welfare | ukwatch.net

Why David Cameron Blames the Poor

tim — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 21:47:00 +0000

David Cameron's ‘blaming the poor' speech in Glasgow may be more than just an attempt to placate the unreconstructed right of the Conservative party. It is not often recognised how far British public opinion has shifted towards a liberal individualist stance on social issues in recent years. In some ways we are more Thatcherite under New Labour than we ever were under the Conservatives.

Evidence from a range of attitude surveys points in the same direction. Sympathy for the poor, growing steadily stronger through the 1980s and early 1990s, has collapsed. By 2006 the situation was almost exactly reversed. The public is roughly twice as likely to attribute poverty to laziness or lack of will power now compared with a decade ago. The numbers thinking the government should spend more on the poor has steadily declined.

People are also much readier to accept the inequalities of the market. In 1997, slightly more people thought it unfair that those on high incomes could buy better health care or education than the rest of the population than took the opposite view. Now nearly twice as many think buying better health care or schooling is perfectly acceptable as don't.

Various factors contribute to explaining the shift to the right in social attitudes. Our recent qualitative work examined how people discuss fairness and government services. A strong theme across our interviews was the acceptance of inequalities. While the better off should be expected to contribute in the same way as everyone else does (and tax avoidance by the super-rich was seen as just as outrageous as benefit cheating by the poor), there was little support for redistributive taxation. Such attitudes are buttressed by a strong and widespread belief that opportunities to succeed, while not entirely equal, are open to those prepared to make the effort across society. Why fleece the better off when they pay in just as much as anyone else, and anyway we all stand a reasonable chance of getting there if only we try hard enough?

Opportunity for all and tolerance of income inequalities are strong themes in political discussions and in public opinion. Turning that round, sharply progressive tax and direct interventions to help the most vulnerable become unacceptable. When it pursues such policies, the government is careful to do so by stealth. Perhaps the success of those ideas is reflected in the lurch to the right of public opinion. Cameron's claim that ‘social problems are often the consequences of the choices people make' is the logical extension of this view.

Bring Back the Workhouses

Tim Holmes — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 10:42:21 +0000

As the downward economic spiral ensures that millions more people are likely to be unemployed, the government is devising ways to crackdown on and discipline the workshy gets. Last year it was forcing single mums to take jobs, under plans co-devised by a rich investment banker named David Freud (a fucking nobody in other words). This year, again with the help of Mr Freud, they are planning to abolish incapacity benefit and replace it with a more 'temporary' scheme that will compel benefits offices to goad the recipients into seeking work. Meanwhile, those on Jobseekers Allowance who remain unemployed for more than a year will have to "pick up litter" and do similar community service, at first for four weeks and then full-time if they don't snap out of it. Forgive me, but isn't community service a form of state penalty dealt out to petty criminals? Is the government now saying that unemployment is a crime?

The first thing to notice about this is that, as with the rollbacks of pension entitlements, all three major parties are backing this policy. The Tories have embraced it as one of their own. The consensus in favour of systematically dismantling protections for the poor, the old and the sick is rock solid in our political elite. The second is that, with wearisome predictability, some supporters of New Labour are working desperately hard to give this process a left gloss. Johann Hari argues that we cannot defend the current system in which millions of people are left to rot on the dole. True enough, but a) that is not a function of the welfare state, but of the capitalist economy which requires and produces a reserve army of labour; and b) what Johann is defending is the most authoritarian version of supply-side economics, which is quackery of a kind that Enlightenment-fetishists ought to be seriously worried about. Hari argues that people should be forced to do menial, generally pointless, labour in order to qualify for miserable benefits. He has an inertia-ridden, spliff-smoking friend named 'Andy' whom he thinks would benefit from cleaning graffiti or picking up litter. It would reconnect him with the world of work, force him to exercise his talents, and so on. Otherwise, he will remain listless and idle. And anyway, so the argument goes, if Labour doesn't do it, the Tories will in a much nastier way.

