Unemployment: Labour and the Tories compete to blame and persecute the victims

Are you unemployed? If you are you are in a pretty tough situation. There clearly aren't enough jobs to go round, and many of the jobs that can be found are pretty poor. Add to that the fact that the minimum wage if you actually get paid it, is inadequate. The reason for this situation is a global economic crisis created by 'free' market capitalism. The great crash of 2008 is still reverberating around the global economy, and the response from western governments - austerity - has made the economic situation worse, not better.

But austerity is not intended to make things better for ordinary people. The intention with austerity is to make ordinary people pay for the mistakes and greed of the bankers, and the tame politicians which support them. To make people pay for a crisis which is not of their own making. For capitalists, the added bonus is that the crisis can be used to suppress wages and attack collective rights and agreements which have benefited workers, slashing pensions and terms and conditions. Its simple, the 1% have taken a larger slice of the economic cake, and have increased their share of wealth to 46% globally, and they have taken that wealth from the rest of  us.

You'd never believe it if you read the Daily Mail but being unemployed has never been easy. I was unemployed in the 1970s. Although I was better off than today's unemployed I still had to deal with the stigma of unemployment and go through the weekly humiliation of standing in the dole queue and signing on. And there were very few jobs going for young people then. I ended up getting a couple of jobs working outdoors on what was called the Youth Opportunities Programme, a government employment scheme. Not great, but at least I was working and being paid for it. And I didn't have to deal with the persecution of workfare and job clubs which today's unemployed are subjected to.

What the Coalition government and its supporters in the capitalist media are doing is seeking to vilify claimants and blame them for their own situation, they are blaming the victims of capitalism. What's worse is that we now hear that Labour are competing with the Tories at their own game in a benefit bashing race to the bottom which is taking us back to the workhouse. How any Labour Party members and supporters can bear this complete betrayal of what the party has stood for is beyond me. But what is certain is that Labour politicians are more concerned with out-Torying the Tories in the hope of being elected than doing the decent thing by the victims of the economic crisis.

There are solutions to helping the unemployed which don't involve workfare or forcing them to take jobs, but none of the three main parties have any interest in pursuing them. If capitalism can't create meaningful work for people to do - and why should it bother to? - then governments must. Those jobs must be green jobs, and they will not only benefit the young and unemployed but they will also help us fight climate change. The solutions, such as One Million Climate Jobs and The Green New Deal  are well thought through and planned alternatives. We need to be actively campaigning in parties, trade unions and wider society to get these solutions adopted otherwise millions face a very bleak future. 

Neoliberal Labour fail the social justice test - again!

Neoliberal Labour are at it again. This time pandering to the Coalition's class-war driven attack on the unemployed with their own version of Workfare. Labour's new plan - or should that be New Labour's plan? - announced by Ed Balls, is that people who are unemployed for more than two years would be forced to work in some sort of government backed scheme for at least 6 months. And Labour have repeated the Tory mantra that work must pay more than benefits.

So what is wrong with this you may ask? Well there is plenty wrong with it. For a start, unemployment is a failure of Labour's beloved 'free' market to provide meaningful jobs for people. But this can't be admitted, so the unemployed must be blamed for their own predicament, including the 660,000 public sector workers who have lost their jobs under the Coalition. In 'free' market la la land you must always blame the victims never the culprits - i.e. the banks, the tax dodging corporations and the tame politicians who support them, the very people who created the economic crisis we are now all paying for. Secondly, if people on benefits get more money than those in work that tells us the simple truth that those in work are not earning enough. Under the previous New Labour government, Gordon Brown's tax credits for working families simply subsidised cheap labour for the tax dodging corporations. It was a form of corporate welfarism. Thirdly, the unemployed and low paid are exactly the sort of people who ought to expect and allegedly 'progressive' party like Labour to give them some support in difficult times. Instead of this reactionary nonsense, Labour should be committed to full employment, as it used to be, and guarantee every unemployed person a meaningful job. But Labour doesn't have the 'Balls' to do that.

What is the answer? At the last general election in its 2010 manifesto, the Green Party came up with policies to halve the deficit and create one million new jobs in the green sector - in areas like home insulation - to tackle the crisis in the economy and fight climate change. This carefully costed programme, paid for by shelving wasteful and unnecessary projects like Trident, and taxes on environmental pollution and the rich, would have put the UK in a much stronger position than it is now. There would not have been swinging cuts in the public sector and no privatisation of the NHS. There is a real alternative of hope to the despair and destruction that neoliberal austerity is wreaking on the people of Europe and the UK. We can bring about positive change if people vote for us. Do you want to be part of a positive future? Then come and join us.

Liam Byrne's approach to 'welfare' is reactionary nonsense

Let me start by telling you a story - once upon a time there was a party in the UK called The Labour Party. It arose from the trade unions and working class struggle. Its focus was social justice, and its agenda was about decent healthcare, jobs, housing, worker's rights, and education. After World War II, in 1945, The Labour Party won a spectacular election victory, and came into power with a mandate which produced what became known as the 'Welfare State', the NHS, better (council) housing and educational opportunities for all. It aimed to protect people from the vagaries of the market, and it succeeded. Millions of ordinary UK citizens, like me, were lucky enough to benefit from those changes.

Now, The Labour Party is a hollowed out shell, filled with middle class career politicians and MPs who have been parachuted onto the green benches of parliament, because they are Ed and Tony's cronies, replacing most of the working class antecedents who once filled many of those places. It is a party in thrall to the market, a centre-right party promoting the most reactionary kind of right-wing populism. The last Labour government, which preferred to be called  'New Labour', eagerly adopted the 'benefit scrounger' stance promoted by right-wing propaganda sheets such as the Daily Mail, and Minister James Purnell introduced measures to bash benefit claimants and the unemployed.

Step forward in 2012, Liam Byrne, the Shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, to give us Labour's latest welfare vision. Byrne talks about William Beveridge whose report, published in 1942, paved the way for the Welfare State. Beveridge proposed measures, which I outlined above, to fight the five - "Giant Evils' of Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness". This was to be achieved by the concept of 'Social Security', in which ordinary people paid National Insurance so that when they became ill or unemployed they could rightly claim benefits from the state.  Those 'benefits' were not 'something for nothing', they were entitlements which people paid for. It was a great system and it worked, especially in the context of governments which aimed to create full employment, as Byrne concedes in his article.

But what Byrne goes on to say is pure 'free' market orthodoxy and a continuation of New Labour's 'benefit scroungers' stance, which is all about blaming the victims of the market for their pitiful situation. It is reactionary nonsense. Those unfortunate enough to be unemployed in an economy where the 'free' market has failed to create anything like full employment are to continue to be battered and forced into some kind of workfare programme, which is simply unwaged-slavery, where people are forced to work for corporations for nothing. I have no doubt that a decent bloke like Beveridge would be horrified by the way in which the concept of Social Security has been deliberately twisted and undermined by neoliberal parties like Labour, the Liberal Democrats, and the Tories, and the shameful way in which the unemployed, disabled and poor are now treated. But what is most shameful is the fact that the Labour Party has helped to destroy what it created, kicking people when they are down, so that the corporations and the rich can benefit from unwaged-slavery and tax cuts.