The Death of the Welfare State (1996)

From the July 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Supporters of capitalism have always denied the need for a fundamental change on the grounds that the system can take care of the 
poor through state help and welfare, now the welfare state, the
 sacred cow of reformists everywhere, is being attacked 
from every direction

Labour and the Tories have, it seems, moved closer together than ever with respect to their attitudes to the welfare state. On 8 May the Guardian reported Labour’s Chris Smith, shadow social security secretary, saying:

"Surely it is time to get away from the sterile battle lines of public and private. . . The principle must surely be that the state acts as guarantor of all provision, the regulator of all provision and the administrator of some. ”

How they intend to guarantee those provisions that they don’t provide, which will presumably have to be provided by individuals for themselves through insurance, is not made clear; in fact not a lot is made clear. What is crystal clear, though, is that Labour has abandoned its commitment to the welfare state along with Clause Four; the to-and-fro of reform and counter-reform between the major parties, such as it was, is over.

This to-and-fro was never, of course, a simple external relation between the parties but has been just as much a part of their internal make-up since the Second World War. Labour introduced the NHS but also introduced prescription charges and charges for dental and optical treatment; the Tories under Macmillan expanded the council house building programme; the current cause of much argument and agonising within Labour—child benefit—was introduced by the Tories in 1945 before Labour took office that same year. The case of child benefit is perhaps particularly interesting and informative, given the possibility of the next Labour government abolishing it for 16-18 year olds.

Family Allowance, the immediate forerunner of child benefit, was agreed in principle in 1943 by the wartime coalition government, and introduced by the Conservative government of May-July 1945, gaining the royal assent on 16 June 1945. The Labour movement was split on the issue, with many trade unions opposed to this reform—but why? Wasn't it to benefit working-class families? In fact, it wasn’t, anything but, the capitalist establishment wanted to introduce this reform because they felt that capitalism in the UK couldn’t afford not to. In 1940, Eleanor Rathbone MP, chair of the Family Endowment Society, argued in favour of the introduction of Family Allowance, saying that a “man with a wife and family is much less likely to act (revolutionarily) than one who has given society no such hostage”. Family Allowance was to be an incentive for working-class men to have dependent families—which could then be effectively held hostage by the state should he question capitalist authority. The ruling class also favoured the introduction of this “benefit" on a more basic level; the unions, hardly revolutionary' themselves, would have been less inclined to oppose it otherwise. The Tory MP L.S. Amery, again arguing in favour of this reform (in the Times, 14 January' 1941), said that Family Allowance would “afford a logical basis upon which a stand could be made against all further wage increases”. It was thus seen as a method of keeping wage bills down.

Who benefits?

If Labour now want to abolish child benefit for 16-18 year olds, is it in order to correct past mistakes, to somehow pass on a real benefit to working people after all? No chance. While they haven’t said exactly what they would spend the money on, they have gestured vaguely in the direction of education; but whose education would it be spent on? Many working-class families have, over the years, come to rely on child benefit, particularly to help support children in further education. If child benefit is abolished for precisely those of the age to go into further education, how will the less well off working-class families be able to afford to keep them in education? The simple answer is, they won’t. The only options for many will be for 16 and 17 year olds to try for places in the already over-subscribed YTS system (adding further to the already massive pool of cheap labour for bosses), to directly enter the employment market with little or no chance of a job and no benefits, or to leave home and beg on the streets. What a marvellous range of choice capitalism offers.

There is another option of course, at least for those families with at least one wage-earner—to fight the employers for higher wages to compensate for the money lost. But if this was thought even vaguely likely, Labour would have been more reluctant to have considered this particular cut. The last thing they want is to encourage class conflict, particularly under their own administration; but the relative weakness of the trade union movement at the present time makes an immediate escalation of class struggle unlikely.. this doesn’t mean that it won’t happen; workers may find themselves forced to fight by sheer material circumstances. But the point is that the ruling class, at least in the West, is being forced to take back reforms that have been previously granted and supposedly reformist parties are being forced to institute and administer the process.

On the one hand, capital feels it can no longer afford reforms, on the other, it also feels that it must take past reforms away and to bolster itself at the direct expense of the working class because of the relative weakness of the trade union movement. This is happening right across the west, with the temporary' exception of France where the government keeps trying to cut back on the welfare state but where workers’ solidarity has so far forced them to back down. They will keep trying, though, because French capital is no more isolated or “sovereign” than anywhere else. In other parts of the world, such as the Far East, home of what western capitalists habitually refer to, with some envy, as “tiger” (“dynamic market”—note the use of this term in labour’s new Clause 4) economies, there have often never been any reforms, even basic democratic ones, to roll back, while countries such as Vietnam refer to themselves as socialist while they introduce some of the most vicious, exploitative capitalist economic structures in the world. Global capitalism is precisely that; nobody is insulated from pressures on profits, which under capitalism is where sovereignty always really lies.

