The real state we’re in: a response to the iPaper’s jobs fair propaganda (2026)

From the July 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Vicky Spratt’s glazing dispatch from the Youth Guarantee Jobs Fair at Boxpark Camden reads like a press release from the Department for Work and Pensions (In Camden, I saw the antidote to Gen Z’s endless job rejections). She describes a ‘buzzing’ event where recruiters from Arsenal Football Club to the NHS handed out chocolate bars and baseball caps to smiling young jobseekers. Secretary of State Pat McFadden who was also present waxes lyrical about ‘welfare reform’ that puts ‘work and opportunity at its heart’. It is, by her account, ‘the antidote to Gen Z’s endless job rejections’.

I was there too. And I saw something very different.

I am not a young person. I am in my late 40s, a former events manager who once worked across Europe (bringing revenue into the UK economy), until Brexit devastated the industry I loved. My case manager at the DWP, aware of my age and experience, sent me to this ‘youth’ jobs fair anyway. What I witnessed was not an antidote. It was a symptom.

The fiasco of the ‘Fair’

Let us begin with the basics of event management, a profession I practised for years before this government destroyed my livelihood. A jobs fair is, at minimum, a professional event requiring adequate space, accessibility, and basic dignity for attendees. Boxpark Camden, a street food market, offered none of these.

The DWP, symptomatic of its ‘The Thick Of It’ style corporate culture, decided to go cheap and secure the food hall’s grubby, rickety beer hall tables and bench seating on the second and third levels. There was no space to move. If you used a wheelchair, crutches, or had any mobility impairment, you could not have navigated the space at all. Access was via narrow staircases only. There were no accessible toilets. The noise was overwhelming, a cacophony that made conversation, let alone professional networking, nearly impossible. The food vendors I met weren’t very happy that their tables were occupied all day by companies (and consuming outside food) and the place packed with unemployed youth.

My case manager knows I have ASD and auditory processing difficulties so added a note on my file to say that a quiet space is required for my meetings. This environment was not merely unsuitable; it was actively hostile. I travelled over an hour and a half on two buses to reach it, despite my job coach’s insistence that the journey was shorter. DWP are notorious for this sort of support for disabled jobseekers: sending us to inaccessible, sensory-overloading spaces in the name of ‘opportunity’. I suppose my job coach has quotas to meet lest he end up back in the electronic dole queue behind me.

For a former event manager, the incompetence was staggering. The UK events industry, worth £68.7 billion in 2024, has been battered by Brexit with 82 percent of industry respondents reporting that leaving the EU negatively affected their business, and 67 percent experiencing significant or minor losses.

The damage is documented and severe. A Stanford study estimates that by 2025, Brexit had reduced UK GDP by 6-8 percent, investment by 12-18 percent, and employment by 3-4 percent. The events sector saw losses of up to £1 million for individual companies. A major exhibition that drew 45,000 visitors annually moved from London to Barcelona. UK musicians have seen a 27 percent decline in small and medium-sized EU festival bookings, with 95 percent of affected artists experiencing decreased earnings.

The government’s own policies have helped hollow out a sector that once employed people like me. And yet when the DWP needs to organise an event, this is the best it can manage: a chaotic scramble in a food court which they probably got for free on a mid-week day in Camden.

Vicky Spratt writes warmly of hospitality roles ‘with training,’ care work, and paid experience on offer at this ramshackle event. What she does not interrogate is the quality of these jobs.

I spoke to the recruiters. Many of the ‘opportunities’ were barely really jobs at all, just the dregs of the labour market. Dishwashing in basement hotel kitchens. Zero-hour contracts in care. Jobs with such high turnover that employers attend fairs like this not out of social responsibility, but to factory farm disenfranchised young people and process them through. The symptom of an economy that has failed to provide meaningful work.

This is the ‘Youth Guarantee’ in practice: an £823 million scheme that offers employers £3,000 per hire, incentivising them to cycle through the cheapest possible labour rather than invest in genuine skills development. McFadden praises Marks & Spencer for creating 1,000 ‘training roles.’ He does not say what those roles pay, how long they last, or whether they lead anywhere. The structure of the scheme itself, paying employers to take on the long-term unemployed, creates a perverse incentive to treat young workers as subsidised, disposable inputs rather than human beings with futures.

Pat McFadden continues his spiel that ‘the narrative that says young people are shirkers and snowflakes … is wrong’. This is clever positioning. Rejecting the most overtly cruel rhetoric, he presents himself as the compassionate reformer and saviour. Actual policy direction reveals the same old coercion dressed in snake oil language.

McFadden describes hiring incentives and work experience placements as ‘welfare reform.’ He says the ‘best way into welfare reform’ is to ‘put work and opportunity at its heart’. This is not reform. This is the ideological enforcement of wage labour as the only legitimate form of existence.

But the Labour Party and the unions that founded it have always been occupied in trying to solve wages problems within capitalism, never questioning capitalism itself. The result? The problems multiply and become more complex and the armies of ‘solvers’ become larger and larger. There is not the slightest prospect that these people will solve the problems, because it is the very nature of wage-labour itself that causes the problems in the first place.

McFadden’s reform talks of cliff edges where people lose housing benefit if they enter work but his solution is not to question why housing should be contingent on employment at all. He speaks of ‘talking to people and working out how the government can help them to change their lives’ but the only change on offer is insertion into the labour market, on capital’s terms, at wages that do not cover the cost of living.

The right exam question, as McFadden puts it, is not how to assess what benefits people are entitled to. It is whether a system that forces millions to sell their labour power to survive while a tiny minority accumulates wealth from their subsequent labour is worth preserving at all.

Abolition of work

The young people Spratt interviews are not ‘snowflakes’. They are victims of a system that demands their labour while offering them precarity in return. Amina, the law graduate relying on Universal Credit who told the iPaper that ‘nobody replies’ to her applications, is not failing the labour market. The labour market is failing her. Brendan, who calls online applications a ‘black hole,’ is not lazy. He is alienated from a process that treats him as an input rather than a person.

The ‘black hole’ Brendan describes is not a glitch in the system. It is the system functioning as designed. Capitalism requires a reserve army of the unemployed applying for dozens, hundreds of jobs, hearing nothing back, to keep wages low and workers desperate. The DWP’s job fairs, with their chocolate bars and branded pens, are not an alternative to the black hole, they are it. To discipline the unemployed, making them visible, countable, and grateful for whatever scraps are offered

A genuine alternative would begin with the recognition that work as currently organised, serves capital not human need. What would society look like where housing, healthcare, education, or sustenance were not dependent on employment? Where the means of production were collectively owned and managed? Where the purpose of economic activity was the satisfaction of human needs rather than the accumulation of profit?

McFadden will never ask these questions. The Labour Party, committed to managing capitalism rather than transcending it, cannot ask them. But over a million young people classed as NEET, the highest figure since the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, are to be herded through food courts and told that their problem is a lack of ‘opportunity’.

