Tag Archives: Comment

The welfare state saved me. To need it isn’t a moral failure

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Powered by Guardian.co.ukThis article titled “The welfare state saved me. To need it isn’t a moral failure” was written by Lola Okolosie, for theguardian.com on Monday 25th May 2015 13.22 UTC

Last week, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) released figures showing that, between 2010 and 2013, a third of the UK population experienced income poverty. During this four-year period, 19.3 million people had a disposable income of below 60% of the national median at some point. These figures illustrate how millions of people are treading water, struggling to keep afloat and afford the very basics. Crisis loans and food banks are real.

In the wake of the election of a Tory majority government, it almost feels like the thing to do is to stop banging the same drum, to stop highlighting these issues. Yet here we are. Turning our heads away from people’s current experience of poverty – and what lies ahead – just isn’t an option.

As a senior teacher and a writer for this publication, my income is such that I can afford life’s luxuries. I own my own home and car. I can afford meals out and holidays that take me further than Europe’s shores. I don’t have to face the daily humiliation of wondering if I have sent my children out into the world in clothing that reveals reduced circumstances, and with not much in their bellies. Note the agency in these sentences; I am one of the privileged few. Yet the woman I am today wouldn’t exist without the welfare state.

It’s become almost passe to write that the Tories are dismantling our society’s safety net and pushing millions further into poverty. And although, for some, this is keenly felt as an awful new normal, it remains abstract for others – a reality several steps removed. Not so for me. I grew up knowing what it is to feel stomach cramps as a result of hunger; to have a packed lunch for school that was simply bread and butter; to be so ashamed of my ill-fitting clothes that I avoided going out altogether.

As a young adult I have been homeless and only saved from experiencing life on the streets by women’s refuges. I have moved from jobseeker’s allowance to wages so low that living was only made possible through housing benefit and working tax credit. I have accessed legal aid and had a small insight into how the law can work for even the most vulnerable. And I could undertake my bachelor’s degree because, as a poor independent student, I didn’t have to pay more than £1,000 in tuition fees.

I am the product of a compassionate state, one that believes in the potential of all its citizens. For that I am supremely grateful and lucky. Yet even writing this seems brazen, as though admitting a failure on my part. Poverty is good at shaming you into silence.

A surfeit of humiliation and guilt attaches itself to poverty. How dare I have used the state to realise a better life for myself and the children I would later go on to have? But if the state isn’t concerned with the uplift of those on the lowest rungs of society, how does it view them? Are they simply the fodder needed to realise the 1%’s wealth accumulation?

In my mid-30s, I am no longer reliant on the welfare state – and haven’t been for some time. The truth is that for the majority of those who claim benefits, it’s a short-term measure, tiding them over in their time of need. Now I am comfortably middle-class, even with all the talk of the “squeezed middle”, I am buffered from the worst the government has in store. Yet it all feels like one unfortunate calamity away, its proximity unnervingly near, made real by the daily struggles of younger family members who are trying to recover from childhoods in care, who have few or no qualifications and work on zero-hour contracts. When Iain Duncan Smith talks of “neighbourhoods blighted by worklessness” he fails to mention the poverty of opportunity in such areas, which his government’s policies will further entrench.

No one needs to remind me of the absolute necessity of our welfare state and so I happily pay into it. My wider family in Nigeria – a country where benefits are non-existent and pretty much everything has been privatised – live in the type of poverty that takes seeing to believe. And despite knowing first-hand the difference between absolute and relative poverty, I don’t believe the existence of the former cancels out the debilitating reality of the latter. Poverty in Nigeria or the UK isn’t a choice. Framing it as such is a heartless red herring, waved about to make us believe that only when people are without clothes, food or shelter should we bother to give them a passing glance.

Now more than ever, we need a chorus of voices mobilised against the draconian treatment of society’s most vulnerable. We need the millions who have at one time or other in their life accessed the welfare state to believe that they aren’t failures for doing or having done so. We need to continue the argument, which says it is decent, good and right that the state steps in when all else fails. Because to continue down the path the Tories have so gleefully outlined means society will only become more divided and unstable.

