New Labour vs Wheelchair Layabouts II posted by Richard Seymour

Follow-up to this post.

I have never had the pleasure of being seduced by David Blunkett, but I can't help a tremble or two as I anticipate his gentle hand soothing my objections to the new plans to cut incapacity benefit. According to Channel 4 News, there are plans to cut incapacity benefit by £10 a week, and to remove people from those benefits after two years.

This stands in contrast to what was claimed last month, when Blunkett's office denied all such reports and said that they were more interested in 'changing the structure' of the benefit system. The actual proposals raised by Blunkett last month reflected the US-obsession of New Labour politicians. The 'workfare' agenda tabled by the Clintonites was appropriated with considerable gusto by Gordon Brown, and the entire 'Third Way' neoliberal agenda was cut from the same cloth - particularly Brown's acceptance of the doctrine of NAIRU (the idea that there is a non-accelerating-inflation rate of unemployment, a 'natural' rate of you will, that can only be lowered through supply-side measures to improve labour market flexibility and skills).

Blunkett seems to have gone down Bush Avenue, however:

As part of his imminent green paper on welfare reform, Mr Blunkett is planning to reform incapacity benefit so that those deemed capable of work are expected to attend regular job interviews and counselling sessions. More than half of the 2.7m on incapacity benefit are deemed capable of work.

...

Mr Blunkett said he was looking to the US for ways to introduce more innovative partners to help the unemployed into work, including faith based groups. He said Britain could learn from America's better developed sense of corporate social responsibility.

Britain needs more of the Church-State-Halliburton axis, then.

Measures are also proposed to restrict access to these benefits on the supposition that many claims are fraudulent. TUC figures, however, show that only 1% of claims have been fraudulent to date.

The important thing to recognise about these deeply authoritarian and vicious measures is that they are not to do with appeasing the Daily Mail or right-wing voters. They are ideologically-driven. Gordon Brown has a commitment to a very slender kind of 'equality', which is of such a kind as to afford 'opportunity'. That is, since he accepts the Giddensian bluster about the 'knowledge economy' (although he may now prefer, as Tony does, the lighter reads written by Charles Leadbeater), he wants to equalise 'endowments', access to those capacities and skills that lend themselves to advances in the new economy. This doesn't, of course, address the major causes of inequality of both opportunity and income - namely, the inequitable distribution of wealth and power. However, as Gordon Brown is under the curious misapprehension that his welfare-to-work schemes have been a resounding success (they haven't), the authoritarianism follows. Having 'extended opportunity', broken with 'the old school tie' and 'reformed higher education', the Chancellor must feel there is little else he can do to get these work-shy sickies off the public purse.

The fact that this is being aggressively pushed now has much to do with Blair's regret that he didn't fuck the disabled over in 1997 as he planned, as well as his desire to leave a lasting legacy when he finally plans to piss off in 2009. There is only one solution: we've got to break his fucking legs.