What Spratt won’t ask

Spratt’s article is not dishonest, but it is narrow. She does not ask why a jobs fair for young people was sending an experienced professional approaching her 40s to a youth event. She does not ask why the DWP chose a filthy Camden street food market over an accessible conference venue. She does not ask why the jobs on offer weren’t skilled careers but, overwhelmingly, low-wage, high-turnover positions where you’ll still be visiting food banks rather than skilled careers. She does not ask why a law graduate is on Universal Credit after six months of silence from employers. She does not ask why the ‘solution’ to youth unemployment is always more work, never less capitalism.

Spratt does not ask Pat McFadden whether the welfare system he oversees is designed to support people or to discipline them. Whether ‘work and opportunity at its heart’ is a promise or a threat.

In the end, McFadden’s ‘welfare reform’ is nothing more than an attempt to make wage-working seem more palatable, to dress coercion in the language of opportunity.

A.T.

So They Say: Fair Play in War (1976)

The So They Say Column from the July 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

Fair Play in War

A certain mental agility, not to say an outright contortion of sanity, is part of the stock-in-trade which our “superiors” find necessary to employ in order to explain (away) the irritatingly persistent difficulties which arise from the private-property system and what they intend to do about them. We say agility, because that is what it takes to face several directions at one time. The progress of Mr. Jimmy Carter in the US primary elections for example, is surely evidence enough that the days of the two-faced politician are over: now it is essential for them to display at least three or four.

However, fleet footwork is not the sole preserve of the professional shadow boxers; the affliction spreads further afield. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute produced a recent report — Medical Protection Against Chemical Warfare Agents — dealing with nerve gases. We put aside for the moment the fundamental flaw in its viewing “protection against” as of greater importance than the reasons for the existence and development of killer gas. The Institute has been investigating “a non-woven synthetic textile, coated on the outside with a repellant, and has a layer of activated charcoal on the inside” which may offer protection. Such treated material could be used in “gas masks and combat jackets.” They acknowledge some drawbacks.

Even if some of the new drugs could be incorporated into military auto-injectors [protective clothing], all that can realistically be said of the new methods of treatment is that they will provide more time than is available with the existing treatment to move poisoned individuals to medical facilities. While this is a valuable step forward, in times of war, it is unlikely that medical facilities would be able to cope with the vast number of casualties.

Daily Telegraph 5th June 76

Capitalism turning the knife in the wound; insufficient medical facilities on one side struggling to cope with the over-efficient work of other “medical facilities” who have been developing the gas. However the monster has its scientific counter-balance, the problem being

Clothing capable of giving full bodily protection to the skin and to the respiratory system, is so cumbersome that soldiers wearing it would be brought to the point of military uselessness.

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute seem to be waiting for the day when “our boys” in the improved carbon jackets can withstand nerve gas for long enough to become militarily useful. This is what they appear to project but these “peace artists” paint a gloomy picture. The answer to the techniques of killing does not lie in double, or triple-think, but in the abolition of the social system which produces war. That is a solution within the realms of possibility.

Divide & Rule

Five members of the Felixstowe Conservative Association face expulsion from their local Conservative club because they campaigned for an Independent Labour candidate at the local elections in May. Their story is that they wanted to divide the Labour vote, allowing a Conservative candidate to top the poll in a previous Labour stronghold. Although the plan succeeded, their local treasurer was not impressed, “as far as we’re concerned they’ve worked for the opposition”. However the five are unrepentant:

We’ve succeeded in getting a Conservative elected in Labour’s safest ward in the only way that it could be done . . . and believe there was the strongest justification for what we did.

Daily Telegraph, 1st June 76

No doubt they all threw up their hands in horror and shouted “Cheat!” with the rest of their cronies some days later when Labour MPs broke “pairs” and entered the lobby to avoid a government defeat in the Commons.

Virtue of Necessity

Disquiet is growing among both teachers and students over the contradictions which face them when trying to apply a “text-book” analysis to capitalism in the expectation of a logical answer. On the one hand there are student teachers who are occupying their colleges, or marching, in protest against the likely failure of an estimated 15,000 of them to find teaching jobs. Against this there is the President of the Association of Head Teachers (Scotland) referring to “overlarge classes” and concluding: “We need these extra (not “surplus”) teachers.”

On the other hand there will be, according to figures given at the annual conference of the National Association of Head Teachers, the likelihood of 250,000 school leavers without jobs this summer, while the Lord Privy Seal, among other notable onlookers, is calling for “more sheer hard work before we are anywhere near out of the wood” in the Times of 10th June. The contradictions have encouraged the self- styled experts to exhibit some of their “departmental” reasoning in the letter columns. The President of the National Union of Students writing to the Daily Telegraph on 5th June argued that the government had “a golden opportunity to improve the pupil-teacher ratio.”

The Government has already spent £50 million training this year’s jobless student teachers for the dole queue. How can our economy benefit from miscalculation and wastage of human resources on such a massive scale?

“Our economy” and “wastage of human resources” gives away the extent of the NUS’s ‘“revolutionary leanings.” These refrains are music to the ears of the ruling class — it is only the tempo upon which they disagree. However the difficulty may be overcome according to the Headmaster at University College School, London. Unemployed teachers and unemployed school leavers? Apply a little thought and you come up with the following:

Here, surely, is a great opportunity for unemployed teachers to set an example giving themselves experience of the kind of work which many of their future pupils will have to do. Industries, businesses, hospitals, hotels, schools and institutions of one kind or another ail have vacancies for what is mis-termed “menial employment” . . . If unemployed teachers give a lead showing that a job well done, however “menial” can be rewarding and satisfying then the unemployed school leaver might be inspired to follow.

Times 10th June 76

We had a fancy that the man of learning may have been glancing through “The Charge of the Light Brigade” shortly before penning his letter, but there is a difference. He sees the officers turning home before long in order to continue the good work. Having gained an experience of “menial” jobs, he argues, “in the long run they would be much better teachers.” And what of the others? The school leavers who were “inspired to follow.” Ah yes, with luck wage slaves also — but that is what capitalist education is about.

Dear Sir

Reinforcing this last point was the response to the new GCE examination in the “business use of English.” The Managing Director of Adpower Ltd., a “specialist staff consultancy,” had some pertinent observations to make.

Many (school leavers) are unable to get a job in the professions or in industry because they are incapable of filling in a job application form (even ours which are deliberately kept simple) . . . College leavers have simply not been prepared for the next stage in their lives — getting a job. If this new GCE examination lives up to its expectation of training young hopefuls how to speak and write commercial English, then the Associated Examining Board must surely have the backing of everyone in commerce.

Times 10th June 76

Dear Capital, Assuring you of our best attention at all times the “young hopefuls” remain therefore your most obedient servants, etc. etc.

Alan D'Arcy

The Politicians and the crisis: Part 1 (1977)

From the July 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

On Sunday May 8th, in London the seven-nation conference of heads of state ended. Present with their aides were the Prime Ministers of Canada, Italy, Japan, UK, the Presidents of USA and France, and the Chancellor of West Germany; and on the final day Roy Jenkins in his capacity as President of the EEC.

The Conference was the latest of a series of similar conferences to appraise and look for solutions to the very real and increasingly dangerous problems facing the West European industrial countries, North America and Japan, and the rest of the avowedly capitalist world, i.e. Australasia. Latin America and so on, plus and by no means least the primary producing countries of the “Third World”, who are themselves at various stages of industrialization.

