Reinventing the Welfare State. Ursula Huws

they had been in the dark pre-war period. So deeply engrained is the notion of social progress, that few British people would imagine comparisons could be drawn between the twenty-first-century welfare state and the Victorian workhouse, where families were broken up and the poor forced to do menial labour in return for food and shelter. Yet, viewed objectively, the welfare state today has many more features in common with its nineteenth-century predecessor than with the comparatively humane mid-twentieth-century model than we should be comfortable with. Gone is the idea that unemployed people, having paid contributions into a national insurance scheme, have an unconditional right to their benefits for a specified period. Instead, as ‘jobseekers’, they are forced by savage sanctions (withdrawals of benefit) regimes into accepting whatever work is available, however low paid, or, if no such work is available, into unpaid ‘work experience’ – the twenty-first-century equivalent of picking oakum or breaking stones (with the welfare system, as we have seen, providing their employers with a hidden subsidy for the use of this labour). Once sanctioned, many are rendered destitute: forced to sleep on the street or use food banks to survive. Perhaps the main difference is that the Victorian workhouse would at least have provided them with a bowl of gruel, a dry bed and a roof over their heads.

      The statistics are shocking. According to the Trussell Trust, the number of emergency food parcels delivered to people in crisis by food banks reached a record 823,145 in the six months between April and September 2019, a 23 per cent increase on the previous year. Among the recipients, ‘one in five have no money coming in at all in the month before being referred for emergency food’ and ‘94 per cent of people at food banks are destitute’.⁹ The number of rough sleepers also reached a record high. Research commissioned by the Greater London Authority found 8,855 people sleeping rough in London between April 2018 and March 2019, of whom 62 per cent were sleeping rough for the first time.¹⁰ In 2018, the Department for Work and Pensions admitted that between April 2013 and April 2018 over 21,000 people died while waiting for benefits.¹¹ Meanwhile, it was estimated that the number of children from working households growing up in poverty rose by 38 per cent from 2010 to 2018 – from an estimated one in five households to one in four.¹²

      THE GLOBAL DIVISION OF LABOUR HAS FRACTURED SOLIDARITIES BETWEEN ORGANISED WORKERS AND THE ‘RESERVE ARMY’

      Meanwhile, what has happened to the fragile solidarity between organised labour and the precarious reserve army of labour whose interests are constantly pitched against each other by employers trying to get work done at the cheapest possible price? As already noted, in the post-war period there were specific circumstances that enabled such solidarity, rooted partly in shared experiences and culture and partly in proximity, which meant that the same workers might move in and out of the reserve army, or see other family members do so. Institutional mechanisms existed for developing broad common demands and negotiating them at a national level. But the neoliberal policies introduced in the intervening period have driven deep wedges between workers, helped by technological change. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, few parts of the planet have remained beyond the scope of transnational corporations. The reserve army is now, by and large, made up of strangers.

      A global reserve army has been created, rapidly expanding, equipped with a basic knowledge of at least one world language, generic technological skills and a smartphone, able to be summoned at short notice to carry out one of the increasingly standardised tasks required in the twenty-first-century economy. This reserve army can be accessed in two distinct, but overlapping, ways: by moving jobs offshore to low-wage countries, or by using migrant workers in the domestic economy. In either case, a disciplinary effect is exercised over better-paid, organised workers. Whether you are told that your job could be sent to India or China, or outsourced to a company that employs migrant workers, the impact is essentially the same: you are less likely to hold out for demands for improvement to your wages and working conditions. And you are also less likely to know the workers who could replace you, to have mechanisms to appeal to their solidarity, or to empathise with their situation.

      It is a rational response, in such a situation, to demand that the union dues you pay are spent on protecting the wages and conditions of the paid-up members and resisting any attempt to dilute the workforce. If you have lost faith in the ability of social democratic parties to represent your interests, it is also, unfortunately, a rational response to turn your anger against those unknown foreign workers who are undercutting you, and enter the embrace of xenophobic populist parties offering the promise of a return to the certainties of the past. This might explain much of the appeal of Brexit, Trump, Le Pen, the Freedom Party of Austria and the Alternative for Germany Party, although it says a great deal for the trade unions across Europe that, on the whole, they have been able to resist such divisiveness and continue to campaign against racism among their members.

      To pose the problem in this way runs the risk of understating the complexity of the situation. The lack of solidarity between indigenous workers and foreign-based or foreign-born workers cannot be reduced simply to racism, although racism may often play a role in it. Once the mechanisms that were created, and reinforced, by solidarity between organised workers and the reserve army have been shattered, the resulting fracturing of the working class affects people of all origins. Many of the households in poverty, the users of food banks and the people sleeping rough on our streets are white people of British origin who have been failed by the social safety net. The global division of labour must therefore be seen as one precipitating factor among several that has brought us to this pass.

      DEMONISATION OF ‘SCROUNGERS’, IMMIGRANTS AND OVERSEAS WORKERS

      By these and other means, welfare systems have evolved into a disguised means of redistributing from labour to capital, not from capital to labour. And this reversal has been disguised in such a way that the blame for it is displaced along multiple dimensions. Most obviously it is displaced onto welfare claimants, seen as ‘scroungers’ taking scarce resources from ‘hard-working taxpayers’. But it is also displaced onto overseas workers, seen as stealing jobs from British workers, and onto migrants, who, in addition to stealing jobs and undercutting wages are also often perceived as consuming public resources, such as housing, education and health, which should by rights belong to native workers. The search for groups to blame does not stop there, however. Another favourite target is the elderly, adding an intergenerational wedge to the other divisions forced into the working class – splintered not just by employment and citizenship status but also by age.

      BLAMING THE BABY BOOMERS

      The elderly form a large and growing portion of the UK population. There are nearly 12 million people aged 65 and over in the UK, of whom 5.4 million are aged 75 or over and 1.6 million 85 or over. The Office for National Statistics estimates that by 2066 there will be a further 8.6 million UK residents aged 65 or over, who will make up over a quarter (26 per cent) of the population.¹³

      Life expectancy is, however, falling, in a reversal of a long-term trend. The Continuous Mortality Investigation revised its Mortality Projections Model in 2019 to predict that life expectancies at age 65 had fallen by around five months for both males and females, to 19.8 years and 22.4 years respectively,¹⁴ a trend it is difficult not to attribute to austerity policies.

      Small wonder, then, that the pension bill is a prime target for those wishing to cut public expenditure, despite the fact that pensions in the UK are low compared with other European countries, at £141 per week, compared with £507 in Germany, £304 in France and £513 in Spain.¹⁵

      The 2010s saw a path being prepared for future cuts. Several interrelated themes have been visible in the popular discourse, but they add up to a general message that the current generation of retirees is privileged, and that these privileges are gained at the expense of other groups in the population, especially the young, including their own children.

      One common theme is that the baby boomers’ pensions are being paid for by those ‘hard-working taxpayers’ who featured so prominently in the rhetoric of New Labour as well as Tory government propagandists. This misrepresents the reality to quite a considerable extent. During the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, when most of the current crop of