For a couple of weeks we've been treated to a tug-of-war of rival briefings. The Treasury initially said it was going to cut disability benefits to support rearmament measures, followed by another slew of on-the-record announcements that peeling back social security had a "moral case". Then last weekend the press was awash with claims of disquiet in the cabinet over putative cuts, which encompassed soft left and Starmer loyalists alike. It held out the possibility of a rethink ... and then we got Tuesday's announcement of cuts to disability support in the Commons.
Liz Kendall, the DWP secretary, gave a speech that might as well have been written for Iain Duncan Smith during his inglorious tenure. There was no substantive difference at all. Kendall's announcement that the hated Work Capability Assessment would be scrapped and Personal Independence Payments would not be means tested was a sliver of carrot before a battering with a very big stick. There's going to be a rejigging of the PIPs points system, pretty much ensuring only those with the most severe and debilitating impairments will receive state support. Extra Universal Credit payments awarded to those living with disabilities or difficult health conditions are going to find them frozen for four years, while new applicants can look forward to receiving just half of this additional support. If someone is under the age of 22, they will lose eligibility to apply for this health element of UC altogether.
The consequences of these few measures will be catastrophic. About a million people will lose thousands of pounds a year, which would - from Kendall's point of view - lead to the perverse outcome of some giving up employment precisely because the present level of support enable them to keep working. And as for the new points system that will govern PIPs, this is surely a recipe for a skyscraper full of appeals as hundreds of thousands of people are wrongly judged not to be debilitated enough. Which is exactly what happened with the WCA.
For a week, we've heard how no Labour politician entered politics to cut welfare (a woeful and inaccurate representation of those on the Labour right, at least), so why put the boot into the poorest and most vulnerable? On the one hand, they think sticking to Rachel Reeves's strait jacket will win over hard right Reform-curious voters still taking their political cues from Sun editorials. As per Labour's dalliances with racist positioning it won't work. But, for as long as the left refuses to get its act together while the Greens struggle to cut through, electoral punishment isn't immediately in the offing. Only concerted opposition from the unions, rebellion-minded Labour MPs, and the extra-parliamentary movements of the disabled themselves acting in conjunction can force the government to think again.
But we need to be absolutely clear why this is happening. It has nothing to do with a "£5bn saving". If it was there might be some more honesty around framing the issue, rather than the tedious combination of "we're the party of work/benefits are keeping disabled people out of work." No, what we are seeing is a scapegoating operation providing cover for employer failings. For it's not welfare that "traps" claimants, but employer attitudes around availability, flexibility, and reliability of workers with impairments and chronic conditions. Their "rather not" attitude to making reasonable adjustments, or accommodating workers who require a bit more support might force an employer to modify ways of working and, horror of horrors, negotiate with employees over better and inclusive working conditions for all. Blaming benefits, not bosses gets the latter off the hook. And the second comes back to maintaining the social workhouse, the apparatus of bureaucratic loopholes, harassments, and humiliations whose affect is to discipline class relations by making "alternatives" to compulsory work as undesirable and as stigmatising as possible.
Kendall's remodelling of social security is set to punish the ill and the disabled for not being healthy and/or able-bodied. This is a continuation of Conservative cruelty, and that is entirely the point.
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13 comments:
Unless it's purely intended as a distraction from something, it boggles the mind trying to imagine what they think that they're going to achieve.
Are the Duncan Smith and Esther McVey fans still a major voting force, and open to becoming faithful Labour voters, just as long as they believe that sufficient efforts are being made to marginalise and kill disabled people?
At this rate only Reform voters will even turn up to the polling stations.
Yoou live long enough and you think, hasn't this been tried before? In 1997 Labour piloted a single work focused gateway for all benefit claimants, alongside various New Deals - for young people, for people with disabilities - and then merged Employmenst and Social Security to form DWP with the aim of getting people back into work or into work. Millions were spent on pilots to test processes and Jobcentre Plus set up to deliver.
Surely there is research result to show what worked and why the numbers getting disability payments did not fall that a pragmatic, 'it's delivery that matters, not ideology' can draw on.
