Zero points, shit in rivers, and weeping at Margaret's grave

I got an uncanny feeling of déjà vu when watching the recent Channel 4 drama about water company pollution, Dirty Business

A teacher, Reuben, gets an infection when surfing in sewage encrusted waters. Periodic attacks involving writhing on the floor and vomiting mean he has to give up his job. He applies for disability benefits but gets zero points because, as the assessor keeps repeating, when he is not having an attack, he functions normally (3^rd episode, 20.43).

You can see the tired resignation creep across Reuben’s face, as he realises that the fact he does have regular attacks which make him unemployable is completely irrelevant to the assessment.

This is so evocative of the hundreds of thousands of sick and disabled people deemed fit for work points in the roll-out of the Work Capability Assessment under the Con-Lib Dem coalition. They got zero points too because although they couldn’t do any job that existed in the real world, by reaching above their head or into their top pocket once, they revealed that they could do an entirely abstract form of work.

At the time, there were futile calls for a real-world test to take account of what jobs actually demanded people could do repeatedly (as jobs tend to). But these were slammed down by the government in the shape of employment minister Chris Grayling who declared himself “absolutely, unreservedly and implacably” opposed to such a real-world test.

Current Labour DWP enforcer Pat McFadden doesn’t need to signal his opposition to a real-world test – it’s taken as read that it’s a total non-starter. The unbending focus now is on reducing the numbers of people qualifying for Personal Independence Payments (PIP) (which is what the teacher in Dirty Business applies for) despite the fact that 300,000 claims a year are rejected.

Labour did want to make the PIP criteria much tougher, something even Iain Duncan Smith found too much to stomach, but plans were put on hold as a result of an unexpected rebellion of backbench drones. But they will undoubtedly be repackaged as a result of the Timms Review now out for consultation.

Nothing better illustrates the duopoly afflicting the allegedly adversarial British political system than the treatment of sick and disabled people. The default consensus that they are ‘taking the mickey’ and deserve to be punished for having the temerity to have something wrong with them, which is probably half in the mind anyway.

The attitude, as John Pring shows in The Department, can be traced back to the dog days of the Thatcher administration, when health minister and “Mr Privatisation” John Moore wrote to chief secretary to the Treasury John Major, saying rising spending on sickness benefits needed to be tackled, with ‘no choice’ but to make ‘long-term savings’.

In the old system, i.e. invalidity benefit which existed before the testing regime began in the early ’90s, the ‘overriding consideration’ had been one of reasonableness, with the claimants’ ability to work measured against jobs which existed in the real world.  But that is a bygone era in British history. Hence the assessor’s monolithic insistence that when the ex-teacher in Dirty Business was not having a debilitating attack, he was perfectly able to do a job. The fact that vanishingly few employers would want to employ someone who involuntarily squirmed around on the floor every week, being sick everywhere, is not the state’s problem.

Have a nice day.

As of the beginning of this month, new claimants in the Limited Capacity for Work Related Activity Group of the Health element of Universal Credit (formerly Employment and Support Allowance) will have to survive on £50 a week, a nearly 50% cut from the £97 they previously received. This is so the ‘perverse incentive’ to apply for sickness benefit is removed. Actually, there is now a ‘perverse incentive’ to say there is nothing wrong with you even though there is, to ensure against the possibility that you will be judged unfit for work and placed in the LCRWA group.

This, in case you needed any reminder, is being carried through by a ‘Labour’ government. I remember being told in 2020 – by some young careerist working his way up the greasy pole at a meeting to choose the Labour leadership candidate which the CLP I was in would support – to “think of the most vulnerable person” I knew and then cast my vote for Sir Kier Starmer.

What he forgot to say was that if I harboured some sadistic desire to make them suffer even more, I should vote for Starmer.

As Dirty Business makes clear, there is a unity of purpose between the ‘Labour’ party and the Conservatives, which was briefly under threat in the four years before 2020 (which now resemble some strange hallucination). And the wretched consensus is not merely about how to treat the chronically ill.

