Scrapping Universal Credit
The announcement that the next Labour government will scrap Universal Credit (UC) shows that ‘another world is possible’. This important decision follows a long campaign by Disabled People Against Cuts (DPAC) to stop and scrap UC, often in the face of opposition of others in the labour and trade union movement who proposed to fix and reform. This policy shift will be truly transformational if the replacement is co-produced with disabled people and other benefit recipients and is based on a different set of values from those informing welfare benefits over the last 40 years.
UC is a pernicious means for the state to monitor and control benefits claimants and large parts of the atomised cheap labour workforce. Some in our movement and beyond bought the lie that it was a way of streamlining the benefits system by combining six benefits into one and making ‘work pay’.
UC architect Iain Duncan Smith had no such benign intentions. His focus was on the harsh values of the Poor Laws and Thatcherite notions to deliver a fearful and compliant workforce to capitalist enterprises paying below subsistence wages and offshoring super profits in elaborate tax avoidance and evasion schemes. The gig economy relies on zero hours contracts and non-unionised workers who have few rights or protections and will work as demanded by unregulated employers under fear of sanction.
The desire by the right wing of the Tory Party to crash out of the EU with no deal has partly been so they can rip up the basic but minimal protections afforded to workers in the EU. The Tory think tanks are already targeting the scrapping of maternity leave, bank holidays and raising the pension age further in a post- Brexit Britain.
Fortunately, the Labour leadership of Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell has prevailed and we now have policy that is truly for the many not the few. The conference motion commits to scrapping UC and replacing it with a progressive benefits system, getting rid of the hated work capability assessments and abolishing punitive sanctions. The task now is to create a system of support that is socialist and puts the diverse needs and shared rights of people before super profits for business.
This means removing neo-liberal conditionality from the benefits system. This is essential because large parts of the country do not have employment opportunities for people to ‘compete’ for. The creation of a reserve army of labour only punishes people for the failings in the capitalist economy which cannot sustain healthy and prosperous communities. In the areas of the country where traditional industries have closed and not been replaced with an alternative, the population is increasingly struggling below minimal levels of existence as exemplified by the explosion of food bank use.
The new system must take into account the complex relationship between paid and unpaid work and disability/ill health. This requires a radical shift in our approach to welfare and benefits that is based on 21st century socialist values, not Blairite notions of what is possible or acceptable to right wing and reactionary media.
PETER BERESFORD AND MARK HARRISON
Mark Harrison is director of Social Action Solutions, and Senior Research Fellow in Social Action at the University of Suffolk.
Peter Beresford is co-chair of Shaping OurLives, the disabled people's and service users’ organisation and network, and Professor of Citizen Participation at the University of Essex.
