Red Tories Blowin in the Wind: A Chronicle of Welfare Cuts Foretold

 

Sometimes calling them Red Tories is being too kind. Labour’s £6 billion pounds’ worth of cuts to disability benefit, which threatens the “ability of low-income families to meet basic needs like food and shelter, potentially endangering lives”, is going somewhere even the Tories under Iain Duncan Smith’s regime of conscious cruelty did not tread.

The cut means that from next year new claimants in the Limited Capacity for Work-Related Activity group (LCWRA) will only get £47 a week to ‘live’ on, £50 less than they currently do. Existing claimants will have their benefit frozen at £97 a week, a real-terms cut. And if you’re under 22 you won’t be able to get anything at all.

Additionally, it will become harder to claim Personal Independence Payments. Under Kendall’s plans you have to ‘score’ more points on daily activities, such as incontinence, washing and dressing, and communicating.

For context, LCWRA is the old Support Group under pre-Universal Credit Employment & Support Allowance (ESA). These are people officially deemed to have such severe health problems there is no current prospect of them being able to work, notwithstanding Labour’s insistence that those with the harshest, ‘life-long’, conditions will be exempt.

Even Iain Duncan Smith left them alone. His attention was taken up with applying the Work Capability Assessment – introduced by Labour in 2008 – to existing ESA claimants, to turning the screw on those declared unfit for work but placed in the Work-Related Activity Group  (the equivalent of the Limited Capacity for Work group under Universal Credit), and ratcheting up sanctions on Jobseekers’ Allowance claimants (over a million sanctions were imposed in 2013).

Not that he wouldn’t have got around to it had he not abruptly resigned as Work and Pensions secretary in 2016. Although it’s illuminating to recall why he resigned from Cameron’s Cabinet. It was, he claimed, because he couldn’t stomach cuts to Personal Independence Payments*, which would have made it harder to qualify for PIP and meant some people wouldn’t have got anything at all. Last year, nearly half of all claims for PIP, around 300,000, were rejected.

The Starmer/Kendall/Reeves cuts are on top of the cuts that Duncan Smith found so intolerable he had to resign. This means that the current Labour government are significantly to the right of Iain Duncan Smith. When Rachel Reeves promised to be tougher than the Tories on benefits (not as tough as, mind, but tougher), she was telling the truth for once.

But with all due respect to the innate genius of IDS, Kier Starmer, Liz Kendall, Rachel Reeves, Therese Coffey or Yvette Cooper (that’s irony by the way), you can see what is going to happen to disability benefits simply by observing what important think tanks and corporate ‘thought leaders’ are saying.

The fact the Labour are introducing these cuts is, in a sense, irrelevant. Labour are, at present, the British government (probably for one term admittedly) and this is simply what the British government wants to do.

So let’s look at a chronicle of disability benefit cuts foretold.

In November 2014, Paul Litchfield, chief medical officer of the BT Group, published the fifth and final independent review of the Work Capability Assessment. This was, as John Pring notes in The Department, the very time that claimant deaths were reaching a peak under the first round of austerity, but Litchfield wasn’t interested in that. He recommended that the government look “as a matter of urgency” into why there had been such a substantial rise in the proportion of claimants placed in the Support group.

In a curious twist of fate, that is exactly what Starmer’s Labour government is doing.

In 2016, the neoliberal Reform think-tank proposed slashing the weekly benefit given to people in the Support Group by £58 so as to equalize it with the rate of Jobseeker’s Allowance. The thinking was that having a higher rate for sick and disabled people encouraged them “to stay on sickness benefits rather than move into work”. The chimes perfectly with Labour’s claims that the benefit system represents a “big discouragement to work”.

Reform (the think-tank not Farage’s company masquerading a political party that is currently leading in the polls) also described the benefits system as “broken” which uncannily is the exact word chosen by Sir Kier Starmer.

Interestingly, though, while Reform advocated putting the money saved from removing the additions to standard unemployment allowance into an enhanced Personal Independence Payment, Labour is cutting PIP as well. And the benefit levels for disabled people and the main body of claimants aren’t being equalised, the former is being significantly reduced.

Also in 2016, the Social Market Foundation proposed abolishing the ESA Support Group entirely.

The writer, who in 2016 analysed the output of these think-tanks, made a prophetic statement: “Policy change can often be explained by reference to changes in background ideas about the state, society and the individual, held and promoted by influential individuals, groups, political parties and … multinational companies,” she said. “It turns out that you can predict such a lot by simply watching the way the wind blows.”

Dominic Cummings, who apparently is informally advising Starmer’s government, used to refer to the educational ‘establishment’ – made up of local authorities, teaching unions and even the Department of Education – as the ‘blob’ because they were, allegedly, always thwarting his plans for schools.

