Around these parts, we like a bit of nostalgia. Except when it's Labour revisiting and implementing welfare policies from the 2010-2016 period of Conservative government. Having already had Liz Kendall announce a raft of measures designed to make disabled people's life harder, at her Spring statement Rachel Reeves announced even more cuts. Three million of the very poorest who rely on Universal Credit can look forward to losing £1,720/year. A measure that, according to the government's own statistics, will force another 250,000 people into poverty. This was accompanied by the usual lecture that Labour is the "party of work", and to rub their contempt in Darren Jones, Fittingly Reeves's number two, compared disability cuts to stopping children's pocket money.
But this is alright as the government are putting extra money into training and work. Because, as we know, the problem has nothing to do with employers actively discriminating against workers with seen and unseen impairments, or the refusal of too many to make reasonable adjustments to accommodate employees with extra needs. No. Reeves and her ilk just know that the biggest barrier to employment are that benefits are too generous. An entirely Tory view of those who most need support, and one Reeves has been itching to reinforce for a decade. And to think this woman once used a soft soap interview to complain about Labour members comparing her to a Tory.
As a policy, penny pinching the disabled is counterproductive to Reeves's growth agenda. After all, poorer people tend to spend greater proportions of their income which, in aggregate, have multiplier effects that keep many a shop in business. Taking money from them is limiting spending power, and that can only dampen economic activity and make it harder to reach the forecasted fairy tale growth figures. It also appears Reeves has inherited something else from the George Osborne years - the affectation of treating economic performance and public spending as if they're synonymous. I.e. Tightening the state's purse strings is proof that the present occupant of Number 11 is a responsible steward of the British economy. Even though, in reality, overseeing fiscal retrenchment takes money out of the economy. It makes no sense, right?
Except it does. That Reeves's number one mission is economic growth has always been hooey. Her primary goal and that of Keir Starmer's is the continued stabilisation of the class politics of British capitalism. For the Labour right have something to prove: that they can be a reliable servant of capital while the traditional party of business is out of action. And here, Starmerism and its warm ups from the Blair-Brown years have to demonstrate their "seriousness". You will recall that, as far as they were concerned, the left's partial take over of Labour between 2015-19 came seemingly out of nowhere and the establishment suffered a rude shock when the "unelectable" Jeremy Corbyn robbed the Tories of their majority in 2017. To become the preferred party of concentrated wealth and therefore a stable career ladder for the right wingers coming up behind today's cabinet, they have to prove Labour is a dead dog as far as left wing aspirations and working class politics are concerned. They have to show a sharply class conscious bourgeoisie that the Corbyn-lite promises Starmer made in his pitch for leader were just for pretend. And, as political objectives go, the Labour right are delivering on their promises not to promise anything.
How do they know they're succeeding? By the nice write ups in the FT, and how the bond markets are reacting. And their verdict is steady as she goes. In other words, UK state debt continues to be a safe bet for investors because Reeves isn't doing anything that might unbalance the present array of class forces, and certainly nothing to suggest to business - and particularly finance and commercial capital - that their interests won't come first in Labour's thinking. Therefore, misery and impoverishment of millions of UC recipients is a price they're willing for others to pay to achieve their miserable political goals. But in so doing, the current bunch are abdicating Labour's historic role as a lid on subaltern aspirations. Because they're now the ones overseeing class war on the most vulnerable sections of our class, Labour is hardly in a position to channel their anger and resistance in a harmless direction. And it's this abandonment that will extract a heavy political price from Reeves, Starmer, and their party in the coming years.
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8 comments:
Where will people go, if not to labour? Will they go right wing or is there an actual alternative?
In roughly 1971, Nigel Lawson wrote a piece for the Sunday Times berating the LP’s inability to recruit the demonstrators on the streets, in order to make politics safe from their ideas. Plus ça change?
The cuts had to be rewritten because the Chancellor of the Exchequer was innumerate, but that experience has chastened neither Rachel Reeves nor her minions. First Torsten Bell, and now Darren Jones. They even look the same as that sort in the Blair years. Callous, and dependent on the assumption that, "They're Labour, so they must be all right basically." They weren't then, and they're not now. Now as then, they are barefaced liars, this time claiming, for example, that PIP was devised "as a top-up to the health top-up to Universal Credit".
As for the rest of us, an extra £500 by 2029? Let joy be unconfined. But even that is only an average figure. It will not apply to every household. Not only are sums negligible to our overlords but catastrophic to those affected going to be taken away from the already most desperate, but a further quarter of a million people, including 50,000 children, are going to be pushed into poverty. Meaning that they will not be spending anything. When has austerity ever caused economic growth? That is not a rhetorical question. When, exactly, has it?
Spot on, Phil. As Alexei Sayle satirically commented, ‘the global financial crash of 2008 was caused by there being many libraries in Wolverhampton.’
I think your analysis is too sweeping, but only because category of 'disability' is now too broad to be genuinely useful. There have always been people with profound or severe disabilities who could never work, and there's always been people with milder conditions, but who were more likely to still work; those labelled 'oddballs', 'of a nervous disposition', 'slow', 'tearaways' ...
The current problem isn't the profoundly disabled, it's the explosion of reported milder conditions, coupled with social, political and economic changes which mean the latter are now less economically active. Lots in the mix, but availability of benefits, and their relative value versus working, is a significant factor. The knock on effect is people in the former get dragged into efforts to tackle the latter. (And yes I am aware things like PIP can be difficult get, but that's not the sum of disability related benefits).
However, Reeves's approach is not coherent at the margin. Increasing payroll taxes will reduce demand for labour, especially at lower end, where those with milder conditions are likely to be. Whilst fiscal drag means they will keep less of the value of their earnings, which makes benefits more attractive.
Since most of them have proven themselves time and time again to be incapable of voting for an actual alternative, even during those blips in the system when one is actually offered, those who don't buy the brand of carnivore manure which Starmer is selling will do one of two things: go to Reform, or stop voting altogether.
A lot of the angry morons will flock to Toad's banner, just as they did in the US, and get buyer's remorse pretty soon when he wins.
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 lost economic activity, 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.
@kamo, is that what you read in the Torygraph? Stop parroting other people's made up shit and try making some of your own. Here's a starter. Too many smug, sneering entitled self important supercilious snobs are living off others peoples money - that's rentiers like you. The productive, I.e. those who do the work are supporting the unproductive, rentiers, like those that buy the Torygraph. Tax wealth, tax unearned income, tax assets, tax all trading and lock up the city w*nkers that parasitize
the rest of us. Eat the rich!
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