Labour's 'opposition' to bedroom tax is phony

The campaign against the “bedroom tax”, with over 660,000 households due to start losing significant amounts of housing benefit from Easter Monday, has exposed the duplicity of a Labour leadership that has tried but failed to hijack the protests.

Labour is not actually opposed in principle to the ConDems’ punitive cut in benefit for those in social housing of working age deemed to be over-occupying by having a spare bedroom. In fact, New Labour introduced the criteria for private-sector tenants in 2008. The Coalition uses this fact to justify extending the policy into social housing.

Shadow works and pensions secretary Liam Byrne has actually linked a fake opposition to the bedroom tax to plans for tougher workfare. He was roundly booed at a recent rally in Birmingham. Byrne was behind the abstention by Labour in parliament  last week over the vote on retrospective laws to enforce workfare.    

By contrast, left MP John McDonnell was cheered at the rally for declaring that Labour councils should refuse to implement the policy. His is a lone voice.

If tenants are deemed to have one spare room, the amount of rent eligible for housing benefit will be cut by 14%. If they have two or more spare rooms, the cut will be 25%. This will mean an average loss of about £14 a week for council tenants. Those who rent from housing associations are facing an average loss of about £16 a week.

In Scotland, the Scottish National Party has said the local authorities the party controls will refuse to evict people who get into arrears as a result. No doubt the SNP has one eye on encouraging people to vote “Yes” in next year’s independence referendum. Whatever.

Meanwhile, not a single Labour council in Britain has made the same declaration (Green-led Brighton has, however). In Dundee, the SNP led-council was the first to pass a policy to stop evictions, but this was opposed by Labour councillors.

Just as Labour councils have busily gone about implementing ConDem cuts in local spending, destroying jobs and services en route, they will enforce the bedroom tax. Labour leader Ed Miliband has no intention of instructing them to do otherwise, although if he did the tax would become unenforceable.

For Labour, it’s about people moving to smaller homes as a “solution”. As shadow cabinet member Helen Goodman said: “We’ve said that the bedroom tax should only apply if people have been offered a smaller place to live and turned it down because, obviously, it is better to use the housing stock more efficiently.” Yet all the figures indicate that smaller properties simply do not exist in the required numbers.

In Liverpool, where 6,700 tenants of Riverside Housing Association alone face severe benefit cuts, senior staff acknowledge that the “impact on communities could be profound”. They, naturally, intend to carry out their orders should evictions become necessary.

Tenants groups across the city have come together to spearhead the national campaign against the bedroom tax. Labour set up its own “campaign” in a bid to limit the protests to petitions and pleas. Tenants saw through this and are planning their own Assembly on April 6 to plan further resistance.

Ultimately unaffordable rents are the reason for a housing benefit bill of £23 billion a year. This huge sum is, in effect, a subsidy to landlords of all types. With social housing rents due to rise further – thanks to New Labour’s policy of “convergence” across different sectors – the attack on tenants is certain to increase.

The obvious alternative is to slash rents, build more homes at affordable rents, requisition empty properties, socialise land ownership and create an economy founded on decent wages for ordinary workers. Labour’s policy, by contrast, is to encourage “responsible capitalism”, a society that only exists in dreamland. As we have said many times, what is the point of Labour?

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

  

Working for free nightmare is here to stay

Jubilant opponents of the ConDems’ multi-faceted so-called Work Programme are celebrating two court judgements ruling that most of the schemes were unlawful. Yet their joy is certain to prove short-lived.

It means that university graduate Cait Reilly shouldn’t have been obliged to give up volunteering at a museum to work for free filling shelves at Poundland in order to keep her unemployment benefits.

Neither should Jamie Wilson an unemployed HGV driver from Nottingham have been told that he had to work unpaid, cleaning furniture for 30 hours a week for six months, under a scheme called the Community Action Programme.

Tessa Gregory of Public Interest Lawyers was among those claiming that all of those who refused to take part in these schemes and were stripped of their benefits have a right to claim the money back.

