Peter_North

January 04, 2006
The party of perpetual poverty
Daily Mail, 4 January 2006

The first government initiative of the new year brings further graphic proof of Mr Blair’s drastic political weakness.

The Work and Pensions Secretary, John Hutton, has had to go grovelling to Labour MPs to beg them to support the government’s plan to reform incapacity benefit. He has written to MPs in the hundred constituencies with the highest number of people drawing this benefit — only five of which are not held by Labour members —to persuade them of the merits of the proposals.

Incapacity benefit is a totemic and highly emotive issue for Labour MPs, for whom any attempt to restrict its reach is tantamount to consigning the sick and disabled to penury and starvation. The reform plan — which Mr Hutton was forced last night to water down — is therefore being resisted tooth and nail. Along with education and health proposals which are provoking similar unrest, incapacity benefit reform has thus become a key measure that Mr Blair must get through if he is to prove that he is not a political dead duck.

Failure to re-establish his authority would mean that calls for him to step down earlier rather than later would become irresistible. So the stakes are very high. So high, indeed, that the Government has even had to resort to telling the truth in its desperate attempt to get it through.

Thus Mr Hutton yesterday made the breath-taking admission that incapacity benefit — along with its predecessors invalidity benefit and sickness benefit — was a device to conceal the true level of unemployment and pretend that fewer people were out of work than was actually the case.

So it was a fraud on the public — and in more ways than one. No-one would argue that people who are genuinely unable to work should not receive help. But the way the incapacity benefit system works is an invitation to fraud. There has long been overwhelming evidence that many people are claiming it on the basis of false diagnosis of ailments such as depression or bad backs.

More than 2.7 million people currently claim this benefit at a yearly cost to the taxpayer of some £12 billion. The effect on the country, however, has been far more grave and far reaching than merely ripping off the taxpayer in an almighty political scam.

For it has also trapped huge numbers of people in a downward spiral of welfare dependency. It offers more money than the jobseekers’ allowance claimed by healthy people who are out of work. Incapacity benefit rises, which take place after six months and again after a year, positively invite fiddles by encouraging people to stay off work to claim the maximum payment.

The result is that they become trapped in a vicious circle of low income and plummeting initiative and self-esteem, which prevents them from ever finding work and escaping from poverty.

And as Mr Hutton has also now admitted, the scam has sold short the very people whose interests Labour is supposedly in business to represent. It was Labour constituencies which paid the heaviest price because those areas which have the highest number of incapacity benefit claimants are no less than five times more likely to suffer severe deprivation than the rest of the country.

Under Labour, poverty among disabled people — including those who are genuinely so — has actually worsened. A recent report by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation found that 30 per cent of disabled adults of working age were living in poverty, a higher proportion than a decade ago, and double the rate for non-disabled adults.

The Foundation put this down to ‘discrimination’ by employers. But a more likely explanation is the fact that any wages wipe out the benefit — and if jobs are low paid, life on benefit can seem more attractive. Thus the trap snaps shut around the poor.

The implications are truly shocking. The truth is that a benefit for which Labour MPs are going to the barricades on the grounds that it is vital for poor people has actually trapped those individuals deeper in poverty — and most harmed their own constituents, the very people who most depend upon them.

The benefit represents in fact a wholesale abandonment of the poor by Labour MPs, who are more interested in gesture politics that enable them to fantasise that they are helping the poor rather than facing up to the tough choices that really would make a difference in lifting people out of poverty.

Instead, a vicious dependency culture has been created which has condemned generations to a life on state handouts. Far from being a party for the poor, Labour has thus become the party of perpetual poverty, keeping many of our most vulnerable citizens trapped in the political powerlessness of a class permanently set apart.

This disgraceful admission has only been wrung out of the Government because it is so desperate to bring rebellious Labour MPs on side. But Mr Blair’s proposals have reportedly already been emasculated in the attempt to get them through.

He had wanted to impose strict time limits on the benefit, means-test claimants and replace payments with vouchers in order to end the abuses of the system.

But despite Downing Street’s claims that the reforms have not been scaled back, it appears that most if not all these specific proposals will be absent from the green paper on welfare reform to be published later this month. So once again this particular ball will have been dropped.

In fairness, the sickness scam was not originally of Labour’s making. It started under the Tories who used it to conceal the true level of unemployment. But the fact remains that in more than eight years of government Labour has singularly failed to tackle this scandal.

In the glad confident morning after Mr Blair’s first victory in 1997, he famously told the Labour MP and welfare expert Frank Field to ‘think the unthinkable’ about welfare reform. Mr Field duly did so. It was so unthinkable that he was thrown out of his job and welfare reform has gone nowhere ever since.

Instead, welfare spending has ballooned along with welfare dependency as more and more people have been sucked INTO phpbb_debilitating and demeaning reliance on the state.

Mr Field understood that the way incapacity benefit operated — along with other aspects of the welfare system — undermined the values of decent people by providing incentives for dishonesty. This moral rot has never been tackled for a number of reasons.

First is the loss of nerve by the Prime Minister to embrace root-and-branch reform. Second is the implacable attachment of Gordon Brown to means-testing — a principal cause of the benefits trap. And last but by no means least is the unshakeable belief among Labour MPs that the remedy for poverty is to give the poor money.

The way to end the incapacity benefit scam is surely to provide just one benefit for all who are unemployed, and impose tough tests to ensure that it is restricted to people who genuinely cannot find work. Tinkering with the system won’t solve it; watering down the tinkering turns pusillanimity INTO phpbb_a joke.

The situation cries out for tough-minded thinking. But if Mr Blair was incapable of this when he was at the peak of his political power, few can believe that, with power draining from him every day, he is likely to achieve it now.

Peter_North

True.

Take an entry level job at £5ph, 37 hours a week

37*5=185

Take off tax and NI = £154

Out of that, joe average must spend...

Rent £60
Food £25
Travel £20
Lunches/work expenses £10
Water £10
Gas £10
Electric £10
Council Tax £10

What's the point?

mkpdavies

I've been saying this for ages.

Though Paul will be along in a few minutes, to tell you that you can live on 5 pear a year if you try hard enough.

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Peter_North

has he tried it?

It's do-able but its no life. It's drudgery and misery, especially when your mates are still in bed living off a cosy benefit scheme because they're a bit depressed.