Why the Liberal Democrats are just as compassionless as the Tories when it comes to welfare

The Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg inspired me to write this article by informing listeners to his talk radio show that "we want a welfare system which is compassionate".

Now pretty much everyone knows that Nick Clegg is such a turncoat that his name has become synonymous with self-serving political dishonesty, however I believe it is still a useful exercise to look at some of the welfare policies that Nick Clegg and his Liberal Democrat sidekicks have helped the Tories to bring about and judge how "compassionate" they have been.

Iain Duncan Smith
[Main article]

The first thing to note is that anyone with the slightest real interest in building a "compassionate" welfare system would have done everything in their power to keep the moral and intellectual pygmy that is Iain Duncan Smith as far away from the welfare system as possible. Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats not only refused to veto the appointment of Iain Duncan Smith as Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, they have used their parliamentary votes to ram through all compassionless (and in many cases hopelessly botched) - policies. Even worse than that, they even voted to save him from the consequences of his own blundering incompetence, when anyone in their right mind would demanded his immediate resignation.

The Atos administered WCA regime
[Main article]

If you are even remotely familiar with the Atos WCA regime, you will know how compassionless it it. Not only are there countless first hand testimonies as to how cruel and inaccurate it is, the government's own statistics admit that thousands of people a year have died within weeks of undergoing the Atos administered assessment regime, and the Courts have twice declared that it discriminates against those with mental health conditions.

Despite the court ruling that the Atos administered WCA regime is discriminatory, Iain Duncan Smith has refused to halt the process, a decision that elicited not a squeak of protest from Nick Clegg nor the rest of the Liberal Democrat leadership.

Aside from the fact that the Atos administered WCA regime discriminates against the mentally ill, another enormous problem is the incompetent way in which the process is administered. Nearly 40% of people who appeal against the decision to strip them of benefits win their cases and have their benefits reinstated*. There are so many appeals against dodgy Atos decisions that it costs the taxpayer (not Atos) £50 million a year to deal with them all.

One would have thought that the company responsible for costing the taxpayer £50 million a year in appeals against their dodgy decisions would hang their heads in shame, but on the contrary, the boss of Atos earns a salary of £40,000 a week, and despite this appalling legacy of failure causing untold misery to tens of thousands of families (and costing the UK taxpayer tens of millions of pounds) he was rewarded with a £1,000,000 bonus in 2012.

Have the Liberal Democrats taken any noteworthy action to stop this appalling and discriminatory abuse of disabled people, whilst the people responsible for administering it lord it around on seven figure salaries? Of course they haven't.

The Benefits "Up-Rating" Bill
[Main article]

Despite its absurdly Orwellian title (an honest title would have been the Benefits Down-Rating Bill), Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats used their parliamentary votes to push through this appalling piece of legislation, which was designed to impose below inflation rises (real terms cuts) on the incomes of the unemployed and low paid workers alike.

The Tory narrative to justify this economic attack on the poorest people in society was the utterly misleading "why should your unemployed neighbour get more than you?" argument, which is misleading on countless grounds. I'll briefly outline three.

1. The Tories are responsible for the longest sustained campaign of wage repression on record, so saying that they are going to cut benefits even more harshly than wages is like saying "We've been kicking you in the groin for three years straight, so in order to make you feel better, we're going to wear steel toe capped boots as we kick your neighbour in the groin from now on".

2. The unemployed neighbour wasn't "getting more" anyway, since an inflation matching 2.5% addition to £71 per week in Jobseekers' Allowance is actually significantly less than a 1.5% increase on the average salary of £500 per week.

3. The vast majority of people to be affected by the Benefits Up-Raring Bill are actually the working poor, not the unemployed. This is because the bill didn't just cut unemployment benefits, it cut all kinds of in-work benefits too (Working Tax Credits, Child Tax Credits, Child Benefit, Housing Benefit, Income Support, Maternity Pay, Paternity Pay, Statutory Sickness Pay ...). The fact that the "up-rating" bill actually reduces the incomes of far more working families than it does unemployed people illustrates the utter dishonesty and maliciousness of the people that devised the "why should your unemployed neighbour get more than you?" narrative.

None of these objections bothered the Liberal Democrats, who used their parliamentary votes to get the "up-rating" bill through parliament.

An interesting contrast can be made with the way the Liberal Democrats constantly bang on about how they raised the income tax threshold (the one allegad success that they so desperately cling onto). What they never say is that they voted through Tory measures like the Benefits Up-Rating Bill which are designed to snatch back any gains the working poor may have made through the raising of the income tax threshold. The Lib-Dems won't shut up about how they gave the working poor a few extra quid, but they remain absolutely silent on the fact that they have used their parliamentary votes to help the Tories snatch it all back again, meaning the only real beneficiaries from the raised income tax threshold are the already wealthy.
 
Bedroom Tax
[Main article]

One of the most convincing examples of the Liberal Democrat commitment to harsh and compassionless welfare reforms is the "Bedroom Tax", which was voted into existence with Lib-Dem parliamentary votes and defended in Parliament by the Liberal Democrat MP Steve Webb.

The "Bedroom Tax" is an abomination which disproportionately penalises disabled people (around two thirds of all families affected by "Bedroom Tax" have disabled members).

"Bedroom Tax" is a cruel and arbitrary regime which attempts to drive people out of their homes - even though there are nowhere near enough smaller properties to rehouse all of these displaced people.

