Current Coalition Governments Approach to Welfare Reform - Essay Example

Topic: Current Coalition government’s approach to welfare reform XXXXXXXX XXXXXX XXXXXX XXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXX i) Introduction Welfare is one of the most contested issues in British politics from the post World War II period. To have an impassionate understanding of the welfare in Britain is not an easy option since the question of welfare is not only enveloped by different competing ideologies but also it has become an in its own right. In this context, one can better understand welfare through critique of the ideologies of welfare. As a critique of ideology, I would like to use certain insights of Marxism in order to de-mystify the ever-intensifying debate on welfare. Moreover, to delineate the welfare track of the present coalition government, I would be drawing primarily from the Department of Work and Pensions (2010) document “Universal credit: welfare that works”. The document has invented a category of worklessness to describe the condition of people on benefit. I would like to criticise this notion of worklessness from the Marxist standpoint of reserve army of proletariat and unpaid labour. Also, the coalition document arguments that there is no enough work incentives in the present system of welfare provisions. However, the kind of work incentives are on offer by the coalition government is immaterial for the people who are already doing unpaid work both within and without the households. Coalition government creates a myth of welfare dependency as if people have an inherent motive to be on welfare than on jobs. Here, my aim is to look at the trajectory of UK’s welfare system in brief, to show that the present Coalition government policy has drawn much from the neoliberal ideology of the New Right and New Labour and to offer a Marxist critique of the postulates of the policy. ii) The coalition ideology of anti-welfarism Coalition government document “Universal credit: welfare that works” is supposed to bring in a “fundamental welfare reform” (2010, p.2). According to the neoliberal logic, the welfare cuts improves work incentives by ensuring that individual keep more of their incomes from work by introducing a smooth and transparent reduction of their benefits. The rationale is to improve work incentives by getting rid of the wrong features of the prevailing system. The reduction of benefits leads to a reduction in interaction with agencies thus smoothing the transition to work. The customers will therefore be in a better position to understand their entitlements, making it easy to administer and reducing fraud. The need for fundamental reform is constructed based on two ideological assumption; namely, the existing welfare policy a) hampers economic growth and b) promotes welfare dependency. In brief, the need to welfare reform arises from the ‘fact’ that communities remain in poverty or getting poorer in spite of the huge spending on welfare provisions. The rationale of the ‘new’ system is to ensure that there are returns from works done and so to encourage people to see that work is the main outlet from poverty. This will improve the people livelihoods thus raising the country’s per capita income. At first, the document has replaced joblessness with worklessness. Even linguistically, it is a twisting of a word. Worklessness is not equal to joblessness. Joblessness is a perennial condition of the capitalist economy as capitalism tends to keep an “industrial reserve army” in the Marxist parlance. It is the Coalition government’s ideological stand against welfare that makes them to go for equating joblessness with worklessness. The portrayal of welfare dependency as the reproduction of poverty and joblessness does not have much sociological merit. It is the Coalition government’s ideological inclination that leads to them to see the poor as lazy and passive. iii) The welfare trajectory The post World War II Britain was a place of reconciliation. There emerged a class consensus which intended to reduce the class conflicts in the society by providing welfare to large number of population. Reinstating the communitarian position, Shapiro (2007, p. 29) points out that “under today’s circumstances in Western democracies some degree of individual liberty may need to be sacrificed to strengthen the bonds of community”. The welfare policy in the United Kingdom which was formulated by the Beveridge welfare state after the devastating was to ensure the survival of the community. However, the British welfare state thus emerged was not a communitarian but a libertarian one as it favoured the market oriented policies in the liberal framework. The liberal welfare state emerged in the United Kingdom was markedly different from that of the United States as the British system “had some more socialistic characteristics” (Powell, 1999, p. 2). On the other hand, one could argue that the British welfare system was based on the idea of the mixed economy. Therefore many commentators have argued that “Britain is an odd mixture of the socialist and liberal types” (ibid). Unpaid labour was central to the maintenance of such system, especially that of the women as “the social settlement of the Beveridge welfare state is based on particular assumptions regarding the ideological triangle of nation family and work” argues Powell (1999, p.2). Here, Taylor-Gooby (2009) the ideal citizen was always the mainstream White male and others were excluded