The ruling class has unleashed a ruthless ideological assault on the working class. It has resurrected the Victorian distinction between the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor with a vengeance. Its purpose is to divide the working class in order to make it pay as a whole for Britain’s ballooning national debt, and its principal weapon is the Welfare Reform Bill currently going through parliament. Amongst the many vicious proposals in this Bill is one to cap total household benefits at £500 per week, £26,000 a year, no matter how many children there may be. Their populist argument is that people on benefits should not get more than this, approximately the median individual wage. Yet, if this becomes law, tens of thousands of people will be forced out of their homes in London and other high-cost areas simply because the housing benefit they receive will come close to the new limit, leaving nothing for them to live on, particularly if they are disabled. It will also mean that when people lose their jobs, they stand a good chance of being made homeless and their children forced to move school as well. It is a new form of social cleansing. Robert Clough reports.
As with all ruling class appeals for ‘fairness’, this one is completely dishonest: the comparison is between a total household income on the one hand, and an individual wage exclusive of any benefits on the other. Yet the proposal is extremely popular: according to YouGov, 76% of voters and 69% of Labour voters support the cap. The Labour Party echoes Prime Minister Cameron’s talk of ‘fairness’ through its appeals to the ‘squeezed middle’, those who in its eyes ‘work hard and do the right thing’ (Liam Byrne, Shadow Social Services Secretary). They are seen to be in the ranks of the deserving: by implication there are those who do not ‘do the right thing’, who are not part of ‘a responsible workforce’, and who deserve to be hammered.
When it becomes law, the Welfare Reform Bill will consolidate the government’s attack on disabled people. Already tens of thousands are being denied Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) as a result of punitive tests run by French multinational Atos and forced on to the lower Jobseeker’s Allowance. Now the government intends to limit the receipt of contributory ESA to 12 months and to means-test it thereafter; for some, it will involve an income cut of £94 per week. The Bill also proposes to replace Disability Living Allowance (DLA) with Personal Independence Payments; its aim is to cut the annual cost of DLA payments by 20%. The transfer from one system to the other will involve even more of the degrading Atos-type tests. An estimated 3.2 million people are in receipt of DLA: they are to join others in paying off the national debt. And this is not all. The Bill also proposes to limit housing benefit entitlement from April 2013 for social housing tenants whose accommodation is deemed larger than they need. In other words, parents whose children leave home will not receive sufficient housing benefit to cover the rent and may have no choice but to leave. It will also place foster carers in an impossible position since children in their care are not counted as members of their household. Not even the destitute are exempt: the Bill proposes the abolition of the Social Fund, already pitifully inadequate, but a lifeline for those whose benefit payments are delayed.
Most of these measures will come into effect from April 2013. However, from 1 January 2012, new and draconian limits on Local Housing Allowance for the private rented sector came into effect. First, it will be pegged to the 30th percentile of private rents in any one borough instead of the 50th. Second, caps introduced for new claimants in April 2011 have been extended to current claimants, including the maximum rate of £400 set for a four-bedroom property. Third, single people between 25 and 35 will no longer be able to claim housing benefit for a one-bedroom property, but will have to accept the much lower shared accommodation rate.
The first two measures have put 800,000 properties across the country out of reach for benefit claimants: nationally, the number of claimants will now exceed the number of properties available for private rent. In Liverpool, for instance, 21,000 claimants will chase 12,000 properties; in Birmingham, 34,500 claimants will compete for 23,300 properties. The proportions are worse in London: in Newham there will be little more than one house for every two claimants. In Oxford, there will be 5,200 affordable properties for 12,000 claimants; occupiers of a two-bedroom property will now receive the maximum of £150 per week instead of £196.15. Oxford City Council chief executive Grainia Long suggested that ‘the only feasible option for many families who want to stay in their communities will be to borrow more or to spend less’. Neither, of course, is a feasible option. It will be even worse for young people since there are relatively even fewer properties available as shared accommodation: 70% of local authorities have reported in a survey for the charity Homeless Link that they had no shared accommodation provision. Homelessness amongst young people will soar as a consequence.
