Working class voters, who the left is supposed to champion, want a fairer and more contributory welfare system.
Working class voters, who the left is supposed to champion, want a fairer and more contributory welfare system
Labour leader Ed Miliband will today set out plans to replace out-of-work benefits for around 100,000 18-to-21-year-olds and replace them with a means tested payment dependent on attending training.
Miliband will also announce plans to make the welfare system more contributory, with people able to claim a higher Jobseekers Allowance (JSA) rate of £71 a week once they have paid national insurance for five years as opposed to two.
The move towards a more contributory system is designed to bring the UK more in line with other European economies, where the contributory element tends to be greater than in the UK. The plan to move some young people off JSA, which would affect around seven out of 10 18-to-21-year-olds currently on the benefit, aims to incentivise them to seek training.
Miliband will say that Labour must “address the long-standing pressures on work, family and people’s sense of fair play that has been piling up for decades”:
“Our country continues to confront a fiscal situation the like of which we have not seen for generations, the result of a financial crash the like of which none of us has ever seen.”
“We cannot just hope to make do and mend, and we cannot borrow and spend money to paper over the cracks.”
Most interesting perhaps will be the reaction of sections of the Labour party to today’s announcement, most notably the left.
In the past, ‘tough’ sounding announcements on welfare have been greeted unenthusiastically by many activists who interpret it as the leadership pandering to the Daily Mail and other sections of the right-wing press.
And there have been times in the past when this has undoubtedly been true. However it would be a mistake to view today’s announcement as a sop to the right.
Indeed, in attempting to make the welfare system more contributory, Ed Miliband is actually pitching directly to Labour’s working class base, which has long wanted the party to reform the system so that those who work hard see the most benefit.
Despite many popular perceptions, working class voters are the most enthusiastic proponents of welfare reform – almost half believe that if benefits are cut it will help people stand on their own two feet.
It isn’t only working class voters who want the system reformed, either. According to a YouGov poll for IPPR, 78 per cent of people believe the benefits system is failing to reward those who have worked and contributed to it.
This doesn’t mean that Labour should pander to the country’s most regressive instincts on welfare, but it does mean that progressives must recognise the sense of unfairness prevailing in many working class households.
Yes, the left should always push back against the demonisation of people on benefits , but equally important is to remember that a life on benefits is a huge waste of a person’s potential. There is absolutely nothing left-wing about that.
Today’s announcement is also important in the context of an increasingly disenfranchised Labour core vote. Some argue that Labour should forget about blue collar voters and instead concentrate on keeping the support of liberal and ethnic minority voters.
This would be a mistake, however, for as Luke Akehurst recently put it, “Labour’s strength and resilience has been because of the distinctive nature of the party as a party rooted in a class, the working class, and organisationally linked to it via the trade union link.”
It would also be electorally foolish, for as Akehurst adds, “this isn’t the basis of either the much discussed 40 per cent strategy or even of a 35 per cent strategy, but of a 20 per cent strategy”.
It is important to view today’s welfare announcement in this context, but also to contrast it with vindictive Tory policies such as the bedroom tax and the removal of housing benefit for under-25s.
Working class voters, who the left is supposed to champion, want a fairer and more contributory welfare system. Ed Miliband and Rachel Reeves appear to understand that, and today’s announcement appeals to this desire for welfare reform without abandoning any of Labour’s best traditions.
56 Responses to “Progressives should back Ed Miliband’s welfare proposals”
CW
This is the Labour Party at its worst. This is the Labour Party that is going to lose the 2015 election.
James Bloodworth should be ashamed of himself for trying to legitimise this.
And on what grounds? On hot air and bullshit. On assertion, obfuscation
and a couple of push polls. There’s nothing really resonant here. This
is Labour giving up on trying to create a vision and offer leadership,
and instead competing with the Tories to up the ante of social sadism.
This is the truth: these proposals will affect working-class people the
worst. These proposals are explicitly about confronting young
working-class people who are unemployed; about monitoring them, punishing them, crushing them, until they’re so desperate they’ll take any shit in the workplace over another day in the penal colony. Why? Because Labour doesn’t have the integrity
to fight for them, instead.
And these hundreds of thousands of young people be expected to live off fresh air, presumably (or else, off their parents, who themselves have little to spare). But, Labour’s demagogues have the audacity to call this neo-Hobbesian “state of nature” they’re aiming at “bracing”.
This is also the truth: Ed Miliband and James Bloodworth and all the other
bloodsuckers and mouthbreathers don’t have a clue what working-class
people really want. Nor do they care. They only evoke the mirage of
‘public opinion’ to justify the exclusion and oppression of the people
they claim to represent.
Would-be Labourites: Vacate this ship, before it sinks.
CW
Bah! So, you think you “appeal” to working-class voters by playing on their resentments in petty ways that will ultimately hurst working-class people the most? This isn’t leadership or fairness. At best, this is cynicism and stupidity. At worst…
Well, look at it this way, James Bloodsworth is already trying to establish a racist divide between “the working-class” and “ethnic minorities” with regard to welfare politics. So, what is he saying, here? That the working-class is white and it shouldn’t have to pay for asylum seekers? This is the shabbiest form of demagoguery – this is “authoritarian populism”, in Stuart Hall’s terms.
Or else, the don’t really believe this shit; they don’t know what the working-class thinks; and they’re just competing with the Tories in the stakes of social sadism, trying to beat them at their own game, because that’s the only game in town.
Or both.
RFW
JSA is no more than 3% of the welfare budget. It’s not worth bothering about in economic terms. But, all parties know that being nasty gets you more than 3% of votes. Labour, sadly, feels it has to mimic the Tories with this side issue.
As for ‘huge waste of a person’s potential’, that’s simply patronising and usually a sign that the writer has no direct experience of the issue himself.
Wouldn’t it be nice if Labour adopted Socialism as a policy?
RedMiner
It has been consistently shown that those who know least about benefits are most likely to support increasingly punitive measures. Instead of this absurd ‘tougher than the Tories’ policy, which Labour can never win with a media that will portray them as soft even if they recommended summary execution of claimants, Labour should be educating the electorate on the reality, and not driving people further apart, not finding yet more ways free unpaid Workfare placements can be sent to Britain’s businesses disguised as ‘training’. Just how much training do you need to stack supermarket shelves? we have people doing apprenticeships in the kinds of jobs a precocious monkey could master in a couple of hours.
The whole thing is a sham. And now kids who were at school are to pay for the economic crash engineered by their parents as the Welfare State is again singled out for cuts, even though only 3% of the Welfare budget is actually taken by JSA.
Progressives support this kind of right wing tripe? you’ve supped too much Kool-aid, bub.
Henry T
Some of these ideas may appeal to some working class voters because the traditional values of solidarity and true fairness have withered, as Labour has stopped offering egalitarian reforms. In other words, by abandoning the “Labour Movement” and accepting they are just vying for the driving seat of capitalist Britain, they have contributed to the growth of right wing ideas. This allows them to use those ideas – just like the Tories and UKIP – to play on our emotions and resentments and win votes without redistributing any money. Put simply they are hoping to appeal to the worst feelings of desperate workers in order to get into office.