” (Guardian, 1 February).

Demonstrating power

Education and Employment Minister Eric Forth told the Commons that some of the [Newbury bypass] protesters had been refused benefits because their demonstrations meant they were not available for work. Daily Mail. 18 January.

Poverty

Nearly 1,000 families lost their homes each week last year, according to figures published yesterday by the Council of Mortgage lenders which showed repossessions rising again. Repossessions increased to 49,410 in 1995 from 49,210 in 1994—ending a four-year decline since they peaked at 75,540 in 1991. Guardian, 1 February.

Economics in Wonderland

Financial crisis is such a regular occurrence at Eurotunnel that it is hard to remember the company being in any other state . . . There is no reason Sir Alastair Morton and his crew should want a full financial reconstruction since it would mean recognising the underlying economic reality: that Eurotunnel equity has no value at all. Part of the function of a board of directors is to sustain at least some hope of some value for shareholders, even if this is at some indefinite point in the future. Charade this may be, but bankers have some interest in going along with it. They are already guaranteed every penny of money the project generates over and above its operating costs. . . .

Just trust the Market

Commercially, price wars are nearly always pointless . . . in petrol retailing it is questionable whether even the motorist gains . . . the petrol price war will create petrol deserts in large parts of rural and inner-city Britain as Esso. BP, Shell and the supermarkets battle it out and small retailers close. Independent, 18 January.

A pound of flesh

Gavin [Morrey], who quit work 18 months ago with chronic shoulder injuries, contacted the bank [Barclays] because he was unable to pay his £124-a-month mortgage. He gets just £80 a week disability allowance and his wife. Sue, earns £134 a week on a production line. The couple, who are supporting their 16-year-old student son Grant, were asked to list their weekly outgoings . . . [the Bank’s letter) read: “We appreciate sight of your income and expenditure details which give some indication of your financial position. We would have thought that sufficient economics could be made in respect of food and personal expenses to enable you to fulfil your contractual commitments” (News of the World, 31 December).

The Scavenger

Greasy Pole: All in what together? (2012)

The Greasy Pole column from the April 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

Such is the glut of material it is not necessary to drill too deeply into political history to excavate an impressive sample of pledges, slogans, phrases deposited by our leaders which they came to regret. For example during the devastating slump of the 1930s a few million unemployed who had returned from the war bitterly questioned the meaning of Lloyd George and his “Land Fit For Heroes”. In the 1960s there was Harold Macmillan dreamily talking of a time when a customarily struggling people “never had it so good”. Labour Prime Minister, James Callaghan never lived down “Crisis? What Crisis?” when he was asked, as he returned from an economic summit in the West Indies in 1979, about his plans to deal with British capitalism’s turmoil. The fact that he did not say this (it was no more than a reporters’ version of what he had said) did not lessen the impression of a flippant dismissal of a serious problem and led to the loss of Labour votes. And recently, as the present recession (of a kind widely assumed by the economic experts to be a thing of the past) rumbled into its stride, David Cameron attempted to rally us with the assurance that: “We are all in this together”.

Ancestry

What right has Cameron to speak to us in this way? Well, in this social system with its historically characteristic class structure there is all he needs to give him that right. His background is rich in antecedent; through his paternal grandmother he is a direct, if illegitimate, descendant of King William IV and, through tortuous lineage, a fifth cousin of the present queen Elizabeth. Apart from being blue-blooded, he is (possibly to his own relief) a son of a family with a long and lucrative history of high standing in banking and trade. His late father benefited from a family tradition of being a senior partner in one of London’s richest, most powerful stockbrokers. If this is not enough to secure his superior place in the social hierarchy, Cameron is married to a step-daughter of Viscountess Astor who, apart from being a descendant of Charles II was the owner and designer of an exclusive jewellery business and is now the CEO of a home furnishing design company. In other words, Cameron has all he needs to assert his place in the class structure of capitalism, which encourages him to lay down the laws governing our lives in the interests of his class. And which includes swamping us with repression and manipulation, at times denying the reality of it all with specious claims to have common interests with us. This is, put simply, another aspect of the class struggle.