As the programme recalls, David Cameron promised to tear up 3,000 pieces of needless regulation in order, he claimed, to release the growth potential of the British economy. Over a decade later, Starmer wrote to all 17 regulators in the UK telling them to relax rules for companies. This has resulted in a steep decline in enforcement actions, as they obediently scrabble to fall into line with the government’s so-called growth agenda.

And where has this deregulatory mania got us (aside from turds in rivers that is)? In the 18 years after the Financial Crisis of 2008, the economy has grown by 22% (an average rate of under 1%), while in the 18 years prior to 2008 it grew by 53% – more than twice as fast (and that record was terrible compared to the social democratic post-war years). But do carry on, won’t you.

We are in the grip of necrophile Thatcherism and it’s killing us. Some more than others, admittedly.

To secure for the capitalists, by hand or by brain, the full fruits of everybody else's labour ...

Fresh from inflicting incomparable suffering on sick and disabled people (10,000 people have died shortly after the Con-Dem Work Capability Assessment) the incomparable Chris Grayling has warned of the terrible consequences of raising taxes on very rich people. Such a selfish, envious act, he counsels, would only come back to haunt us because we would “clobber” wealth creators.

It would be remiss, therefore, not to investigate this mysterious alchemy of wealth creation and the strange degree to which it believed to be the exclusive property of the very rich.

The very rich in the UK at the moment can be divided into three categories:

1. Major shareholders in corporations. Not small investors but large institutions owning hundreds or thousands of shares – other companies, banks, hedge funds, pension funds, extremely wealthy individuals. They all receive dividends paid out of the company’s profit. Theirs is an entirely passive role, they do nothing to create wealth; they just get it. The economist David Schweickart has called this a “tax on enterprise”

2. Large companies owning natural resources or monopolies such as water, electricity generation or the railways. They were frequently gifted these resources from the government or bought them for a song. They do all they can to sweat these assets as comprehensively as they can, clobbering (to use a current phrase) their largely captive market of customers for the benefit of their shareholders (see category 1). Wealth creation is not one of their activities.

3. Private landlords. Not all very rich but large companies are moving into this field and property companies are becoming darlings of the stock market. Landlords obviously make money through rent, the receiving of money by virtue of owning an asset in the first instance. As private tenants know all too well, they do very little, frequently sweet fanny adams, to maintain or, heaven forbid, improve these assets. Wealth creation, my foot.

Do entrepreneurs exist? Of course they do. But to deliberately equate them with capitalists is ideological subterfuge of the first order, and to downplay the immense contribution of workers (whose product is appropriated) to wealth creation, equally deceptive. "As any economist will confirm," writes Schweickart, "unless labour costs are less than the value added by labour, there will be no profit." Society needs new creations, new ways of doing things; it needs entrepreneurship that benefits everybody. What it does not need is the siphoning of the massive wealth it creates to tiny minorities.

It occurs to me that the late, socialist Clause 4 of the British Labour Party’s constitution is oddly suited, with some minor adjustments, to the modern-day Conservative Party. The Labour Party does not want it anymore anyway, so it’s going spare.

Here’s the original

And the new, improved 2013 version:

“To secure for the capitalists, by hand or brain, the full fruits of everybody else’s labour and the most inequitable distribution thereof  that may be possible upon the basis of the private ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, and best obtainable system of undemocratic and hierarchical administration and control of each industry or service.”

Succinct, catchy, and it captures the Conservatives’ USP perfectly.

Naught for your Comfort. The British work capability atrocity

“Politics as currently practised,” says the French journalist Christian Salmon, “is no longer the art of the possible, but the art of the fictive. Its aim is not to change the world as it exists, but to affect the way it is perceived.”