Perhaps it might be possible to consider it fair for extra charges to be levied upon on a person (or small family) that refuses to move out of a large social housing property after the council have said they need it to house a large family, despite having been offered a smaller property in return. However slamming all "under-occupiers" with arbitrary charges when there are absolutely no smaller properties available for them to move into is as compassionless as it is unfair and economically illiterate.

This lack of available smaller properties exposes "Bedroom Tax" for what it is: Yet another attempt by the Tory party to impose austerity on the poor (whilst simultaneously giving vast tax cuts to the rich).

Not only is the "Bedroom Tax" an abomination, it was also introduced in such a cack-handed manner that it turns out that some 40,000 people who have been forced to pay it aren't actually liable and should surely be entitled to reimbursement.

The Liberal Democrats didn't just use their parliamentary votes to pass this abomination into law, one of their own MPs (Steve Webb) was part of the team that devised and defended the scheme.

Retroactive "Workfare" legislation
[Main article] 

Another blatant demonstration of the Liberal Democrat commitment to support the compassionless Tory attacks on the welfare system was their decision to vote in favour of Iain Duncan Smith's absurd retroactive lawmaking exercise called the Jobseekers' (Back to Work) Bill, but which should more accurately have been called Iain Duncan Smith's "I'm Above the Law" Bill.

This ludicrous bill came about as the result of a court judgement that Iain Duncan Smith's mandatory unpaid "Workfare" schemes were unlawful. The judgement was made on the grounds that Iain Duncan Smith had drawn up a bunch of unintelligible rules and that he hadn't even bothered to subject them to parliamentary scrutiny before enacting them.

Thousands of people were stripped of their benefits for failing to comply with Iain Duncan Smith's unintelligible "workfare" rules, then once the court ruled that these schemes were unlawful, it seemed that the victims of these unintelligible and unlawful rules would be entitled to an estimated £130 million in compensation for the unlawful treatment they had suffered.

Iain Duncan Smith's response to this was to draw up a ludicrous piece of retroactive legislation designed to retroactively change the "Workfare" rules so that they would have been intelligible and approved by parliament had they been written that way at the time all those people were sanctioned. The Liberal Democrats happily voted in favour of this, giving their seal of approval to a truly outrageous bastardisation of the parliamentary process in order to help Iain Duncan Smith keep the £130 million he had unlawfully stolen from some of the most vulnerable people in society, and save himself from the sacking he so richly deserved.
 
Benefits sanctions
[Main article]

One of the most merciless welfare reforms since the Liberal Democrats trashed their own political reputation by helping the Tories sneak back into power is the massive increase in the use of benefits sanctions, which leave people absolutely destitute, reliant upon food banks, or even worse, homeless.

In the last two and a half years, the number of unemployed people sanctioned has averaged 64,307 a month, compared with 27,108 a month between 2000 and 2010, a 137% increase. Several DWP whistleblowers have stated that this massive increase in sanctions is a direct result of sanctions league tables and intense pressure from DWP management to increase the number of weekly sanctions.
 
After repeatedly lying that there were no such things as sanctions league tables, Coalition ministers were caught out when the sanctions league tables were leaked to the public. As we have come to expect, the mainstream corporate press and the Parliamentary Standards Authority both allowed the government ministers that had repeatedly lied about the non-existence of sanctions league tables to get away with their lies without the slightest sanction.

Aside from the lies, there are many truly disturbing things about the massive increase in benefits sanctions, here I will briefly outline three of the worst things.

1. Thousands of people have been sanctioned for absolutely ludicrous reasons. Here are a few examples:

• 60 year old army veteran sanctioned for selling poppies for a few hours a day in the weeks before Remembrance Day, despite applying for dozens of jobs too. [source]
• Sanctioned for attending a job interview instead of signing on at the Jobcentre (despite contacting the Jobcentre beforehand to reschedule the signing on appointment). [source]
• Sanctioned after being given a training appointment which clashed with the fortnightly signing on appointment. [source]
• Sanctioned for having a heart attack during an Employment and Support Allowance interview. [source]
• Sanctioned for a month for being five minutes late for an appointment. [source]

2. Sanctions are inherently discriminatory. When Jobcentre staff have sanctions quotas to fill (which is impossible to deny given the proven existence of sanctions league tables) it is much easier for them to trick mentally ill people into losing their sanctions than it is to try and catch out the tiny minority of hard-core benefits scroungers that probably know the rules even better than the Jobcentre staff do themselves. This isn't just idle speculation, the culture of tricking "easy targets" into losing their benefits has been exposed by whistleblowers.

3. Sanctions are used to force people into giving up their labour rights. Sanctions are the means by which Iain Duncan Smith compels people to give up their labour rights and work for free on his mandatory unpaid "workfare" schemes. These schemes are not just bad for the people who are forced onto them under threat of absolute destitution, they are bad for the rest of us too. It doesn't take an economics genius to realise that flooding a market (the labour market) with free commodities (an army of tens of thousands of rightless and unpaid "workfare" labourers) will have the effect of pushing down the value of the commodity in question (the value of our labour - the wages of the rest of us). Another appalling aspect to Workfare is the unfair market advantage handed to unethical businesses that take advantage of this supply of free rightless labour over those that eschew forced labour. Yet another negative consequence is the fact that many of the recipients of Iain Duncan Smith's supply of free labour are tax-dodgers and in many cases not even British companies, meaning the profits from the reductions in their wage bill are siphoned off abroad.