Divided

David Cameron can be relied on to tell us every now and again that he is “passionate” about all sorts of plans, chances and prospects. So we might ask how he judges his government’s response to his widely publicised call for national unity to deal with the recession – as we are all in the mess together. There are many examples in opposition to this, of an emphasis on people being officially divided between hard workers and dole-scroungers, between genuine invalids and fraudulent incapacity benefit claimants. Some time ago we had to endure government spokespeople relating how “decent, hard-working” people can be seen at five o’clock in the morning trekking to work through dark and silent streets where, behind curtains, benefit fraudsters slept blissfully on. We heard about Boris Johnson complaining that in a sandwich bar he is often served by someone from abroad – because the English are too lazy to compete with diligent foreign workers for such jobs. And a particular victim of this kind of demonising has been, and is increasingly, the disabled.

Disabled

In this cause, the gutter media have joyfully joined the campaign to support the government propaganda that the benefits system is being bankrupted, publishing photographs of incapacity benefit claimants refereeing football games or running in races. This has stimulated an upsurge in discrimination – sometimes abuse or violence – against disabled people commonly assumed to be cheating for their benefits. Charities like Scope, Mencap, Leonard Cheshire, Royal National Institute for the Blind, report regularly receiving calls about this and believe it to be officially encouraged. The head of campaigns at the National Autistic Society has stated that The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) where Iain Duncan Smith is secretary “is certainly guilty of helping to drive this media narrative around benefits, portraying those who receive benefits as work-shy scroungers or abusing the system that’s really easy to cheat”. The Head of Policy at the Disability Alliance said his organisation is hearing of higher levels of verbal abuse: “It seems to be growing as a result of a misperception of much more widespread abuse of benefits than actually exists. That’s being fed by the DWP in their attempts to justify massive reductions in welfare expenditure.” (The intention is to reduce total Disabled Living Allowance payments by 20 per cent by 2015/6.)

So what does Cameron think about his call for unity being used to divide people? That catchphrase of his has passed with the others into a disreputable history, leaving us with two questions. What is the “it” which we are urged to be “in”? And do we want to be there with him? Do we want a society typified by people existing, in this country apart from elsewhere, in such peril that a cut in state benefit reduces them to desperation, needing to choose between buying food and heating their home? Are we impressed by politicians’ transparent efforts to justify this? There is a simple answer: we can do better and as a start we can expose the likes of Cameron and their insidious defence of the indefensible.

Ivan

After the Gold Rush (2012)

From the May 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

  Scandals abound in the private ‘employability and work-based training’ sector. The latest of these involves the company A4e, whose workers are up before the beak on fraud charges, much to the outrage of the self-righteous press, while the former proprietor Emma Harrison has walked away clutching millions. Just who is being defrauded here, and what exactly goes on in these companies?

Once upon a time unemployed people signed on at the Benefit Agency, which would administer their unemployment benefit payments, and then were sent to the Jobcentre, run by the Employment Agency, where they would look at rows of vacancies on cards and receive advice on CVs and applications from Jobcentre staff.

Around 2001, as part of my work with local charities, I attended a briefing by Jobcentre staff who explained with much chagrin that these two offices were to be merged, many of them put out of work, and much of the heavy lifting formerly done by trained staff now farmed out to regional call-centres using untrained workers on minimum wage following printed scripts. The unemployed, now termed ‘customers’, could look forward to a streamlined conveyer belt service that had neither the time nor the expertise to give them any worthwhile advice at all, while high-need users could expect to fall through the net altogether. This was the great Jobcentre Plus ‘rationalisation’ of 2002, in which Treasury money left the equation and the slack was expected to be taken up by the employment-oriented European Social Fund.

What none of us anticipated at that briefing was the longer term effects of this cost-cutting exercise by the Department of Work and Pensions. Just as companies who farmed out their IT requirements end up hiring ‘experts’ at vast contract rates, often to deliver trivially simple upgrades, so the DWP in trying to save money had created a vacuum of ‘employability support’ into which a blizzard of private companies rushed, hoping to cash in on the bonanza. Such was the unregulated confusion of this early gold rush for DWP and ESF funding that a good number of cowboy start-ups got in on the act, aiming to take the money and run. Almost anyone, it seemed, could pretend to be a college or training centre and pull down state cash for doing nothing. As each scam was exposed rules were tightened up, but the employment services industry has been rocked by successive waves of scandal ever since.