In British politics, nowhere is this gap between perception and reality more yawning than in the government’s treatment of sick and disabled people. The iniquities of the British state’s work capability assessment (WCA), which disabled people have to pass in order to continue to receive financial support have been well recorded. 38% of decisions are reversed on appeal and 14% of general practitioners (family doctors) say they have patients who have self-harmed as a result of fear of the assessment or actually going through it. Six per cent of GPs say they have patients who have attempted or committed suicide.

The tests have caused “misery and hardship” to thousands of benefit claimants says the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee. The WCA is “arbitrary and cruel” says Peter Beresford, professor of social policy at Brunel University.

What is less noted, though, is the role of the “art of the fictive”. The fictional character of the government’s claims about what the tests involve and are intended to do. When challenged after revelations of the deaths and suffering the tests help to bring about, the government resorts to systematic deception. The deception has two main forms.

1 If only you’d told us how ill you were

When, in September 2012, after a man who suffered from epilepsy was stripped of his disability benefits following a decision he was “fit for work”, and subsequently died, the UK government’s Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), said it suspected a regrettable error in the flow of information.

“We encourage people to provide as much medical evidence as possible when they apply for Employment Support Allowance,” said a spokeswoman, “and often people who are found fit for work only provide the necessary evidence when they ask for a reconsideration or an appeal.”

Two months later, when it was revealed that a half-blind, paralysed stroke victim who couldn’t speak had died following a decision he was fit for work, the official line was identical.

 “We encourage people to provide as much medical evidence as possible,” bleated the DWP “Often people found fit for work only provide the necessary evidence when they ask for an appeal.”

There’s one slight problem with this excuse. It’s lack of acquaintance with reality. Far from sick people not providing the correct medical information, the government’s work capability tests specifically do not ask for medical evidence.

Claimants are required to fill in a 20 page questionnaire, which asks about their ability to perform “tasks”. They are then compelled to attend a face to face “medical” in which their ability to perform day to day “tasks” like walking and shopping is interrogated. At no stage in the process is medical information ever requested.

The lack of official curiosity about those pesky medical facts is indicated by this comment from a general practitioner, writing about how one of her patients, “a woman in her 20s who is slowly dementing and will eventually die at a young age”, was found fit for work following a work capability test:

“I believe that this could have been avoided had I been asked to provide a medical report explaining her disability [my italics], prior to the assessment process.”

But no-one in the DWP bothered to ask.

Now, as the government never tires of saying, officially, decisions about whether a claimant is fit for work or not, are not solely based on the result of the work capability test. Theoretically, medical information from the claimants GP or medical specialists is also taken into account. Information, it should be stressed, that is provided when the claimant first applies for Employment and Support Allowance (ESA), the name for disability benefit. It has to be provided then, or otherwise the claimant wouldn’t get ESA. But for them to continue receiving it, they have to pass the DWP’s work capability assessment and be deemed ‘unfit for work’.

Theoretically, the DWP, based on the medical evidence it has been given, can overrule the decision made by the work capability assessment. I say theoretically because, to my knowledge, this never happens. The DWP just rubber-stamps the decisions made by the work capability test.

So the excuse of a lack of medical evidence is a complete fiction. But if it fails to convince, there is a back up.

2 It’s such a waste of human potential to leave people stranded on benefit for the rest of their lives

“It’s not a financial exercise,” protested then employment minister Chris Grayling when defending the work capability test on the BBC’s Panorama investigation, Disabled or Faking It. “It’s about saying it’s a huge waste of life for so many people to be left at home on benefits, doing nothing.”

“I very passionately believe,” he went on, “that if we could help people back into work, they are much better off than they are if they are left stranded at home on benefits for the rest of their lives.”

The tests are an example of “tough love”, Grayling said.

You can see the documentary here:

And here:

A government advisor was more aggressive in defending the government record. “Which part of your progressive tradition says it is ok to just let people rot on benefits their whole lives?” he asked the New Statesman’s Rafael Behr in 2012.

There is one small flaw in this justification. People on Employment and Support Allowance are very definitely not left to “rot on benefits their whole lives”. But in order to understand why, you have to understand how the benefit system works. The government relies on most people, and most journalists, not knowing.