But the celebrations will be cut short. Within hours of the judgement, ministers at the Department of Work and Pensions issued new, more detailed regulations which, they insist, allow the workfare schemes to continue unabated.

And in reply to those who want to claim back benefits unlawfully taken away from them, employment minister Mark Hoban was on BBC last night looking and sounding like a character in a Dickens novel whipping up “the taxpayers”,  insisting that people without work should be grateful for the “help” they’re being offered.

Paragraph 74 of the judgement says this: “However, any scheme must be such as has been authorised by Parliament. There is a constitutional issue involved.” So there’s more than the technicalities of regulations at stake here. The government no longer consults parliament.

And it goes deeper still.

Tom Walker, employment law partner at law firm Manches, said: "This judgment upholds what is perhaps the key tenet of employment, namely the 'work wage bargain'. If someone gives their labour to a company, they should be paid for it. However well intentioned a workplace scheme may be, it is very dangerous to introduce compulsory unpaid labour into the UK employment market."

Last week the court heard another legal challenge, this time to the tightening of constraints on non-EU immigration which has split thousands of families in recent months. The operation of these schemes wasn’t subject to Parliamentary approval either.

The deepening global financial and economic crisis has brought the system to its point of breakdown. Companies like Poundland now depend on essentially free, state-subsidised labour to produce and sell devalued and debased products

Anything so long as it’s cheap and profitable, never mind their effects on people or the planet. The same pressures are at work on companies throughout the global food chain, whether it’s the cheap labour demanded by UK fruit and vegetable growers, or the processors and sellers of horsemeat lasagne.

Now the state is sanctioning the end of the wage-labour contract, which is the fundamental social relationship that defines capitalist production.  And Walker is right. That’s a dangerous thing to do.

So its time for a real celebration.

February 12, 2013 was the official first day of production under workers’ control in the factory of Viomichaniki Metalleutiki (Vio.Me) in, Greece. This means production organised without bosses and hierarchy, and instead planned with directly democratic assemblies of the workers.

The workers’ assemblies have declared an end to unequal division of resources, and will have equal and fair remuneration, decided collectively. It’s the way to go wherever you live and work.

Social relations based on private ownership must now either revert to slavery or be superseded by a new stage in social evolution. We must learn the lessons from the past. Arbeit macht Frei – labour makes you free – was the sign posted above concentration camps by the Nazis.

So we have to move forward to a democratically-determined, collective stewardship of the world ‘s resources and sustainable production to satisfy need. This goal can’t be postponed.

Gerry Gold

Economics editor

Labour is Coalition Lite

So the race to the bottom continues as Labour and the Tories try to outflank each other by getting tough with the unemployed, the disabled and “benefit scroungers” in general. How will the readers of the Daily Mail and other right-wing papers distinguish between the two?

It’s a question made more difficult by today’s announcement by Ed Balls, the shadow chancellor and his colleague Liam Byrne. Balls, who devoted his time in the New Labour government to deregulating the banks, says the long-term unemployed will have to take a designated job or lose their benefits if his party is returned to power.

The private sector will be given the money by the state to employ people for six months at the minimum wage. Labour would fund the scheme by reducing pension scheme tax deductions claimed by high earners. Labour’s workfare proposal is a variation of schemes already in operation by the Coalition government under which many claimants have to work for their benefits.

Labour is, in essence, Coalition Lite.

Balls’ scheme has nothing to do with solving unemployment as a social question and everything to do with impressing “swing voters”. Demonising vulnerable groups like the jobless and the disabled who depend on state benefits is always considered good for a few votes.

Labour's shadow work and pensions spokesman Byrne said the long-term unemployed needed to be "working or training and not claiming". Ah, music to the ears of Angry of Surbiton. "There is a vital principle at stake here," he added. Yes, there is Byrne. It’s called taking out on the poor and disadvantaged.

Not that Labour needs an economic crisis to launch its reactionary ideas. During 13 years in government, the Blair regimes set about “reforming welfare” along the lines they had picked up from the Clinton administrations in America.

