So here we go again… another ‘radical’ reform of the benefits systems. Another ideological onslaught on the poor. From NL to the Con/Dem right-wing lash-up…
Let us get one thing straight about unemployment and people being trapped in poverty…it is caused by deep structural and cyclical changes in the economy and not by a mixture of individual shortcomings and the existence of the welfare system itself. There are plenty of countries with no welfare benefit system but with vast numbers of people trapped in poverty and unemployment: they are the half of humanity living in third world urban slums. If you take the industry from large industrial areas and replace them with a scattering of McJobs then you end up with deep-seated structural unemployment. If you have a boom and bust economy then unemployment goes up and down in lockstep with the economic cycle: the culture of dependency inexplicably waxing and waning if you subscribe to it as your explanation of unemployment.
The Government’s paper does make some valid points about the complexity of the system and the effects of high rates of benefit withdrawal as earnings income increases. Both of these are major problems for people claiming benefits. However the oppressive system of conditionality is praised as something that reduces unemployment. Stalking the later half of the paper is the need to cut the social security budget: that is the need as far as the rich investors have, no-one else needs it. Contribution based benefits are dismissed in a rather flip way suggesting that the whole benefit system will be means-tested. This will increase complexity rather than reduce it.
It is means testing that brings in a huge amount of complexity into the system. More means testing more complexity. On top of that local welfare states with policies and budgets etc decided locally…simplification? Finally on simplification the paper looks towards IT links with employers to provide real-time data on people’s income. Millions of employees/claimants, hundreds of thousands of employers (remember this is to be a utopia of a huge number of small employers coming to the rescue…) and a huge number of variations as shifts change, deductions change etc. Not simple.
Underlying issues? Denial of the structural and cyclical causes of unemployment and poverty. Without a long essay in marxist economics it is capitalism and capitalist greed that guts economies and societies not having a welfare state. The other thing motivating our rulers is hidden away in the talk of “distance from the labour market”. Essentially it is this. From the point of view of the capitalists the unemployed are not acting as an efficient reserve army of labour in driving down wages. If someone is for instance a technically qualified worker say a cook in a cafe. A lone parent on Income Support with no access to childcare is not providing any competitive pressure on the cook in the cafe. Imagine the cafe gets taken over by a chain. The chain operating company will want to drive down wages. A large number of part-time workers working as cafe staff or in a factory producing pre-packaged food and drink for the cafe will either replace the skilled cook with a half decent salary or at least provide greater downward pressure on pay.
There is quite a lot of stress in the paper on part-time work. This will be minimum wage stuff not GP’s or teachers keeping their skills sharp while bringing up young children. It will not provide a decent standard of living. These are and will continue to be people trapped in poverty. Someone working 16 hours a week at the minimum wage of £5.80 will earn £92.80 a week. They will pay no tax or national insurance as they are below the thresholds for these. Most of their income will at present come from tax credits and benefits of one sort or another…but they will be acting as a much more efficient part of the reserve army of labour as they are at once in the labour market as a worker and at the same time someone the bosses hope is desperate due to still being very poor. The Government is deep down simply looking to make this process much more efficient.
What do we want instead? Economic policies that encourage beneficial forms of economic growth as opposed to boom and bust casino capitalism. We need a decent minimum wage. £10.00 an hour would mean that people would have real standards of living. Proper ongoing training so people have real skills and real childcare provision. Affordable? Yes…it would cut into the cost of the benefit system like nothing else. Yes it will help to have a proper system of tapering to allow people to choose the amount work that suits them but this needs to be on the terms of ordinary people both in work and out. And scrap conditionality for ever…the poor are not the authors of poverty. Capitalism and its parasitic ruling class are.
21st Century Welfare? No, more like 19th Century…..
The whole thing sounds kind of nuts really – as do most of Lord David Freud’s cold and heartless ideas in respect to welfare reform. For example, the 10% cut in Housing Benefit made to claimants who have been unemployed for a year. We all know people will try to make up the shortfall from their other income rather than be driven from long-standing homes and so the cut will hit single people more than people with children, young people more than older people and people living in expensive areas more than people in areas where the rents are lower. Some people will lose £5.00 a week while other will lose £35.00 per week. Lunatic, unfair and unjustifiable.
This “across the board” 10% cut in Housing Benefit made in respect to people unfortunate enough to have languished for a year on Jobseeker’s Allowance is awful. This will affect everyone; innocent or guilty; feckless or dutiful. For example a sixty four year old man or woman with a lifetime of work behind them, made redundant through no fault of their own, and who cannot find alternative employment because of their age will suffer the cut no matter how hard they have looked for work; no matter how many times they have visited their local Jobcentre; no matter how many applications they have made, or letters they have written, or emails they have sent, or phone calls they have answered or interviews they have attended with employers. They will suffer the same cut as the individual that has actively refused every reasonable offer of work made to them. Refusing work is one thing but being denied work because of your age is another. This particularly pernicious measure in respect to the 10% cut cannot be right and will never be able to be sold to the public as necessary, reasonable or just. To be honest I hate it. As a Conservative I am embarrassed by it. Such a measure should never have been advanced in the first place.
I also have deep reservations in Housing Benefit cuts proposed in respect to under occupation which could see benefits slashed in respect to elderly widows and widowers living in family homes, which they have occupied for decades, whose partner has passed away and whose children have left home to start live of their own. Hundreds of thousands on men and women may be forced out of lobg-standing homes and accommodation that they have lived in for decades because they have a spare room or similar. Are we really going to see such innocent people evicted from long-standing homes into bedsits or “non self-contained” rooms as happened to many of the under twenty-fives under Sir John Major?
This is truly devilish and diabolical stuff.
David Freud is truly a heartless, inhumane and very wicked man.
The suffering that eventually results from all of these measures will be immense, potentially unbearable and, worst of all, completely unnecessary but for a warped capitalist ideology.
Sadly most people don’t realise that the real point of the welfare reforms is to introduce what is archly called ‘conditionality’. Any one who watched the Welfare Reform Bill when this workfare concept became enshrined in British law will have seen that conditionality is the backbone of these reforms. Conditionality means threats, sanctions, required to attend, control, bullying.
IDS is the new boy on the scene. He is bringing his studies of the cycle of dependency and sensible sounding streamlining and tapering to the party. But after thirty minutes of heart warming caring he muttered something about conditionality and ran away.
People on JSA will be made to take work that is thrust upon them or have their benefits withdrawn possibly for life. It is more of the new kind of penalties that don’t require a court of law.
At CarerWatch we don’t have the remit to save the fit unemployed. But the extension of threats, sanctions and control to the seriously sick and disabled is chilling and unacceptable. The disabled battle their condition every day. They battel an unforgiving flexible neo con labour market. These choices about working are theirs and theirs alone.
Why have the disability charities not spoken up about this. Bedazzled with the hopes of all disabled people to be able to work – they have traded hopes for reality and left the disabled exposed to endless bullying.
Conditionality is the elephant in this room.