I am not going to waste time arguing over anecdotes. Let's start with the real world. As far as incapacity benefits are concerned, as I have pointed out before, there is no serious prospect of meeting the government's reduction targets even with the most punitive measures. This is because the best research indicates that: a) the recipients are largely genuinely incapacitated, contrary to the claims made by David Freud who has asserted that only a third of recipients are genuine; b) they live in areas where work is scarce and are the component of the labour force that is least attractive to employers, even if they can do a limited range of tasks, so the jobs for them largely don't exist; c) the theoretical commitment, ie the belief that an added supply of labour will create its own demand in accord with neoclassical economics, is barmy and unsupportable. Now, let's talk about jobseekers. How many jobseekers are there at any one time, and how many jobs exist for them? At the moment, the ILO estimate of unemployment for the UK is just over 1.6m (and growing). The number of jobs available in the UK economy is just over 650,000 (and contracting). (See the most recent ONS stats here [pdf]). So, even under the best conditions, with vacancies closely matching local skill distributions and educational levels, and with employers willing to accept local populations, there would still be a vast pool of people unemployed through no fault on their own part. And they should be compelled to carry out petty, punitive labour just so that they don't lose sight of what work really means? This is reactionary drivel.

Why doesn't Johann call for massive state investment in job creation? Why not offer people dignified, meaningful, public service work, with decent wages? Rather than what turns out to be a coercive system designed to make the receipt of benefits as unpleasant as possible for those concerned? After all, if litter really needs cleaning up and graffiti really needs dealing with, why don't we have the council services to take care of it? Could it be that councils, particularly in working class areas, have been run down for years and forced to rely increasingly on local levies that can't make up the shortfall, even as the government obliges them to get involved in extremely costly PFI programmes? If we're not down with public works programmes and job creation, why not simply make the system more redistributive? In other words, rather than capitulating to the hysteria about slackers on our taxes, why not simply say that those who have benefited most from an economy that keeps millions in unemployment should be obliged to pay the most to secure a decent livelihood for them in the interim of their incapacity or lack of paid employment. As they can hardly be relied upon to do so voluntarily, they will be expected to pay higher taxes on their salaries, bonuses, investments and profits. The poorest, meanwhile, the majority earning less than the mean income, could either have taxes reduced or abolished.

The reason Johann Hari can talk like this is because he accepts a moral fairy tale: benefits are some sort of charity in which nice middle class people part with a portion of their income to support the poor. That much is patently obvious from his opening shot. But the welfare state is not a charity. It is a modestly redistributive model to which everyone in work contributes. Most of those receiving benefits will have paid taxes at some point, or will at some point in the future. They do not need to be ordered around and demeaned by forced labour when at some point in their life they fall on hard times. Even those who have never paid taxes and, for the sake of argument, are conscientious layabouts who avoid the labour market (and who can blame them, given that most people cannot expect the relative security, dignity, fame and financial rewards that a newspaper columnist will receive?), don't need to be penalised in this way. First of all, even if it could work, it would require a nightmare scenario to do so. To really get to grips with the supposed recalcitrant spliff-heads and daytime-telly addicts (my stock of cliche is rapidly running out), you would have to construct a state bureaucracy so intrusive, and so arrogant and overbearing, that it would inevitably bring large swathes of even the 'deserving poor' under its surveillance and constant harrassment. People who have spent their lives contributing to the society would find themselves battered with 'work-oriented interviews', phone calls, demands for information, allocations for miserable 'community service' work. Constant testing and grading, and in the case of the incapacitated, inspection by GPs pressured with reward-focused targets, would be the motif if such a pointless exercise. Even if you could single out the tiny minority of putative couch potatoes, which of course you cannot, it would save the taxpayer next to nothing and produce no overall benefit. The politicians who are devising these schemes have every reason to know all this. They are not targeting the 'Andys' of this world, even if Andy is unfortunate enough to exist and to have a priggish moralist like Hari as a friend. The intention is to, as fully as possible, role back the welfare state - not to replace it with a version that people like Johann Hari can defend in good conscience, but to reduce it to a shell. That requires, as with the attack on the US social security system (scheduled to resume under Obama, I bet you), the contrivance of 'crises'. Suddenly, we lack the money for all this luxury, suddenly there is a financial gap, a shortfall, and there are all these millions of people using the system when they should be in paid work...

I suspect what really motivates Johann Hari's defense of the government is the concluding argument, which is that the Tories would impose a much worse scheme. It may indeed be so, but that is no defense of the government's policy. Of course, there is a great pressure on supporters of New Labour to find a way to defend the government or shut up, so as not to give any quarter to the resurgent Tories. But the idea that one can neutralise certain pressures by giving into them, attempting to co-opt and tame them, is nonsensical. It has never worked, not when the issue is immigrants, asylum seekers, Islam, wheelchair layabouts, crime, or any other hot button topic you can think of. The appetite of big business and investors for lower corporation taxes, more privatisation, more and more opportunities for accumulation with less of what they consider an unconscionable burden, is unquenchable. There is nothing you can give them that will stop them coming back in their media and their lobby groups for much, much more. Moreover, once you tell people that the David Freuds of this world are right, and that there is indeed a problem roughly as they describe it with solutions roughly as they prescribe them, you shift the argument away from social justice and the obvious way in which people are victimised by this economy, and the crying need to reverse the policies of the Thatcher years and shift power and wealth back to working people. You then get an argument about just how authoritarian the government should be, how much benefits should be cut, and under what circumstances, who should be targeted and how, etc etc. And you find yourself complicit in a process that targets and cheats the poorest, while assuring everyone that it is the progressive thing to do.