Increasingly we aren’t framing poverty as the result of political forces: the privatisation of state assets such as energy and transport; the weakening of unions; the steady erasure of the welfare state. Instead, we internalise all the guff telling us that poverty is the inevitable result of an individual’s moral decrepitude. Though the wealthy have always spun being poor as a willing choice of the selfish, dumb and lazy, now, more than ever, society seems to be buying this message.

With all Labour’s chatter about failing to recognise the value of aspiration – as if only those who want to pay less tax have it – the party is running scared and away from the most vulnerable. It is an unsightly manoeuvre, one that comes off as grasping and shortsighted. It is important that they do not become complicit in a lie that claims the poor can be shamed and punished out of poverty.

My parents didn’t receive benefits when living in England, yet our poverty was no less degrading as a result; it is not more dignified to offer oneself as cheap, easily exploitable labour. The Tories must not win an argument that is immoral to its core: that accessing the welfare state is a sign of individual failure.

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An obituary from the year 2025 for a Labour party that abandoned its roots

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Powered by Guardian.co.ukThis article titled “An obituary from the year 2025 for a Labour party that abandoned its roots” was written by Aditya Chakrabortty, for The Guardian on Monday 11th May 2015 20.00 UTC

Throughout its long and volatile life, Labour had heard many predictions of imminent demise. Yet mass shock still greeted the party’s passing away in its sleep early yesterday morning, 9 May 2025, just shy of its 120th birthday. The proximate cause of death given was the trauma suffered after one election defeat too many.

This was a party that had long been accused of harbouring a death wish. Who could forget the epithet hurled at Michael Foot’s 1983 manifesto? “The longest suicide note in history.” In 2015 – just weeks before the humiliation of Ed Miliband – Labour’s roving philosopher, Jon Cruddas, had predicted that his side could simply “disintegrate in real time”. Back then, he’d been called foolish; only later was he hailed as prescient.

The hindsight of the 2020s is a marvellous thing; at the time, Labour’s steady decline was obscured by its own fidgetiness. It swerved left, then squirmed right. It wanted free markets but controlled immigration; it sought to be business-friendly, to a big business class only interested in ripping off the public. Many circles were apparently squared in that tumultuous quarter-century.Meanwhile, the myth that Gordon Brown had spent all the money became unshakeable, shaping the next generation of politics – just as the jibe about the winter of discontent had reverberated through the 80s and early 90s.

Perhaps mirroring the party’s diminishing patience, the people in charge sported ever-shorter names: Tristram, Stella, Dan.Throughout, the diminishing membership displayed their traditional contemptuous loyalty to whoever happened to be in charge. By Labour’s last election of May 2025, its much-trumpeteddifference with the Tory perma-government came down to this: our PPE graduates are smarter than your PPE graduates.

All this provided gallows humour and column fodder. Yet Labour could survive numerous defeats, as Ed Miliband’s own propaganda acknowledged: “Labour has only been in government for four short periods of the 20th century.” Even David Cameron’s boundary reform, which holed Labour below the 250-seat watermark, could be endured. What the movement couldn’t afford to let slip, however, was its role as the natural conduit for the discontents of wider society. That was what distinguished it from the natural party of government, the Conservatives. Fatally, that was the part it stopped playing.

From Arthur Henderson onwards, the party’s central demand had always been fair shares. That goal was defined by the father of the NHS, Nye Bevan, as “where the doctor, the grocer, the butcher and farm labourer all lived on the same street – the living tapestry of a mixed community”. Some hope of enacting that in today’s property market. In a society growing apart as fast as Britain’s, it was becoming impossible to agree what “fair” meant. Vast inequality had bred political polarisation. Labour, the party of collective politics, now represented a collection of niche electorates.