The problems discussed were primarily the world trade recession, with its unemployment. particularly amongst the young, inflation, energy, imbalance in international payments, the expected $45,000 million surplus of the oil-producing countries grouped in OPEC, the debts of the developing (non-oil producing) states, the “necessary” increase in nuclear energy (and its attendant dangers, political and military), “aid” to developing countries in which the Eastern (Soviet) bloc trade organization Comecon was urged to follow suit.

Carter, the US President, also raised the question of illegalities which had hitherto been condoned in certain banking, multi-national business and political circles. (The former Japanese Prime Minister, Mr. Tanaka, in relation to bribes from the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation was very involved.) This latter matter was not mentioned in the final declaration of “7 Pledges” to revitalize capitalism’s ailing economies, possibly because although not unimportant, it was regarded as peripheral to the major problems. To raise it officially would have also meant an explicit reference to companies and individuals. But does the conference have any significance for the working class of the world?

It can be safely said that modern society rarely appears to have stability for more than about two consecutive fortnights at a time, and that countless conferences and meetings have come and gone. Like many things it is all relative . . . and yet the newspaper headlines must at least have indicated something of magnitude — e.g. “7 Pledges to stop chaos” (Daily Telegraph, 9th May) and the politicians’ view on what could happen if these problems are not solved, must mean something. Put it this way: Carter, Callaghan and the rest wish to present as good a face as possible on the existing system whether they choose to call it capitalism, the “mixed economy”, a “free market”, a “social market” economy, the “free world” (i.e. capitalism with some sort of parliamentary democracy), partly because they are obliged to continue with it and also perhaps because they like the trappings of political power. As Carter said at the end of the conference: “We have to remember that making decisions, even unanimously, is not a guarantee that our decisions will be consummated. In many ways our own reputations are at stake.” As an article in the Daily Telegraph on Friday 6th May (the day before the beginning of the heads-of-state meeting) under the heading “Outlook for the World Summit — Hidden Threats to the World Economy” stated in its opening paragraph:

Chancellor Schmidt probably expressed the inner thoughts of all the European leaders when he said on Wednesday that he was looking to the London summit this weekend, mainly to bolster confidence. By this he meant the leaders' self-confidence and their electorates’ confidence in them, both of which are indeed at a low ebb.

Why this dual lack of confidence then? Because the politicians always aim to convince themselves and in turn the electorate that the capitalist system has found a way of stabilizing itself, and that despite its many imperfections it could at least avoid a catastrophe of the 1930s’ slump dimensions. They imagined that with their versions of Keynesian economics they had eradicated the deeper troughs of the business cycle.

However, from the mid-sixties onwards their policies have been demonstrated to be futile and unsound. It has been a gradual process, this dawning on the part of capitalism’s politicians.

Perhaps more to the point, among their advisors in the corridors of power, the higher echelons of the Civil Service, this bewilderment was exemplified in an article entitled “Whitehall at its wits’ end” (Sunday Telegraph, 24th April):

‘Everyone is baffled’ confesses one Permanent Secretary. “The old levers just don’t do the trick any more. We’re living in a world we didn’t make and don’t understand’. The Treasury has according to one senior Labour Minister (unnamed) ‘a very marked loss of confidence’, which reveals itself ‘to the discerning eye’ by the presence of competing economic ideologies. Before the Treasury served up only the pure milk of Keynesianism; now Keynes and Friedman are both on offer.

Graham Turner, the author of the article, states that “Whitehall is at its wits’ end . . . like the rest of us — they have not the faintest idea where Britain is going”.

The British politicians, their advisors and their counterparts in other countries may not know where the British and world economies are heading, but they do know, from personal experience and from the reading of history, where the 1930s’ crisis led.

The fact that they spoke at the Summit conference as candidly as they did demonstrates the seriousness of capitalism’s present difficulties.

The Japanese Prime Minister said “the world economic situation was now as serious as that of the early 1930s when leading industrial nations failed to act in time to prevent a slide into the 1939-45 war. History should not be allowed to repeat itself. Western nations had to co-operate more energetically in tackling economic problems” (Sunday Telegraph, 8th May).

He also recalled the fiasco of the 1933 London Economic Conference when no agreement was reached and a communique not even issued. “The difficulties today are greater and are compounded by new problems”.

The French President, Giscard d’Estaing. recalled that the ending of the 1977 conference coincided with the anniversary of the end of the 1939-45 war! “Sombre and pessimistic pictures were sometimes drawn of the present state of the world, but the cooperation at such conferences make it possible to avoid the mistakes [!] that helped to bring on that war.”

Helmut Schmidt of West Germany spoke on similar lines and “thought that they had avoided the results of complete selfishness” — by avoiding the “traps of the 1930’s.” President Carter like the other heads of state was concerned that decisions reached should not be merely pious, but recognized that making decisions and implementing them was not one and the same thing. "Sometimes heads of State tend to over-emphasize their own importance,” he said.

Callaghan considered that continuing unemployment carried political risks, not merely by the replacement of one party by another (naturally he does not want to lose his job) in Parliament — but that political democracy could be threatened. He is obviously concerned regarding the growth of the National Front, with racialism as the main plank of its support, and it is obvious there is a parallel here with the Nazis’ anti-semitism, which was copied in this country by the pre-war British Union of Fascists (although in recent years Sir Oswald Mosley has tried to obscure his organization’s former position on this subject).

It would seem inconceivable that the British working class could en masse support an organization tainted with fascism. Some of NF’s leaders were given to dressing up in Nazi-style uniforms before the organization was formed, and their arguments for economic nationalism — “self-sufficiency” — were advocated by the Nazis. However, it seemed improbable at the time that the Nazis would make much headway.

It can be justifiably argued that Britain in the 1970s, even with inflation and high unemployment is not the same as Germany in the early 1930s at the height of the depression with 6 million unemployed and the dire poverty it meant. However, in spite of the lower percentage of unemployed compared with that period and the lesser relative hardship of today’s unemployed, there is apathy and cynicism to politics and politicians generally, which though understandable is far from healthy — and also a good deal of resentment on the part of some of the young. This is why the established politicians are concerned wondering whether, if the crisis continues irrespective of the party in power, some of the youngsters might transfer their violent support from football teams to organizations like National Front. After all most of the workers of today know little of the 1930s; they make comparisons within this period, and as to whether the politicians’ promises and policies ring true. Over 400,000 of the present unemployed in Britain are in the 16-to-25 age group. In the rest of Western Europe the percentage is a little lower, and in the USA it is higher than in this country.

The major parties of British capitalism are discredited and the growth of the National Front directly arises from this. It is a particular indictment of Labour-style reformism and its inability to deal with capitalism’s problems, heightened as they are in times of crises.

Frank Simkins

(To be continued)

More gruel, anyone? (1989)

From the March 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

As if life is not hard enough already for them, the people who depend on Social Security benefits for their living are now being targetted. And what, you might ask (unless you are on benefit yourself, in which case you know the answer) does that mean? To begin with we might consider the fact that "targetted’’ is a non-word, a verb created out of a noun. Such creations are not uncommon and often taken to be evidence of fresh, innovative thinking. If the new word catches on, in quarters where there is a real fear of not being thought of as fresh and innovative, it may become set into jargon, without which no speech or article commands proper attention and which is useful to evade an inconvenient reality or to confuse a simple issue.