Nick Clegg's commitment to compassion within the welfare system doesn't seem to extend to preventing their Tory coalition colleagues from imposing sanctions league tables (and lying about it), more than doubling the number of people forced into destitution for "crimes" such as being 9 minutes late for a Jobcentre appointment because their preceding job interview overran, nor protecting the unemployed from being forced onto unlawful, economically illiterate Soviet style compulsory labour schemes.

Conclusion

Nick Clegg's guff about wanting a "compassionate" welfare system is totally undermined by the the track record of the government that he is part of. Many of the harshest policies like "Bedroom Tax" and the cuts to in-work benefits for the working poor were only made possible by Liberal Democrat MPs votes in parliament. Even when some of Iain Duncan Smith's worst welfare policies have been condemned as unlawful and discriminatory by the courts, the Liberal Democrats have backed him to the hilt.

It is absolutely clear that the Liberal Democrat leadership value a few years of six figure salaries and their access to ministerial cars far more highly than they value the idea of protecting the most vulnerable from Tory malice, let alone building a "compassionate" welfare system.

The electoral price the Liberal Democrats are going to pay for this collusion with the Tories will be a high one, however it is impossible to feel an iota of sympathy for them that they are going to bear the bulk of the electoral whiplash rather than the Tory party that actually devised most of these schemes.

Yes Tories like Iain Duncan Smith, David Anthony Freud and Mark Hoban have been the worst offenders, but by now we have come to expect nothing more than incompetence and malice from the Tory party. Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats have had every chance to restrain Iain Duncan Smith, or even force his removal from the position of responsibility that he is so hopelessly unfit to hold, yet they've done worse than nothing, they've backed him to the hilt and voted in favour of every single compassionless (and hopelessly botched) piece of legislation he's put before parliament.

By letting a callous and intellectually stunted monster like Iain Duncan Smith run amok, they've destroyed their credentials as a "liberal" party and lost the right to expect anyone at all to take them seriously when they speak of wanting a "compassionate" welfare system. Liberal Democrats are due their imminent resounding electoral defeat, and I doubt many people will be convinced by their pathetic "It wasn't us sir - it was the big boys in blue ties" appeals for compassion before we cast our votes in the 2015 General Election.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

More articles from
 ANOTHER ANGRY VOICE 
         
Secret Courts and the very Illiberal Democrats
              
What is ... Wage Repression?
    
Workfare, neoclassical economics and tabloid mindsets

           
The Atos administered WCA regime: Psychological torture for the disabled

        

Michael Gove's ideological vandalism of the English education system

                     
The "Making Work Pay" fallacy
        
Problem Solving - with Iain Duncan Smith
         
What is ... a justification narrative?
     
The economic case against tax-dodging
                                          
Who is to blame for the economic crisis

                                            

Why I want you to question everything - even me.

As Another Angry Voice has become more popular over the years, I've been accused of being all kinds of things. If the accusations my various critics have thrown at me are compiled together and accepted at face value then I must be some kind of preposterously confused schizophrenic. A Tory supporting communist; a Zionist Anti-Semite; a totalitarian libertarian; a misogynistic feminist; a religious atheist, an anti-American western imperialist; and a statist anarchist!

If the aggregated complaints of my critics are to be believed, I must be some kind of Internet troll-lord, spewing reams of mutually contradictory attention seeking click-bait. I hope that those of you who are familiar with my work recognise that I'm nothing of the sort and that I strive to make my work mutually consistent, to conduct coherent analysis and to back up my views with reliable evidence (the green links on this blog).

I'm never really that bothered when people resort to calling me a "Nazi" in lieu of actually critiquing any of the points I've made or questioning my evidence. Once the individual has resorted to slinging totally unsubstantiated accusations, and the wielding of political words (with actual definitions) as nothing more than blunt insults, I feel there is no point in debating the issue further on the grounds that the poor individual is clearly incapable of developing anything remotely resembling a coherent argument.

On some rare occasions I do allow myself to be riled into responding to my most incoherent critics. One such example was a bloke that accused me of being a "tiny-minded" person with "a blog that feeds into the ethos of not challenging authority"!

The attack on my intelligence is like water off a duck's back. I know I'm an expert on a few things and reasonably clued up about a lot of other subjects too. If I had been over-sensitive enough to allow insults like that to get to me, there's absolutely no way I could have continued with Another Angry Voice for so long. The thing that really riled me was the accusation that my blog feeds into "the ethos of not challenging authority".

I thought that one of the clearest and most consistent themes in my work is my belief that authority must be challenged. Nearly everything I've ever written challenges the reader to question authority, be it the authoritarianism of the crony capitalist state, the appeals to authority of the neoclassical economic orthodoxy, the deceptive propaganda presented by the mainstream media, the claimed moral authority of various religious groups or the pseudo-rationalist authority of the ranty anti-theist brigade too.

I challenge you to question it all.

In fact I encourage you to challenge me too.

Instead of passively taking what I say on authority simply because you might agree with some of the stuff I've said previously - I challenge you to find something I've written that you disagree with. Try to find a flaw in my reasoning, try to find some counter-evidence to undermine one of my assertions. You need to remember that I'm just a bloke with a blog, not an authority on all matters, so there's absolutely no way you should be agreeing with everything I say.

