Pensions, healthcare, education, welfare: it's all up for grabs. posted by Richard Seymour

Eagerly floating measures to increase the working age, the government casually misinformed the public about a savings crisis that necessitated cuts, in a strategy that mimicked Bush's "social security crisis".

Today, we hear about "perverse incentives" that encourage people to laze around in their wheelchairs rather than seek work. There is, the government says, is "sick note culture" which means that the ranks of the disabled and infirm are peppered with fakes, and they intend to do away with it. The two subjects are not unrelated, for when Blair was asked how he intended to handle the "pensions crisis", he denied that tax rises would be necessary: instead they would do it "cutting welfare costs by making changes to incapacity benefits".

So, John Hutton MP, the Work and Pensions Secretary, has the ideal neoliberal solution:

Under the slogan "work is good for you", John Hutton, the Work and Pensions Secretary, will say that the Government will offer more support to people looking to re-enter the job market, but that this must be matched by "increased obligations" for claimants.

People on incapacity benefit will be summoned to interviews to see if they are genuine cases and risk losing part of their benefit if they refuse to take part in back-to-work programmes. Payments could be cut by up to £10.93 a week - from a maximum of £76.45 - for refusing to go to a work interview, and by up to £21.86 for a refusal a second time.

The number of people of working age on incapacity benefit is 2,638,400. Undoubtedly, a huge amount of this is simply concealed unemployment, since research shows that four out of ten people on these benefits want to get back to work. However, the same research also shows that:

a) "[L]ess than 1% of claimants were fraudulent".

b) Many disabled people face "prejudice when trying to find work".

c) "The number of people who get [incapacity benefit] has been falling for years."

d) "Britain spends much less on employment help for disabled people than other European countries."

The average number of job vacancies in 2005 was 606,500. That, of course, includes a huge number of very temporary vacancies created by shifts between work, maternity leave etc. And it is by no means clear that even if the work was suitable for those who want it, and have disabilities, they would be able to access it. Vacancies are often created by skill shortages in particular areas: one's suitability for a job often doesn't correlate to its availability. That is why those 606,500 vacancies are not immediately wolfed up by the million or so classified as unemployed (depending one whether you accept the claimant count, which no one should, or the International Labour Force survey). To put it bluntly, the jobs simply are not there for the wheelchair layabouts, even if they could do them, even if there were a million fakers ready to be copped by a New Labour feeler. The UK economy is simply not equipped to handle a large influx into the labour market unless the government is about to undertake public works programmes, which I sort of feel would be on a par with child abuse as far as this government goes.

Almost simultaneously, the government is attempting to introduce an Education White Paper which, the Audit Commission says, works "against the interests of the most disadvantaged, least mobile and worst informed parents and children". The proposals include allowing a new breed of "trust schools", independent from democratic control, to have much more say in determining what pupils they include - and exclude. Business-owned City Academies already operate on this basis. Far from assisting Labour's key constituents, the policy would involve the unfair advantage that already accrues to middle and upper class pupils as a result of their mobility and resources being compounded. The source of the policy is believed to be the same intellectual midget and former Observer columnist (if that isn't a tautology) that promoted the 'city academies' from within the Downing Street clique, Lord Andrew Adonis. The government's white paper, the Commission notes, assumes that spare capacity in schools is somehow due to poor performance and unpopularity and therefore a little healthy competition will oblige them to buck up their act - yet, in most cases it is actually due to demographic change. Further, if choice is really what is at issue and if it really were a virtue, then much more spare capacity would be needed. Finally, the transfer of the public education system into private, unaccountable hands - bear in mind that every primary and secondary school would be encouraged to become a trust, in which the local elected authority has no direct authority - would be extraordinarily difficult to reverse once effected. Local authorities need to provide an overall strategy for provision based on aggregated information, whereas what the government intends is an inefficient, marketised free-for-all that will disadvantage the poor.

Finally, and again coterminously, the unctuous health secretary Patricia Hewitt is leading the charge against the greedy bastards on hospital beds. There is too much of a 'handout culture' in the NHS, according to the government - so it is demanding that financial management be put ahead of clinical objectives, which is about as nakedly callous as one can get. If there is a financial crisis in the NHS, it will be in no small part due to the extraordinarily wasteful PFI projects that New Labour continues to impose on the public sector (do you notice a common thread developing here?). Once again, hospitals are encouraged to compete over meagre resources:

Until this year, hospitals could fairly accurately predict the number of patients they would be expected to treat. They agreed contracts with local primary care trusts guaranteeing most of the income they needed to do the work. Patients can now choose, however, from a menu of at least four local NHS trusts where they are entitled to free treatment. Consequently, hospitals can lose income if they do not attract enough patients.

The fee they get for each attendance is also being priced differently. A national tariff was set last April for all non-emergency operations. If a hospital spent more than the norm for a particular procedure, it lost money on every patient treated.

That is, hospitals that are most in need of investment receive less cash, and those stuck with the 'underperforming hospital' get an underfunded service.

There is, underlying all of this, not mere opportunism or an obsession with 'pragmatism' or polling data or technocratic efficiency - it is an ideologically coherent project. The government intends to reduce the role of the state in the provision of key services on the basis of the neoliberal doctrine that private enterprise and markets are more efficient than planning and public ownership. And, proceeding in accordance with another dogma of neoliberalism, the idea of a 'natural' or 'non-accelerating inflation' rate of unemployment (NAIRU) which can only be reduced through supply-side measures, they intend to coerce a large number of people in incapacity benefit into the labour market, thus reducing the cost of labour in general. Finally, accepting these doctrines, the government intends to restore profitability to British industry by compelling workers who are not fortunate enough to be able to afford an early retirement to labour for longer. Despite paying tax and national insurance, despite a lifetime of contribution to the growth of the economy, workers will be obliged to work longer and harder. Some will never see a day of retirement, and many already do not: in Calton, Glasgow, the average life expectancy of a male is 53.9 years. Poverty kills, particularly pensioner poverty. The government's response: "work is good for you".

How to resist this neoliberal offensive? Well, striking dockers gave a glimpse of how this week when they defeated the EU's attempt to liberalise ports and diminish working conditions. Here are some future possibilities.