Welfare Reform Act to force sick and vulnerable into work

tim — Sat, 10 May 2008 12:05:25 +0000

The draconian measures laid out in the Welfare Reform Act 2007 are now being implemented in Britain by the Labour government of Prime Minster Gordon Brown. The Act represents a wide-ranging attack on millions of the poorest and most vulnerable people who rely on Incapacity Benefit (IB). Recipients of the benefit are deemed unable to work due to poor physical or mental health.

Under the new legislation, their entitlement to financial support is being replaced with new, conditional Employment and Support Allowance (ESA). From November, those registering for the first time as too sick or unable to work will only be entitled to ESA, whereby payments are determined by national insurance contributions, and are subject to means testing. All existing IB claimants will then be transferred to the ESA.

The main aim is to force people into work under threat of poverty. The government has stated it intends to cut the number of Incapacity Benefit claimants by 20,000 each year.

Attacks on welfare have been a central plank of Labour’s policies since coming to power in 1997. Unemployment benefit has been restricted and Lone Parent Benefit reduced.

The government has stated that 2.4 million people currently receive Incapacity Benefit and that up to one million should not be entitled to it. This figure is actually a distortion as statistics from the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) show that only 1.4 million of the 2.4 million unable to work due to illness actually receive any additional payment. The rest receive standard national insurance credits only.

Since the measures were first mooted in 2006, a campaign based on demonising Incapacity Benefit claimants has swung into operation. This has been fuelled by incessant media scare stories about Incapacity Benefit “scroungers”, “spongers” and “cheats” who claim the benefit “fraudulently” instead of working.

According to recently published research, the number of cases of Incapacity Benefit “fraud” is so low it is almost impossible to measure accurately. It is estimated to account for less than 0.3 percent of total Incapacity Benefit payments.

The tabloid press would have us believe that recipients of “generous” Incapacity Benefit live a life of luxury. But those who are on the benefit are among the poorest people in society. Basic Incapacity Benefit payment ranges from £63.75 on the “short-term lower late” to £84.50 on the “long-term higher rate.” Research conducted by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation in 2004 found that claimants on Incapacity Benefit and or Disability Living Allowance/Income Support met only 28 percent of the costs of people with low-medium needs, 30 percent of the costs of people with intermittent/fluctuating needs, 35 percent of the costs of deaf people and people with visual impairments and 50 percent of the costs of people with high-medium support needs.

On April 4, the Daily Express ran a sensationalist headline “Outrage At £8.5m A Week For Jobless Junkies And Winos,” claiming that “Taxpayers are forking out £8.5million a week in benefits to support jobless drink and drug addicts.”

The article cited statistics from the DWP revealing that 51,410 people whose medical record included a diagnosis of alcoholism received long-term Incapacity Benefits. The figures also showed that a further 49,890 on Incapacity Benefit were drug addicts.

That so many people, including young people, are victims of alcoholism and drug addiction is a societal problem—not only an issue of dependency, which constitutes a genuine illness that causes untold suffering. The turn to alcohol and drugs is exacerbated by the steady erosion of stable job opportunities, the decline of many industries, and decreasing access to quality education, health care, and to drug treatment programmes.

Most of those in receipt of Incapacity Benefit reside in inner city areas in London, the North-West, the North-East, Scotland and Wales. Many of these workers would have previously been in secure, relatively stable jobs in industries like mining, steel and shipbuilding. Over the past 25 years these jobs have been decimated, with millions forced into lives of poverty and the attendant problems such as debt and ill health.

Currently claimants have to pass a rigorous “personal capability assessment” (PCA) in order to quality for IB. A new “work capability assessment” is to target all Incapacity Benefit claimants, with only the terminally ill excluded from the requirement.