Targetting, according to the rich Tory ministers who run the Department of Social Security, means rearranging the system of state benefits so that they are paid only to those who can prove to be in the greatest need. It is. they say, a reform long overdue. A recent TV programme about the difficulties experienced by claimants who try to get money from the meticulously targetted Social Fund included the contrasting case of a mother in a large, mock-Tudor house on the greener fringes of Croydon. She declared that she drew her recklessly non-targetted Child Benefit once every few months, when she remembered, and then only to pay it straight into her bank account.

The policy of paying flat-rate benefits to everyone in certain categories, regardless of need, was laid down as long ago as the Beveridge Report. When the policy was written into legislation there was a great shudder of relief among those who, whether through personal experience or not, understood what the Means Test had meant — a harrowing, degrading probing by officialdom for reasons to disqualify desperately poor people from benefit. The Means Test, we were told, had been abolished for ever. But targetted benefits are Means tested benefits, albeit under a zappy. freshly-created — distorting — name.

Dependency culture

It is true that means-tested benefits are recommended to us by Tory ministers as an essential antidote to the widespread scourge of the dependency culture, than which nothing is more dangerous to our morale. Dependency encourages us to live off others instead of using our abilities to contribute to the social good. Those who wondered whether these verbal assaults were targetted at the ruling class, whose income from the labours of the rest of us enables them to jet around the world's playgrounds. may have been reassured by the recent stream of bracing advice from ministers on how we can avoid falling into dependency. The common theme of this advice was that anyone who is poor, cold, hungry or homeless has only themselves to blame. Edwina Currie, before she made the bad mistake of upsetting the farming lobby, came unscathed through the anger provoked by her patronising dissertation to pensioners and any other potential sufferers from hypothermia about the advantages of warm underwear. Peter Lloyd, an Under Secretary at the DSS, recommends clothing ourselves from jumble sales (which many workers do in any case):

I am a great attender of second-hand sales for charities in my constituency. You can get very good bargains. (Daily Telegraph, 12 January 1989)

Lloyd is a member of Lloyds (no relation, presumably), which means that he has. apart from anything else, at least £100,000 which he can afford to lose in an adverse insurance deal. Someone with that kind of money may buy second-hand stuff at jumble sales — it’s all good clean fun, helps out some local charity which targetted claimants are applying to in unprecedented numbers and maybe wins a few votes by showing what a cheery, caring fellow he is. But living in need is not good, clean fun. Getting by on cast-off bargains is a way of life reserved for the class who, directly or indirectly, contribute through their exploitation to Lloyd s fortune and add also to his political comfort by voting him into parliament.

Young people — in whose hands, as politicians so often tell us, The Future Of The Country Rests — are finding their benefit so efficiently targetted that it is shot out of existence. This is happening because the government prefer to have them working. A recent leaflet from the DSS informs them, in terms which suggest that it is the best news they have had for a long time:

From September 1988 if you are under 18 you will normally not be able to get Income Support.

It then puts, and answers, a number of suspiciously docile questions:

Why can't I get Income Support?

Because there is a guaranteed Youth Training Scheme (YTS) place for everyone under 18 who does not go into a job. 

Must I go on YTS?

No. The choice is yours. But if you don't go on YTS any money your parents get for you will stop at the end of your extended Child Benefit period.

Removing workers from the scope of benefit by presenting them with this kind of “choice" does wonders for the unemployment statistics and it is right in the historic tradition of punishing people for being poor. Under the Tudors this was a matter of brutal persecution which, as more and more peasants were driven off the land, had to be modified into the subtler repressions of the Poor Law. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries relief was based on, and administrated by, the parishes, which caused paupers who were unsettled to be carted backwards and forwards across parish boundaries as each tried to cast off responsibility for them. There was, of course, always the workhouse, which in the eighteenth century developed, through a process of reasoning which was a stranger to logic let alone humane concerns, as a deterrent to the condition it was supposed to relieve:

The great object of the poor law board is to ensure a constant unvarying and efficient discipline during the entire residence of the pauper within the workhouse. He rises to the minute: he works to the minute: he eats to the minute. He must be clean, respectful, industrious and obedient. In short the habits inculcated in the house are precisely those the possession of which would have prevented his becoming an inmate. (Chairman of the Sheffield Guardians. November 1855)

Undeserving poor

Another tradition — or perhaps a better word would be tactic — is to divide the people on the lower rungs of poverty into the deserving and underserving poor. The penury of the deserving poor is recognised as largely beyond their control: they are old. or unpredictably redundant (provided they have not neglected the approved ways of guarding against its consequences) or the victims of a sudden disaster. They may also be sick — except that a failure to join BUPA at the proper time may mean they don't deserve to be among the deserving. On the other hand there are the undeserving poor, tainted by a stigma so profound that only a brash rogue like Shaw's Alfred Doolittle would willingly confess to it: “I'm one of the undeserving poor, that's what I am. Think of what that means to a man." The undeserving poor are cunningly work-shy, preferring to live on state benefits to submitting themselves to a good day's exploitation. If they do work they dissipate their wages on booze or gambling. Before the days of smokeless zones, they kept coal in the bath. Nowadays they loll about all day watching the latest videos on an outsize TV set in the corner.

Nobody has yet been able to explain why the undeserving poor have a habit of increasing and decreasing all together and why they tend to concentrate in certain areas. For years — decades even — the undeserving poor lie dormant in their various employments and then suddenly sprout into indolence, their growth being especially luxuriant in places like South Wales. Scotland or Northern Ireland. For example a recent (16 December 1988) article in New Statesman and Society reported that in the region of Strathclyde 28 per cent of the population now live at or below the official poverty line. This includes about one third of the region's children, who are not yet able to choose whether to be deserving or undeserving, and 42 per cent of its old people, who are probably past caring how they are classified and only wish they were a bit better off. This mass descent from the normal poverty of employment into the lower reaches of destitution is largely due to unemployment (what Edwina Currie would call being workshy) which, according to the Strathclyde Council, now amounts to almost a quarter of a million people. A lot of these are trying to bridge the gap between their income and their needs by living on credit. For a while this method may work, in the same way as alcohol or any other drug, by blotting out reality. But the reckoning is unavoidable: the misery of Strathclyde's never-never hangover can be assessed by the fact that its Citizens' Advice Bureau is now dealing with almost 70,000 enquiries from people in credit-crisis — almost twice as many as they were in 1982

So what happened to the targetting of benefits? The National Association of Citizen's Advice Bureaux states that the changes in Social Security last April, which were supposed to bring a great rationalising of poverty into security, have left 82 per cent of the poorer claimants worse off. Some of this is due to the abolition of special needs grants and their replacement with, very often, loans from the Social Fund. There is a Catch 22 here which would impress Joseph Heller, because a loan will be agreed only when the applicant can repay it from their benefit but by definition anyone on Social Security who needs a loan is unlikely to be able to do this. As a result many claimants don't apply for a loan or if they do apply they are refused — which drives them to experiment with the tender mercies of the local loan sharks while about half the money allocated to the Social Fund lies unused.

