The ‘Labour’ Government’s Green Paper Pathways to Work: Reforming Benefits and Support to Get Britain Working amounts to a cranking up of more Tory-style persecution of the sick and disabled dressed up as ‘welfare reform’
With its reprehensible and pernicious Green Paper Pathways to Work the ‘Labour’ Government has not only now betrayed the sick and disabled, it has also betrayed its own core values and historical purpose, in short, it has sold its soul to capital and established interests—and for what? To destroy the last remnants of the welfare state which the Labour Party created in the first place? To attempt outflanking the Tories and Reform on the right of politics, flanked as it is with blimpishly ubiquitous Union Jacks. For any right-of-centre votes ‘Labour’ hopes to get out of all this, there will be a haemorrhaging of left and centre-left votes that will go either to the Greens or Lib Dems and seriously jeopardize their chance of returning to power come the next general election, possibly (and terribly) opening the way for Reform. That is what happens when you offer no progressive alternative and strip a nation of hope.
The ‘Labour’ Party is now simply just another neoliberal party with no discernible principles or policies that can be interpreted as centre-left, nor even as socially democratic. Starmer, a political hollow man, appears to be addicted to betrayal. This despicable Green Paper is just the latest of those betrayals. Starmer already betrayed his former leader Jeremy Corbyn who promoted him to a position whereby it was much easier for him to run for leader subsequently; having snatched the leadership he then when about reversing all his previous centre-left positions, betraying the Labour membership and all those who had believed him, and thereby betraying the entire Labour Movement; and then suddenly became a convert to the spurious anti-Semitism smears against Corbyn orchestrated by the neoliberal right and Israel lobbies of the party in order to discredit the party of the time and thus lose general elections—anything to prevent a socialist, who also happened to be pro-Palestinian, becoming prime minister.
So now we have a hyper-patriotic political hollow man as prime minister, backed up by a robotic neoliberal George Osborne-tribute act in Rachel Reeves, neither of whom should even be in the Labour Party, let alone leading it. Many are rightly asking, what is the point of ‘Labour’ being in Government if they’re just going to drive through worse welfare cuts than even the Tories? Not only that, but the anti-claimant rhetoric has been put up a few more notches under the Starmerites (while, heinously, Health Secretary Wes Streeting has been openly claiming that mental illness is being “over-diagnosed”—what he means is, the fact we’re in a mental health epidemic is simply inconvenient for the Government). Chancellor Rachel Reeves has emphasised in her sting-in-the-tail Spring Statement which included yet further cuts to disability benefits that ‘Labour’ is “the party of work”—perhaps they should rebrand themselves as the Party for Work and Pensions…
Fortunately there has been widespread condemnation of ‘Labour’’s Green Paper; moreover, respected sources are already pointing out, chillingly, that publishing data and figures on how much is ‘lost’ to the economy by supporting disabled people who cannot work has echoes of the “useless eaters” propaganda of 1930s Nazi Germany which led to the Aktion T4 euthanasia programme (this was among the many themes of two consecutive polemical poetry collections of mine: Tan Raptures (Smokestack Books, 2017), and, more markedly, Shabbigentile (Culture Matters, 2019), in which, in a number of poems, I made the case for comparisons between the terminology of 1930s Nazi propaganda and that used against today’s disabled and unemployed by politicians and right-wing ‘red top’ newspapers (a recent example of this was when right-wing mouthpiece Isabel Oakeshott casually referred to disabled claimants as “parasites” on the reprehensible gutter press channel Talk TV), as well as documenting the Mendelian/Malthusian/eugenicist origins of much modern day welfare and disability policy under both New Labour and the Tories. In this disturbing context, is it an entire coincidence that this same ‘Labour’ Government is already pushing through legislation for assisted dying? This is a chilling legislative juxtaposition which demands the utmost urgent scrutiny and calling out because it potentially betokens an even more deeply menacing type of ‘pathway’.
What is patently clear is that neoliberalism, whether under the Tories or under ‘Labour’, is neoableism: it denies disability, in fact, it can’t seem to tolerate it, it ‘downgrades’ mental health diagnoses, solely for ‘economic’ reasons, to scrape some more pennies from under the mouldering settees of the poorest households—while letting the rich completely off the hook. (The irony of course is that it’s neoliberal capitalism with its rapacious competition and pressures of precarious employment that actually causes much mental illness in society, particularly among the young; the big pharmaceuticals mop up on the consequences, profiting on suffering but only patching up the conditions (sometimes arguably even making them worse)). But yet disability is a problem for neoliberalism because neoliberals judge everyone and everything by so-called ‘economic activity’, we’re all just numbers on their balance sheets. As the adage goes, they know the price of everything but the value of nothing. (Including the fact that there are many other forms of societal contribution other than the purely economic: there is volunteering, and caring, an entire ‘shadow sector’ of altruism which is rarely if ever recognised or praised). By also targeting PIP (personal independence payments) the ‘Labour’ Government is also penalising countless claimants who are actually in some form of work purely because said benefit, which is non-means tested, enables them to be. Stripping any claimants of PIP therefore will inescapably produce the opposite results to those mooted by ministers: it will tip people onto the scrapheap of unemployment and impoverishment.