The to-and-fro of reform and anti-reform has always been the pattern to some extent, but things appear to have reached a state where reform has effectively lost its impossible fight. Reformist parties such as Labour have almost entirely capitulated; they were never going to introduce socialism anyway, having only ever been at most state capitalist parties, but now they have given up entirely. A never-ending pissing into the face of a gale has left them wet and weary and has exhausted what emancipatory desire they might once have had. All their desires now are masturbatory and egotistical, focused on nothing more than the plaudits of high office that mask a basic sterility.

There are few more frightening, deadly or apt symbols of the failure of reformism than the world-wide rise of tuberculosis. The steady and virtually inevitable erosion of welfare reforms has caused the number of cases of TB to rise steadily in the west over the last few years after most people had thought it had been effectively eradicated. In other parts of the world, of course, it had never gone away in the first place. A recent article on TB in the Guardian Weekend (27 April) put this point quite succinctly. In the 1970s there was a general optimism in the west that TB was effectively gone for ever, thanks to vaccine research and improved living conditions. But only in the west:

“Admittedly, no one country ever wiped it out completely. And in the third world, things remained not much better than they hail always been. But, hell, they were free to buy our superdrugs weren't they? ”

Well, no, they weren’t. They couldn’t afford them. Profits, as ever, came first. As they do with HIV research, even while HIV is forming what the same article designated a “devil’s alliance” with TB, not that it’s on the increase again in west. Who is most at risk from TB? The poorest and weakest members of society of course, the elderly homeless and immigrants shoved into cramped and poverty-stricken living conditions. But as the welfare state is dismantled, it seems highly likely that TB will spread further, and it will spread first through the poorer sections of the working class. As the Guardian article

again puts it:

". . .  tuberculosis is universally recognised as the disease of poverty. And as such, it acts as a chillingly efficient barometer of the human physical condition. Today, that barometer has swung right off the scale throughout the third world, and at the same time it is beginning to rise in Britain and other advanced capitalist states. ”

Reformism has failed and how the reformist project is collapsing; as it does so, evils we thought were wiped out or at least under control, are coming back with increasing vengeance. TB is not just a disease, in the contemporary world it’s also a symptom of the failure of reformism within capitalism.

In the film Apocalypse Now, Captain Willard says of American hypocrisy in war: “We cut them in half with a machine gun and we give them a band-aid.” Reformism was always a similarly inadequate response to capitalism’s violence in the name of profit, trying to patch up the symptoms of the disease that capitalism itself is. Now, though, the ruling class can’t even afford to keep the first aid kit stocked up. It’s high time the rest of us realised the necessity of taking on and eradicating the disease itself.

Jonathan Clay

Sting in the Tail: Warning to our readers (1995)

The Sting in the Tail column from the June 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Warning to our readers

Shock horror! A spate of muggings in what was once ‘appy ‘ampstead has resulted in some very valuable Rolex watches being nicked.

Several of the well-heeled fraternity including one of Michael Heseltine’s daughters and ex-model Jilly Johnson have had their prized timepieces snatched from their persons. Some of the watches cost as much as £20,000 and one is described as being “diamond encrusted' (Guardian, 29 April.)

In a cunning and very well publicised attempt to surprise the muggers, decoy policemen wearing fake designer clothes are parading around Hampstead sporting imitation Rolex watches provided by the company which is, naturally, anxious to see that its customers are not discouraged from buying the real thing.

So our warning to all our readers is: do not go up to Hampstead flaunting your £20,000 Rolex as you could easily be mistaken for a policeman.

Somebody tell them

What happens if you put a lot of predatory fish, large and small, into a fish tank and leave them to get on with it? That’s easy, the little fish get gobbled-up by the big ‘uns.

This is what has happened in Britain’s passenger bus industry since it was deregulated in 1985. The government’s declared aim was to end “public monopolies” run by municipal authorities and “open up the industry to competition”.

For a while, this is what happened as lots of new operators emerged to compete with privatised ex-municipal bus companies for a share of the lucrative market.

But since then hundreds of the smaller companies have been taken over or forced out of business by biggies like Stagecoach or Badgerline, and the end result will be a few big companies each aiming for the legal maximum of 25 percent of the market.

The government and its think-tank advisers completely failed to foresee the so-predictable consequences of their policy, but shouldn’t capitalism’s loudest advocates at least understand how the bloody system works?

Natural unemployment?

Socialists are used to dealing with well-paid apologists for capitalism’s shortcomings. Politicians who tell us that it is natural to be aggressive and acquisitive. Priests who tell us that it is natural to have poverty amidst plenty.

Now we have another piece of “natural” nonsense. The economic journalist Evan Davis in the Independent (20 April) wrote a column entitled “How Much Unemployment Comes Naturally?”. He reviewed various “expert” opinion on what the natural figure for unemployment might be. One of these groups of experts, the Centre for Economic Policy Research, comes up with a figure of 6.4 percent. He favours a figure “of about 5 or 6 percent”; this is based on comparing the commercial property market with the labour market.