Social security as a percentage of GDP fell. Many benefits for lone parents were terminated. Out went the Department for Social Security in favour of Work and Pensions, relegating the concept of the welfare state to the past. Directly in the firing line

were people claiming disability benefits.

In 2008, New Labour introduced the employment and support allowance (ESA) in place of disability benefits and instituted the dreaded work capability assessment (WCA). Firms like Atos have been paid millions since, with the incentive of forcing the disabled into work. Naturally, the ConDems picked up on all these initiatives and reinforced the attack. Iain Duncan Smith, the current work and pensions secretary, won’t be satisfied until he’s buried the welfare state for good.

Leaving aside the fact that Labour appears to have already earmarked cuts in pension tax relief for another policy, it is clear to anyone who cares to think about it that an Ed Miliband government would be just as reactionary as the present one.

The recent “one nation” rhetoric is a thin mask for another great deception. If elected, Labour would continue to make the cuts to reduce the budget deficit and appease the money markets. Miliband’s vision of a “one nation economy” is one where employers and workers collaborate in a kind of a corporate state.

Britain is a low-wage economy in the midst of a systemic global economic and financial crisis. That fact goes unsaid by Miliband and his party. Better to attack an easy target than identify capitalism itself as the problem. Which makes you ask again, what is the point of Labour? What is the point of electing a party whose policies are in essence indistinguishable from those of the Tories or Lib Dems? They are all in it together and we should have no truck with the whole sordid business of traditional party politics.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

Exposed: welfare-to-work industry gravy train

The workfare scandal of forcing the unemployed to work for businesses for free or lose benefits has lifted the lid on outrageous profiteering at the expense of the jobless and taxpayers in general.

And we’re not just talking Tesco, Argos, Poundland and the other companies who may have got cold feet when the anti-workfare campaign took off and threatened to lead to consumer boycotts.

There’s an entire welfare-to-work industry out there that, beginning with New Labour and continuing with the ConDems, has been making a fortune out of lucrative government contracts.

Leading the pack is A4e, founded by Emma Harrison who yesterday quit as the government’s “families champion” following a string of fraud allegations against her company which police are investigating.

Her firm got on the Whitehall gravy train in 1997 when the Blair government launched its “New Deal” programme aimed at getting “socially excluded” or “problem” groups into work.

A4e and Harrison never looked back. Last year, the firm had an income of £180 million from government contracts, MPs on the public accounts committee were shocked to hear. Harrison herself boasts that she lives in “utter luxury” in a 20-bedroom mansion in the Peak District. She can afford it, paying herself a dividend of £8.6 million last year.

In the 2010 New Year’s honours list, drawn up under the Brown government, she was awarded a CBE for “services to the unemployed”. Seriously. The Daily Mail reported that some A4e “placements” have only lasted one day. The company can make up to £13,000 per unemployed person if all goes to plan, whatever that may be.

As is well documented, the assault on the unemployed and people with disabilities began under New Labour with the aim of “making work pay”, starting with the so-called New Deal projects and then Pathfinder schemes. The punitive approach was later followed by compulsory reassessments for those claiming disability allowance. Trial workfare projects were also launched. The ConDems have built on all these – with a vengeance.

In early 2008, James Purnell, then work and pensions secretary, announced a four-fold increase in the market for private companies and voluntary organisations to get the long-term unemployed off benefits. He said: “The private and voluntary sectors already play a role in delivering our work programmes. I want to take this to the next level, free them from central control and allow them to innovate. Their involvement is here to stay and set to grow. For the providers the rewards will be high, with longer contracts and a growing market.”

How right he was. Indus Delta is an online welfare-to-work industry website, detailing all the lucrative projects coming up and listing the major providers. There are no fewer than 67 companies involved. Apart from A4e, there are well known names like Balfour Beatty, the security company G4S and Manpower. Global firms like the US-based Maximus and Australian Sarina Russo are there too.