I have been repeatedly turned down for Personal Independence Payment, even on appeal, despite having osteoarthritis from head to toe, the remains of the most ulcerated colon of anyone who ever lived to tell the tale, depression, anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder, paranoid personality disorder, anankastic personality disorder, anxious personality disorder, and an Autism Spectrum Disorder, possibly Asperger's Syndrome. So I can assure you that PIP is hard to get. Anyone who is receiving it must really, really, really need it.
Those who suggest that it is possible to self-certify as mentally, or if some of them were to be believed even physically, ill enough to be awarded PIP, yet for some unknown reason most people, including themselves, did not therefore do so, are on the same level as those who suggest that anyone might use a foodbank, yet for some unknown reason most people, including themselves, did not therefore do so.
In the spirit of 40 years of Education Secretaries who have presumed to opine as to how much homework should be set, how often disruptive pupils should be put out of class, and so on, Wes Streeting, whose only degree is in History and who has never worked outside politics, now informs us that there is an "overdiagnosis" of mental illness. It is particularly galling to hear the approval of people who opposed the lockdowns, and who have rarely stopped banging on about them in the five years since. They predicted an explosion in mental illness, and that is undeniably a factor. But the alternative was mass deaths from Covid-19. The lockdowns were the less bad option. Yet those who most noisily foresaw its downside seem not to have noticed their vindication.
Streeting is personally opposed to assisted suicide, although it would be interesting to see whether he would resign rather than implement it. But his attitude is the context in which it is being railroaded through Parliament, with even the requirement of approval by a High Court judge having been abandoned, meaning that the Bill itself ought to be, in the terms in which it was given a Second Reading. Streeting's enthusiasm for contracting out the National Health Service to his own private donors is the context in which assisted suicide is openly expected to be treated in the same way, no doubt with prepayment plans, with advertising, and with sales staff paid by footfall. The withdrawal of benefits from the already suicidal ought to do those interests no end of good. And with them, their pet politicians.
Main parties (at least privately) accept current welfare system incentivises unproductivity and is unsustainable. The numbers simply don’t lie. Even interests defending welfare don’t deny this, they mislead with fallacy of composition focusing on those with most severe and persistent disabilities, who they know will be most protected.
There just isn’t enough productivity to subsidise the uproductivity, and finding ways to squeeze the productive are increasingly counterproductive. Some argue for kicking the can; borrow more to maintain short-term spending and hope for some deus ex machina. I don’t rate Reeves, but her ‘straightjacket’ is real, spending is not the same as investing, a Gov’t with a serious productivity problem trying to borrow more to prop this up will only end in more trouble.
I do agree businesses should be incentivised to do more to revive economically inactive, but successive Gov’t policies for 30+ years have actively worked against this. I’m also pessimistic about how many economically inactive people are now permanently conditioned into inactivity. I find it interesting that in second half of 20th C we had a population that had experienced unprecedented levels of trauma and hardship, who worked to build a welfare state. Now we have large chunks of population dependent on welfare and traumatised at the idea of working.
@Kamo. So, the current welfare system "incentivises unproductivity"? Putting aside the grammar, I would be interested to see the evidence for this claim. As for "it's unsustainable" - again, what is the evidence for this? Just because the usual gobshites keep saying it doesn't constitute evidence or make it true. Presumably if instead of trying to penalise people for being ill we actually invested in a health service which prioritised making people well, then more people would recover or not be so ill as to have to stop working. If you mean not sustainable in the sense that letting large numbers of people struggle on with chronic and often highly treatable illness, or expecting people with disability to find work without offering support and encouragement to employers to employ them, and assistance in maintaining employment (as in help with travel, housing and equipment) is not sustainable if we want a flourishing and contented society, then I would agree that it is not.
