The Party of Labour Wants to Get Britain Back to Work

'Get back to work!', or when mute compulsion is no longer so quiet...

The Party of Labour, an institution once birthed to defend and advance the interests of workers and the poor within the confines of British capitalism, has just launched one of the gravest attacks on the working class in its history. The political organisation that introduced the National Health Service is now on the frontline of pulverising the conditions of the country’s poorest, most vulnerable citizens.

The Labour government’s proposals to cut £6 billion from welfare benefits, pushing eligibility criteria in a vastly more punitive direction and ridding 1 million people of health benefits, is a direct assault on a growing proportion of the nation’s popular classes. Some 23 percent of the working-age population claim they have a disability which affects their everyday life, up from 16 percent a decade ago. In the country’s poorest areas, places such as Blackpool, Merthyr Tydfil, Hartlepool and Great Yarmouth, one in six adults are claiming sickness benefits. In my city, Stoke-on-Trent, the number is as high as 14 percent.

Depression, anxiety and musculoskeletal disorders reign high among a population that has been forced to face decades of what GPs and other medical practitioners have termed “Shit Life Syndrome”. The tortures of capitalist “enshittification” - endless work, constant insecurity, paying through the nose for everything - have rebounded back on the bodies and psyches of working class people with devastating force. To cope with this fundamental problem, of great detriment to the goals of economic maximisation, Britain spends £65 billion on sickness benefits. A greater sum than the nation’s defence budget, over triple the amount spent on policing and well over ten times what is spent on the asylum system, it is of great concern to Britain’s political elites that so much money is spent on preserving forms of life outside of the labour relation.

Whilst the welfare state is unquestionably a critical cog in capitalism’s repressive state apparatus, Labour chiefs, like their Tory predecessors, are not remotely convinced that the Department for Work and Pensions is fulfilling its disciplinary obligations. Figures from January showed 2.4 million incapacity benefits claimants now have no work conditions, up 50 per cent in five years. According to the Office for National Statistics, there are 580,000 economically inactive people who have never worked, an increase from 470,000 six years ago. Of this cohort, the number of people in their twenties who have never worked and are inactive due to sickness has doubled since 2016. This growth in worklessness terrifies the ruling class. As does the distinct possibility, reported by The Times, that half of claims for Britain’s main benefit will be for poor health by the end of the parliamentary term, with the cost of payments for sickness topping £100 billion a year for the first time.

The government proposals to deal with this starkly capitalist dilemma, outlined in the ‘Pathways to Work: Reforming Benefits and Support to Get Britain Working’ Green Paper, include the merger of Job Seekers’ Allowance (JSA) and Employment Support Allowance (ESA) into a new unemployment insurance scheme. This would move the latter squarely under the rubric of the former, which is terrifying given that I applied for JSA at the beginning of the pandemic and was effectively told my chequered work history and previous benefit claims prevented me from receiving it. Universal Credit (UC) will be subject to “cost neutral” reforms, with increases to the basic rate but freezes to health top-ups and cuts to new applicants. As the New Economics Foundation has highlighted, closing the gap in monthly payments by £100 would result in a £73-a-month cut to each recipient of sickness and disability benefits. Additionally, as Chris Smythe has highlighted on X, increasing the basic rate by £64 a month is a lot less than the current £417 gap between the basic and top rate, and young people under the age of 22 will likely not be entitled to UC incapacity top-ups at all. The introduction of ‘Right to Try’, a lone positive in an otherwise brutal policy rollout, will prevent benefits from being removed or benefits recipients from having to restart claims whilst beginning a new job. And the hated Work Capability Assessment (WCA) will be scrapped, with all health benefits to go through Personal Independence Payments (PIP) by 2028.