That one fact glared out of the results of the 2015 election. Multicultural London became more Labour, even while university towns and Guardianista strongholds began flirting with the Greens– a trend which was only to continue over the next two general elections. Meanwhile, across the de-industrialised north, Nigel Farage robbed votes from Miliband. “It suddenly became clear that Labour no longer had just one enemy – the Tories,” remembers Glen O’Hara, professor of history at Oxford Brookes university. “It had a whole kaleidoscope of enemies – from UKIP to the SNP.”

Economics commentators had long warned that the very idea of a national economy had become untenable. London was now a city-state for bankers and hipsters, supported by immigrant service workers the guff sold to the north and Wales about becoming a knowledge economy was just lies.

Now Ed Balls and other Labour big beasts were discovering what that meant for them: wipe-out. Economic and political polarisation were to be the central facts of the 2020s. Labour had faced this problem before in the 1930s – this time, however, it had neither electoral hiding place nor the regular inflow of political talent.

No political party can speak three different languages at the same time, especially not one that has got out of the habit of listening to its own base. Faced with an impossible task, the elite that now ruled the people’s party – the Kinnocks and Goulds and Straws – crumbled. While the Tories were also reduced to a regional party, its voter base was, at least, in largely one place. Now that Nicola Sturgeon had won Scotland, Cameron and George Osborne were much better than their Labour opposite numbers at playing the English vote. Not only that, the Tories used their decade alone in power to tame any dissenting parts of civil society. The BBC, the non-governmental organisations, the universities: all saw their funding regimes tightened up and responded by buttoning up on any unhelpful criticisms.

Labourism had emerged from an industrial culture: you could be born in a co-op hospital and be buried by the co-op funeral service. Most of those civil institutions had collapsed after Margaret Thatcher. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s response had been to create a new client base of public sector workers across de-industrialised Britain. By 2020 Cameron and Osborne had put paid to that. What they left instead was an insider-outsider economy: those on a good wage with a house might still be tempted to vote Labour, those struggling on three temporary jobs a day had no such line to the movement.

Labour leaves behind an estimable legacy. As prime minister, George Osborne is still able to rely on those private finance initiative  schools and hospitals, while Brown’s knot of tax credits proved impossible to cut while maintaining a low-wage workforce. The party is succeeded by two offspring. First is Fabian and Fabian, a small publishing house producing glossy proposals for ever more taxes. Then there is WWP, short for the White Working-Class party: a grouplet of cultural studies graduates who hold regular tours of defunct factories and monthly meat raffles.

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The Tories’ £12bn of welfare cuts could come back to haunt them

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Now they can get on with the really nasty stuff unopposed I guess.

Powered by Guardian.co.ukThis article titled “The Tories’ £12bn of welfare cuts could come back to haunt them” was written by Patrick Butler, for theguardian.com on Friday 8th May 2015 13.08 UTC

By the autumn we will find out how the Tories will make welfare cuts of £12bn a year by 2018. If they go ahead – and there are difficult political choices to be made here – these cuts will amount to one of the defining social policy decisions of the next five years.

The Tories were curiously loathe to explain how they would make these cuts during the election campaign. Either they knew, but were not telling because the truth would scare voters; or they didn’t know, but it didn’t matter because this was only ever a coalition bargaining chip to trade with the Lib Dems.

Ironically, a Conservative majority government may now find itself having to take unpopular choices it perhaps never really expected to have to make.

As we know from this week’s leaked Whitehall documents, when it comes to cuts there is no longer any “low-hanging fruit”. What’s left are in large part harsh cuts hitting middle-income working families: or, as the Institute for Fiscal Studies politely puts it, the “less palatable options”.

What we do know is that the Tories will freeze the level of working-age benefits for two years from next April, disqualify most 18- to 21-year-olds from claiming housing benefit, and reduce the household benefit cap from £26,000 to £23,000. Those three policies, the IFS calculates, will find the Tories about £1.5bn a year.