In reality the ranks of the ‘undeserving’ poor are now being extended beyond claimants to embrace public sector workers as well. In the first nine months of 2011, 172,000 local government jobs were axed. The current public sector pay freeze will cut pay by 15% by 2015. 70,000 jobs in the voluntary (not-for-profit) sector disappeared in 2011, 10% of the total, as councils cut budgets for essential services they provide.
Unemployment is at a 17-year high, 2.68 million, with over one million 16-24 year-olds not in employment, education or training. Cameron claimed that the private sector would absorb those who lost their jobs in the public sector; in the last quarter of 2011, however, the private sector created just 5,000 jobs compared to the 67,000 lost in the public sector. Labour Party leader Ed Miliband refuses to give any commitment on reversing Coalition cuts, and has endorsed the need for the public sector pay freeze. His overriding concern is to prove that Labour will be ‘fiscally credible’ in government – credible, that is, to the City of London and the ruling class.
Over the next two months councils throughout Britain will be approving the second year of savage cuts under the ConDem coalition’s austerity programme. Tory, LibDem and Labour councils alike will be confident that they will get away with it after organised resistance to the first year’s cuts was negligible. Trade unions offered no real opposition to the loss of jobs and essential services for working class people. There is no evidence that this is about to change: the current debacle over public sector pensions is proving once again that the unions are not fighting for working class interests. Public sector workers not only will have to work longer and pay more for worse pensions: many of them will lose their jobs anyway. For poorer sections of the working class, conditions will become increasingly desperate.
Council services across the board will be cut: those for disabled children and for children with mental health problems, youth, day care and community centres, adult, home care and elderly social services, libraries, sheltered housing, school uniform allowances. The children’s charity NSPCC calculates that spending on social care for children will fall by 40%. Not a single Labour council will take a stand against the demands of the ConDem coalition; they may shed crocodile tears as they wield the axe, but they will cut ruthlessly.
The trade unions have done nothing to staunch the loss of jobs or services. There were a mere 15,000 days lost through strike action in public administration during the first 11 months of 2011 (excluding the two one-day strikes in June and November against public sector pension cuts). Confronting councils over budget policy will be deemed political and therefore illegal under anti-trade union laws. Trade unions are not about to jeopardise their huge assets, so their main concern has been to stitch together voluntary redundancy deals. Local councils will look at this abject record and conclude that far from initiating resistance to cuts, unions will move to stifle it wherever it appears.
The lack of organised resistance is giving the ruling class confidence to intensify and extend its attack on working class living standards. We need to start a real fight against benefit cuts, the threat of eviction, cuts in council services and jobs, privatisation. We cannot rely on the trade unions let alone the Labour Party. We have to build anew a movement which will defend the independent interests of the working class.
Public sector pensions struggle: ending in a whimper
It is two months since two million public sector workers went on strike on 30 November against changes to pension schemes which would force them to pay more and work longer to get a worse pension. Yet there has been no further action, even though the proposed changes are due to come into effect in April. The winter of discontent promised by trade union leaders has petered out: their fighting talk has come to nothing.
Leaders of Unison, the GMB and the Royal College of Nursing have ignominiously accepted the government’s latest offer and will ballot their members on it. The two largest teaching unions, the NUT and NASUWT, have continued to negotiate; the NUT executive has rejected demands for further action in February and March by a majority of 2 to 1. The third largest teaching union, ATL, has accepted the government proposals, as has the second-largest civil service union, Prospect.
Unite, PCS (the largest civil service union) and the UCU are the only unions to have rejected the government’s proposals. In the UCU’s case this was after its general secretary Sally Hunt had argued for acceptance.
The UCU has called a one-day strike of college and university lecturers for 1 March, and wants to discuss further joint action with those unions which have yet to accept. But with the NUT currently opposed to further action there will be little appetite to come to an early decision in favour of further strikes.
The continuing inaction will mean that one by one these unions will find reasons to give up the token resistance they have shown so far. We cannot be deceived by Unite General Secretary Len McCluskey’s assault on Ed Miliband and Ed Balls for their ‘sudden embrace of austerity and the public sector pay squeeze’. His comments have been echoed by arch-capitulators Paul Kenny of the GMB and Dave Prentis, Unison general secretary. It proves once again how easy it is for trade union leaders to sound radical whilst doing their outmost to stifle real resistance.
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! 225 February/March 2012
