Two years ago, Tony Blair boasted to a big business audience that New Labour would be the only party that would be serious about welfare reform – the fashionable term for welfare cuts. Now he is being true to his word. The government has announced plans to continue with Tory cuts which come into effect next April, and to consider adding to those further cuts of its own.
First, on 19 November, Harriet Harman, Social Security Secretary, decided to implement Tory government cuts of between £5 and £10.50 per week in lone parent benefits through the abolition of the higher rates of income support and child benefit they currently receive, saving £390 million over three years. The next day came a report that the government is considering cuts in benefits for 6.5 million disabled people. Such cuts would be implemented either by taxing such benefits, or means-testing or time-limiting them. Answering criticism of her decision on lone parent benefits, Harman declared ‘I said this is a hard choice. We’re not making a virtue of this. But we are making a virtue of the fact that we have to stay within our manifesto commitments.’ Not that this is all. The government has also decided to press ahead with a further Tory measure to limit backdating of benefit claims to one month rather than one year at present. And lastly, they will continue with plans to limit payment of council tax benefit to poor people in large houses, affecting 65,000 people and costing them on average £3.80 a week.
A week earlier, Harman had criticised a group of 54 academics who has protested about poverty-level benefits, saying ‘We will fulfil our duty to support those who are without work. But those who can, have to recognise their responsibility to work’. In other words, working class people have a choice: poverty-level benefits, or poverty-level wages.
Alongside actual benefit cuts, civil servants have been in a policing programme to force people off the various types of disability benefit to which they may be entitled. No less than 250,000 claimants of the disability living allowance (currently paid to 1.8 million people) have been targeted for home visits under the so-called ‘benefits integrity programme’. It was only after four months that ministers agreed to exclude paraplegics from the review. What is clear is the government is stigmatising disabled people as the ‘undeserving’ poor in an effort to reduce the £23 billion benefits they currently receive.
‘Hard choices’ is a cliché‚ used whenever the government announces an attack on the working class; there are never any ‘hard choices’ to be made in relation to big business and the multinationals – for instance over tobacco sponsorship. Gordon Brown’s Green Budget spelled out further attacks on low-paid workers and women in particular through the proposed Working Family Tax Credit. This would replace existing family credit, and could only work if the government scrapped independent taxation of men and women, and if workers were forced to tell their employers intimate details of their domestic arrangements. Even then, the net effect would be to make low-paid families worse off. Then there was the proposal for ‘after-school clubs’ for lone parents. Harriet Harman has pointedly refused to rule out the possibility of making their use compulsory, saying that compulsion was ‘not the issue’.
What has the Parliamentary Labour Party been doing in response? One MP, Steve Pound, said of the single parent benefit cut that ‘It’s only the same as the price of a couple of packets of fags’, saying later that government whips had told him to say this. Five others appeared in a fashion shoot as ‘sexy, stylish and spirited’ MPs in Elle magazine before being told by party whips to support Harman’s war against the poor. Another woman MP dismissed evidence that two-thirds of single parents live below the poverty line with the comment that ‘These aren’t desperate people. Most of them have got men somewhere in the background’, going on to say, ‘I appreciate there were some people who voted for us who thought we would make a difference. They didn’t understand’. Lastly, a former leftist, Denis MacShane, described single mothers as recipients of ‘state charity’. Ugly, middle-class prejudices, uttered by people who will stoop to anything to defend their privileges and their positions.
The cornerstone of Labour’s victory was its alliance with big business and the multinationals. The government and its policy committees are stuffed with their representatives. They are now demanding action on welfare spending, and they have a bunch of fawning, odious, middle class wretches in the Labour Party only too eager to do their bidding in between obligatory makeovers.
They have declared war on us – we must declare war on them.
Robert Clough
FRFI 140 December 1997 / January 1998