Under the remit to “focus on what people can do, not what they can not,” a distinction will be drawn between “being eligible for benefit and being capable for work.” If it is found that the claimant is capable of doing some sort of work, they can receive benefit only on the condition that they retrain and look for work. The penalty for not doing so will be the loss of benefit.

Under the new rules, eligibility for benefit will be decided on a DWP doctor’s evidence and “capability for work” could be assessed by other unspecified “health professionals”.

At present, the severely mentally impaired are exempt from being assessed. Under the new measures, these claimants are required to be assessed and have to agree to look for work in order to qualify for ESA. They are also obliged to attend courses to improve “employability.” They will also be compelled to “manage their health” in work and undertake therapy for their mental health problems.

In order to speed up the number of claimants denied benefit payments, doctors and “care teams” will be directly involved in ensuring that their patients are removed from IB and forced into employment. The Welfare Reform Act follows proposals made in 2005 to allow “employment advisors” from Job Centres to be based in doctors’ surgeries. The pilot schemes began in 2006 in six areas of the UK.

“A revolution in our welfare state”

The Conservative Party has proposed its own assault on Incapacity Benefit. In January, Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary Chris Grayling announced what he termed “revolutionary” welfare proposals.

Under a Tory government, anyone who failed a “work capability” test would automatically lose their entitlement to Incapacity Benefit. They would then be placed on Job Seekers Allowance, immediately resulting in a welfare payment cut of £20 a week.

The plans also specify that those on IB with the “potential to work” would be referred to “welfare to work” providers. These would include private-sector companies.

In preparation for their welfare announcement, the Tories studied welfare systems in a number of countries, and were particularly praiseworthy of measures taken in the American state of Wisconsin, which had cut the number of people on benefit rolls by 82 percent in three years.

Grayling said of the proposals, “For Britain such an approach marks a revolution in our welfare state. It marks an end to a situation where the receipt of incapacity benefit is an unconditional entitlement. In the future, it will carry with it the responsibility to do everything that you can to get back into work and help lift yourself out of the poverty trap that the benefit can represent for so many people.”

The response from the government was merely to complain that the Tory proposal would cost too much to implement. Peter Hain, the Work and Pensions Secretary, said, “The Conservative proposals could cost an extra £3 billion to £4 billion on top of planned spending in this area.”

Labour and the Tories agree that public spending must be slashed in order to make the British economy more competitive with its European and world rivals. When the initial bill was first proposed in 2006, Secretary of State for Work and Pensions John Hutton said the welfare state “must help UK companies succeed in the global economy.”

As well as forcing IB claimants into work, the government is also targeting 300,000 more lone parents and one million additional older workers, including those over retirement age.

Welfare and health provision and the private sector

A critical element in slashing access to benefits such as IB is to facilitate the privatisation of both welfare and employment service. Over the past decade, the private sector has been utilised to step up attacks on the welfare state and to profit from providing services.

A prime example is Atos Healthcare, a subsidiary of a French-based computer firm, which employs 50,000 people worldwide and has annual revenues of 5.4 billion euros. The new Employment and Support Allowance medical assessment system is to be run by Atos Healthcare.

Atos Healthcare was awarded a £500 million seven-year contract by the DWP in 2005 to provide medical advice and assessment services. These include Incapacity Benefit, Disability Living Allowance, and Industrial Injuries Disablement Benefits.

Employees of the company were recruited to be on the technical working groups which drew up the new harsher, Work Capability Assessment. The increased cost of examinations is expected to be in the region of £200 million up to August 2015.

The company also plays a direct role in the provision of medical services. Then known as Atos Origin, the firm won an £8 million contract to operate the first privately run walk-in NHS clinic for local residents and commuters near Manchester’s Piccadilly railway station in 2005.

In January this year, Atos won a 10-year contract to run St Paul’s Way Medical Centre in Tower Hamlets, East London. The former state-run surgery was one of the first to be taken over by a private company. The Tower Hamlets takeover prompted a demonstration by dozens of doctors, nurses and local residents. One doctor who has worked in the area since 1983 told the BBC, “This practice is in one of the poorest areas in the country. There is overcrowding, poverty and a lot of people who are having difficulties with English. There is a huge amount of ill health. The residents are very angry that their health care is going to be sold for profit rather than for personal care.”

In London alone, the government has identified a further 150 GP surgeries that could be taken over and run by private firms.

Sinners/Scroungers/Saints

eddie — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 20:19:53 +0000

“People’s understanding of lone mothers have been dominated by myth and misrepresentation,” asserts one display in the Women’s Library’s current exhibition about the history of lone mothers in Britian.