to under)paid labour of different sorts. Then, the rolling back of the welfare state was initiated with Thatcherism and Third Way. iv) The continuity from New Right and New Labour The anti-welfarist policies of the Coalition government in the UK are not happening in isolation or as historical exception. Welfare cuts was the defining feature of Thatcherism as “much of the politics of welfare in the 1980s revolved around cuts and restrictions in public spending designed to allow tax cuts, particularly reductions in the rates of income tax (Hills, 1998, p. 2). The New Labour under Tony Blair too pursued the Thatcherite policies of tax cuts for the rich and welfare cuts for the poor (Walker, 2004). Tony Blair’s famous Third Way inspired by the equally famous sociologist Anthony Giddens actually did not create a middle path between social democracy and liberal democracy as it promised. On the other hand, it simply became tool for capitalist class war over the majority of the working population which is composed of both the wage-earners and the wageless. At present, the coalition battle over welfare state has become more symbolic as there nothing much left in the welfare state to roll back. v) Marxist critique As Arrighi (1990, p.30) points out while elucidating on the Marxian idea of the reserve army of proletariat, “the means available to the bourgeoisie to ‘feed’, that is, to reproduce the Reserve Army are reduced, while the incentive to employ proletarian labour as a means to augment capital also decreases and, ceteris paribus, the Reserve Army increases”. Therefore, the point is that coupled with recession and inability/unwillingness to control the finance sector, the Coalition government is unable to either feed the people who are reserved to labour or employ them in jobs which would ensure them a decent wage. Contrary to the coalition government’s description of jobless as the invented category of workless, people on welfare especially women do work although it is unpaid. Elson (2005, p. 6) right asserts that “there are different proportions and forms of paid and unpaid work in the four sectors of the economy. The paid work may be formal or informal; and the unpaid work may be carework, volunteer work, subsistence work, or unremunerated market work”. Many retail giants have shown a tendency to use the unpaid voluntary labour in place of the paid jobs. The point is that rather than cutting down welfare, the government must focus on creating jobs with wages. The welfare dependency is vague term that hides more than reveals. The welfare recipients are not merely passive spectators of the social processes. They do contribute through various forms of unpaid labour and voluntary labour. It means that they have role in the extended reproduction of labour in general. It is not that they are not working but they are construed to be workless by the coalition neoliberal ideology. They are not actually leading workless life but wageless life. Without the wageless lives of the ‘unemployed workers’ social reproduction is not possible. According to Denning (2010, p. 8), “rather than seeing the bread-winning factory worker as the productive base on which a reproductive superstructure is erected, imagine the dispossessed proletarian household as a wageless base of subsistence labour—the ‘women’s work’ of cooking, cleaning and caring—which supports a superstructure of migrant wage seekers who are ambassa­dors, or perhaps hostages, to the wage economy”. vi) Conclusion Welfare is not only a contested ideology but also contested by different ideologies such as liberalism, feminism and Marxism. The present coalition policy is guided by anti-wefarism which sees the welfare recipients as passive receivers of social processes. It does not recognise the realty of their unpaid labour. By branding their life with the category of worklessness, the coalition government closes eyes at the larger picture of joblessness and unpaid voluntary labour which is wrecking the lives of those who are willing to work hard. Incentives to work must come from and through job, not through welfare cuts. Reference List Arrighi, G. (1990) Marxist Century, American Century: The Making and Remaking of the World Labour Movement, in S. Amin, G. Arrighi, A.G. Frank and I. Wallerstein, Transforming the Revolution: Social Movements and the World System, New York, Monthly Review Press, pp. 29-63. Department for Work and Pensions (2010) ‘Universal credit: welfare that works’, available at http://www.dwp.gov.uk/docs/universal-credit-full-document.pdf Denning, M. (2010) Wageless life, New Left Review, vol. 66. pp. 79-97. Elson, D. (2005) “Unpaid Work: Creating Social Wealth or Subsidizing Patriarchy and Private Profit?” The Levy Economics Institute, Presentation to Forum on Social Wealth, Political Economy Research Institute, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. pp.1-16. Available at http://www.peri.umass.edu/fileadmin/pdf/dpe/fsw/Diane.pdf Hills, (1998) Thatcherism, New Labour and the Welfare State, CASE paper, London: London School of Economics. Powell, M. (ed.) (1999) New Labour, new welfare state?: the third way in British social policy, Bristol: Policy Press  Shapiro, D. (2007) Is the welfare state justified?, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press  Taylor-Gooby, P. (2009) Reframing social citizenship, Oxford: Oxford University Press  Walker, R. (2004) Social Security and Welfare: Concepts and Comparisons, Maidenhead: Open University Press. Read More