By Michael Burke
There can be no doubt that the government’s announcement on welfare ‘reforms’ amounts to a fierce assault on the well-being of the most vulnerable in society. As this will cause a significant backlash for relatively modest projected savings, the question arises, Why would they do this?
The answer lies in the common interests of workers and poor. Although they are an enormously heterogeneous mass of individuals their pay and conditions are each linked to the overall fight between labour and capital over the share of national income.
In effect, impoverishing those on welfare is an attempt to pick off the most vulnerable sections of the working class and poor by targeting them, and to lay the basis for wider and broader attacks on living standards.
In the first instance this is a savage, targeted austerity imposed on those entitled to benefits. According to the Resolution Foundation, if the Government plans to save £5 billion from restricting PIP by making it harder to qualify for the ‘daily living’ component, this would mean between 800,000 and 1.2 million people losing support of between £4,200 and £6,300 per year by 2029-30.
It is disingenuous for ministers to present these reforms as providing broader benefits, which are tiny. Universal Credit (UC) support for up to four million families without any health conditions or disability will rise by around £3 a week. Clearly, this is a pittance by comparison.
The government also presents further cuts as savings, to be achieved by cutting the level of the health-related LCWRA (Limited Capability for Work-Related Activity) element within Universal Credit, which is currently claimed by 1.6 million people.
Scandalously, these proposed cuts are focused on young people (aged 16-21), who may no longer be eligible for any extra support, and those who fall ill in the future, as their additional support will be halved, from £97 per week in 2024-25 to £50 per week in 2026-27.
This is a policy based on Tory/reactionary tabloid headlines about feckless or indolent young people. These are the same young people already burdened by student debt, who suffer low wages and are more subject to precarious employment. Together these are a strategic project, which aim to permanently lower the expectations and living standards of an entire generation, compared to older workers.
Ministers have played fast and loose with the ‘savings’ element of this package. When challenged about the negative effects of these measures on other areas of social policy and their associated costs (housing, employment, skills, ill-health, mental ill-health, crime and so on), ministers have talked about the cuts being a moral issue, which is simply insulting to welfare beneficiaries.
But this fake moralism is also a tacit admission that the cuts will not lead to anything like commensurate savings, because of the negative impacts on other social budgets.
Ministers are rightly wary of trying to justify the cuts on the basis of savings. As the history of austerity has shown, cuts are not savings. Yet these cuts are also being made as the military budget is rising, there is £3billion a year for the Ukraine war ‘for as long as it takes’, non-doms are being sweetened with reduced taxes and fossil fuel companies’ windfall taxes are set to be abolished.
What is the real motivation behind these cuts? In effect it is an attack on all workers and poor people, with disabled people, the sick and young people first in the firing line. The effect of the cuts will be to force many people to take very low-paid and/or precarious work or go without income altogether. This in turn will have a general knock-on effect on the rate of pay and conditions for all workers on low-paid or average wages. It also paves the way politically for further cuts.
From 2010 onwards austerity has repeatedly transferred incomes and wealth from poor to rich and from labour to business in an attempt to revive the economy. These attempts have failed.
With these severe, targeted measures, the government hopes to have more success precisely because they are targeted on the most vulnerable, the least able to resist. It represents a further, vicious twist to the austerity policy that has been in place for 15 years.
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