Along with Muslims, Gypsies, asylum-seekers and black youths, single mothers have been fair game for the British press for many years, their punchbag status peaking in the late 1980s and early ’90s.

Who can forget John Redwood and Peter Lilley’s infamous vitriolic attacks on single mothers when they were members of John Major’s cabinet?

Drawing extensively on the records of the organisations One Parent Families and Gingerbread and using photographs, pamphlets, audio testimony, films, timelines and a visitor comments board, Sinners/Scroungers/Saints aims to right some of the popular myths surrounding lone motherhood.

Although lone-parent households have existed in substantial numbers throughout history, in Britain, their numbers, in common with other industrialised nations, have increased, with an estimated 1.9 million lone parent families caring for 3.1 million children today.

And, while lone parents are not exclusively women, historically, the majority of lone parents have been, with 91 per cent of lone parent families today headed by a woman.

“Few women choose to become lone mothers because to do so usually results in increased poverty,” the exhibition argues. Indeed, the poverty associated with lone parenthood is exacerbated by the many thousands of fathers who fail to provide for their children.

“Only around one in three lone parents receives maintenance from their child’s other parent,” reads one display. The testimony of the now best-selling crime novelist Martina Cole provides an interesting insight into coping as a single mother.

“I remember being so hard up that I had to sell the tumble dryer in the middle of winter,” she remembers. Following her mother’s advice, she would post herself “£5 with a second-class stamp at the beginning of the week and, that way, I’d always have a fiver for the weekends.”

Insightful statistics are dotted around the walls, but, if anything, the exhibition is a little too soft. Where are the killer facts that would slay, once and for all, the pernicious myths that surround this issue?

For example, while it is a popular assumption that there has been an increase in lone mothers because they have access to relatively high rates of benefits, in their book Lone Parent Families, Karen Rowlingson and Stephen McKay explain that “the US has the highest level of lone parenthood in the Western world,” but “its level of social assistance is among the lowest.”

Sweden, on the other hand, “has the largest proportion of lone parents in paid work but the benefit replacement rate is also the highest.” They conclude that “this therefore contradicts a narrow rational economic model of behaviour that assumes people weigh up the financial costs and benefits of a particular course of action and then act accordingly.” Take that, John Redwood!

The two academics also question the supposedly “high rates of benefits” that single mothers can receive. “Numerous independent academic studies have been carried out into benefit levels and they all show that those levels are woefully inadequate to allow people to participate in society in any meaningful way.”

Furthermore, while it is often assumed that lone parenthood has detrimental effects on children, Rowlingson and McKay note: “The research that has been carried out suggests that, once poverty is taken into account, there is little, if any, independent effect of lone parenthood on outcomes for children.”
Again, Sinners/Scroungers/Saints fails to correct this popular misgiving about lone parent families.

Despite these criticisms, an hour or two spent here will provide visitors with an informative and balanced corrective to the often disgusting representation of lone parenthood in Britain’s gutter press.

As “Lone Mother, 2007” says, “Working mothers this, working mothers that. You’re either a benefits scrounger or you’re a man-hating career woman who neglects her children. And, actually, most of us are just trying to do the best we can.”

Sinners/Scroungers/Saints: Lone mothers, past and present runs until March 29. ian_js@hotmail.com.

Tories and New Labour go after the disabled.

JamieSW — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 18:47:01 +0000

The Tories claim they could get 200,000 people off incapacity benefits by requiring recipients to prove they can't work and reducing entitlements. In light of New Labour's goal of getting a million people off incapacity benefits by 2015, this seems small pickings. No wonder Labour accuses them of stealing their ideas (in reality, Labour has simply taken over old Tory policy nostrums). But, setting aside the rank authoritarianism and vindictiveness of such crackdowns, how achievable are such aims? The November edition of the Cambridge Journal of Economics, which is focused exclusively on New Labour's economic management, deals with this question. Since the claim is that this number of people can be moved into work, the obvious answer would appear to be 'no'. That New Labour has reduced the claimant count is without doubt, and while some of it is due to macroeconomic trends, it seems likely that much of it is due to reduction in access to benefits ('welfare reform') given the massive gap between the official unemployment rate and that registered by the ILO.

