Kill the (other) Bill….

With the media and political spotlight focused on the woeful nature of the NHS Reform Bill its probably a little easy to forget the other horrific Bill that is grinding towards the statute book. The Welfare Reform Bill is still out there,lurking with intent to cause havoc and misery in millions of peoples lives.

Labour’s admirable performance in making the governments life very difficult over the NHS only makes its performance in this regard all the more lamentable. We have shown what we can do when we put out minds too it, we have shown that we can lead and inform public opinion and when we do the government is on the back foot.

Leadership is desperately needed on this issue. Six groups recently told The Guardian that the governments reforms and overblown rhetoric are increasing the stigmatisation of disabled people. Tom Madders, head of campaigns at the National Autistic Society, told the newspaper;

 The Department for Work and Pensions is certainly guilty of helping to drive this media narrative around benefits, portraying those who received benefits as workshy scroungers or abusing a system that’s really easy to cheat.

Iain Duncan Smith,writing for the Independent on Sunday, makes it clear that next week the government will try to regain the front-foot after this weeks disaster by pushing Ed Miliband on his Bill. Ed should accept that challenge and call for a rational debate over welfare and call for an end to rhetoric that is scapegoating vulnerable people. In his article, for example, Duncan Smith cites the spiraling cost of welfare with absolutely no reference to the causes of this to be found in his own governments policies.

It would deeply impress me if Ed did this but sadly I don’t expect it to happen. Welfare,along with the economy is actually another area that our atrophied National Policy Forum needs to discuss because it is an area where the leadership is missing the opportunity to make another courageous stand. Maybe, at first, it would be an unpopular one but we cannot be the Party of always taking the line of least resistance. This country desperately needs an informed discussion about welfare – one free from the pollution pumped into it by the media and the government, after this week Labour and Ed Miliband should use their enhanced standing in the country to make sure we have one.

Lectures on responsibility from the totally irresponsible…

One of the most repugnant features of any government is the incessant personal morality chatter that spews forth from Westminster like a constant stream of raw vomit. I’d love to be able to claim that Labour never did this but that simply isn’t true – however, it generally tends to be the occasional light shower of vomit from Labour in power compared to the torrent that the Conservatives feel the need to send forth. It’s made doubly disgusting by the fact that politicians are amoung some of the least personally responsible people on the planet. Drunk on relatively small amount of power afforded to them and the mistaken notion that representing people makes you inherently better than them, they imagine their recklessness is simply a perk of the job – a bit like expenses really.

It is in this light that we should judge the latest comments of Iain Duncan Smith who said ‘feckless’ parents would only spend extra benefits on themselves. A bit like MP’s and expenses then? Ironically, these remarks are actually part of a gargantuan effort on the part of Mr Duncan Smith to explain away this governments failure to tackle child poverty. I hope all you ‘feckless parents’ are taking notes as our Work and Pensions Secretary really mans-up and admits to his complete and utter failure to do his own job.

Duncan Smith patently doesn’t understand what its like to be either a drug or a gambling addict (or, indeed, to be without work for a long period of time). This is clearly proved by the fact that he avoids the word addict and uses instead the softer colloquialism, ‘habit’. Obviously he is under the impression that having a major – life destroying addiction – is a bit like sucking your thumb, all you need to do is tie a ribbon around the syringe or pack of poker cards and there you go – job done.

However, I would imagine there is much admiration within the Cabinet for IDS’s buck-passing skills. The Chancellor in particular has done an exceptional job of turning the ritual of receiving the latest suicide-inducing economic news into a bigger standing joke than an Alan Carr show with his imaginative ability to find fault in anything except his own policies. This is a government founded on the principle that it is anybody but its own fault.

It started off badly when it blamed everything wrong in the world on the last Labour government. Rather than objectively asses the issues it managed to reinvent history to the point where even the decisions it actually supported in opposition are the root of all evil. You would think it couldn’t get any worse but it actually has; Cameron still regularly uses this at PMQ’s and so does every single government minister – especially the Liberal Democrat’s who agreed with Labour even more in opposition and now have to curse them doubly in a rather disturbing self-flagellation/disavowal ritual which has successfully destroyed relations between the two parties for at least several decades to come.