As for not enough productivity to subsidise 'unproductivity' then you have not been paying attention. Last year corporations in the USA spent over 1 Trillion $ on share buybacks. Productive? Hardly . Rentiers extract vast amounts from the rest of us, and that is absolutely a subsidy of the unproductive by the productive. There are trillions floating about in the investosphere - that weird semi-monde somewhere 'off shore', and largely off the books, carefully 'managed' by a very well-heeled crowd of shadow bankers, lawyers and dodgy accountants, all of dubious morality and none of it is productive in any rational or practical sense. The shadow money from this nefarious crew funds our main political parties and buys the loyalty of MPS, economists and advisers and the whole corrupt cabal infesting whitehall and the City, as well as controlling the media to ensure only their views are given prominence (where people like you pick up your 'opinions' and parrot them).
In the spirit of your concern over the unproductive, I suggest a rentier tax of 98% on wealth - be it land, shares, crypto or any other such source. Anyone who leaves the country as a result will not be alllowed back. Ever. Any attempt at avoidance or evasion will lead to confiscation of all assets, to go in to a People's Wealth Fund. That would fund a very generous Basic income for everyone, with plenty of allowances for the disabled and unwell.
Ask yourself what the long term result of screwing the poor, the ill, the disabled, the old, the young, the students, the rural worker, the 'low' skilled worker, the unqualified, and the propertyless is likely to be - given they form a huge majority of the population. It will end in bloodshed, destruction and many, many tears. Those that survive to struggle on through the aftermath as the world collapses around them may wish that they had not.
@ Sean Dearg
The DWP, OBR, ONS and other public bodies publish a range of official statistics covering increasing rates of economic inactivity, weak productivity, increasing levels of ill health, especially mental health, especially amongst younger cohorts (increases way beyond comparable developed economies). And obviously the rising costs of these things. If you want to know why the Gov’t thinks this is unsustainable you could look at the recent work of the Economic Affairs Committee, but there are other reputable sources reaching similar conclusions.
Now, we could say this is all a pack of lies, which would be great, because there’d be no need for constantly increasing real terms spending on a problem that doesn’t exist. There would be no need for cuts, there would be no need for historically high levels of taxation, we could immediately ease the cost of living crisis by doing away with fiscal drag, we could abandon lots of questionable policies which only exist as sticking plasters for these underlying problems.
What I find interesting about some of your other ideas is that you can see the problems, but rather like Rachel Reeves, your instinct is to do things that will make them worse. Illiberal policies like expropriation (posh word for state sanctioned theft) and capital controls invariably lead to further economic decline, they’re also incompatible with functioning democracy; it’s fine when other people’s stuff is being nicked, but once your own stuff is up for grabs, and the economy is tanking, support strangely disappears. Wealth taxes are not particularly common because they cause more problems than they solve. A Basic Income is an interesting idea, but it defeats itself the moment you start saying X and Y should get more (and that’s before you try to cut the state spending which a) becomes obsolete as a result of it and b) needs to be cut to pay for it). Corporate investment is weaker than it should be in the UK, but that's because business somehow isn't sold on the growth via anti-growth policies strategy (can't for the life of me think why).
It’s not inconceivable to me that the current spirit of Western decadence will end in violence, I don’t think it’s necessarily the most plausible or even the most likely outcome, but I don’t think it will be led by people who lack the resilience of their forebears.
There comes a point where the only thing you can accept as their rationale is: they really believe it should be this hard to claim benefits, that you should feel like a moral failure for not working, that public money should be transferred upwards not sent back down to the poorest, and that people genuinely should not be able to rely on the state for any kind of life when they're unable to work.
We can no longer frame it as "are they trying to court xyz voters?" or "what are they trying to achieve?" - just like how the Lib Dems abandoned their tuition fees promise, they do it cos they completely believe in it
I'm gonna repeat a bit what I just posted above. The results are the point. Whatever we think the outcome will be - deaths, total immiseration, people feeling helpless and taking on jobs that leave them in hell cos of their disabilities, and a sea change in how society feels about welfare and the disabled - that *is the purpose of the "reforms"*
Blair had a similarly cruel view of welfare but was starting from a) a much higher standard of welfare on offer and so his schemes and pilots didn't delve deep into pure cruelty (tho some did of course), and b) the possibility of resistance in the unions. Starmer is starting with a welfare system smashed by Blair, Brown and the Tories, and a union movement that has lost what little spine it had left
So all those pilots don't matter. They now have the ability to just cut and slash and burn, and that's exactly what they're gonna do
My mum often asks me "how can they [the Tories at the time] keep these cuts now they know how many hundreds of thousands of people have died?" and I told her: "mum, they were told in advance that huge numbers of people will die. We read about it in the papers. It was not hidden. So, if you're told your plan will kill 100,000 people and you do it anyway, what does that say about you?: it says that you're happy to kill 100,000 people"
Labour knows its plans will kill people, and it's going ahead with them anyway
Finally, if sympathy means anything, I truly do feel horrible for you for the life that's been forced on you. I suffer extreme pain and terrible depression that has resisted all treatment, but I'm able to work and live a decent enough life.