Principally however, the government will modify the conditionalities inscribed into applications for PIP. Until now, applicants are given points based on their ability to carry out everyday tasks. How many points one gets during the application process determines whether you are paid between £1,500 and £9,600 a year. Under incoming plans, claimants will be required to score at least four points on at least one activity to qualify. A threshold, again according to Chris Smythe, that “would include those who need help cooking a meal, but exclude those who can use a microwave.” Similarly, “needing help to wash your hair or your body below the waist would not meet the new threshold while needing help to wash your upper body would.” If you score four points on these tests, you would also need another four to qualify for the lower rate of payment and another eight for the higher rate. Given that people with mental illness usually score fewer points across the board, capable of carrying out some activities but with structured support such as reminders to eat and wash (two points respectively), they would be severely punished under the new guidance. When one takes into account that mental health makes up 37 percent of new PIP awards, an increase of 28 percent since 2019, it is clear that the changes to the points system are geared towards slowing mental health claims. As if to add insult to injury, the Green Paper has expressed clear intent to increase face-to-face reassessments, further tying the delivery of health benefits into the government’s plans to reduce the economic inactivity rate.

In a recent press release on the system’s dysfunction, the DWP expressed the notion that claimants are hurried into the “binary categories of either ‘fit for work’ or ‘not fit for work’ through the Work Capability Assessment”, with those placed in the latter category given no employment support or “further engagement from the system”. As I have written elsewhere, this is a constant refrain of those who want to shrink the amount of money those on benefits are entitled to, whilst rapidly building upon the conditionalities claimants face. Besides the fact that it is false - there are other categories in which people are expected to engage with employment support whilst not applying for work - it is also an argument that fits a particular agenda. The state wants to erase this middle category from the public debate because it’s a coterie of unwell people facing tighter conditionalities who do not have especially higher rates of returning to work. Crucially, Labour and the DWP want to frame the question around the reduction of financial support and accelerated conditionalities as conducive to moving greater numbers of the sick and disabled into the labour market.

The government is intent on reducing the welfare bill, cutting the incomes of over a million, up to £5,000-a-year per person in some cases, hitting those with depression, anxiety or neurological disorders hardest, whilst also worsening the living standards of people suffering arthritis, cancer, cardiovascular disease and much else. These have been the terms of an ongoing moral panic which has been rapidly stealing the attention of Britain’s elites. The Financial Times, asks “What went wrong with the UK’s welfare system?” The Daily Mail reports - and then subsequently removes - a piece on “The Great Benefits Con”. Fraser Nelson has vocalised on Channel 4’s Dispatches his intention that the poor try and go it alone, breaking their dependency on the labyrinthine welfare system by entering a hostile labour market with no state support. Andrew Marr dreads the long-term consequences of a generation not acculturated enough to the habits of work discipline. And Charlie Mullins, millionaire buffoon, decries youthful scroungers on live television from the comfort of his holiday home abroad, demanding the government “stop pussyfooting around!”

This particular moral panic, as Stuart Hall and his co-authors identified in Policing the Crisis, typifies a frenetic anxiety about a real set of crises rocking our rulers into a titillating dread which speaks volumes about their inability to reproduce the power structures. And like the moral panic over ‘muggings’ identified and theorised by Hall, et al., today’s nervousness over worklessness expresses concern over a set of competing but congruent crises, fixating on the realm of worklessness and welfare.

Namely but by no means solely, Britain’s decline as a capitalist power, its stagnant growth and receding productivity mirrors an ailing, ageing population exhausted from the labours of a political economy that is all work and no pay. Yet, elite disquiet being unleashed upon the nation’s poorest dovetails with financial and imperialist necessity. On the one hand, Rachel Reeves and Keir Starmer have walked their administration into a set of fiscal traps, taking their lead from an austerian Treasury, cutting the state, further opening the NHS and other public bodies up to private hands and asset managers, desperate to avoid further tax rises. And on the other hand, in the one sphere of leadership where Keir Starmer looks remotely comfortable (except when he’s sat next to Donald Trump of course), Labour are exerting a great deal of energy in trying to communicate an image of Britain as a relevant imperial power, capable of bridging the gap between the US and Europe, leading the charge towards rearmament in this world of rising imperialist rivalry and increased military spending.

