Labour and the Social Workhouse

Is Kemi Badenoch the Prime Minister? I ask because last week prior to Keir Starmer's announcement about increasing military spending, the Leader of the Opposition said it should be part-funded by cuts to social security. And on Wednesday, the BBC was leading with news from "sources" that this is exactly what Rachel Reeves plans to do.

It could be this is more muddying of the water. The government's comms haven't exactly been on point, and "anonymous" downbeat briefings have been made in the past that came to nothing. But in this case, I don't think so. The contempt Reeves has for those subsisting on social security has been known for a decade, since she said Labour doesn't want to represent people who are out of work. Readers will recall that, as Chancellor, Reeves has followed it up with stripping away winter fuel payments and keeping the two child benefit cap. Before Trump came back, there have long been mutterings about doing something about the benefits bill, with disabled people and the long-term sick in the crosshairs.

The way this is being presented is typical of a government drenched in dishonesty. In April last year, 1.5m people reported inconveniences associated with long Covid and a further 381,000 said their day-to-day activities had been limited a lot. A good chunk of whom would be in receipt of sickness benefits. Another gift of Covid and the preceding government's lack of seriousness has been the co-morbidities arising from infection. Susceptibility to auto-immune diseases, cancers, heart disease, respiratory conditions, and more are well known and are exacting a toll from a population that have contracted it many times. These too are adding to the sickness bill. But the most common problems are musculoskeletal conditions to the point of debilitation, and mental illness. We never hear about what's driving these, perhaps because it raises inconvenient questions.

Politicians know some ill and disabled people are unsuitable for work and that the overwhelming majority on sickness and disability benefits are there precisely because of that. Which is why the Tories are past masters at scapegoating them by tarring them with the scrounger/skiver brush. Labour are not so crude, prefer to say the system isn't working for them, and is creating "perverse incentives" to stay away from work. But the effect is the same: the delegitimation of the long-term sick, a denial that their system chews up and spits out broken bodies and damaged minds, and has no further use for them.

The Italian autonomists used to talk about the social factory in which every occupation, including unpaid domestic labour, reproduced the system and were therefore productive of capital. Perhaps we should think about the social workhouse, which is productive of stigma, fear, and forcing unwell people into work. This isn't primarily to make money out of the disabled and the ill, but to reinforce the discipline wage labour depends on. Clamping down on benefits is Labour's way of telling their bourgeois backers that the management of class relations is safe with them.

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