Fight to restore the safety net

Micheline Mason of Wandsworth and Merton Left Unity calls for a campaign against destitution

Insecurity is a profound emotional state. It is experienced as a lack of control over our own lives, a constant anxiety which keeps us awake at night. It spreads to our children and other dependents who absorb the violence into themselves and have no outlet for their anger. Whilst in this state it is almost impossible to do the things which are needed to cope with life, even less to progress our lives to a more stable situation. It also makes us ill.

According to the National Institute of Clinical Excellence (2010):

“Clinical depression is set to be the most common impairment in Europe by 2020 and may rise faster as the poor get poorer. Obesity and addiction to alcohol and other drugs are also reaching epidemic proportions in the richer countries”.

These figures include children and young people. “Prescriptions of Ritalin for school age children in England, have quadrupled over the last decade reaching 661,463 in 2010. This is with little to no evidence about the effect which these cocktails of drugs are having on the development of children’s brains.” (Association of Educational Psychologists)

As illustrated in Ken Loach’s film, in the ‘Spirit of ’45’ we had built an infrastructure in Britain based on the concept of ‘All for One and One for All’ – houses, employment, education, healthcare as a basic human right for everyone. Underpinning this was the concept of Social Security. This was the safety net set to catch anyone who fell on hard times whether through bereavement, unemployment, sickness, or disability. The understanding was that if anyone were allowed to sink into absolute destitution, it would be almost impossible for them to get their lives together again.

This provision became statutory under the National Assistance Act (1948) and consequently the Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Act (1970). The system worked on the principle of:

a) a right to have our needs (as defined by the Acts) assessed and

b) if found eligible for assistance that assistance must be provided. It could not be withdrawn unless it had been proved that the need for such assistance no longer existed.

If the provision was in the form of a cash benefit, this would be worked out carefully to guarantee the sum the government had worked out you needed to live on. This sum appeared on all your letters of entitlement. Your income was not allowed to fall below this level, as long as you remained eligible (still had the need).

As a disabled person, like many thousands of others, I have benefited from this provision all my life. Despite the discrimination of employers I have worked, even reaching salaried status for quite a few years, but I have never been able to completely meet all my needs from my own earning power, given the costs of specialised housing, aids and support needs. With the state topping up my earnings I have been enabled to live a very active, independent and productive life. And when I couldn’t work, there was no question that I would not be able to receive a basic income to cover housing, food and essential bills. Even in those times of complete dependence on the benefits system, I was able to manage my life and plan for a better future. I had a child who never went hungry or needed to worry about homelessness.

If new rules were brought in which might negatively effect your entitlement to benefit, they were always staged, usually only being introduced for new claimants so as to not withdraw something people had become dependent upon.

If you were yourself at fault for not filling in the correct forms for example, you would always receive a letter telling you what you needed to do, and by when, in order to not be left with no money or service. Even then, if you still didn’t comply you would probably get a visit from a social worker to see what was happening – if you needed more help, or if you had moved, recovered or retired.

What has changed, inch by inch, below the radar of our awareness, is the withdrawal of this safety net. We now have a system of Social Insecurity as a deliberate policy. The justification for this is argued on the basis that we can no longer afford to be so generous with taxpayers’ money because of our national debt etc, but these arguments do not hold water. Unless people actually die the state still pays for all the emergency measures it has to put in place to contain its own victims, eg. temporary housing, foster care and adoption services, psychiatric hospitals, care homes and even prisons. Often these institutionalised services cost far more than the benefits they replace.

The real motivation is ideological, not economic. Those deep and dark roots of eugenics are still alive in the hearts and minds of the wealthy elite who currently hold the power in government and who act as agents of the corporate, capitalistic global minority.

Eugenics was founded in the late eighteenth century by Sir Francis Galton and many other prominent owning class people. It was a pseudo-science which espoused the notion that human beings came in different grades, or ‘stock’, and these differences were genetic and inherited. The lower ‘peasant’ stocks were seen as weaker in every way – physically, intellectually and morally. The upper classes were, by contrast, healthy, strong intelligent and thrifty, so it was only natural that they should be in control. The eugenicist movement felt it was their duty to make sure these lower ‘degenerate’ stock were not allowed to outbreed their masters and to such ends they introduced the crudest methods of birth control for poor people and people who were considered ‘defective’ (including ‘moral defectives’, such as women who had given birth outside of marriage).

