It is fitting that Labour’s latest assault on welfare was announced by Liz Kendall, the most resilient of the party’s Blairites, who has survived every factional battle by offering the one thing that truly matters in British politics: reassurance. She reassures capital that nothing will change. She reassures the civil service that things will be competently run. And she reassures the press that Labour will never, under any circumstances, be a party of redistribution.
The plan, if one can call it that, is to “modernise” Personal Independence Payment (PIP). The word hangs in the air like an old Tory euphemism: modernisation, like reform, always means some new form of cruelty. PIP, Labour tells us, is “unsustainable.” There are too many claimants, too many people stuck on benefits who could be working if only we had the right incentives, the right nudges, the right paternalistic shove. This has been the unifying consensus of British politics for the last thirty years, a fiction repeated so often that no one bothers to interrogate it anymore.
The data, we are told, is alarming. The number of people claiming PIP with mental health conditions has risen. This is presented as self-evidently bad, a sign that something has gone wrong, not with the labour market, not with the NHS, not with housing or wages or working conditions, but with the claimants themselves. There are too many of them, and they cost too much. The logic is brutally simple: if you make people poorer, they will work. If they still don’t work, they will suffer. And if they suffer enough, they will disappear.
Starmer’s Labour likes to talk about growth, but it only ever reaches for the most stagnant and unimaginative levers. Cuts are easy. Investment is hard. They will squeeze the disabled and the unemployed, not because it will improve the economy, but because it makes them look tough. The alternative would be to challenge the class dynamics of British capitalism, to take power from landlords and energy companies and asset managers and put it in the hands of workers. That is unthinkable. So instead, we get this: a new war on welfare, dressed up in the language of progress.
The problem is not just that Labour has abandoned the social democratic commitments it once claimed to hold. It is that it has absorbed the worldview of capital so completely that it can no longer conceive of an alternative. It has become, in the purest sense, a party of management. It will manage decline. It will manage austerity. It will manage unemployment and stagnation and rising prices and falling life expectancy. It will do so efficiently, competently, with great professionalism. And when the work is done, it will ask for thanks.
It is tempting to say, as many have, that Starmer is no different from the Tories. But this is too easy. He is different, in the way that a clever bailiff is different from a cruel one, in the way that a bureaucrat is different from a fanatic. If the Tories revel in the destruction of the state, Labour’s instinct is to keep it just strong enough to function as an instrument of discipline. Their cuts will be fairer, more orderly, less chaotic. They will not do them because they enjoy it, but because, in the end, they do not know how to do anything else.
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