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From Socialist Worker, No. 106, 25 January 1969, p. 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
THE LONG STRUGGLE of the working class for a better life finds its expression in the ‘Welfare State’.
But current campaigns for higher family allowances, pensions and supplementary benefit have little support in the labour movement.
Why is the Welfare State unpopular with the workers?
One reason is the success of Tory propaganda, which that the government is ‘smothering initiative’, and encouraging idleness.
But workers only accept Tory ideology when it appears to explain their own – justified-resentment at the way the Welfare State treats them.
The origin of the Welfare State goes back to the Liberal government before World War I.
Scared by the growth of the Labour Party and the militancy of the workers led by Ben Tillett, Tom Mann and Jim Larkin, Lloyd George tried to buy off the working class by introducing old age pensions, unemployment and sickness insurance, and other reforms.
But if the workers inspired the reforms, they did not control them. Lloyd George as able to establish the ‘contributory principle’ in which the poor paid for their own social security through compulsory deductions from the wage packet.
The scheme was so full of loopholes that the very idea of ‘national insurance’ became unpopular.
In practice – because workers were ‘out of benefit’ or ‘not covered’, or could not live on the benefit provided – few of the unemployed, old or sick escaped the Means Test.
This rotten scheme was supported by the Labour Party in parliament. Only five Left-wingers, including George Lansbury saw through Lloyd George’s swindle.
Labour’s Welfare State of 1945–51 was not basically different. Once again, the real cause of the reforms was fear of the working class.
After 30 years of war and unemployment, a section of the ruling class decided that the people must be appeased.
As Quintin Hogg said in parliament in 1943: ‘If you do not give the people reform, they are going to give you social revolution.’
The Tories were discredited, and entangled with vested interests such as the British Medical Association.
Only Labour could do the job of saving capitalism. Using troops to break the dock strike and jailing dockers’ leaders was the other side of the coin.
Labour’s Welfare State was nothing but a watered-down version of the wartime plan produced by the Liberal academic Sir William Beveridge. The level of benefits was fixed so low that a large number of people became dependent on the Means Test, renamed National Assistance.
And the contributory principle was still the basis of the system. Instead of redistributing wealth from the rich to the poor, the workers were to save up for a rainy day by compulsory insurance contributions.
In 1938, 9.5 per cent of the national income went on social security. By 1951, the proportion had risen to just 11 per cent.
The Welfare State was created by middle-class politicians who are basically afraid of the working class.
The workers have less control over the welfare bureaucracy than over the factories in which they work, where at least they have trade unions and shop steward committees to protect them.
The first job of the bureaucracy is to prevent abuse.
Since the Welfare State is only a service for the poor – if you have money there is always the private sector, in education, health, housing and social security – there is no need to throw money away.
Read Richard Titmuss on Supplementary Benefit Offices: ‘There are ... some offices which take one right back to the Dickensian poor law. They are literally slums ...’ The staff, some of whom earn less than the people they are dealing with, make their decisions according to a secret rule-book, the A Code, whose contents have never been revealed, even to social workers.
The administration of rebate schemes helps illustrate the nature of the Welfare State. Again, the main priority is to prevent abuse.
Take the Greater London Council’s rent rebate scheme. The applicant has to sign a declaration which includes words:
The declaration continues:
The GLC should not have been surprised when, out of 43,000 tenants expected to apply by the end of July, only 15,000 did so. And this is only one example of underclaiming of means-tested benefits.
This then is the Welfare State. Inadequate benefits, many of them subject to means tests, a heartless bureaucracy and the lot paid for by the working class, in compulsory contributions and taxes on consumption.
Understandably, the workers lack enthusiasm for schemes which merely tamper with the system, however worthy some of the schemes may be.
The working class movement must demand:
Some of the ways in which these aims can be achieved will be outlined in future articles
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Last updated on 30 October 2020