A work capability test classifies claimants into three groups, based on a points system.  If they score between 0 and 15 points, the claimant is chucked off benefit altogether and merely told they are free to apply for Jobseekers Allowance. If they score between 15 and 24 they are placed in the Work Related Activity Group (WRAG), for people who may be able to do some work or work at some point in the future. Above 24 points, claimants are placed in the support group and it is accepted their medical condition means they will never work.

Far from being left to rot at home on benefits, spending countless days doing watching Jeremy Kyle, people in the WRAG group are required to attend six work-focused interviews, take training courses and very possibly, join the Work Programme and work for nothing. They are compelled to undertake “work-related activity”. Last September, it was revealed that the government wants to dock £71 a week from these sick and disabled claimants who don’t adhere to their “back to work agreements". So they can then “rot at home” on £28 a week, largely because rotting is all they can afford.

Now some appeals against incorrect WCA decisions are because people have been placed in WRAG group when they should have been placed in the support group (this has become more urgent because the government has decided that WRAG ESA is now time-limited for year, meaning that if a claimant’s partner earns more than £16,000, after 12 months, the claimant gets nothing, even though they have often paid National Insurance all their working life).

But the vast majority of appeals against WCA decisions are because people are simply denied all support. They score 0 points and are informed they are ‘fit for work’ and they can apply for Jobseekers Allowance if they wish.

This happened, for example, to a man waiting for heart transplant, kept alive by a portable machine, as well as to a man with terminal brain cancer, a person with no short-term memory, a woman with 90% burns to her body, an incontinent disabled man who is both blind and deaf, and a semi-paralysed woman. To name but a few.

These are people, bear in mind, who have been deemed to be not sick enough to be placed in the WRAG group of claimants, and receive ESA. The people in the WRAG group must be, according to government ideologues, the ones who are left to rot on benefits at home, even though, while rotting, they are subject to benefit cuts for not looking for work with sufficient ardour.

The decision they are fit for work puts sick and disabled people in an impossible position. Their only source of income is removed, whilst they know, even though the DWP pretends not to, that they are unemployable, and so can’t replace the income that is being taken way. They face destitution. I’ve been to four WCA assessments, said cancer survivor Margaret Monaghan, “but they always find I’m fit for work, despite the fact no employer would give me a job in a million years.”

It’s no wonder that the stress caused by this realisation is frequently cited as a reason why so many people, die shortly after taking the work capability test.

Of course, we know, because Chris Grayling said so, that this is not a financial exercise. The fact that ESA claimants get £94 a week while on Jobseekers Allowance, the rate is £71, has clearly not entered the head of anyone in government.

If you still have a lingering feeling that the government is cracking down on shirkers and those faking illnesses, consider an official DWP report from 2011 which found that 55% of those found “fit for work” in work capability tests were living without benefits and without jobs. They were destitute in other words. Thirty per cent were claiming Jobseekers Allowance and just 15% had jobs.

The surveys, though included in a 2011 report, were actually conducted in 2009 – before the current government came to power. Work capability tests, it should be remembered, were introduced by the last Labour government. Their use has been significantly expanded by the incumbent Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition and its terms have been made even stricter. It seems a racing certainty that the number of people made destitute by the work capability test has increased exponentially.

There is “naught for your comfort” in an honest and truthful appraisal of what the work capability assessment does. You can choose to accept this discomforting reality or you can choose to believe the government’s reassuring fictions of “tough love” and helping people back to work. The decision is yours.

Our curious case of economic bondage. Why we want capitalism to succeed even though we don't

Credit where it’s due, capitalism is ingenious. It owes its remarkable resiliency, says the American philosopher David Schweickart, to the fact that, while its basic institutions remain in place, it is in the rational self-interest of almost everybody to keep capitalists happy.

Under capitalism, you can have growth or you can have a recession. And nobody wants a recession.