The predictable response to this mess from the poverty lobby is to suggest that more money be allocated to the needy. This always has a certain appeal for it can't be denied that poverty in all its degrees is symptomised by a lack of money and rich people don't involuntarily live in slums or suffer from hypothermia or malnutrition. Neither are they to be seen queuing at their local DSS to have their domestic innards probed by the Biro of some harassed, sometimes callous, clerk on the other side of the shatter-proof screen. But the calculations of the poverty lobby tend to overlook the fact that the present situation, with its levels of destitution, was supposed to have been legislated out of existence by the so-called Welfare State modelled on the Beveridge Report. Since then there have been numerous re-arranging of benefits; the available money has been shuffled about, allocated first to this type of claimant and then to another. How successful this has been can be gauged from the suffering workers of Strathclyde and the despairing staff of any inner-city DSS office.

Redistributing poverty

All the plans to reform poverty out of existence ignore the vital fact that what counts is the source of our income — how we get our living — for that determines which class we are in and whether we live secure lives or are constantly under the burden of want. People who depend on being employed for a living are members of the working class, the group who experience poverty which can soon slide into destitution if they fall sick, or have more children than they can afford, or are made redundant, or become addicted to alcohol or some other drug. In this class are the people in places like Glasgow, the people whose budgets can be disastrously thrown out by an increase in their mortgage repayments, who can be quickly changed from a proud "owner-occupier'' into a wretched unit of homelessness In this class are the people whose abilities lie unused in a slump and who come to rely on state benefits to live, making themselves targets in the sights of any government looking for economies in its expenditure.

The other class are not to be found in inner-city slums and nor do they worry about temporary changes in capitalism's economy. They can afford to have as many children as they like and the best medical treatment in the most exclusive clinics when they are ill. Although they are socially redundant, as a class they do not suffer from being out of a job because they need never be employed in the first place. They live — in their several houses, their easy security, their luxury — off the exploitation of the working class. They are the people who really exist in a dependency culture for they rely on the workers labour. They are the class whose taxes finance schemes like Social Security and it is their representatives in government who are now concerned to reduce what is being paid out in state benefits". The "Welfare State" was not an act of generosity, a gift of historic proportions from the capitalist class to the workers. Destitution does not come cheaply for such is its cost in terms of crime, loss of production and social dislocation that to alleviate it through a system of state benefits is an investment rather than a gift. National schemes for sickness, unemployment and old age were designed to spread the load of that investment over the ruling class as a whole, even if clever politicians represented them as specifically intended to relieve distress among workers. That deception is now being eroded by the Tories equally specious claim that security for workers is to be found in less cohesive private schemes which will, through the wages they pay to their employees, adjust the burden among the employers.

What does it matter, if in the process a few thousand more people — children, their parents, retired workers, the sick and the elderly — suffer the stress of poverty that bites that much deeper? The indignant campaigners of the poverty lobby are strong on indictment, but like the boys in Dickens' orphanage their worry is that the gruel is too thin. Poverty need not mean an impoverished idea about how society works and how we can make it better.

Ivan

TV Review: Something Else — Frank Finds Out

TV Review from the January 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

One genuinely enjoyable piece of British TV — entertaining without pandering to racial prejudice or mocking traditional working class stereotypes and of particular interest for its insight into the capitalist system — was screened on October 8. The programme Frank Finds Out was part of the Something Else series, made by young people: it related the adventures of a young unemployed person, confused as to the reason for his plight, setting off to London on his bike, no less.

Frank's object is not to find work but to discover who is responsible for his life being run against his own interests — “The Guilty Ones" as he calls them. His investigation of the various institutions working to perpetuate the current system was often hilarious and sometimes very pointed. On the Prime Minister he comments: 

She won't listen to your point of view if you've only got a couple of quid; try donating £30,000 to the Party, that should get you invited in for a cup of tea and a chat. 

The Royal baby (“Who's a lucky boy then?") is shown to want for nothing while workers" children live in varying degrees of poverty.

On capitalist production and the minority ownership of land, the film was trenchant in its satire. For example there was Mr. Capitaling. derived from the advertisement character Mister Kipling, making "exceedingly large turnovers" and using his inherited capital to make a surplus from the bakers and then reinvest his profit. His workers buy back a proportion of what they have produced but are compelled to return to the ovens next week, to repeat the whole process over again. And when the warehouses are full? “Simple", says Mr. Capitaling. "I close down the works" —- and here we see the now sad-faced bakers trudging dutifully to the Job Centre.

Another character, the "Villain", the embodiment of the "criminal element" in the working class, tells us that he is regarded as a "Wrongdoer" by most of society. He proceeds to show, however, that the real crime is that the land-owning class claim divine right of possession, whereas in fact they obtained their land not through currently accepted means — "Did Henry VIII go to his nearest estate agent and negotiate for St. James Park?" — but as part of an historical process of appropriation.

The "Villain" asks whether god gave these people the land or whether they just took it and concludes with the following indictment:

As Winston Churchill almost said. "Never before in the field of human con tricks, has so much been stolen from so many by so few".

Of course the presentation of the Queen, the Prime Minister, the High Court Judges, civil servants and multinational corporations as the enemy of "the Guilty" suggests that the removal of these institutions, even if possible under capitalism. would end problems like unemployment. This is false optimism: only the establishment of a society of free access to goods and services will do that.

PR, JG

Running Commentary: Hypocrisy at Camp David (1978)

The Running Commentary column from the November 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

Hypocrisy at Camp David

There is no record of anyone who attended the recent Egypt/Israeli talks at Camp David actually being physically sick, but such was the hypocrisy which spewed out there that it might easily have happened.

With the first approaches between the two countries, last year, Begin and Sadat both made unctuous speeches implying that peace could come to the Middle East provided all the leaders there were sincere in their desire for it. It was, they said, a simple matter of good intentions triumphing over bad — a weary but persistent version of history.

These good intentions soon evaporated when the leaders got down to discussing the real business of the economic and military domination of the area.

It was then that the Americans, much in the style developed by Henry Kissinger, forced both sides once more to the conference table. The agreement which followed — which effectively postponed settlement of the more sensitive problems — was publicised in the same nauseating manner as before, with Sadat embracing Begin as a grinning Carter looked on.

Capitalism’s war and peace are not matters of good intentions, or bad; war springs from the economic rivalries inherent in the system. The Middle East, with its oil rich fields and its strategic importance, is especially sensitive and so has been in continual conflict for a very long time.

America’s rivalry with Russia has given given it an interest in keeping the peace — on American terms — in the Middle East, an interest which was demonstrated in, for example, the intervention over Suez in 1956 and the invasion of the Lebanon in 1958.

So Camp David, behind the publicity handouts, was a typically sordid carve up of capitalist interests, backed by some frightening military power. As an agreement it will be worth no more than those others which, when it suited the signatories, were broken.

The true nature of Camp David was illuminated when it became clear that the American arms industry was going to be able to sell a lot more of its products as a result — and to both sides, too.

So everyone was happy, except those who care for the future of human society and who want a safer world for us to live in — or those who may have been sick over it all.