In reality, the blob, consisting of “influential individuals, groups, political parties and … multinational companies” is always at work ensuring governments, as in the case of disability benefits, keep to the neoliberal script.

It is so huge it is very difficult to exist outside of it. The blob has a very keen sense of its own self-interest, and can always provide useful advice on what to say on any given subject, meaning its members don’t have to expend too much energy on thinking.

Corbyn wasn’t part of the blob and look what happened to him. But the blob has devoted acolytes at the helm of all political parties (and also in the backwaters of all political parties). Reform, the ‘party’ that is, might present itself as anti-establishment but it is right at the heart of the blob; its former leader, Richard Tice, handily on message in attacking “shirkers and skivers”.  The Greens might appear to be the one political party that is resisting the blob but should they ever hold the balance of power and enter government, I predict the blog will emerge victorious after a short scuffle.

To adapt the old anarchist canard, and song, no matter who you vote for, the blob always gets in.

* Duncan Smith was a tyrannical advocate of the notion that work is good for you, a zealotry shared with fellow blob dwellers Starmer, Reeves and Kendall. So it’s revealing that he was so opposed to cutting Personal Independence Payments. Perhaps that’s because, in recompensing people for the additional costs of disability, PIP enables people to work. But this realisation is apparently lost on the geniuses in the DWP.

Trigger Warning – This book can cause serious damage to your propaganda

 

There is an innocuous-looking paragraph tucked away in John Pring’s marvellous exposé The Department which says so much about how the British political class has carefully nurtured this appalling, though largely unrecognized, scandal over several decades. And how – when faced with incontrovertible and accumulating evidence of the human damage inflicted – it has just doubled down.

On page 51, Pring recalls how in the US in the early 1980s, Ronald Reagan imposed a series of cuts to disabled people’s benefits, resulting in a spate of suicides. One woman with arthritis, spinal disease and severe depression, left a note saying, “the message I’m getting is either work or die.” “The Reagan administration”, Pring writes, “reviewed about 1.2 million cases and stopped payment to nearly 500,000 claimants, with 200,000 of those terminations reversed on appeal, until Congress forced a halt to the programme in 1984.”*

This sounds so much like the “slow violence” of British All Work Test/Personal Capability Assessment/Work Capability Assessment programme, even down to the huge number of successful appeals, that it’s quite uncanny. With the exception of course that no-one in authority has had the courage to say stop*.

That failure, as Pring relates, has been responsible for hundreds, possibly thousands, of deaths. These casualties comprise three kinds: people suffering from mental distress who were hounded and threatened with destitution by the Department of Work & Pensions (DWP), those whose real and impairing physical conditions were ignored, and those, such as ex-squaddie David Clapson, who died as a direct result of sanctions.

And it reveals the political/ideological lineage of what has happened over on Airstrip One which all began in 1989 when Thatcher’s social security minister, John Moore, sent a note to chief secretary of the Treasury, John Major, stressing “the need to tackle the rising expenditure on these benefits” with “no choice” but to make “long-term savings”.

But though the policy was shot through with its Reaganite/Thatcherite parentage, it did not loosen its grip when the Tories lost power in 1997. In fact, so keen was Tony Blair to demonstrate that Labour was no longer the party of Clement Attlee and Harold Wilson (and heaven forbid Jeremy Corbyn) that he made it a point of pride to extend the policy. It was the Labour party that introduced the Work Capability Assessment (WCA) in 2008 (under Gordon Brown actually) and vied with the Tories in the 2010 election campaign over how quickly existing Incapacity Benefit Claimants could be re-assessed (the promise was 10,000 a week). Of course, it was the Conservatives – in the person of Iain Duncan Smith in particular – who actually perpetrated this, resulting, as Pring documents, in a spike of deaths and suicides at the height of austerity in 2013/14. But the sad and sobering point is the Labour party would have done exactly the same thing.

And is doing now. Rachel ‘tougher on benefits than the Tories’ Reeves has kept Tory plans to further tighten eligibility for sickness benefits, resulting in ‘savings’ of £1.3bn. This further turning of the screw follows the creation of the WCA itself (because previous testing regimes like Peter Lilley’s All Work Test and Tony Blair’s Personal Capability Assessment were still too tied to the pesky opinions of medical professionals), more stringent rules introduced by Labour in 2010, yet further fine-tuning by the Conservatives in 2012, and of course Rishi Sunak’s goodbye present to the sick and disabled.

But still there is the common perception that if you self-diagnose as feeling a bit peaky, you can just saunter in to your local Job Centre and claim benefits. For example, Paul Routledge, chief political correspondent of the Labour-supporting Daily Mirror recently informed his readers that millions who “should and could work” “sign on” for long-term sickness benefits.

