[Printed here are excerpts from three articles in Socialist Appeal analysing the British Labour government's social policies.]
'Welfare to work'?
The Labour government intends to introduce workfare for the long-term unemployed. Workfare is an attempt to scare the unemployed into finding a job with the threat of withdrawal of benefits.
Workfare is based on the theory that the unemployed are basically skiving. It beggars belief that after 25 years of relatively full employment, after 1974 the western world should see a sudden and simultaneous outbreak of mass scrounging.
Has sitting around claiming benefits become more attractive during the Tory years? Hardly. The "replacement ratio" — the ratio of benefits to paid employment — fell under the Tories from 79% in 1978 to 60% in 1983-84.
Are there the jobs to go to? To take a typical month, January 1997, the official unemployment level was 1,815,000. As Labour, then in opposition, was quick to point out, this figure had been massaged downward by wholesale fiddling. And this figure was after six years when the economy was supposed to have been in boom.
The official level of job vacancies in that month was 262,000. The official sorcerers assure us that this refers only to vacancies referred to job centres, and the real level is three times as large. Let us accept their assurance for a moment — that still means that there are no jobs for all the unemployed.
The long-term unemployed face prejudice from potential employers. They do need carefully crafted assistance to dig them out of the unemployment trap. Will [Chancellor of the Exchequer] Gordon Brown's plan help them? Brown offers four options: a job, full-time education, work with a voluntary organisation, work on an environmental task force.
If a claimant refuses a job or placement, they will lose at least 60% of benefit, and they will lose the lot for two weeks.
The proposals will do nothing to reduce the dole queues. The plan is to cost £3500 million, paid for by a one-off windfall tax on the fat cat utilities. They can afford it. But what happens when the money runs out and no more real jobs have been created in the meantime?
For the "Welfare to work" project, the biggest target group are jobless 18-24s: 178,000 youth who have been on the dole for more than six months. The jobs in the private sector will be provided by handing out £60 a week for six months to the bosses. Work for a voluntary organisation will be paid at benefit levels plus £400, as will work for an environmental task force.
Over six months that works out to about £15 per week. This means a young unemployed person (who gets £37 dole money) will be working for about £52 a week or £1.30 per hour!
The feeling is very strong among youth advisers that employers will cherry pick the most able young people to make money out of — not hard when they're being subsidised £60 a week — and the voluntary and environmental task force will be seen as the rubbish option.
The plans for the long term unemployed are similar, and subject to the same criticisms. Three hundred and fifty thousand people have been jobless for more than two years. About half of them are to be subsidised into private sector employment, with a £75 per week top-up to the boss, plus a £750 training subsidy.
Both supporters and opponents of the plan reckon that there will be a deadweight effect of about 50%: about half of all the vacancies would have occurred anyway, and the boss would have had to take someone on — subsidy or not. So it is employers that are subsidised, not jobs for youth!
On top of that, there is a "substitution effect": young people are taken on for the £60 subsidy, but somebody else loses out. Critics put the deadweight and substitution effects together as high as 90%.
Even under favourable estimates, nearly three quarters of the jobs "created" under the plan are not new jobs at all.
Next October half a million lone parents will be offered the same sort of options as the young and the long-term unemployed.
But the most startling spread of workfare is to the long term sick and disabled. A £200 million project is to target 80-100,000 people with disabilities. The hidden agenda is given away by the Sunday Times headline of July 7: "Labour to clamp down on 'sick' benefit scroungers".
Subsidising employers gives the bosses the idea that they can employ workers for peanuts. The real aim of the job subsidy is to drive down the wages of those already in work, especially the youth, who are most likely to be competing with the people who get a temporary job as a result of the job subsidy.
The world economy has slowed down since 1974 and capitalism can no longer provide a job for all. The system has failed us and we need to change it. Attacking the unemployed is just blaming the victim.
Business to run schools
Education secretary David Blunkett's policy adviser, Michael Barber, has announced that big business will be asked to tender for the management of some of the proposed "education action zones" to be set up in some of Britain's most disadvantaged areas.
Many management consultancies were showing interest, and Barber hoped that other non-educational companies would get involved.
Graham Lane, Labour education chairman of the Local Government Association, who can hardly be described as a radical, was quick to condemn the moves: "This could be the beginning of the privatisation of the education authorities. It could lead to the break-up of education authorities. It could lead to the destruction of local democracy."
If business has made a mess of running the economy, how can we trust it to run a school? Only a short while ago [Prime Minister Tony] Blair and Co. were telling us about the disastrous "short termism" of British business; now they will reward this "short termism" with new profit-making ventures in the education system.
The scheme is supposedly to tackle the fairly bad literacy and numeracy levels in British schools. Yet the "action zone" concept has been lifted straight out of the US, a country with an even worse literacy and numeracy record. There, even companies like Procter and Gamble, the household detergent manufacturer, are involved.
The Labour government has only just scrapped the Tories' nursery voucher scheme. Now it is bringing private business straight back into education through the front door. On the day of the announcement, shares in Nord Anglia Education plc rocketed and netted their chief executive £1.6 million.
These moves represent a Trojan horse which will be used to undermine the whole of the education system, health care, welfare and the public sector generally. Other "action zones" in health and employment services are as yet unannounced — but they will be set up; have no fear about that.
Education "zones" will be allowed to tear up national agreements on teachers' pay and conditions. They will be exempted from the national curriculum and the teaching of "unnecessary" subjects like history and geography, in order to concentrate on getting "better" results in English and maths.
The 'unthinkable'
Blair asked for a thousand days to prepare for the next thousand years. How does scrapping invalidity benefit fit in with these preparations? Or how about the new ceiling of £500 for funeral expenses for the homeless?
All this is before we get the results of the various reviews into the welfare state. Once that happens, the new "policies" will come thick and fast.
Isn't it ironic that it will take up to a year to come up with a figure for the national minimum wage — a fairly prominent manifesto commitment — yet it only took six months to introduce the cut in lone parent benefit, nowhere mentioned in the run-up to the election?
Blair told his ministers to go away and "think the unthinkable." And we can only wait to see what "unthinkable" policies will be proposed.
Blair, alongside US President Bill Clinton, has championed so-called "flexible" labour markets and "welfare reform" as the twin pillars of government policy.
Blair would have us believe that "new" Britain, the "young country", is a country built around "innovation", excellence, high tech creativity and so on. Yet the reality of life here is poverty, destitution, huge disparities in wealth and income that now exist on a scale not seen since the 19th century, regional decay, the development of an "underclass" living on paltry benefits on the "fringe" of normal society.
These are the products of Tory economic dogma, of two decades of attacks and cuts, of labour market "flexibility" and all the other policies that big business has thrown down our throats for 20 years.
And Blair accepts all this. His admiration for Thatcher is scarcely concealed. His only response: to "reform" welfare. And now we know what he means.