The welfare ‘reform’ measures currently wending their way through Parliament are so right wing you might have thought they were drafted by the Tories. Funny you should mention it…David Freud, who drafted the White Paper on which the bill is based, has just defected to the Conservatives. This shows two things:
<!–[He’s a rat leaving what he sees as a sinking ship.
<!–[New Labour sucking up to the Tories with anti-working class policies just paves the way for the real thing to take over and put the boot in further.
Who is (Lord) David Freud? He is one of a clutch of bankers who were brought in to use their expertise (presumably their expertise in mucking up the banking system and the rest of the economy along with it) in the service of government. They let Freud loose on welfare reform. “I didn’t know anything about welfare at all when I started.” he admitted, “but that may have been an advantage…In a funny way the solution was obvious.”
The solution, according to Freud, was twofold:
<!–[First, coerce the unemployed back to work with benefit cuts and workfare, and
<!–[Enrich the private sector while doing so.
The current Bill represents a further turning of the screw even compared with proposals being promoted last year. (https://communist.red/benefit-claimants-governments-firing-line.htm) The government is proposing to abolish Income Support. This is a commitment made by the state as a result of labour movement pressure that British people in the twenty-first century should not be allowed to starve to death through lack of means. For many of us it is a residual reminder that we have at least the concept of living in a civilised society.
It’s not as if benefits in this country are overly generous. A single person made redundant in 2009 will get just £60.50. Incredibly someone under 25 (surely an age at which people can be expected to be financially independent) will receive just £47.95. The TUC is calling for Job Seeker’s Allowance to be bumped up by £15 a week, a modest and urgent demand we should support.
The government’s proposals remove entitlements and fail to value the important work of parents and carers. Parents with young children, carers, sick, disabled, people with mental health problems and other vulnerable groups face tougher tests to qualify for benefits. If they fail they could be cut off with no support.
In the government’s sights are two groups of workers in particular – those on Incapacity Benefit and single parents. Everybody except full time carers, parents of children under 3 and 300,000 severely disabled will be pushed on to JSA. That means they are to expect the knock on the door from New Labour on the assumption that they’re skiving.
Here are excerpts from a letter to the Guardian from Ron Graves from Prenton, Wirral on 12.12.08. “I have been unable to work since 1986, and I am mostly housebound, yet James Purnell has this insane idea that because he thinks I should, I will be magically capable of work. If I could work, I would. Incapacity benefit pays me £95.90 per week, which is way below the official poverty level. Does Purnell seriously think that I would willingly subsist on such a paltry sum if I didn’t have to? IB is not money for nothing – it’s for being unable to work; it’s for being in severe pain since 1983; it’s for having no immune system to speak of…This is not free money – I pay for it every moment of my life.”
No doubt brave boys like Purnell feel good squaring up to the severely disabled. Why don’t they try their luck by picking on a fat cat now and then?
The big stick to be used against welfare recipients is to be made to work for their entitlements – workfare. To work just to get income at the level of JSA means you could be on £1.73 for 6 months! Not only is this outrageously exploitative; it can also undermine the efforts of other low paid workers to improve their wages and conditions as they are undercut by those on workfare.
The other group under attack are single parents. The government, which seems to inhabit a parallel universe from the one that the rest of us live in, is incapable of understanding that the real problem single parents genuinely wanting work come up against is the lack of decent affordable childcare.
Even the Tories pretend to come across as a bunch of softies compared with the hard-faced men from New Labour, posing as ‘the Party of the family’. Tory spokesperson Mr Grayling said: “Nobody could accuse me of being soft on welfare reform but there is a real issue about the welfare of children early in life. The big problem is the availability of the right kind of childcare.”
Regarding private provision the Financial Times has been charting the fiasco of their welfare-to-work schemes. Nicholas Timmins complains, “The private and voluntary sector has come to be seen as the magic bullet that will help to overhaul the labour market…But that model was devised in good economic times.” (30.01.09) So, you see, private provision will overhaul the labour market when it is delivering full employment – that is, when it doesn’t need overhauling! But, as socialists have pointed out, you can’t magic up jobs for people on incapacity benefit and single parents, who can be quite difficult to place, when there are no jobs to go to.
Pathways to Work has missed its targets by 73%. The payments to the private sector are results-based, so they’re losing money here. So they want to change the rules. Richard Johnson of Serco told the FT (03.02.09), “The funding model has to change fundamentally, at least in the short term.”
In other words they want to be paid even though they know they can’t deliver. We have some different advice for this Labour government. And we won’t be charging the sort of consultancy fees Lord Freud regarded as his right. Throw the private parasites out of the welfare system. Scrap the stupid rules that penalise the jobless for the unemployment created by capitalism. And, instead of inviting the bankers in to give us the benefit of their expensive advice, take over the banks they’ve left in chaos as part of a socialist plan of production to get everyone who wants one a job. Then we might stop Lord Freud and the rest of the Tories mangling the welfare system even further if they are elected.