British cars in trouble

British Leyland has been subjected to the attentions of a succession of whizz kids, if that term can be applied to the ageing likes of Lords Stoke and Ryder. These men were said to be possessed of unnatural powers enabling them to tame the wildest ways of capitalism’s anarchy.

Well so far they have all failed, which has not deterred another candidate being pushed into the cage to see what he could do to put down the uncontrollable.

Michael Edwardes came to British Leyland with the reputation of a man who unfailingly organises profitable balance sheets. So when he found that BL is in such deep trouble he must have had problems, after all those nice things said about him in the newspapers, in admitting that it might be anything to do with him or with what he is trying to control.

Nobody could have been surprised when Edwardes decided that the real problem is with the workers at British Leyland who, as everyone knows, are a peculiarly lazy, unreliable and selfish lot. In fact there has been so much propaganda recently on those lines that the BL worker has become part of British capitalism’s folk mythology, a scapegoat for the system’s defects.

It should be noted, that so far Edwardes has confined his criticism of those who don’t work to exclude the most blatant examples of it — the capitalist class. Perhaps he is too well aware of who is employing him — and of what they expect him to say.

Behind the emotional smoke screen, the facts about the car industry are clear. Competition is fierce — and getting fiercer in this country, as more and more foreign vehicles challenge for a slice of the market. Where before there were a few Renaults and Volkswagens there are now many, as well as Japanese, Italian and even Russian cars.

British Leyland invested a lot of money in its Marina model, which competes in the middle range where the pressure is particularly strong Cutting corners to keep costs down has resulted in a shoddy car, even by the standards of the car industry, and this also contributed to BLs sick joke image.

A typical mess of capitalism. But the answer does not lie in inveighing against the workers, who also compete for employment and for survival, but in an examination of the social system itself.

No vacancies

Not only do the workers (skilled tradesmen, foremen, shop-floor workers, managers) operate capitalist society, and produce and distribute its commodities, but they play a large part in enforcing the capitalist ethic. Many members of the working class never see a capitalist (unless perhaps on the telly, or getting into a taxi outside a London luxury hotel). The average youth is drilled into accepting the capitalist ethic (that is, it is right for the owning class to live in wealth without working, but it is wrong for the rest of us to live even in poverty without working) by other members of the working class: parents and relatives, teachers, journalists, policemen, workmates, civil servants, etc.

Almost certainly Stephen Dayus, the sixteen-year-old son of a Birmingham window cleaner, never met or spoke with a capitalist. Yet he was convinced of his own worthlessness when he left school and could not find a job. “He longed to be an electrician and wrote countless letters to employers. But in job-hungry Birmingham — where thousands of youngsters shared his plight — the reply was always the same: no vacancies” (Daily Express, 29.3.78.) Stephen probably did not realise that there are thousands of young people in this country at this moment who are not only not looking for employment, but would regard it as totally irrelevant. They will never have to “get a job”; they may sit on a few boards of directors in due course, but the nearest they will get to work will be to make sure that others are working in the enterprises they will inherit. All Stephen knew was what other members of the working class told him; that the was failing in his line of duty if he could not find an employer to make a profit out of him. “Finally, depressed by rejection and the jibes of luckier friends sixteen-year-old Stephen hanged himself” 

No individual capitalist can be blamed for this tragic suicide. It is the capitalist system, with the loyal support and assistance of many deluded members of the working class, which killed Stephen Dayus.

Running Commentary: More royal drivel (1983)

The Running Commentary column from the September 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

More royal drivel

The Police Federation is a strange body, dedicated as it is to improving relationships between the police and the people the police coerce through in-depth research into social problems. This learned lot were recently addressed by one of the world's great experts on psychology, youth delinquency and social pressures — which can only mean the Prince of Wales.

This typically unproductive member of the ruling class thinks that young "offenders'' — youths who break the laws which protect useless parasites in their privilege — have “icy and unfeeling’’ attitudes towards the elderly and would benefit from a spell of Army discipline. (The Army is another strange body, whose profession is to destroy things and kill people).

Of course the Prince is no fool and he had ready some evidence to back up his theories — after all, his audience consisted largely of Chief Constables who are famous for their persistent hunger for dispassionate, scientific research.

The “evidence” consisted of what the Prince saw — or thought he saw — when he visited some courses run by the Army last year, when about 2,000 youngsters put themselves through some risks and exertions. The Prince decided that they had "benefitted immeasurably” from it all.

Jolly good. But as a contribution to research it was useless because those young people were not delinquents, they did not come from slums and they had volunteered to go on the courses as a possible way of getting a job. It would have been a very different matter, if the courses had been filled with restless young offenders from places like Toxteth and Lambeth, sentenced by some pompous magistrate to find their true character dangling at the end of a rope on a rock face.

There is in fact some evidence, which the Prince did not use, about the effects of this kind of regime, in the “short, sharp shock” Detention Centres (now Youth Custody Centres), where youngsters are pushed by a variety of nasty methods beyond what they think are their physical and emotional limits. This evidence does not support the theory that such harsh discipline breeds humane responses. The “success” rate (the proportion of inmates who are frightened out of further offences) of this type of “treatment” is notably low. Perhaps this is because nothing a Detention Centre can do can be worse than living in the slums of Liverpool, Manchester or London.

It is to be expected that parasites like the Prince should be keen that the people whose work keeps him in privilege should be disciplined into accepting their inferior social standing. It is to be expected that the forces of coercion, in the persons of Chief Constables, should applaud his vacuous drooling on the matter. But the subjects of it all — the working class — should react with anger and contempt and a resolve to end such a miserable, decadent society.

Bad connection

The trade unions and the Labour Party are in high fever about the looming menace of Norman Tebbit and his threat to place a garrotte on the unions and in particular to make it more difficult for them to pump money into the Labour Party.

No one who has a concern for working class interests and for a healthy, effective trade union movement will object to plans to sever the ties between the unions and the Labour Party. By such standards — not to mention those of democracy within the unions — there is much to be said for substituting the “contracting in” procedure, by which any union member who wants to contribute to Labour Party funds must declare so, for “contracting out”, by which the contribution is taken from the member unless they say otherwise.

The present excitement springs from the popular fallacy that it is only Tory governments who wage war on the unions while Labour governments live in unbroken peace with them. The 1945-51 Labour government was constantly in conflict with trade unionists, especially with "unofficial” strikers — strikers who couldn't get their Labour-Party-dominated union to support them.

The Wilson government also fought the unions, in one famous strike denouncing the seamen as misled by a group of “politically motivated” wreckers. That government, after years of struggle over pay and conditions, tried to draw up legislation with which Tebbit would have found no fault, but Barbara Castle's anti-union proposals in In Place of Strife were too much for even the most obsequious of union leaders and they had to be shelved. The Callaghan government made their name by breaking the firemen's strike with troops in their Green Goddesses, for the battles with the pickets in the Winter of Discontent and for its ministers urging workers to break through picket lines.

Unions must clash with any government, whether Labour or Tory, because they stand — at least when the unions are doing their job — on opposite sides of the class struggle. The unions should represent the interests of the workers, and the government the interests of the capitalists, in the struggles on the industrial field.