The main message I'd like people to take from my work it is that I want them to challenge authority. Go on a public protest, sign some petitions, donate to worthy causes, boycott tax-dodgers and unethical businesses, get involved in politics, write to your MP, share your political views, search out heterodox ideas and probably most importantly of all, educate yourself to see through the misleading narratives and outright lies that the political establishment and their professional propagandists in the mainstream media desperately want you to believe.

If there's one message people should be able to discern in my work it is that I want the reader to challenge authority, and it saddens me that some people are too blinded by ideological tribalism to even recognise that.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

Footnote: As can be seen in the brilliant bit of graffiti I used in the article header image, the appeal to "question everything" is actually a logical paradox because the very first thing you should be questioning is whether everything needs to be questioned. Here are some more paradoxes if you like that kind of thing.

More articles from
 ANOTHER ANGRY VOICE 

What is ... Confirmation bias?

Why dissent is positive
  
What is ... A Justification Narrative?
  
The economic case against tax-dodging
              
Workfare, neoclassical economics and tabloid mindsets
    
What do Tory donors get for their cash?
                   
Why Ed Miliband needs to "grow a pair"

           
The Great Neoliberal Lie

        

Common sense and neoclassical pseudo-economics
   
How can we stop our politician lying to us?

                                            

The Tory plan to sell access to your confidential NHS records

This article is about the Tory plans to sell off our private NHS data. If you are in a hurry and can't spare the five minutes it would take to read it, simply scroll down to the bottom of the article for tips on what you can do to stop access to your private medical data being sold off to unaccountable corporations, and some other tips on how to protect your privacy.

In March 2014 a new data repository of all NHS patient records will be created. Advocates of the scheme tell us that collecting together all of this medical data will help hospitals and university research departments conduct better research, but what they are keen to gloss over is that private companies will also be allowed access to the records and patients will have absolutely no way of knowing which companies and organisations has been trawling through their private medical records.

The confidential medical information available to private sector organisations such as insurance companies, drug companies and private health services from the care.data database will include things like NHS numbers, date of birth, postcode, ethnicity and gender. This information will make the individual easily identifiable should the organisation that has purchased the data wish to put names to medical records.

One of the chief propagandists for the scheme Mark Davies has admitted that there is a risk that private companies will be able to "re-identify" patients by matching up data from the (barely) "pseudonymised" NHS records with their own data (or with publicly available records). Davies contests that it is a "small theoretical risk", but as public assurance director for the care.data project, it is his job to convince the public that this is a good idea, so it is hardly surprising that he would deliberately talk down the inherent risks.

There is absolutely no doubt that the private sector organisations that buy up our private medical records could use them to "re-identify" patients. Davies presents no evidence to support his assertion that the risk of this happening is "small", so we can dismiss his claims as entirely speculative. By far the most important consideration when we're considering the likelihood of "re-identification" is whether there is potential profit in it for the corporations.

In order to establish that the risk of "re-identification" is high, all we need do is demonstrate that patient "re-identification" is potentially profitable, since if it is potentially profitable it would clearly be against the corporation's own financial interests to not attempt patient "re-identification".

It is not difficult to think of ways that companies, especially private health insurance companies, could profit from having access to our private medical data and the private medical data of various family members too. If you go to a private health insurance company, it is clearly in their financial interests to have access to have not just your confidential medical records, but the confidential medical records of various family members too (so that they know even more about your medical records and your family health history than you do yourself).

Given the brutality of the Tory attacks on the NHS, it seems almost inevitable that universal access to health care will be abolished and replaced with a US style system of private medical insurance if they get their own way. If such a system comes about, and the private insurance providers built themselves databases of "re-identified" private medical records, it is easy to see how millions of people with complex medical histories, or family histories of illness could be hit with astronomical insurance fees, or get outright blacklisted from the health service.

Mark Davies' justification for selling our private medical data to private businesses with clear financial incentives to "re-identify" the owners of the records is absurd. Here's what he said:

"We have private hospitals and companies like Virgin who are purchasing NHS patient care now. This is a trend that will continue. As long as they can show patient care is benefiting then they can apply."

There are numerous problems with this statement, not least the fact that NHS services are being sold off like this against the public will. 84% of the public believe that the NHS should remain a not-for-profit public service, yet the Tories have been carving it up and selling it off to private sector profiteers as fast as they can.

Even if we accept the premise that the NHS will continue to be carved up and sold off against the public will, this is still no justification for allowing our private medical records to fall into the hands of countless private sector companies.

Lets put it this way, say the Tories give away your local hospital to Virgin Health. Even if you're not absolutely furious about this, in what way is this particular hospital privatisation an excuse for the Tories to sell access to your confidential medical records to Bupa, Saga, PruHealth, Circle, Serco, AstraZeneca, Bayer, GlaxoSmithKline and countless other private sector organisations?

Another important consideration is the fact that once our private medical records have been released to private sector organisations, there is absolutely no way to put the genie back into the bottle. The private sector organisations will be able to keep copies of the data and do with it pretty much whatever they please. So even if in the first instance they make a convincing case that they will use their access to our private medical records to "benefit patient care", they will still have copies of our medical records that they can then return to time and again for whatever profit making purposes they can think of. Once our privacy has been compromised and our confidential medical records sold off to private sector interests, there is literally nothing we can do to prevent them from using our medical data in whichever way they want.

About privacy

Before I get to the "what you can do ..." section, I'd just like to add a few words about the concept of privacy and how it is under sustained attack.

Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that "No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks".
  The whole concept of privacy is under sustained attack. The secret services have been caught out trawling the private communications data of millions of innocent people, dodgy advertising agencies install secretive web tracking software on our computers without our knowledge, David Cameron is ploughing ahead with his plan to have our Internet Service Providers monitor and censor our browsing activities and now his government is planning to sell off our private medical data to unaccountable private sector interests.

One of the notable things about these assaults on our privacy is many of them are imposed on an opt out basis. Thus our right to privacy is automatically invaded if we do not give explicit instructions to the contrary. This means that our right to privacy is entirely dependent upon our knowledge of how it is under attack. Essentially this means that the uninformed give permission for their privacy to be invaded by default.

If the ruling establishment gave the slightest damn about our right to privacy, things would be very different.

• Instead of compelling ISPs to install David Cameron's Chinese style Internet Firewall by default, people should only be subjected to such surveillance and censorship should they be stupid enough to explicitly ask for it.
• Instead of being allowed to install countless trackers on our computers without our knowledge, dodgy advertising agencies should only be allowed to track those that explicitly give them permission.
• Instead of being given permission to trawl our confidential medical data unless we deliberately opt out, private companies should only be allowed to access the medical records of those that give them explicit permission.
• Instead of allowing themselves to trawl the entire Internet without constraint, the secret services should have to convince a judge that they have reasonable grounds to suspect criminal activity before they are allowed to harvest anyone's private communications data or web browsing history.

What you can do to oppose the sale of access to our medical records

1. Opt out. All you need do is inform your GP that you don't want your medical data uploaded onto the database and shared with countless organisations. You can use the resources on this page to tell you GP that you want to opt out.

2. Write to your MP. If you are opposed to the idea of private health companies being sold access to people's private medical records you should write to your MP and explain your opposition. You can find the contact details for your MP here (Remember - if you include your name and postal address in your correspondence your MP has a statutory obligation to reply to your concerns).

3. Share this article. I'm not telling people that they should opt out, I'm giving them information and letting them decide what is in their own best interests. Many people will conclude that it is in their best interests too prevent private health companies from trawling their private medical records.

4. Live in Scotland. Scotland has a degree of autonomy over their health service, meaning that as much as the Tories would like to give away the confidential medical records of Scottish people to their corporate mates, they just can't.

A few other tips to protect your privacy

[Note - none of these tips will completely protect your privacy but they will help you make it significantly more difficult for people or agencies to spy on you or steal your private data]

1. Instead of using Google to search the net, use a proxy search engine like IxQuick.

2. Download the Ghostery Add On for your browser. This provides information on who is spying on your web activities and gives you the power to block them.

3. Use a secure connection to browse the Internet. When you have this set up correctly all website urls will begin https:/ instead of just http:/

4. Be very careful which Apps you download, some of them pinch your private data and sell it to advertising agencies.

Here are a few more tips from Privacy Clearing House

 Another Angry Voice  is a not-for-profit page which generates absolutely no revenue from advertising and accepts no money from corporate or political interests. The only source of revenue for  Another Angry Voice  is the  PayPal  donations box (which can be found in the right hand column, fairly near the top of the page). If you could afford to make a donation to help keep this site going, it would be massively appreciated.

More articles from
 ANOTHER ANGRY VOICE 

The NHS is not safe in Tory hands

How NSA overreach is worse than terrorism
  
Lazy Lord Coe and the privatisation of the NHS
  
The economic case against tax-dodging
              
What is ... Wage Repression?
    
What do Tory donors get for their cash?
                   
Why Ed Miliband needs to "grow a pair"

           
The Atos administered WCA regime: Psychological torture for the disabled

        

Michael Gove's ideological vandalism of the English education system
   
How can we stop our politician lying to us?

                                            

The "New Labour are Left Wing" Myth

The  very idea that the New Labour government of 1997-2010 was some kind of left-wing project is probably the single biggest myth in UK politics.

1979 and all that

New Labour was clearly a continuation of the Thatcherite experiment, she said so herself.

When Thatcher introduced right-wing neoliberal economics to UK politics in 1979 it was undoubtedly an extremist ideology. It is important to remember that the UK had been a role model to the world before Thatcher and her crew imposed this economic ideology from the extreme-right fringe, which had been forged in Latin American dictatorships. 
 
The social reforms of Clement Atlee's post-war government (universal health care, social housing, nationalisation of natural monopolies, the welfare state, legal aid ...) had been imitated across the liberal democracies of the world, then along came Margaret Thatcher to set about destroying this legacy.
 
As so many countries embraced the social democratic mixed economy model in the 1950s and 60s, the liberal democracies experienced the longest sustained periods of economic stability and growth on record. During this period, which was commonly known as the "golden age of capitalism", but more perhaps more accurately described as "the golden age of social democracy", several Tories occupied 10 Downing Street and ran administrations that were far more left-wing than New Labour. Tory Prime Ministers like Harold MacMillan were still clearly acting as the party of Establishment interests (as the Tories always do), but their economic policies were miles to the left of the New Labour economic agenda. 
 
The United Kingdom set a remarkable legacy of social progressivity under both Labour and Tory administrations, which was overseen by the Tory dominated and undemocratic hereditary House of Lords. This legacy has been under demolition ever since 1979, with the UK now once again trendsetters, but this time in the "race to the bottom" that is the apparent objective of  the neoclassical economic orthodoxy. When Thatcher set about this installing the neoliberal order as the new political orthodoxy, it hadn't even been fully embraced by the United States (that happened when the Reagan administration came to power in 1981).
 