Yeah right.

As Pring illuminates, the fact that people “know” this can be attributed to the determined, and astonishingly effective, propaganda campaign enacted from the start of the ’90s that inculcated a fashionable cynicism that most ‘disabled’ people on benefits were, at best, swinging the lead and, at worst, outright frauds.

That this belief is as fresh as ever is illustrated by Sir Kier’s instruction to the Department of Work and Pensions (the Department of the title) to rifle through benefit claimants’ bank accounts to find evidence of fraud. The fact that fraud is miniscule, and for Personal Independence Payments it actually stands at zero, doesn’t make any difference.

But now we are told by Liz Kendall, who lives, by the way, in a Notting Hill mansion and claims thousands in Parliamentary expenses to pay her heating bill, that there a millions of not really ill people on sickness benefit (god knows how they got there), who need a bit for firm encouragement (doubtless through the threat to cut off their only source of income) to join the virtuous ranks of the “economically active”.

This attitude has survived unscathed since it was first fleshed out at the start the century under the previous Labour government. Then, as Pring relates, DWP-linked academics convinced themselves and others that the country was in the dreaded grip of a “malingering epidemic”. A book on the subject, Malingering and Illness Deception, mentioned the word “malingering” more than one thousand times – despite the fact that there was no actual evidence that the thing existed (the excuse being that the research hadn’t been done yet or was too difficult).

In Pring’s words – in an interview about the book – “There is this belief that people are defrauding the system and it is based on nothing whatsoever.”

As five months of a new government committed to ‘change’ have demonstrated, this conviction is as firmly entrenched as ever. Its latest iteration is that after Covid, there are millions vegetating on “long-term sickness” benefit whose purported ailments (or “illness behaviours” as they were termed a few years ago) shouldn’t stop them working. And as compassionate [sic] guardians of the public interest, we are going to flush them out.

The fact that Britain is now, post-Covid, a lot sicker, both mentally and physically, than before is not allowed to seep into the brains of these ideologues. After more than a decade of fiscal austerity combined with stagnating wages – and then topped off with a lockdown that imprisoned people in their homes followed by inflation, high interest rates and a resultant ‘cost of living’ crisis – this shouldn't come as a surprise.

This country was, though no-one in power wants to face it, suffering from falling life expectancy before Covid hit.

In reality, though the absolute numbers of disabled people on out-of-work benefits has risen, the proportion of disabled people on those benefits has dropped slightly.

Possibly if you want to reduce the benefits ‘bill’, you should strive to make society and the economy healthier for the people who make it up. Just as if your aim is to curb the tax credits ‘bill’, you increase wages.

But that kind of thinking would just get in the way of the smooth transmission of the propaganda, wouldn’t it?

At the end of Pring’s book, he evinces the hope that those who suffered because of decades of “dehumanizing bureaucratic neglect, cruelty and violence” can retrospectively receive justice.

But the prerequisite for justice is acknowledgement, recognition, awareness. And I’m sorry to say I can see neither hide nor hair of that.

This is the first part of this review. In the final part, I would examine what this tale of wanton “neglect, cruelty and violence” reveals about the corporatisation of British politics and system’s reliance on an unholy fusion of politics and the media.

 

*As the linked article relates, Reagan’s eventually aborted plan of withdrawing benefits from hundreds of thousands of disabled people was revived by Donald Trump during his first administration. I honestly don’t know whether it was implemented at the time but, given that he’ll be back in office from January, it probably will be.

Waking up to Sonny and Cher again

In what I suppose can be classified an example of irony, they keep repeating Groundhog Day on TV. But in order to live in Bill Murray’s head and experience the same day over and over again you don’t have to switch on ITV4. You just have to reside in Britain and pay the barest attention to politics.

The latest example of the recurrent waking nightmare comes in the form of the Daily Mail demanding (in the person of columnist Andrew Pierce who’s also a regular on Good Morning Britain) action against “an army of shirkers” on sickness benefits “which the British taxpayers are footing the bill for”.

According to the Mail “a senior government source” only a million of the 2.4 million people on universal credit or ESA and not required to carry out work-related activity are “so disabled they are incapable of doing any work”.

If this rings any bells, it might be because of the 2007 ‘independent’ report by former investment banker David Freud – commissioned by Tony Blair just before he left office – which concluded that the 2.68 million people then on Incapacity Benefit should be reduced by 1 million.

Despite Freud getting “his numbers wrong” (he only looked at recent claimants, not long-term ones), his eponymous report became holy writ for different governments. Its thinking was at the heart of the Work Capability Assessment (WCA) – the “functional”, non-medical test for all Incapacity Benefit claimants introduced by Labour in 2008. The WCA was founded on deliberately ignoring medical history and the opinions of doctors.

