The ConDem assault on the working class is accelerating as the government senses there is no widespread resistance. An all-out offensive on welfare benefits is accompanying the third round of cuts to local services. Not a single Labour council has stood up to the government. The trade unions have colluded with the Labour Party to prevent any struggle from taking place. Deepening poverty is evident in the explosion of food banks across the country and the demand that they attempt to meet. Resistance has to start now across local communities, and has to be organised and led by those who are in the frontline facing the relentless attacks of the ruling class. Robert Clough reports.
From 1 April, one in five social housing tenants will be deemed to be under-occupying their homes and will face substantial cuts to their benefit payments. Popularly known as a ‘bedroom tax’, councils and housing associations are sending letters telling tenants the new rules: HB will cover one room for each adult or couple living as part of the household. Children will be expected to share a bedroom however small up to the age of ten, and up to 16 if they are the same sex. Disabled people may retain an extra bedroom for a paid carer, but not for an informal carer such as a family member. Claimants with what is assessed as one spare bedroom under the new size criteria will have their HB cut by 14% and those with two or more spare bedrooms will face a 25% cut. The cuts, averaging £14pw, will affect an estimated 660,000 working-age social housing tenants, 31% of those claiming HB.
The choice facing working class people is invidious. According to the government, they should decide to move to smaller flats or houses. However, there is a dire shortage of one and two-bedroom social housing accommodation which could mean that 95,000 people might face eviction in the first year alone. The alternative is to move into private rented accommodation – smaller houses or flats where the rent is higher and the conditions often poor. In Liverpool, 15% of private rented accommodation is not fit for habitation, and over 50% does not meet the Decent Homes Standard.
Many of these working-age tenants will also face a cut in council tax benefit. The budget for this is being passed down to local councils by central government and subjected to a 10% cut of £500m. Pensioners will have their benefit protected, so the burden of the cut falling on those of working age will be even greater. 670,000 recipients of the benefit in both social and private accommodation will have to pay some of their council tax; this includes an estimated 162,000 low-paid workers. The average bill of £156pa hides wide variations: while Tower Hamlets’ Labour council has decided not to charge low-paid tenants, 25,000 low-income workers in Brent council, also Labour, will have to pay £240pa. Another Labour council, Ealing, has decided on a minimum payment of £210pa, and, in a vindictive twist, £330pa for those out of work for more than a year.
There are further benefit cuts taking effect from 1 April. In January the government passed legislation to limit benefit increases to 1% per annum for the next three years. With annual inflation approximately 3% this represents a substantial cut in real terms for all claimants. On top of this, the capping provisions of the Welfare Reform Act will come into effect. The maximum benefit will be set at £500pw for families and £350pw for single adults. 56,000 families, half of them in London, will lose an average of £93pw.
The net effect of the cuts will be to throw an estimated extra one million children into poverty by 2020. The cuts have been accompanied by an ideological onslaught which attempts to pit those in work against the unemployed. The green light was given by Chancellor George Osborne when, at the 2012 Tory conference, he spoke of ‘the shift-worker, leaving home in the dark hours of the early morning, who looks up at the closed blinds of their next-door neighbour sleeping off a life on benefits’. It expresses the contempt the rich have for poor people, regarding them as next to criminals and benefit claimants as scroungers, perpetually seeking opportunities for fraud.
Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith was next with a tirade against working family tax credit claimed by low-paid workers, alleging without a shred of evidence that £10bn had been lost to illicit welfare claimants and fraudsters ‘from around the world’. The last Labour government introduced working tax credit as a state subsidy for low pay – the real beneficiaries being the companies that pay their workers poverty wages. Eligibility for the credit depended on working a minimum of 16 hours a week; the Coalition raised this in 2012 to 24 hours, forcing tens of thousands of families below the poverty line.
Duncan Smith also alleged that spending on tax credits had risen 58% ahead of the 2005 general election, and 20% in the two years prior to the 2010 election. In fact, the rises were 8% and 8.8% respectively. The actual loss through fraud as opposed to mistaken claims – the application process is very complex – was £1.27bn, 0.7% of total spending on tax credit. This, of course, did not prevent the billionaire press hysterically amplifying the government’s claims whilst ignoring the annual £70bn tax avoidance and evasion by the rich.
In an attempt to justify the 1% cap on benefit increases the ConDem government has said that benefits have risen at twice the rate of wages over the last five years. The government paints a picture which presents benefit claimants as ‘shirkers’. In reality the cap hits 9.5 million households (40% of the total) of whom:
• 2.5 million are ‘workless’ and will lose an average of £215 a year in 2015/16;
• 3 million are households with one or more adults in work who will lose
£75 a year through the freeze in child benefit;
• 4 million are also households with working adults but who will lose £230 a year through cuts in other benefits as well.
The truth is that cuts in benefits and cuts in wages go hand in hand for the ruling class in order to ensure that there is a reserve army of labour which can be forced into low-paid casualised work. This is particularly important for the retail sector which can only remain profitable if it has access to a pool of labour which will work zero hours contracts on the minimum wage. With 1.4 million people forced to work part-time because they cannot get a full-time job and 650,000 in temporary jobs who want permanent work, the size of this pool is increasing all the time.
What of the Labour Party? Shadow Work and Pensions secretary Liam Byrne told the 2011 Labour Party conference that ‘Many on the doorstep at the last election felt that too often we were for shirkers not workers’ and later at the LSE said ‘Labour is the party of hard workers not free-riders. The clue is in the name. We are the Labour Party. The party that said that idleness is an evil. The party of workers, not shirkers.’ In order to appear tough on the ‘shirkers’ in advance of the parliamentary debate on the 1% benefit cap, Byrne and Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls came up with their own proposal: that anyone out of work for two years or more would be obliged to take any job offered or face losing all their benefits. Labour has taken its stand: against the working class and the poor.
Now is the time for resistance to start, independent of the Labour Party. The system of direct payment where all benefits are paid to claimants including HB will be implemented from 1 October 2013. This will add to pressure on the poor to make a choice between paying the rent and council tax, or feeding their families and keeping them warm. It will be increasingly impossible for millions to survive. Organisation has to be community-based. Its slogan has to be: Can’t pay, won’t pay. It will need to collectively organise against council and housing association harassment and against the threat of eviction. It will need to be open and democratic, not the property of individuals or organisations. Trade unions will be welcome, but not as self-appointed leaders. They have done nothing to defend council services or jobs so far. Unite General Secretary Len McCluskey talks endlessly about a campaign of civil disobedience but has done nothing to summon it into existence. We also remember the lesson of the anti-Poll Tax campaign, where the trade unions opposed non-payment because it would cut the income of Labour councils. What is to stop them arguing the same thing this time? Organisation is down to the people. We have to start now.
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! 231 February/March 2013