After 18 years of Tory neoliberalism under the governments of Margaret Thatcher and John Major, the United Kingdom was desperately in need of an adjustment back towards the policies of the progressive left in order to rebalance the economy away from the inevitable chaos of recklessly deregulated markets and rampant rentierism. The problems for the UK were that by 1997 neoclassical economics had become firmly established as the economic orthodoxy* and the Labour party leadership had been usurped by adherents of this extremist neoliberal ideology.

New Labour distracted the trade unions and the workers with innumerable bits of pseudo-socialist window dressing in order to disguise the fact that they had openly embraced an extremist right-wing ideology that had been confined to ugly US backed military dictatorships (like Chile, Argentina and Indonesia) just 20 years previously.
 
New Labour

Of course the preceding paragraphs must read like a familiar potted history to those that have followed politics carefully and noted the dramatic veer to the right that the Labour party undertook after the wilderness years of the 1980s, but many people still don't seem to have noticed that since the 1990s the New Labour party have occupied economic territory way to the right of the Tory administrations of the 50s and 60s.

There are clearly many people that would disagree with my historical explanation and maintain that New Labour hasn't utterly betrayed its left-wing roots, however firm evidence of this dramatic shift away from socialism can be seen in the actual economic policies enacted by the New Labour regime.

New Labour policies

Please consider whether any of the New Labour policies in the long list below are in any way compatible with the concept of socialism. As a quick refresher I'll provide a brief and uncontroversial definition of socialism before I begin the list of New Labour policies.

"Socialism is an economic system characterised by social ownership of the means of production and co-operative management of the economy. "Social ownership" may refer to cooperative enterprises, common ownership, state ownership, citizen ownership of equity, or any combination of these."

^{Refusal to renationalise the Tories dreadfully botched rail privatisation fiasco despite a 1997 manifesto pledge to do so, and a landslide parliamentary majority to do it with. It is worth noting that public opinion was strongly in favour of rail renationalisation, the grass roots of the Labour party even more so. However New Labour continued handing out vast taxpayer funded subsidies to keep the whole shambolic mess from systemic failure. New Labour barely even tried to reform the hopeless over-priced, over-crowded jumble the Tories had created, let alone doing what the public actually wanted and bringing the railways back under democratic control. Had New Labour been the slightest bit left wing they would have taken the public railways back off the bunch of rent-seeking corporate parasites that have been bleeding the taxpayer and the rail traveler dry ever since it was privatised.}
 
Deregulation of the financial sector which New Labour did in line with the bonkers right-wing neoclassical economic theory that deregulated markets tend towards equilibrium and stability.

Abandonment of democratic control over the Bank of England, which entailed handing control of the central bank to unelected private interests, giving them absolute control over monetary policy and even introducing specific regulations to prevent the democratically elected government from trying to even influence goings on at the central bank.

^{Refusal to renationalise or even effectively regulate the privatised utilities companies. This allowed corporate rentiers to rinse as much profit out of the general public through cartel like price inflation of their water and energy costs, whilst simultaneously overseeing a catastrophic abandonment of infrastructure investment.}

Building up an estimated £240 billion black hole of debt through the use of PFIs, which are catastrophically inefficient neoliberal economic alchemy schemes. PFIs allow private sector interests to milk the taxpayer for many times the actual construction value of an infrastructure project (school, hospital, bridge, council offices etc) for several decades after completion. PFI is basically a way of stealing from future generations in order to fund lavish, over-priced infrastructure projects. The concept of PFI was dreamt up by a bunch of conservatives as a kind of significantly more lucrative Privatisation 2.0, yet New Labour embraced PFI much more passionately than the Tory administration of John Major which preceded them.

Turning a blind eye to the rampant tax-dodging of multi-national corporations and the super rich minority. New Labour operated a hands-off approach to tax collection, allowing HMRC the freedom to engage in all kinds of back door deals with major corporations, costing the country £billions. This lax tax-collection regime has continued under the current government, but New Labour were just as guilty of turning a blind eye to the tax-dodging escapades of multinational corporations and the super rich minority as the Tories are now. New Labour bear a great deal of responsibility for the tax-dodging situation being as desperately bad as it has become nowadays.

Allowing the development of a vast housing Ponzi bubble built on unsustainable levels of debt accumulation. New Labour were quite happy to ride the feel good wave of false prosperity as the property bubble inflated and the public used home equity extraction to "live beyond their means". George Osborne is attempting exactly the same housing inflation trick with his Help to Buy property price inflation subsidies right now, which illustrates that New Labour and the Tories share remarkably similar economic territory, and that George Osborne is too thick to have even learnt probably the most important lesson of the 2007-08  financial sector meltdown; that debt fueled property price inflation does not represent the road to sustainable economic growth.

Refusal to invest in much needed social housing. The construction of social housing is a proven fiscal multiplier (the kind of government investment which returns more economic growth than it costs in government expenditure) yet New Labour refused to build. Instead they oversaw the mass privatisation of council housing stock into the hands of privately operated and undemocratic housing associations and continued the "sell it off on the cheap and prevent the proceeds being used to invest in new social housing" policy of the preceding Tory administration.