So where will the remaining £10.5bn come from?

The Tory line throughout the campaign has been: trust us on our track record. We made the cuts before, and we’ll make them again. The coalition did indeed make about £18bn of welfare cuts over the last parliament – but importantly, in view of what they need to achieve over the next five years, very little in the way of savings.

The bulk of the cuts – roughly two thirds – came from below-inflation uprating of benefits; the rest from restricting child benefit for wealthier families and some cuts to child tax credit. The cuts made here were more or less cancelled out by massive overspending on disability benefits and housing benefit.

According to social researcher Declan Gaffney, the net savings from five years of supposed welfare “revolution”, measured against the savings expected in 2010, were about £2bn. Contrary to Tory rhetoric, the coalition track record on finding welfare savings was dismal.

To reach £12bn by 2018, the Tories will not only have to massively increase the pace of welfare cuts made over the past five years, but achieve net savings. They will have to focus on the five big ticket items: tax credits (currently about £30bn a year); housing benefit (£21bn); disability living allowance and personal independence payments (£15bn); incapacity benefits (£14bn); and child benefit (£12bn).

One key area will be incapacity benefit spending. Previous attempts to cut this failed (spending rose at least £3bn above anticipated levels under the coalition): the high number of successful appeals against the notoriously unpopular fit-for-work tests revealed that there were simply not, as the coalition passionately believed, millions of people fraudulently claiming the benefit.

The Department for Work and Pensions believes there is scope for reform, however, and we can expect more drastic measures to try to reduce the numbers claiming employment and support allowance, by moving as many as possible on to the less-well remunerated jobseeker’s allowance.

This will be controversial, and Whitehall has concerns over the ability of the outsourced service (formerly run by Atos, now Maximus) to do this. Savings here will be painful, in human terms, and are far from guaranteed.

Housing benefit will be another target area, but the anticipated increase in spending (up £3bn a year from 2020) will be difficult to reverse given the growth in working households on low or static incomes forced to draw on housing support to meet high rents, particularly in London and the south.

Tax credits and child benefit cuts would appear to be necessary but they will take hundreds if not thousands of pounds a year out of the pockets of many of the middle-England voters that delivered David Cameron the premiership. Cuts to smaller budget items, such as carer’s allowance and statutory maternity pay may deliver marginal savings but at the cost of alienating the same demographic.

The Conservatives will look to a relatively buoyant employment market to reduce spending on unemployment benefit. But this relatively small budget line will do nothing to get them close to the £12bn target. Universal credit will be heralded as a technological fix to benefits spending by increasing the incentives for people on a range of in- and out-of-work benefits to come off the dole or work more hours. But the troubled programme is way off schedule (it may not be working fully until 2017 at the earliest) and there is no hard evidence it will deliver savings.

There will be much emphasis on so-called behavioural change policies, even though they will deliver barely any savings (and may not work even on their own terms). The benefit cap will continue, and there will be the threat of benefit sanctions for alcohol or drug addicted,​ mentally ill, or obese claimants who refuse treatment programmes.

The decision for​ the Tories is how many of these cuts they want to deliver and what the political costs of this will be. There is no coalition partner to blame if they don’t offer up £12bn; but if they take their foot off the welfare cuts pedal the imperatives of ​​deficit reduction mean savings will have to be found from other departmental budgets.

Cameron spoke this morning of a “one nation” Toryism but he will know his £12bn of cuts will disproportionately hit the poor, young sick and​ disabled. The cuts will deliver more pain, fear and instability to those they affect. We can expect a rise in child poverty, a further decline in living standards for all but the most well-off, and more stupendous rises in productivity in the food bank sector.

A majority gives the Tories a mandate to begin seriously dismantling the welfare state, but Cameron – if not all of his party – will know this carries a political cost. Deliver social security cuts on this scale and many of those who voted for him yesterday may be surprised to find that it is they, and not the mythical scroungers and shirkers of Tory demagoguery, who will lose out.

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