The Labour Party have always cynically exploited their trade union connection to help them get into power. If, after all that recent history has taught them, the unions still go along with this they will find again, and to their cost, how mistaken they are. With friends like the Labour Party they hardly need enemies like Norman Tebbit.

Sick note

Poor David Steel, meaning well but so grievously misunderstood.

Some sections of the Alliance had serious doubts about him during the election, with people like Cyril Smith grumbling that he was hogging too much of the limelight and Steel expressing some rattiness with his supporters for their lack of involvement. It seemed to be coming to a head when the leader announced abruptly that he was taking himself off for a long rest. How could a capitalist party survive, asked bewildered Liberals, without a leader to sort out its knotty problems of compromise and deceit, to hand down decisions on policy and action for the mass of the party to obediently carry out?

But then relief for them. Steel was not mad or disintegrating but only struck down by the sort of virus which lurks about waiting to infect politicians who are exhausted by the effort of battling for the votes of the deluded supporters of capitalism.

Steel's illness was said to be making him tired and depressed so that his problems seemed insurmountable. At which point it is reasonable to question the nature of this illness, which has the effect of stimulating such an insight into reality. For the Liberal leader’s problems, like those of Thatcher and whoever replaces Foot, are insurmountable.

All leaders confront the difficulty of first persuading enough workers that theirs is the likeliest method of running British capitalism, that they have a unique ability to bring in an age of unprecedented peace and plenty. If that propaganda succeeds, and the leader passes through the door of Number Ten, they are faced with the further problem of hoping and praying that they will be lucky enough for their term of office to coincide with one of capitalism’s upswings, which they can claim credit for and so appear to keep their election promises.

Some leaders — like Harold Macmillan — have quite a long run of luck before they are exposed to a downswing. None of them are able to control the cycle of boom and slump, or notably to mitigate the effects; such basic elements of the capitalist system are out of their control. Capitalism works through its own laws and takes little account of the electoral needs of politicians.

That is reality. Perhaps Steel, at some blinding moment, glimpsed it and saw what was in store for him if he ever made the top. Enough to make him sick as a politician.

So They Say: Surplus to Requirements (1975)

The So They Say Column from the July 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard

Surplus to Requirements

The pollution free oil tanker is with us. The ships, very large crude carriers (VLCCs) are already in existence and extend in some cases to well over 250,000 dead weight tonnage. Furthermore the increase in world tonnage of the VLCCs is estimated to be 1 million tons per week from the present time to the end of 1977, unless immediate cancellations of orders are made. And why should such cancellations be made? — it is the same reason as that behind their being pollution free — the ships cannot be used.

The disastrous slump in demand for big tanker capacity which has dozens of 150,000-ton and 250,000-ton vessels laid up in moorings from the Hebrides to the Pacific, is no temporary aberration, the report (by one of Britain’s major oil companies) says. It will not reach bottom, even on an optimistic assumption on oil usage until 1979 or 1980.

Sunday Times, 15th June 75.

H. P. Drewery (Shipping Consultants) estimated in March that up to 40 million tons of oil tanker tonnage could be laid up by the end of 1975 (Shipping Statistics & Economics) and the writers of the recent report recommend that every VLCC “on order from the world’s shipyards — apart from those actually now being built — should be cancelled immediately” in order to avoid a “surplus to requirements” tonnage in excess of 110 millions by 1980.

So we have it: the classic solution to the classic problem. While the prospects for profit were good the owners rushed capital into the field, each desperate to claim as large a share of the market as possible, now the market is glutted they have a problem — there are no more profits to be found. The Sunday Times on 18th May referred to this “boom and bust” phenomenon as a “grotesque reversal of normality,” but we would disagree. Given the capitalist’s jungle there is nothing unusual here; What is to be condemned is that the jungle still exists.

A Sordid Indictment

The recent case of the fatal virus disease, Lassa Fever, brought into Britain has caused the authorities to build a “Close security laboratory” at the Microbiological Research Establishment in Porton Down, Wiltshire, to study the disease. This wing will also attempt to learn more about other similar diseases for which there are no known antidotes. The laboratory was formally opened on 9th May by its director Professor Robert Harris who said at the time:

Smallpox is child’s play when handling Lassa fever virus. There is no immunization and so people working with the agents are to some extent on their own.

Times, 10th May 1975.

It is certainly a tribute to the determination of science through the individual workers on the project that they are prepared to run such risks in order to overcome a potentially serious hazard to the health of others, but things are not so straightforward in class society. The newspaper report continued :

Asked about the possible military significance, Professor Harris said the question whether Lassa fever would make a good biological weapon depended on how much people wanted to commit suicide.

It is a sordid indictment of capitalism when medical men have to be asked if their researches might prove valuable for warfare. The journalist who asked the question cannot be accused of any personal perversity — if he had not asked it he would be failing in his (limited) function to find facts, or at least, newsprint. It reaches further when we consider that Professor Harris’ team would also be failing in their jobs should they refuse to make their findings known to the masters of the laboratory — the Ministry of Defence.

Not Important

The following piece appeared in the London Evening Standard on 5th June:

Technology and resources exist to produce enough food to supply developing countries up to the year 2000 and possibly for a generation beyond, Mr. Walter Pawley, director of the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation said in Toronto.

“But,” he added “if you ask me whether I think production will in fact increase in accordance with the resources and technological possibilities, I must say I am pessimistic.''

It warranted 1½" of type. So much for these “united” nations.

The Capitalist Disease

J. B. Priestley the author had some profound comments to make in the Sunday Times of 15th June. Writing in the Opinion column he relieved himself of a stream of ill-reasoned verbiage. His topic was the “English Disease” — an imaginary ailment which Priestley, along with other self-righteous “thinkers” attribute to the English working class.

I mean English not British, because I am not prepared to discuss the problems of the Scots and the Welsh. (As for the Ulster folk, too many of them refuse to come out of the 17th Century.)

Although he fails to define the nature of the disease, the inference is clearly made that the English simply don’t work hard enough. His solution? — Self discipline.

In times gone by, he argues, the English (good table-thumping stuff this) were disciplined by circumstance. This he defines as “grim hard facts (which) shaped their lives.” We take it that he means working class poverty. But not any more however:

If they are slack and lazy, nobody is telling them to clear out and starve.

In his anxiety to point a finger at the offenders, without in turn offending the “decent” folk among whom he classes himself, he picks upon "the younger set.”

They are not on the way to self discipline, ready to transform themselves into sensible reliable citizens. Their freedom only entangles them with whims and fancies, silliness and self-indulgence. And it is largely they who are responsible for that malaise, that English disease . . .

We allow for the possibility that Priestley has entered the seventh age of man, but he really should be prepared to read other copy apart from his own. On page 53 of the same newspaper we leave the realms of fiction and return to the “grim hard facts” of capitalism. The following is the first paragraph from the article “Is your child heading for the dole?”

During the next few weeks 500,000 British school-leavers will get their first taste of working life. For a record number of them this will mean going straight to the end of a dole queue. When unemployment rises, the young always fare the worst. With almost worldwide recession, this summer’s crop of graduates and school-leavers face the least hopeful prospects since before the war.