Cuts, interrogations, 'support'

In this context, incapacity benefits refers to a wide range of receipts. Incapacity Benefits proper are received by 1.4m people; national insurance credits for incapacity by 1m; and Severe Disablement allowance by 0.3m. There are a further 0.3m on Disability Living Allowance who are not included in the overall count. The IB claimant counts are highest in the older industrialised areas of the north, and two areas in Wales have IB claimant counts higher than their working age population. This is associated historically with mass redundancies in the former mammoth industries of coal and steel. Claimants tend to be older, and male - perhaps in part because women receive pension at 60, while men don't receive it until the age of 65. There has already been a reduction in claimants registered in 2004, for the first time in a generation, and if this were to hold, then the reduction by 2015 would amount to 200,000. On the other hand, population dynamics could see trends in the opposite direction - if IB claimants over fifty increase by the same rate as the over-fifty population, then the overall count will have 115,000 added to it. Overall, regardless of policy, the current flows extrapolated to 2015 would add 67,000 to the count. And, since women will have their pension age revised upward to 65 by 2020, the claimant count would be increased further.

In theory, there are enough 'hidden unemployed' in the IB claimant figures to reduce them by one million. The government's proposed measures for dealing with this include precisely those recommended by the Tories - introduce compulsory work-focused interviews with the intention of sorting out those who can work from those who cannot. The benefit will be phased out for all but the most sick or incapacitated and replaced by Employment and Support Allowance, with a strong element of conditionality - recipients must accept forms of training and education designed to get them into work, for face financial penalties. And until they receive their Personal Capability Assessment, claimants will receive exactly what they would on the Job Seekers Allowance (presently £59.15 per week for a single person over 25), thus removing a financial incentive to claim incapacity benefit (£61.35 for short-term incapacitated; £72.55 from weeks 29 to 52; £81.35 for long-term incapacitated) - actually, as you can see here, the financial incentive is initially tiny. Only those expecting to be on IB for a long time would expect a financial benefit from it. That is why one of the government's other proposed measures is to remove the escalation after six and twelve months. They also intend to 'support' GPs in 'helping' people return to work - I suspect this will amount to target-based pressure to force people into accepting work. The journal's research suggests that even these stern measures will not reach the government's target - at best, they might remove half a million from the count by 2015, which means that they would have to find a way to double the impact of their existing measures. Most of the reduction would have to be in those areas mentioned earlier - old industrialised parts of the north with high unemployment.

Neoliberal justification

The dogma underlying the government's approach, which justifies it in its conviction that it is assisting the poor, is the view that "supply creates its own demand" - an extra labour supply will produce higher employment. The market will, on this view, bring demand and supply into balance through wage adjustments (reductions). For this to work, there needs to be maximum flexibility in the labour market (hence, diminished bargaining power for labour, the curtailment of rules protecting job security and so on). As the authors of the journal article point out, it is just not the case that markets automatically balance supply and demand. The effect of these policies will be to increase the official rate of unemployment - only in regions where there is close to full employment already and labour shortages in specific segments to boot will there be the effect the government imagines. That is, in precisely those areas where the IB claimant count is lowest. Given the emerging economic difficulties, the period of sustained employment growth looks like it is coming to an end, and even after recovery it may be difficult to repeat. Further, while the government claims to target those who are not severely disabled and can theoretically do some forms of work, those with enduring health problems are not well-placed to thrive in even a tight labour market.

The policies proposed by both parties are in effect detrimental not only to those claiming IB benefits, but also to the working population as a whole, who are expected to accept reduced wages and security in the government's model. By no means likely to increase employment and tending to reduce the dignity and conditions of those currently on disability benefits, the government's policies will - if they are permitted to get away with it - be able to reduce the size of the welfare state. And that, of course, is what it is all about. The global roll-back of the rights and protections secured by past generations of working people is not passing without resistance. The government's policies on welfare, including cutbacks of pensions, are deeply unpopular. Privatisation of provision is hated. And the congruent process of effective wage cuts and diminishing conditions and entitlements is producing industrial resistance. The barrier such resistance repeatedly hits, as Mark Serwotka recently pointed out, is the commitment of union leaders to the Labour Party. That loyalty is coextensive with profound resignation in the face of the neoliberal assault, a willingness to negotiate away even the most basic forms of protection, and an unwillingness to risk sustained confrontation with the government. Even if the Tories get in and implement the same policies more aggressively (that may be hard to imagine, but they almost certainly would), the union leaders will say "we can't afford to embarrass our party, we must ensure they get elected next time round". The only way out of this is for union members to: a) build up rank and file organisation to resist union leaders when they call for acquiescence, as in the recent postal strike; and b) make a sharp break with New Labour, forcing through an independent political fund as the basis for political realignment.