“Economic growth is in the immediate interest of virtually every sector of society – growth in the straight-forwards sense as measured by GDP,” says Schweikart in his book, After Capitalism. “Whether or not such growth makes people happier or enhances the overall quality of life is quite beside the point.”

Here is Schweickart speaking: 

                                                                                                                                                                      Meaningless Democracy

                                                                                                                                          Another American author, Gar Alperovitz, has noted the same mouse in the maze logic. Choices are so claustrophobically hemmed in by an overwhelming need to make business prosperous and create jobs that democracy is rendered meaningless.

                                                                                                                                              In the absence of an alternative, he says in his book America Beyond Capitalism, the economy depends on the viability and success of its most important actor. So citizens and politicians have to give corporations what they want. Whether they want to or not.

                                                                                                                                              He calls it “economic bondage”.

                                                                                                                                              In the UK, economic bondage is proudly inscribed into every utterance of government. “We have listened to what business wants and we are delivering on it,” said David Cameron in July. “Business said, ‘We want competitive tax rates,’ and we are creating the most competitive tax regime in the G20 and the lowest rates of corporation tax in the G7”. QED.

Bankers’ Fatalism

                                                                                                                                             It will be objected, naturally, that this bankers’ fatalism is self-defeating even on its own terms. Capitalism run in the interests of capitalists is a train crash waiting to happen. Again. Economic growth was consistently higher (actually it just existed), when tax rates for corporations and the wealthy were far in excess of what they are now. So cutting corporate income tax is just a self-serving manoeuvre.

                                                                                                                                             Government economic policy in the US, UK and Europe is now predicated on using taxpayers’ money to buttress insolvent financial institutions and contrive corporate profits. The European Central Bank, which has absorbed banks' toxic debts while giving them cut-price finance, has seen its balance sheet grow from under 15% to over 30% of Eurozone GDP.

                                                                                                                                               The wider impasse that capitalism faces is that its very success in holding down wages, just another cost to business after all, is choking the very consumer demand that it needs to prosper. Over the last two years, real wages in Britain have fallen by 7%.

                                                                                                                                              David Schweickart describes this as capitalism’s recurrent Keynesian problem. Competitive pressures force enterprises to cut costs, wages included, (thus worsening the effective demand problem) and introduce the newest technologies. The result is an ever widening supply-demand gap.

                                                                                                                                               “The roof might cave in,” he wrote in 2002. “A deep and enduring global depression is a real possibility.”

                                                                                                                                               Welcome to the future, a near permanent economic slump.

                                                                                                                                             System Failure

                                                                                                                                               But, and it is a large and heavily ironic but, ubiquitous system failure doesn’t alter the compelling logic that while capitalism remains the dominant economic system (and there is no imminent sign of it disappearing in a puff of smoke), it is, as Schweickart says, in the rational self-interest of virtually everyone to make sure capitalists are in good spirits. Because virtually everyone is materially dependent on the system’s success.

                                                                                                                                               Imagine you are 18 now (or don’t imagine if you are). “The truth is”, as Billy Bragg sang nearly thirty years go, “it’s a buyer’s market. They can afford to pick and choose.” It is in your rational self-interest to make yourself into the kind of person more likely to appeal to employers than rival potential employees. Whether you want to or not. It is just an appreciation of the situation you find yourself in. You can't go on strike.

                                                                                                                                             The English psychologist Oliver James has written about the rise to prominence of Erich Fromm’s “marketing character”. Fromm was a psycho-analyst, a Marxist-Freudian and later Buddhist, German émigré who settled in the US. Way back in 1955 he observed a new psychological type, the “marketing character” - a person whose sense of value “depends on his success, depends on his saleability, depends on approval by others.”

                                                                                                                                              “The identity crisis of modern society,” said Fromm, “is actually the crisis produced by the fact that its members have become selfless instruments, whose identity rests upon their participation in the corporations.”