Refusal to regulate the Buy-to-Let slumlords. The use of rent controls, increased security of tenure for good tenants legislation, construction of new social housing and/or the application of decent living standards in private rents could easily have prevented some of the most egregious property rentiers from extracting so much wealth from the economy, and dampened unsustainable debt fueled house price inflation bubble into the bargain. New Labour did none of these things.

The introduction of "Workfare" schemes. Workfare (compelling the unemployed to abandon their labour rights and work for no wage under threat of absolute destitution) is a brazen assault on the value of labour. There is hardly a more glaring example of a political party having completely abandoned their roots than a party called "The Labour Party" introducing mandatory labour schemes that are nothing less than a direct assault on the value of labour.

The Privatisation of air traffic control, which was done in 1998. Left wing parties shouldn't go around privatising things, yet as we'll see, air traffic control was far from a unique case of New Labour privatisation.

Overseeing an exponential growth in corporate outsourcing contracts. New Labour lavished ever more (absurdly one sided) outsourcing contracts on private sector outsourcing parasites, which are companies that extract near enough 100% of their profits through milking government contracts (companies like G4S, Serco, Capita, Atos, A4E). There were countless massive beneficiaries of the corporate outsourcing boom that went on under the New Labour administration.

Planning to privatise the Royal Mail. Long before the Tories and Lib-Dems sold off Royal Mail for a fraction of its true market value New Labour had plans to do exactly the same. The fact that the majority of the UK public have consistently opposed Royal Mail privatisation, yet all three of the Westminster establishment parties have been strongly in favour of it illustrates that they are all adherents of a right-wing ideology that is at odds with the will of the public and the very concept of socialism alike.

Prison privatisations. New Labour oversaw the introduction of several privately operated prisons and detention centres. Although pseudo-communist regimes like the USSR have utilised forced prison labour (the Gulags), meaning that the left hardly has a clean sheet on the issue, the prison-industrial complex built on a foundation of private profit making prisons and lavishing corporations with virtually free prison labour is a particularly right wing beast. A right wing beast that New Labour were more than happy to ride.

Kick-starting the privatisation of the NHS. Alan Milburn was the New Labour health minister between 1999 and 2003. After introducing the legislation to well and truly kick open the door to NHS privatisation, Milburn walked straight onto the payroll of Bridgepoint Capital, a hedge fund that has capitalised on NHS privatisation. As with the Railways and the Royal Mail, the public is strongly opposed to NHS privatisation, yet New Labour went ahead and started privatising it anyway.

Kick starting the privatisation of the education system. By the time Labour left office in 2010 they had overseen the introduction of over 200 privately operated, yet taxpayer funded schools called academies. As soon as the Tories came to power they used the academies model to mass privatise the English education system. As of December 2013 a total of 3,522 schools had been turned into private academies. These schools (£billions worth of infrastructure) have been given away for free to be operated by unaccountable private sector interests, including several major Tory party donors. As is the case with many of the most egregiously right-wing policies of the Coalition government, the origins can be traced back to New Labour.

Introducing the ATOS administered WCA regime for the disabled.The Atos administered WCA regime of blatant discrimination and psychological torture for the disabled is one of the most appalling policies of the Tory led government, however, once again, the origins of the policy can be traced back to New Labour. Not only is the policy of employing a foreign corporate outsourcing giant to hound the disabled off their benefits a disgraceful policy, it is also distinctly right-wing. A left-wing government with a determination to abuse the disabled would surely have kept the "work" of imposing psychological torture on the disabled "in-house", rather than outsourcing it to a foreign corporation.

Attempting to introduce extremist copyright protection laws. One of the clearest indicators that New Labour were in the pockets of the corporations that any legitimate left-wing party would be working to protect us from was the fact that they spent the dying months of their 13 year rule pushing through some extremist copyright protection laws known as The Digital Economy Act. Parts of this legislation (which have subsequently been repealed) were designed to allow the copyright lobby to cut off a persons Internet for copyright violations, with no trial and no right of appeal.

Revocation of the right to trial by jury and other attacks on the justice system. Equal access to justice is definitely a left-wing principle, one which New Labour desperately tried to undermine with their revocation of the ancient British right to trial by jury and other reforms to the justice system such as their attacks on Legal Aid in 2006.
 
Privatisation of the HMRC property portfolio (into the hands of a company based in Bermuda for the purpose of dodging tax). This case is way beyond parody. In 2001 New Labour oversaw the sale and leaseback of the tax collection authority property portfolio to Mapeley Steps, a company based in Bermuda for the purpose of dodging tax! Not only was this yet another glaring illustration that New Labour behaved absolutely nothing like a socialist party would be expected to (socialist parties don't go around privatising everything they think they can get away with), it also demonstrated the shamefully lax attitude to tax-dodging corporations I mentioned earlier.
 
Backing the imperialist pretensions of the most fanatically right-wing government the US has ever suffered. The invasion of Iraq was a disaster. Admittedly imperialism in itself is not exclusive to right-wing regimes (Soviet imperialism) however it is quite easy to see that the invasion and occupation of Iraq was a policy dreamt up by a bunch of fanatically right-wing Neo-Conservatives in the US. When making character judgements it is often useful to consider the company that is kept, and the governments that the UK aligned with in order to carry out the invasion and occupation of Iraq included arguably the most right-wing government in US history, the fanatically right-wing (and corruption riddled) Partido Popular of Spain led by José María Aznar, Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia and the right-wing government of Japan led by Junichiro Koizumi (aside from pushing Japan into the invasion of Iraq he was also famous for privatising the Japanese postal service and regularly paying homage to Japanese war criminals).