A prospect guaranteed to be no less severe now that Britain has confirmed its membership of the EEC — an aim supported by “Writers for Europe” among those numbers the prim sage Priestley figured.

Alan D'Arcy

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.

News in Review: Unemployment figures (1963)

The News in Review column from the March 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

Unemployment figures

The unemployment figures keep on rising and the government assure us that we have not seen the last of them yet.

Mr. Hare, the Minister of Labour, has blamed the weather for some of the unemployment and pleads that that is something which he cannot be expected to have foreseen.

The economic experts have sharpened their pencils and have swamped the government with their advice. The government, of course, has already plenty of its own experts with their schemes and advice; unemployment increases despite them.

Are the experts, then, so useless? Many of them have had a long and expensive education. They have access to all sorts of information which is supposed to help them in their planning to control capitalism.

It is fair to expect them to come up with something special when the problem demands it, as unemployment does.

Well, have they?

Consider, for one, the experts employed by The Guardian. We might have expected that newspaper, with its tradition of sometimes saying the unusual, to have some startling proposals on the out of work problem. And in a way that is what they did have. Here is what The Guardian's first leader proposed, among other similar suggestions, on January 25th:

Lastly, could the schools not be asked to take back all those pre-Christmas school-leavers who have still not found jobs? To lay on proper teaching might not be easy; but better that they should be in classrooms than waiting idly at home or on the street corners.

Read that again, slowly. Ask yourself whether sending back to school the youngsters who have only just left, whose parents are probably relying upon them to help the housekeeping budget, and for whom you know there are not enough teachers, is a solution to the unemployment problem—or even a sensible suggestion.

Then ask yourself if the experts can do anything about capitalism’s shortcomings. And wonder why you do not do something about them yourself.

The expense of cold weather

Most of us have had our grumble about the Arctic conditions which have had us in the grip since the end of last year. The weather itself is beyond anyone's control, but is there nothing that can be done about the effects of it?

Some of the electricity failures in the Big Freeze Up were caused by frozen insulators on the power lines. This problem could be avoided—and incidentally some lovely landscapes preserved—if the lines were carried underground. But the Central Electricity Generating Board claims that this would cost up to eighteen times more than hitching the lines up to pylons and would, therefore, not be worthwhile.

Some of the breakdowns and delays on the railways were the result of frozen points. This is something which could have been solved easily, in a number of ways long ago, but the railways were reluctant to invest in something which they might not want to use very often.

The efforts at clearing snowbound roads were simply pitiful. But the government reasons that there is no sense in keeping a lot of expensive snow clearing equipment which will probably lie idle for about eight years in every ten. And that seems to clinch the argument against having it.

Over here, in short, capitalism gambles on the weather; something it cannot do in other countries where extreme conditions happen more regularly. From the point of view of the British capitalist there is no sense in spending money preparing for something which is likely to come along very occasionally. That is why Britain is so often caught napping by severe cold or floods or some other vagary of the weather.

Anyway, it is only the working class who bear the brunt of the weather. It is only their houses which become draughty hell-holes in the winter. It is poor, working class pensioners who silently die of cold in their unheated rooms, cut off from the hurrying world outside,

It is the working class who have to face the added torture of the rush hour, on rail or road, in the icy spells.

Capitalism has always shown a ruthless concern for its own economic priorities. So can we expect it to spend money uneconomically to prevent such suffering? Not likely, we can't.

The Common Market

Well, it didn't come off.

Mr. Heath and his men came back defeated from Brussels and presented the British public with another bogy man who was yesterday’s friend. President de Gaulle is now the evil man of British capitalism.

The Beaverbrook press took a somewhat different view, implying hopefully that the British government had seen the light from the Express building and had themselves broken off the negotiations.

“And Now—Forward,” screamed the Express headlines. Forward, we may ask, to what? Whatever the Express, or the Government, or anyone else, has to offer can only be another of capitalism’s gambles.

When the British government decided, several years ago, against joining the European Common Market, they were gambling. When they decided that that gamble had failed they put their money on another—on the application to join Europe. They made it quite clear that that was a gamble, that they were not sure whether membership of the EEC would benefit them or not.

So it is with all capitalism's attempts to defeat its own problems.

President de Gaulle is gambling, now that Europe can unite as an independent capitalist power dominated by a Franco-German axis. But there have been plenty of other such gambles and plenty of other such pacts and many of them have failed even by capitalism's standards. There is no reason to assume that France and Germany, whatever their pact says, will not end up fighting one. another again.

Capitalism, in fact, is one big gamble. Since its fortunes hang on the tail of its unpredictable market, it can never be sure of what to do to secure its own interests.

The great tragedy is that the gambles are always paid off in working class lives and security.

Civil Disobedience

The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, as it breaks up into its opposing factions, is displaying some typical symptoms of the dying reformist organisation.

One of the unilateralists’ arguments has been—and this applies especially to the Committee of 100—that nuclear weapons were such a threat to human society that anything was justified which helped to get rid of them.

Demonstrations and marches were justified. So was civil disobedience, like sitting down in the roadway. The Socialist Party of Great Britain, we were told, would be justified in forgetting about Socialism to campaign against the bomb. Recently, stirring up and exploiting social unrest at places like the LCC accommodation centres was justified on the same grounds.

This must have convinced many people that the unilateralists were prepared to go to any lengths to save us from nuclear annihilation.

It certainly seems to have convinced those soldiers who want to form an active CND group in the Services.

But the unilateralists will not touch this one with a barge-pole. Because what the soldiers are trying to do amounts to inciting troops to disaffection, and for that you can find yourself in jail for seven years.

That is too much for the campaigners, even for the reckless Committee of 100. So they have all officially disassociated themselves from any move which can be interpreted as stirring up disaffection in the Forces.

It was, of course, the unilateralists who first said that people should be prepared to face imprisonment in the cause of banning the bomb. But having urged this futile action on their followers, what sort of consistency is it which then shrinks from seven years in jail?

We know that the unilateralists are breaking up. Are they at the same time cooling down? Are they, as we said they might, becoming respectable?

Arms Budget

There are no surprises in the United States Budget for the coming year.

The American capitalist class expects to be spending a total of $98.8 billions during the twelve months up to June 30th, 1964, and of this well over half—$55.4 billions—will be spent on the armed forces and their weapons. In addition, $4.2 billions will go to space research and technology where, we fear, the weapons of the future will be conceived and designed.

This sort of expenditure has been rising steadily over the past few years; the USA now has an impressive nuclear arsenal to show for the money it has spent.

There are about 650 American bombers on a fifteen minute ground alert and more than 200 missiles ready to be fired from the ground. Apart from these, 114 missiles are in Polaris submarines, prowling beneath the seas.

Arms expenditure, then, is the first preoccupation of the Washington Budget just as it must be for any capitalist government which knows that its international interests are threatened by a rival.

Other things must take their place, lower down the queue. The USA will spend $0.3 billion on housing next year—less than in the current year—$5.6 billions on health, labour and welfare and $1.5 billion on education.

It is no coincidence that the very things which could make human life a little easier are the least likely to get any money spent on them, while the things which are meant to kill and destroy are lavished with funds.

Capitalism works that way.