The largest provider of the ConDem’s infamous Work Programme is Ingeus, which is 50% owned by the global accountancy firm Deloitte. Ingeus-Deloitte last year won an £103 million Work Programme five-year contract just for West London. A licence to print money, is it not?

By the time New Labour left office, contracting out of services and supplies formerly undertaken by the state had reached mammoth proportions. Total government contracts were estimated to be worth £80 billion a year, far more than in any other capitalist economy. You name it, it was outsourced or made into PFI public-private contracts, where the state picked up the bill when things went wrong. For example, 60 hospitals are in financial crisis as a result of PFI deals and the government is bailing them out.

A4e is just a small part of the market state that has all but replaced the welfare state. This undemocratic, authoritarian state directly serves the banks and big business, punishes the poor and is driving down living conditions like never before. Abolishing workfare and ending the demonisation of the disabled requires a totally new democratic constitutional settlement that ends the rule of the rich, the powerful and their hangers-on.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

Unions should block sanctions against unemployed

Thousands of unemployed young people are working for supermarkets without pay for months on end, with the constant threat of losing their measly benefits if they leave, while others are on enforced “mandatory work activity” schemes.

The ConDems, building on New Labour’s regime of withholding benefits from the unemployed, have created a reserve army of young people simply to boost employers’ profits and cut public spending.

More than a million aged between 15-24 out of work. That is 20% of economically active people in that age group. Unemployment, which has been rising since 2007, is as high as in the early 1980s and now stands at 2.62m, the highest since 1994,

Of course that does not include many formerly self-employed, who wait a long time to qualify for benefits, people on disability benefits who are looking for but can’t find appropriate work, and women at home with small children prevented from finding work by soaring childcare costs. The real figure is closer to 4 million.

The unemployment figure includes 286,000 students looking for part-time work to get them through their studies. Some 80% of teachers surveyed earlier this year said they were encountering students in schools and colleges who did not get enough to eat, or to buy clothing.

Many good job and training schemes for young people have had their funding cut. So far the Coalition’s main contribution is a scheme where young people work for companies like Sainsbury, Poundland, Tesco for up to six weeks with no pay. It is meant to be voluntary, but if they even express a slight interest in the scheme, and then withdraw, they lose their miserable £53 a week job seekers allowance for up to six months.

It is suggested that some retailers are exploiting this scheme to get ready for the Christmas rush, instead of taking on temporary workers as they would normally. According to the Institute for Public Policy Research, employers are using government subsidies for apprenticeships to train people aged over 25 they would have hired anyway. Only 37,000 of 126,000 apprenticeships went to 16-24 year olds.

Under the new “mandatory work activity” scheme, young people are given no choice from the moment they sign on and can be sent to work for private firms or the voluntary sector for months on end. Lawyers say this is a modern form of slavery and are challenging it in the courts.

Brendan Barber of the Trades Union Congress says the Coalition must “stop the risk of losing a generation to unemployment and under-achievement by guaranteeing a job or high quality training to every young person out of work for six months”. Pathetic! What about: “The TUC will organise every unemployed worker into a mass movement to remove the Coalition government.” You won’t hear that any time soon!

Young people have done everything asked of them. The number without a qualification has decreased dramatically, and more and more make sacrifices to stay on at college or university. In 2004, 33% of 19-year-olds lacked a basic qualification; by 2010 that figure was down to 18%. Though almost half of young adults do not have a Level 2 qualification (such as GCSEs) at age 16, by the time they reach 21, most have remedied this and the proportion is down to one fifth.

Young people were the driving force of the movements that toppled regimes in Tunisia, Egypt and, before NATO intervention, Libya. They have everything to gain from political and social change and nothing to lose. With the economy heading for recession and more spending cuts on the way, it is clear that capitalism isn’t working and we should make it history. Offering young people the opportunity to join a people’s assemblies movement to transform society is the most important thing we can do.

In the meantime, the trade unions should instruct their Jobcentre Plus members to refuse to impose sanctions on young people looking for work, training and decent pay. Carrying out government orders which turn people into slaves is unacceptable.

Penny Cole