                                                                                                                                               James said in 2007 that Fromm’s insights seemed uncannily applicable to the contemporary English-speaking world. And with the labour market permanently tilted in the employer’s favour, the marketing character seems destined to become the overwhelmingly dominant psychological type of our age. The “marketing character” is the complete opposite of the “democratic character”. The marketing character depends on approval by others, experiences itself as a commodity and is defined by saleability. Democracy, to be meaningful, needs to be made up of people who are unintimidated, do not rely on the approval of others and are able, and free, to disagree.

                                                                                                                                             Changing the Soul

                                                                                                                                               In April, Chris Grayling, a Tory who really merits Aneurin Bevan’s description, attacked critics of the government’s work programme which compels the young unemployed to work for nothing for large companies in order to “gain experience”. “They just don’t understand that in today’s world, things don’t come on a plate,” he said. “That government can’t just create opportunity for all. That people have to go the extra mile if they want to succeed.”

                                                                                                                                              Behind the lament for the hardness of “today’s world” there is relish about high unemployment. A tough labour market creates, against people’s will, the kind of character – malleable, dependent, grateful - that conservatives desire. “Economics is the method,” said Margaret Thatcher. “The object is to change the soul.”

                                                                                                                                              Consider the effects of a further spike in youth unemployment. The need to go that “extra mile” will only become more urgent. Jobs will become more precious and the need to stand out to employers more necessary.

                                                                                                                                              This “situational logic” leads to deformed choices. In the Italian town of Taranto, the Guardian newspaper reported in August, trade unions and local protesters are trying to stop the closure of the local steelworks which employs 12,000 people. A magistrate has ordered the furnaces to be shut down because the dioxins they belch out have been held responsible for killing local people. Cancer deaths are 15% higher than the national average. Yet, mass unemployment is considered by many to be a worse option. “Bizarrely, Italy’s health minister warned that losing your job was detrimental to your health,” the article says. But it is unquestionably true that losing your job is harmful to your health.

                                                                                                                                            The Left points out how this system is entirely discredited. It pollutes, it mocks democracy, it leads to biocide, creates toil in the midst of technological abundance, and poverty in the midst of plenty. And the Right just says, ‘look at your immediate self-interest’.

                                                                                                                                          Vindication not Victory

                                                                                                                                             It is uncanny how practically all the events of the last decade have vindicated the (radical) Left. But being vindicated does not mean you win. There is a t-shirt marketed in Britain that pictures a contented looking Karl Marx below a speech bubble saying, “I warned you this would happen”. Congratulations, you were right all along. Now who are you again?

                                                                                                                                          After the dust has settled on global financial collapse, the idiocy of credit default swaps, the money laundering by banks for criminal syndicates, the rigging of interest rates, the phone hacking, the marketing of anti-depressants to children, you wake up to the fact that the balance of power hasn’t altered. Those in power may be discredited but they still have power.

                                                                                                                                              It is sobering and enlightening to return to David Schweickart’s definition of capitalism. One of its essential features, he says, is that it is based on wage labour. The vast majority of people in this society work for pay. They work for other people who own the “means of production”. The goods or services they produce do not belong to them, but to the small minority who own the means of production.

                                                                                                                                                  The Situational Logic

                                                                                                                                              This feature, says Schweickart, gives capitalism its peculiar vulnerability to crisis, its booms and its busts. Purchasing power is based on what these wage labourers can negotiate from their contracts. If demand slumps, so does the system. But it also makes virtually everyone materially dependent on the health of the system. You have to keep the capitalists happy.

                                                                                                                                              Recognition of our state of “economic bondage” is why thinkers like Alperovitz have come to the conclusion that future radical strategy has to lie in ending this dependency. He advocates the democratic control of wealth and ownership directly, through worker-controlled firms or indirectly, through municipally-owned enterprises. The problem goes well beyond who gets elected to government.

                                                                                                                                             “The deepening social and economic pain is intensifying the situational logic that demands either that a new approach be undertaken,” he says, “or the social and economic pain must continue.”

                                                                                                                                              Five years into the Great Recession we know things can only get worse before they get better.