Although it was Labour’s brainchild, the Conservative/Lib Dem coalition found the WCA very much to their liking when they assumed office in 2010. In fact, Freud switched sides – if he had ever had a side beyond that of the rich – becoming a junior minister in the Cameron government.

Sick consensus

Judged in terms of the amount of sheer human misery the WCA has generated – it was revealed in 2017 that the number of disabled claimants attempting suicide had doubled in its first nine years  – I think the assessment has no equal among post-war domestic government policies.

There is no reason to think, by the way, that the current moral panic over work-shy fakers is any more grounded in reality than Freud’s report was. As a result of Covid, lockdown and the near collapse of the NHS, Britain is a much sicker nation. But these factors will be completely ignored by propagandists eager to replicate past tricks.

But the depressing reality is that these tricks work – in the sense of guiding the ‘national conversation’ in a certain direction. Or, to be more exact, returning that conversation to the lines it took between 2006 and 2015. Welcome to Groundhog Day politics.

Sir Kier Starmer’s Labour party, for example, has signalled that it is right behind the government’s approach to sickness benefit claimants. In January, in a speech delivered at Iain Duncan Smith’s think-tank (now there’s symbolism for you), then shadow Work and Pensions secretary, Jonathan Ashworth, decried the “the huge economic cost” and the “the increased health-related benefit bill” the taxpayer is lumbered with as a result of severely disabled people not getting jobs. Ashworth was referring to claimants in the ESA Support Group – exactly those who, according to the “senior government source” with the ear of the Mail, are not so disabled they are incapable of any work. I think you call it being on the same page.

Being there

But in the brief interregnum between 2015 and 2019, then Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn was definitely not on the same page. In fact he was reading an entirely different book. Centrist Starmer fans love to claim that while Corbyn was leading an ineffectual protest movement, the very serious Sir Kier is determined to actually win an election and make a difference by being in power. The first part is very likely to happen.

However, discounting for a moment that sabotage from within his own party may have prevented Corbyn from becoming Prime Minister in the summer of 2017, it is interesting to note the degree to which he yanked politics in a more humane direction simply by being there; by being leader of the opposition for four years

For example, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the percentage of Universal Credit claimants sanctioned fell from 9% in 2015 to 3% in 2019, the exact period of Corbyn’s tenure. With him safely out of the way, ‘Boris’ Johnson’s “way to work” policy severely intensified the sanctions regime in 2022.

In 2016, with Corbyn’s Labour committed to scrapping the Work Capability Assessment, the government eased WCA conditions, excusing those with severe conditions from reassessment. By contrast, with the putative opposition now reading from the same hymn sheet, the government is planning to tighten the fitness to work test – by removing lack of bladder or bowel control or the inability to access an outside location from the list of “descriptors” used in the assessment.

It’s remarkable just how many U-turns Corbyn – whose leadership was under almost permanent siege from within – did force the government to make. And these were not all extorted when the government was enfeebled after losing its majority in the 2017 election. Many happened before that.

That as Chancellor under Johnson Rishi Sunak could signal “a decisive end to austerity” had a lot to do with the fact that Corbyn implacably opposed austerity from day one of his leadership. Indeed, that’s why he was elected by the Labour membership. He was also integral to forcing the original austerian, George Osborne, to beat an embarrassing retreat on proposed tax credit cuts.

Now, by contrast, with Starmer’s Labour committed to abiding by Tory spending plans, the renewed austerity earmarked to begin in 2025, will happen regardless of which party wins the next GE. Any momentum behind a campaign to abolish the Tories’ two child tax credit cap has been asphyxiated  by Starmer promising to keep it – one of the many “hard choices” (the phrase parrots Hillary Clinton) he has pledged to make if he enters Downing Street.

This pattern has been replicated across the policy spectrum – from taxes on the super-rich, to the treatment of refugees, from the powers of the security state over citizens, to the disavowal of public ownership of utilities. Corbyn shot holes in pre-2015 cross-party mono-politics – extracting some, not insignificant, concessions – while Starmer has methodically rebuilt the ramparts.

Iron Man

To be fair to Sir Kier he does have a stellar record on U-turns. Unfortunately, they all apply to Labour’s own programme – the social-democratic policies that got him elected as leader but which he has systemically discarded in favour of enervated third-term Blairism.

Corbyn’s mere presence shifted British politics slightly to the Left. His successor has used his position to return it to the sterile trajectory it took before the unexpected elevation of the MP for Islington North. And by stopping Corbyn from even standing again as a Labour candidate – an act with no precedent in British political history – to ensure that that fleeting effusion of hope never recurs.

Regardless of whether Starmer wins the next election or not, that’s his role.