In their attempts to
justify their planned reductions in the bill for welfare payments, Sir Starmer
and his government have increasingly taken to describing their demand that
anyone who can work should work as some sort of moral crusade. The underlying
argument, albeit not always expressed in clear terms, seems to be that there is
some sort of contract between the state and its citizens, as part of which the
state agrees to protect vulnerable citizens whilst citizens agree to contribute
by getting themselves gainfully employed. There’s a lot to unpick there.
It treats the state
and its citizens as two different parties to said contract. Yet, in theory at
least, the state is claimed to be nothing more than the way in which citizens
act collectively. But if the state and the citizens are really one and the
same, it’s an odd sort of contract. In the way that Labour increasingly talk
about the relationship between citizens (or workers, to use their preferred
term, which treats anyone not making an economic contribution as a second-class
citizen) and the state, it seems as though they are closer to the Marxist understanding
of the bourgeois state as an arm of the bourgeoisie to which others sell their
labour – with Labour placing itself firmly on the bourgeoisie side of that
equation. Let’s give them the benefit of the doubt, though, and assume that it’s
just clumsy wording on their behalf, and that what they really mean is that
membership of society confers both rights for its members and responsibilities
to other members, and that the state is the way in which that relationship is
managed and maintained.
I suspect that most
of us (even if not all of us) would agree that we want to live in a society
which provides a decent living for people who are young, or old, or sick, or
disabled as well as those who work. By and large, we’d extend that protection to people who are
temporarily out of work. Labour’s target seems to be twofold: firstly, people
who can work but choose not to, and secondly tightening the definition of those
who can’t work, particularly as it relates to the sick and disabled. Both are
problematic. Whilst there is no doubt that there are some people who see a life
on benefits as a valid life-style choice, the number is actually not as large
as some tabloid headlines would suggest, and neither is the lifestyle as
generous or luxurious as said tabloids would have us believe. Similarly, whilst
there is no doubt that some of those who are sick or disabled could do some
sort of work, the approach to assessing fitness for work – which has been
largely outsourced to private providers, frequently with no medical
qualifications or experience, who have performance targets to reduce the
numbers – has often been heartless and cruel, to say nothing of unfair and
stressful. And the sort of work which the individuals theoretically could do
isn’t always available anyway. More generally, even if the number of people
unemployed matches the number of vacancies, it doesn’t follow that they’re in
the right places or that there’s a skills match. A carpenter in Ceredigion can’t
simply become a brain surgeon in Banff.
Accepting all those
caveats and exceptions, there are undoubtedly a number of people who could be
gainfully employed but aren’t, even if the numbers (and therefore the potential
resulting financial savings) of those who could actually be matched with
suitable vacancies are very much lower that the government likes to claim. Arguably,
there is a group of people who are not meeting their side of the contract with
their fellow citizens. The issue of what should be done is, however, a great
deal more complicated than the simple mathematics used to calculate benefits
savings might suggest. Cutting the level of benefits payments is a blunt instrument,
even if it could be precisely targeted (perhaps in the age of Sir Starmer, we
should say ‘laser-focussed’ which seems to be his in-word) only at that small
number of people, because it doesn’t only affect individuals, it also hits
their families. Reducing their income can have other consequences such as
homelessness which lead to other costs and problems. Even if – and it’s a very,
very big if – we, as a society, want to make that group of people suffer, to
starve them into accepting whatever work might be available even if not suitable,
do we really want to push their children into poverty and homelessness? That’s
not a consequence which sits well alongside other alleged government
priorities.
At the heart of the
issue is a really simple question: how does a society enforce the obligations
of membership as well as protecting the rights? The question is simple enough,
but the same cannot be said about the answer. Just about the only certainty is
that sanctions for non-compliance aren’t the right answer when it comes to benefits, although they seem
to be the only ones that Sir Starmer and his crew are considering. A political
agenda driven by tabloid headlines and prejudices causes more problems than it solves.
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