“There are significant ‘hiring and firing ’ costs in both—so companies usually don’t hire property by the day any more than they hire labour by the day. Well, I am told by those who work in it that a typical period in that market might see about 6 percent of buildings unemployed, or vacant. ”

One pleasing aspect about the establishment of socialism is that such experts as the CEPR and economic journalists will be freed from their arduous research and allowed to pursue some useful occupation.

Poverty and TB

The British Medical Journal recently carried a report that the incidence of tuberculosis is rising. In the last five years there has been a 12 percent increase.

“Anyone can catch tuberculosis but it is more likely to spread from person to person in overcrowded conditions and individuals who are badly nourished or otherwise in poor health are less liable to fight off the infection, ” says the British Medical Association. Dr John Moore-Gillon and Dr Malcolm Law of St. Bartholomew's Hospital, London, have now discovered that TB is 10 times more common in the poorer tenth of the population than the richest tenth " (Herald, 13 April.)

The increase of unemployment and homelessness has led to an increase of this poverty-related illness. Just another example of the needless suffering of a section of the working class because capitalism is more concerned with profits than public health.

Who are the immigrants?

The Observer (30 April) under the headline “Jospin hopes to recruit Le Pen’s rag-tag army” reported that the so-called Socialist Party in France were eager to get some of the votes cast in the first ballot for the National Front candidate.

“Pierre Buccelato, 60, is one such voter. A former builder who found himself among France’s three million unemployed when recession struck, he now sells flowers on the edge of a sprawling estate . . . Railing against the foreigners who he claims are awarded council flats ahead of ‘French people ’ he said he once voted for Mitterand but now agrees with Jean-Marie Pen’s National Front. ‘Immigration is why we have no work. Get rid of the immigrants and we’ll get our jobs back,’ he insisted, pausing to admit that he himself was an Italian immigrant who had arrived in France in 1957.”

All workers must seek wages wherever they can. Blaming “foreign” workers for unemployment is stupid. In the world recession of the 1930s there was hardly any immigration to France but there was high unemployment. As long as workers support politicians like Le Pen, Chirac or Jospin capitalism will continue, with all its problems.

“Something Worse Than War” (1944)

From the November 1944 issue of the Socialist Standard

“From 1939 to 1942 the deaths from tuberculosis in Great Britain were greater in number than the total killed in the first four years of the war (United Kingdom Forces).”

“During 1942 the deaths from tuberculosis were three times as many as for factory, mining and road accidents combined.”

This very revealing information we quote from the July 1944 issue of the Monthly Journal of the A.E.U. The accompanying figures were as follows :—

Thus we see the damage to human life that has been wrought by this silent killer in the years that our senses have been deafened by the din of war. But however disturbing these statistics may be, they do not give the complete picture. The evidence that 123.000 and more people succumbed to this disease from 1939 to 1942 makes it quite clear that there are many more living sufferers from the disease. Of this we can be certain, since a large number of people are living and working in similar conditions. The medical men emphatically declare that tuberculosis is an acquired, not an inherited disease. We accept their conclusion, but would add that while it may not be possible to inherit tuberculosis by birth, we note the inheritance of the living and working conditions in which tuberculosis is acquired. From the standpoint of biology, tuberculosis does not “run in families,” but by fact of the economic circumstances of the mass of wage slaves, the disease does run very largely in one big family—that of the working class.

As quoted earlier, the Monthly Journal of the A.E.U. compares the deaths from tuberculosis in 1942 with the figures of fatal accidents from factories, mines and roads for the same year. In spite of the ratio of three to one, we say without hesitation that tuberculosis is no accident! At this point it is interesting to take cognisance of a paragraph dealing with this matter from “The Household Physician” J. M’Gregor-Robertson, revised by David M’Kail, Vol. I., p. 212 (Gresham Pub. Co.) :—

“If all consumptive patients were to expectorate only into special utensils regularly disinfected, and were segregated when helpless and most infectious; if bovine tuberculosis were stamped out or if only sterilised milk were used, and all tuberculous meat and pork were destroyed; if authorities were to insist on a good standard of housing, air space, general hygiene, and to secure the abolition of back lands, ill-lit and ill-ventilated tenements, workshops, and factories, this disease and many others might soon become as extinct as the dodo.”

It is not necessary to point out that the problems of housing, air space, hygiene, back lands and unhealthy tenements, workshops and factories are problems with which the working class are faced. These are our inheritance.

The master class will see to it that not too many wage slaves fall to tuberculosis, otherwise their own profits will be jeopardised. Apparently a mere hundred thousand is not too many. In the political field, therefore, the Socialist Party asks workers to view the state of affairs with determination—determination to abolish a mode of living in which the only consideration for human welfare is that workers shall be able to produce a profit for their masters. And in its place to establish a system of society wherein will obtain equal relationship between every man and woman, and accordingly, the absence of a class whose privileged position demands the exploitation of a working class. For out of such exploitation emanates the poverty, insecurity, squalor and disease of which tuberculosis is but one example.

F. T. Burvill.