Members of the movement included Sir Winston Churchill who, as home secretary in 1913, passed the ‘Mental Defectives Act’ which empowered local authorities to employ ‘catchers’ who could identify local ‘defectives’, including young children, and take them to be locked up in single-sex, long term institutions or ‘asylums’ for the rest of their lives.

These ideas spread rapidly throughout the owning classes of Europe and the Americas, leading to the forcible sterilisation of many thousands of poor or disabled women. They underpinned the false ideologies of racism (including antisemitism), and classism (the belief that the ‘lower orders’ were genetically less intelligent and not capable of intellectual reasoning and could therefore only be ‘trained’) and brought in their wake flawed practices still in use today, such as IQ testing, to ‘prove’ their superiority. They led to Hitler’s ‘final solution’ in the death camps of the Third Reich.

These ideas are on the rise again, as can be seen and heard on a daily basis in our media. The withdrawal of the economic safety net is designed to make people feel insecure and frightened so we can be more easily forced into accepting ever decreasing wages and conditions of employment – zero hours contracts, pay too low to cover the costs of living, unaffordable housing, no rent controls, insufficient social housing, weakened unions and the War on Welfare. This of course suits employers very well with increased competition for jobs, driving down wages and so on. It also suits the giant health insurance companies such as Unum who are waiting in the wings to soak up our insecurities in their expensive private provision, as has been so lucrative to them in the USA.

With Unum advising our government, the practices which underpin the benefits system have changed completely. Steeped still in eugenic thinking, the policy is now to punish and blame poor and disabled people for their lack of effort (the only reason anyone doesn’t have a good, well paid job apparently) and to use such people as undesirable illustrations of what could happen to anyone who thinks the state might care for them for more than a week or two.

How exactly have they done this? Some of the many steps they have taken include:

Changing Income Support to Jobseekers Allowance and introducing many conditions of receipt over and above ‘need’, non-compliance with which can lead to stopping of the benefit altogether (sanctions).

Changing Incapacity Benefit to Employment Support Allowance with many conditions and threats attached. The devastation this has caused to so many ill and/or disabled people has been well documented by the Spartacus Network in People’s Review of the Work Capability Assessment (November 2012) and the second People’s Review of the WCA – Further Evidence (December 2013) including the harrowing stories of people committing suicide upon hearing that all income available to them is being with drawn despite being terminally ill.

Changing eligibility criteria, for example many local authorities now say they will only provide for ‘substantial’ or ‘critical’ needs. They have introduced charges for such services based on your income (which includes all your other benefits).

You no longer get visits from social workers or even letters warning you that your benefit is about to be stopped. It can be ‘switched off’ by the DWP and the first you will know about it is when you go to try and pay your way and find to your horror your bank account is empty. As entitlement to Housing Benefit is attached to other benefits, this is likely to also be also switched off automatically. By then rent areas may have accrued and other debts may be mounting. When you rush down to the Service Centre to try and sort things out, they tell you that the only way to get things speeded up is to wait for an eviction notice.

Introducing an arbitrary Benefit Cap of £500 a week regardless of the effect of this on families who can no longer pay their rent or for food.

There are many more stories of the breakdown of people’s lives and there is no evidence at all that all these measures have led to more people being ‘helped’ into work. In fact the number of people unemployed for over 12 months was 796,000 in August 2010 and after four years of welfare reforms, workfare and sanctions aimed at this group the number has actually risen to 807,000 (Labour force survey, ONS 2014).

Britain is still the sixth wealthiest nation in the world. At our last Policy Conference in Manchester, Left Unity voted overwhelmingly to support a motion from my local branch of Wandsworth to ensure that it would be illegal to leave poor people with no money to live off. To this end we could, with others, initiate a single-issue campaign to restore the original legal requirement to assess and provide, with a guaranteed minimum income for everyone, including those on low pay. Sanctions should be outlawed. Social security is a bottom-line human need. In a society which depends on money to feed our families, the current policies can lead to destitution and have been a death penalty.

If anyone would like to help plan and initiate this campaign, please contact us via the Wandsworth branch email address, wandsworthandmerton@leftunity.org