It is in this amalgamation that the moral panic, taking on a life of its own and coalescing together these distinct elements of British decline, finds its purest form in the Labour Party’s assault on millions of welfare claimants. Since the inception of neoliberalism, workers have struggled over the terms of their own disablement. There is no question that millions of workers have gone on the dole because of disabilities, injury and sickness often caused or inflamed by the drudgeries of capitalism. But there have also been cohorts of proletarians who have sought, in what Harry Braverman in his classic Labour and Monopoly Capital coined as “subterranean streams of resentment and resistance”, to implicitly regulate their relationship to exploitation and eke out more money from the state. In the eighties, sympathetic GPs put redundant workers bruised by defeat and the shop floor onto invalidity benefits because they paid better than regular claims. Today, workers, young, old and middle-aged seek escapes from an increasingly hostile labour market which subjects them to poverty, humiliation, anxiety and oppression. Labour’s reforms, from workplace MOTs and weight-loss drugs to job coaches on mental health wards, represent an attempt to respond to these sick proletarians, redrawing the boundaries of disablement further in capital’s favour, producing hardworking, pliable, cost-effective subjects.

Wes Streeting’s claim that he fears there are sections of the population who are being “written off”, projecting himself and this government as the protectors of the abandoned, elides the reality that his party is plotting a course that will create renewed and reinvigorated forms of abandonment for far larger cohorts of the population. Streeting, whose plan to court pharmaceutical companies into shedding the British population of its “widening waistbands”, is chomping at the bit to reduce the state too, planning to deepen privatisation and create a two-tier NHS. His argument that there is an “overdiagnosis” problem when it comes to mental health and neurological disorders epitomises Labour’s dual health and welfare priorities to shrink the public state as they force people back into work. It seems, if one is to take seriously the facts around Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) for example, that severe underdiagnosis, waiting lists of up to a year, and 1 in 9 rates of diagnosis, are all unimportant realities to this administration. What is clear is that Streeting and his allies will adopt a punitive, harmful approach to the explosion in people taking their mental health seriously, putting the maxims of economic growth and productivity over our health.

Whilst Angela Rayner, Ed Miliband and even Rachel Reeves have voiced timid noises over the scale of the cuts to welfare, Liz Kendall’s beef with the Treasury was not over the scale of the cuts but what to do with the saved money, arguing that the money should be used to initiate back-to-work policies. The Treasury, on the other hand, wants to keep the money to avoid further cuts and tax rises. They are backed by the Prime Minister and vast legions of Labour MPs, principally the judiciously named ‘Get Britain Working’ Parliamentary faction. The institution of Labourism, once founded to protect workers within the habitus of capitalism, is now predominantly committed to imposing an austerian productivism on those it historically represented. If the Party of Labour is unflinchingly wedded to hard work, the question remains who is committed to freedom, leisure and life?

The government and their allies in the ruling class will tell you that growing sections of the population are more and more trapped by a Kafkaesque welfare system that stops people from working and forces them into dependency on the taxpayer. They say that employment, selling your labour for a crap wage under rubbish conditions, throwing away hours of your life for something you are compelled to do, is liberatory and fulfilling. Some people may buy this. Many individuals who are either lucky enough to have an actually nice job or unfortunate enough to experience the worst sides of Britain’s repressive welfare state, may see work as a means to happiness. But this is the real trap. In a country where 38% of Universal Credit (UC) claimants are in low-paying work, where the disabled are demonised for claiming health benefits but simultaneously excluded from significant parts of the labour market, and where politicians claim they want to support us but preside over a state apparatus which surveils us, impoverishes us, and in some cases, even kills us, we need a fundamentally different vision of work, welfare and the social sphere.

Keir Starmer insists there is a “moral case” behind one of the biggest assaults on the working class in my lifetime. It is a moralistic worldview which says you must destroy your body to make money for someone else because if you do not, you will not even be entitled to the pittance handed to you by a punitive state. We must insist upon an emancipatory vision of reduced working time, democratic welfarism, public health free at the point of use, and community spaces for leisure, recovery and betterment. We will not get these demands with this government, so we, the sick proletarians, must organise for them ourselves.