If it weren’t against my democratic principles I would be tempted to suggest that politicians should be banned from pronouncing on personal morality by law, under pain of having to watch paint dry – in the middle of the coldest arctic tundra. Sadly, since we can’t outlaw we it we have to endure it and wearily repeat anytime a politician dares to whisper about it, physician, heal thyself!

Conservatives are clueless on poverty….

'I am totally sure Call Me Dave's pad is that way and not here...'

The school of thought that the Conservative Party, no matter how hard they try, simply will never ‘get’ poverty was today given a massive shot in the arm by the frankly illiterate words of Iain Duncan Smith. Remember people this comes on the same day that it has been revealed that Labour areas are getting hammered into the ground and paying the highest price for this governments austerity drive.

We will ignore the frankly just plain stupid argument that extra money makes the lives of poor people worse and look at another one. Apparently the solution to poverty is to push people into employment. Sounds plausible. Accept when you factor in this nugget from The Daily Telegraph:

the average worker is being hit by a 2.9 per cent cut in wages in real terms, the equivalent of a £651 being wiped off the purchasing power of their annual income.

This shows quite clearly that work isn’t the solution to your poverty problems. In fact, we have this governments barking economic policies to thank for that because they are sending prices through the roof while further depressing wages.  Duncan Smith launches a broadside against the last government;

“By inflating incomes through benefits and tax credits, the previous Government hailed early watershed victories claiming significant numbers of people had been ‘lifted’ out of poverty, by virtue of moving them above the poverty line.

Duncan Smith is rendered blind to the real problems by his ignorant and destructive politics.  Indeed, his argument is logically contradictory. By saying the solution is employment, he implies the problem is the ‘feckless and unemployed poor’. However, for example, Working Tax Credits, as Mr Duncan Smith should really know given his job, are an in-work benefit so how on earth could they have created the implied ‘benefit addiction’ amoung the allegedly ‘workshy’ and ‘feckless’ poor?

He simply can’t fathom that incomes for the many have not risen, let alone been ‘over inflated’, significantly at all, while debt levels have been steadily rising.  Changes to the benefit system initiated by the last Labour government (aimed not primarily at alleviating poverty but actually aimed at compensating the middle classes for their falling wages vis a vie those at the top) only delayed the inevitable cave-in.

Take a look at this graph and you begin to see the roots of the problem. In 1997, it shows how average homebuyer mortgages were only three times average earnings. During the ‘boom years’ however this gap (already big) spiralled upwards to a peak in 2007/8 where average homebuyer mortgages were a mind-bending seven times average earnings. What plugged the gap? Well the graph tells us quite clearly it wasn’t earnings so it must have been cheap and readily available credit. 

However, as the house of cards fell-in globally, the banks soon turned the tap firmly off and the rest as they say is history. If the middle-classes stopped receiving ‘trickle-down’ and became increasingly more dependant on credit then what does that mean happened to the poor? The answer is simple. During our tenure they remained where they were  and even saw a swelling in their ranks; it is figures such as these that shame Labour:

official figures blew apart the Government’s credibility on helping those struggling the most. They painted a bleak picture of worsening poverty in Britain even before the recession took root. The number of people living in poverty had climbed to 11 million by March 2008, a rise of 300,000 since 2006. The poorest have seen their incomes drop, with 200,000 working adults falling below the poverty line last year.

Still, these figures are small beer to what is coming; the ranks of the poor will be massively swelled as the credit and tax credit starved middle classes join them. On the plus side, capitalism’s cannibalisation of the middle classes is laying the ground for an unprecedented democratic union of all the popular classes against it.