Pseudo-Socialist window dressing
 
Even some of the seemingly left-wing policies introduced by New Labour during the early years of their 1997-2010 regime were not what they seemed.

National Minimum Wage. Even though the introduction of the national minimum wage was vehemently opposed by the Tory party, it was not much of a socialist policy because it was set at such an appallingly low level (especially for teenagers and young adults). Setting the minimum wage at such a low level legitimised businesses paying wages that are insufficient to keep their workers from suffering destitution.

Working Tax Credits. In order to stave off the absolute destitution of the working masses and their families, New Labour introduced Working Tax Credits, which are basically state subsidies for employers that pay poverty wages. If corporations were compelled to pay a living wage the need for these kinds of subsidies would be massively reduced. If we look a bit more closely at the economic ideas that underpin Working Tax Credits we can see that it is a particularly bureaucratic form of Negative Income Tax, which was an idea originally developed by the Tory politician Juliet Rhys-Williams and further promoted by Milton Friedman (the spiritual leader of the pseudo-economic ideology of neoliberalism).

Percentage of family income spent on childcare

Child Tax Credits. On the face of it Child Tax Credits also appear to be a left-wing policy, but if we compare them with a genuinely socialist policy such as free childcare for all working parents we can see that at best, Child Tax Credits are poorly conceived pseudo-socialist window dressing. The big problem with Child Tax Credits was that nothing was done to prevent child care providers from inflating their prices in order to soak up all of the tax credits they knew the parents were receiving plus a bit more for good measure. New Labour allowed the cost of childcare to spiral out of control, meaning that British parents pay out the highest childcare costs in the developed world as a percentage of net family income.

Miliband's Labour party

Some people seem to be under the impression that under the leadership of Ed Miliband, the Labour party have taken significant steps back towards the left. Once again, a look at some of their actual policies shows that they are certainly not a socialist party, and if they have shifted back towards the left, they have only taken a few almost imperceptibly small baby steps away from the course of orthodox neoliberalism.

Renationalisation. The Labour stance on renationalisation has not changed since Miliband came to power. The Labour leadership are vehemently opposed to it despite the fact that the vast majority of Labour voters want to see the NHS, the railways, the Royal Mail and the utilities companies renationlised and run as not-for-profit public services. It is not just Labour supporters that favour renationalisation, the public as a whole are strongly in favour or renationalisation and even a majority of Tory voters favour renationalisation of the energy companies and the rail network! After decades of egregious profiteering from the rail franchises and utilities companies it is beyond doubt that there is a strong public appetite for the explicitly socialist policy of returning these vital services to public ownership, yet all Ed Miliband seems capable of doing is offering the feeble pseudo-socialist policy of capping (already massively inflated) energy prices for a few months.
     
[evidence to support all of these assertions in the above paragraph can be seen in this article]

Trade Unions. Another indicator of Ed Miliband's determination to steer Labour away from socialism is his bizarrely cowardly reaction to the Falkirk debacle. Instead of turning the tables by focusing on the rogues gallery of tax-dodgers, banksters, asset-strippers, and vested interests that fund the Tory party, he meekly caved in and tried appease the right-wing press by attacking the trade unions (an utterly futile task, the right-wing press will never side with him). By doing this he allowed David Cameron to land punch after punch without reply. The trade unions are not perfect, but they are democratic organisations which represent millions of ordinary working people. If anyone seriously believes that trade union influence over the Labour party is worse than the dodgy characters that fund the Tory party, they should perhaps familiarise themselves with some of the biggest donors to the Tory party and how David Cameron's so called "Leaders Group" operates.

Workfare. In my view, the Labour stance on "Workfare" mandatory unpaid labour schemes is the single strongest indicator that the Labour party have utterly abandoned their left-wing credentials. The decision of the Labour party leadership to collude with Iain Duncan Smith to get his "I'm Above the Law" Retroactive Workfare Bill through parliament in a single day by whipping their MPs into abstaining on the vote was a betrayal of the people that Iain Duncan Smith unlawfully robbed and more importantly a betrayal of their left-wing roots so dire that they could probably have only have gone further by smearing excrement over the graves of Kier Hardie and Clement Attlee.

[A list of the few honourable Labour party MPs that defied Ed Miliband in order to vote against Iain Duncan Smith's disgraceful "I'm above the law" bill can be seen here]

Conclusion
 
The Labour party is no longer a party of the left. Embracing the neoclassical economic orthodoxy and positioning themselves ever so slightly to the left of the Tories - as they undeniably have - does not make them a socialist (or even vaguely left-wing) party.


 Another Angry Voice  is a not-for-profit page which generates absolutely no revenue from advertising and accepts no money from corporate or political interests. The only sources of income for  Another Angry Voice  are small donations from people who see some value in my work. If you appreciate my efforts and you could afford to make a donation, it would be massively appreciated.

More articles from
 ANOTHER ANGRY VOICE 

The economic case against tax-dodging
              
What is ... Wage Repression?
    
Workfare, neoclassical economics and tabloid mindsets
    
What do Tory donors get for their cash?
                   
Why Ed Miliband needs to toughen up

           
The Atos administered WCA regime: Psychological torture for the disabled

        

Michael Gove's ideological vandalism of the English education system

                     
The "Making Work Pay" fallacy
         
The economic case against tax-dodging
                                          
Who is to blame for the economic crisis