I hate having to read your list of symptoms when hearing about benefit cuts cos it means I can't shy away from *knowing* there are people who are gonna starve to death or commit suicide
I accompanied friends to assessments. One friend had tried to commit suicide a year before, and hadn't repeated it cos he failed and it made his depression worse (can't even succeed at killing himself, what a pathetic failure etc) and the PIP assessor insisted - she really pushed him - that the lack of further suicide attempts ipso facto meant his depression was better. He couldn't do anything to persuade her
Actually there's nothing else to say apart from you're totally right about everything else you said. So this ended up being a pat on the head for the disabled guy 🙂
As far as expropriation goes, I'd say that we, the masses, ought to take matters into our own hands (no pun intended) in that regard, rather than calling in vain for some purportedly benevolent government to ostensibly act on our behalf. This might indeed be incompatible with what passes for 'democracy' according to our political establishment, but such a truncated, impoverished, bastardised conception of 'democracy', wherein 'democracy' is reduced to allowing the lower orders the opportunity to vote in elections every so often for one or other set of representatives of ruling class interests, while their labour power continues to serve as a commodity for capital to generate RoI off of, with workers concomitantly being reduced to cogs in a machine, and while a bunch of petty despots in whom control over the means of production is vested are allowed to inflict all manner of negative externalities on communities without any encumbrance whatsoever, in pursuit of profit, is not one that I have the slightest interest in upholding or defending. The form of democracy I want to see involves those who who don't presently own any means of production and aren't stupendously rich having meaningful control over the decisions that affect their lives, which entails communities and workplaces managing themselves through collective, participatory decision-making, hence the call for direct collectivisation.
I'm quite prepared to risk watching the world burn. We're already risking that anyway by allowing capitalism to ravage the environment, so ...
In the early 2010s, when austerity was being handed down to us by the previous Party of Rentiers, door-knockers from my local authority came by with an iPad game challenging the takers to balance the council's budget without going over the allowed level of council tax increase. I don't drive a car, so I just zeroed all of the road maintenance budgets. Easy! I balanced the books.
Reeves is doing the same thing. Her job requires her to make it look like the books are balanced now. She might be fully aware that they actually aren't - that a big chunk of her supposed savings are going to go straight into processing disability appeals, political damage control, and extra strain on the health service; but she doesn't have to care as much about that. What the books look like in 5 years time could be somebody else's problem.
Addendum: literally the _only_ thing preventing me right now from going out, hunting down Liz Kendall, and putting her in casualty, dealing her serious, life-changing injuries or possibly even killing her is the knowledge that, ultimately, it wouldn't do any good. It wouldn't put a single extra potato on the plate of any of the many, many long-suffering chronically ill and disabled people who are being further immiserated. Starmer would simply replace her with a like-minded goon and/or yes-person who'll do do the bidding of politburo with alacrity, and inflict the same barbaric policies!
Except that the more people who actually DO take such action, the less appealing that it becomes to be a minion of the monsters. That's kind of the point. So if that's really the only thing stopping you, then you shouldn't let it.
The far more realistic reasons not to take such actions include (1) the difficulty of carrying them out successfully, especially when targets know that they are targets; and (2) the fact that the state and its monstrous rulers know full well the threat to themselves posed by such popular vigilante efforts, and will endeavour to make a cautionary example of anyone who tries it. If they fear nothing else, they fear Luigi.
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