The real problem we have is the sheer undemocratic distribution of incomes engendered by an undemocratic social system has become so top-heavy it has simply fallen over. One way to solve this temporarily would be to drastically increase average earnings while curtailing those at the top. However, soon enough inflation would undermine this approach and we would be confronted with an inflationary crisis. The only real long-term solution is a programme of economic democracy, control and ownership. One thing is for sure though, that wont come from Mr Duncan Smith and his class-warrior colleagues because they simply haven’t got the first clue what they are doing even within the narrow confines of capitalist logic. Scary to think these people head the ship of state isn’t it?

No Mr Alexander, we will not ‘work with this government’….

It’s heartening to see that when this government attacks the welfare state or benefit claimants in general the Labour Twitterverse generally explodes in outrage. However, sadly, the same cannot be said of our leadership and it certainly cannot be said of Douglas Alexander whose current role involves shadowing Iain Duncan Smiths Department for Work and Pensions. Events like this tend to suggest that the cultural chasm that exists between Labour’s members, activists and the lofty-leadership still exists. So it is that George Osborne, potential tax-dodger, compares benefit cheats to ‘muggers’ and uses widely discredited figures about the cost of benefit fraud and the response that sallies forth from the opposition benches is for Mr Alexander to don his hair-shirt and promise ‘co-operation’ with the government.

Of course, in all fairness to the man, he is only following the example set by Ed Miliband at PMQ’s when, worryingly, he seemed to indicate broad support for reforms to things like the Disability Living Allowance. No thought being given to the consequence of these reforms however ever actually occurs at the top of the Party. The only calculus ever used is the electoral one ie, how many votes are in it for us? Since these reforms are likely to hit sections of society that are less likely to vote their interests are dismissed in favour of those of people who probably think the onerous burden of actually paying tax, especially to support those doing less well in society, in the first place is mugging enough.

This kind of short-sighted opportunism has made our Party the prisoner of so many vested interests and is precisely the reason that the ‘core vote’ isn’t awfully bothered about voting for us anymore. It’s precisely the kind of thing Ed Miliband was talking about in the lead-up too his election as leader and it is precisely the kind of thing he has yet to show any subsequent conviction in tackling.

Northern troubles….

Today’s Daily Mirror carries a report that Iain Duncan Smith’s welfare reforms could include “localised payments”. Meanwhile, Ed Miliband is reported by the Northern Echo as potentially favouring higher tax credits in the South to reflect higher costs of living. He said:

“We can look at the level of tax credits, so they benefit people in the South who haven’t benefited from the minimum wage.”

Duncan Smith’s attitude is far from unsurprising; since the Conservatives did not make a ‘northern breakthrough’ to the extent they hoped they know its their Liberal Democrat pupp…err partners that are going to pay the electoral price for cuts they make. Liberal Democrats are now complicit in feathering the nest of southern Conservative base at the expense of their own supporters; something that no doubt makes them immensely proud. Nothing is wrong with benefits for the south but the kind of favouritism that saw Michael Gove save school re-building in Somerset while ignoring the North is unacceptable.

Both make the same fundamental assumption that a lower cost of living means lower ‘cost of living’ makes lower benefits justified. Of course, ‘cost of living’ is an arbitrary term so cannot be used as a justification for anything substantial. How do they define ‘living’? Also, both factor out the relative social deprivation of the north which counterbalances the higher cost of living. Miliband, put simply, has got it wrong and is in danger of looking like he is using tax credits as a somewhat cynical bribe in his quest to win southern seats for Labour. It is an entirely different matter to regionalise something like the living wage compared to benefits; a wage is an income earned and a benefit is a safety net; and besides, the younger Miliband has obviously not thought through the implications of his own policy which, in resulting in higher prices will necessitate higher, across-the-board benefits.

The real problem with tax credits is they are fantastically hard to get; so hard to get in fact that they do not really support people coming off abject poverty level benefits back into work; and into contributing through taxes. They do not exist to ‘top-up’ the wages of the middle classes in the south; they exist for the purpose I outlined. Any other purpose is to fundamentally misunderstand benefits and welfare. Mr Miliband, I am sure, would not want to show the same crass and class based disregard for the North exhibited by Duncan-Smith. If he wants to avoid the impression of that he needs to go back to the drawing board on tax credits and welfare.