The initial swarm of gold-prospectors have mostly left the field, either bankrupted, busted or bullied out of the way by a few big players, whose national reach attracted ever larger DWP grants. Small charities were early casualties, as was the risible notion that small and local organisations were best-placed to find jobs for people in the local area. A few big corporations, mostly college-backed, mopped up the market and all the money while farming out the donkey work to these same local organisations who then had to deliver higher targets for less money than ever.

Contracts were awarded by the DWP or the ESF for starts on work-based training, backed by retention, and for job or qualification outcomes, all of which was to be exhaustively evidenced by signed documentation. Since most contractors had their own documentation systems, and few spent money on computerisation, this soon developed into a bureaucratic paper-based nightmare that meant workers spent more time ‘evidencing’ their work than actually doing it. Inevitably the cracks appeared, and workers increasingly had to ‘fiddle’ the paperwork to meet the requirements of nit-picking inspections. Failure to pass these inspections could mean funding being ‘clawed back’, and my not unusual experience was having to stay up all night forging hundreds of ‘attendance sheets’ for long-gone volunteers simply because funding requirements dictated full attendance and conscientious form-filling – in flagrant defiance of the practical realities of dealing with the long-term unemployed.

Workers though tried for the most part to avoid genuine fraud over job documentation, partly because of the heavy penalties but mainly because unlike the ruling class workers are not generally comfortable with criminality. But the competition for contracts being intense, the bids were always excessive, and thus the pressure to cheat was built in. Rarely could a job outcome simply be invented out of thin air, because the individual would have to sign off benefits. But other ‘target-buster’ methods could be employed. People were signed up as starts who already had guaranteed jobs to go to, creating an instant outcome. In cases where jobs had been obtained after the end-date of eligibility, dates could be massaged. Sometimes an employer would refuse to sign a job declaration even though it was for a genuine job, so these were liable to be forged. Where more than one funding provision was offered, people were daisy-chained from one to another, picking up duplicate funding on the way. Then as a bonus, if they got a job, each of the provisions could claim the same job, effectively doubling or tripling the outcome figures. Most notoriously, under instructions from senior management, workers would ‘traffic-light’ clients, giving most help and attention to ‘greens’ who were most likely to succeed, while largely ignoring the extensive needs of the ‘ambers’ and the virtually unemployable ‘reds’, thus defeating the whole point of such schemes and fully justifying the accusation that firms were being paid for jobs that people would have got in any case.

Unemployed people, it is fair to say, sometimes get something out of these schemes, either through volunteering for charities and getting some useful work experience, or by gaining a few low-level qualifications. While the principle is that the firm finds them work, in practice they usually find their own work, largely by their own efforts, with the added incentive of being hounded by the firm whose targets are their real focus. Where the schemes were voluntary or quasi-voluntary, relations were reasonably good-humoured and often constructive, but where they are compulsory, as in the Work Programme, staff and clients are polarised in a palpable class-war tension with frequent eruptions of anger and frustration. Those who most need help get the least, and swill round a never-ending gutter of government schemes delivering the same inadequate provision in the same inadequate way.

Hardly surprising that morale is pretty low among staff, faced with impossible monthly targets, short contracts, a management which couldn’t care less about the people involved, a penny-pinching lack of equipment or training and an endless sea of largely meaningless paperwork designed merely to keep up appearances. Workers who are caught cheating (i.e. doing their job) will be cold-shouldered by the firm and prosecuted by the state, the sacrificial lambs of an industry that is systemically fraudulent.

Who is being defrauded? Not the state, which gets what it wants, the appearance of action plus deniability, and is so cosy with contractors that it refuses Freedom of Information requests even to divulge the names of fraudulent companies (Private Eye, 6 April); not the private companies which coin it while passing on the labour and the risk to others. No, it’s the abused, under-paid and under-resourced staff who are being defrauded of their mostly well-meaning intentions and made to risk jail on behalf of their masters. It’s the unemployed who are being defrauded, mere pawns in the game, there to have their time wasted and their self-respect demolished. It’s workers everywhere who are being defrauded in the belief that the capitalist state cares about the unemployed, or the low-skilled, or the sick or the needy, when really the capitalist state spends extravagant sums simply to maintain that appearance. Private investors quietly make off with criminally record sums while workers just get the criminal records. All in all, it’s the sort of work-based experience that should open a lot of eyes and dispel a lot of illusions. If capitalism were a worker, it would get the sack in no time.

‘Ronnie Biggs’