But they do know the cost of cutting already meagre disability benefits, because they’re sitting on masses of evidence of the tens of thousands of premature deaths due to the last fourteen years of relentless benefit cuts, reassessments and sanctions regimes. Last year all MPs were sent copies of Disability News Service’s John Pring’s compendious polemic on the DWP: The Department: How a Violent Government Bureaucracy Killed Hundreds and Hid the Evidence (Pluto Press, 2024)–surely some of MPs must have thumbed through it by now…? Prior to that, our own anthology The Brown Envelope Book (Caparison/Culture Matters, 2021) managed to get a mention in Hansard by a sympathetic Labour MP recommending that then-DWP Secretary Thérèse Coffey take a read of its gritty accounts of traumatic experiences of disabled claimants through work capability assessments. And for years now, John McArdle’s Black Triangle Campaign has been publicly protesting the shocking scale of fatalities of Tory welfare ‘reforms’, particularly during the scabrous Osborne-Iain Duncan Smith regimes (as has Disabled People Against Cuts).
Politicians of both main neoliberal parties only want to push the sick and disabled to participate in society in terms of being in some form of employment and thus ‘economically active’—so on their terms, not ours. They have no interest in encouraging us to participate in society in any other more authentic cultural sense, such as in the arts sector, where we can have freedom of self-expression and self-representation in a creative sense—and no doubt such an attitude is partly informed by an apprehension that such artistic autonomy might often produce creative political statements and campaigning publications such as The Brown Envelope Book, or the polemical-satirical cartoons of ‘Crippen’ at Disability Arts Online, or the mentoring and publication of socially marginalised and ‘underrepresented’ writers and artists, through such organisations as Creative Future, Survivors’ Poetry, and, of course, our own Culture Matters. In fact, politicians probably don’t want sick and disabled people to participate in the arts at all. There is a column in, of all places, Vogue magazine, titled ‘Labour’s Devastating Cuts To Disability Benefits Are A Blow To Us All’ by one Lotte Jackson, a disabled writer, expressing similar sentiments, and such a high profile mainstream placement demonstrates just how widespread opposition is to the Green Paper. (And politicians always fail to mention the voluntary sector, where many sick and disabled claimants put in unpaid hours in service to their local communities).
What’s interesting of course is that in all their various figures governments never highlight the fact that millions of unpaid carers throughout the country actually save millions (possibly billions) for the state through their selfless duties. The conclusion, then, is that just as with the Tories, our Neoliberal ‘Labour’ Government are basically saying to us: if you are sick or disabled, mentally or physically, you must continue to justify your existence and atone for your ‘economic inactivity’ by either finding some mythical complementary employment, or precarious work, or if not, lose your benefits and starve to death, or be driven to suicide, like countless claimants before you. ‘Labour’ seems set to balance the books of the nation—which apparently our welfare state is “holding back” (DWP Secretary Liz Kendall)—on the graves of the sick and disabled.
That Starmer, with a straight face (though he always has that), calls this Green Paper a “moral duty”, when it is demonstrable proof of his administration’s complete lack of a moral compass (see ‘Labour says benefit reforms are a ‘moral mission’ – it looks more like moral panic’ by my brother James Morrison, author of Scroungers: Moral Panics and Media Myths), shouldn’t entirely surprise us, since all immoral policies pre-empt their inevitable charge by claiming themselves to be the opposite (one’s reminded of Netanyahu’s claim that the Israeli army (IDF) is the most “moral army” in the world, which (double)speaks for itself, and flies in the face of the United Nations conventions, just as the UK’s horrendous human rights-trampling welfare ‘reforms’ have done and continue to).
Not only is Starmer’s ‘Labour’ just as cold, uncompassionate, bullying and brutal as the Tories it replaced, but it’s not even original: it’s simply piling on the vast yawning graveyard left behind after fourteen years of mass ‘social murder’ perpetrated by the previous Tory Government. By accelerating the war on the disabled, and on the poorest of society, the ‘Labour’ Party is also accelerating its own ideological death, and all of this will only play into the hands of Reform—or maybe come the next election, it will be Starmer’s Blue ‘Labour’, with its ubiquitous Union Jacks, rather than the Tories, that will be joined in a Coalition by Farage’s rabble of xenophobes…? It wouldn’t make much difference either way: both main parties are two cheeks of the same neoliberal arse, while Reform represent the neofascist wart that will in time fix itself to one of them.
Just how much more do the sick and disabled of our society have to take? We bore the brunt of fourteen years of Tory austerity and welfare cuts to now find that a ‘Labour’ Government is going to only intensify this ‘permanent’ austerity and the depth and scope of disability benefits cuts. And what of the young? Not only have they grown up in austerity, but they have had to also contend with two years of sporadic lockdowns due to the pandemic, which inescapably contributed to a surging mental health pandemic among them… and what does this ‘Labour’ Government do in response? It argues that mental illness is being “over diagnosed” (!), particularly among the young, and rhetorically downgrades the impact of anxiety and depression, both of which are seriously debilitating conditions. This is governmental gaslighting at a whole new level and it must be fought at all costs.
Alan Morrison
ANTHOLOGY CALL OUT
Faced with this latest and potentially catastrophic assault on the sick and disabled of this nation, Caparison and Culture Matters now call for poems or short prose pieces on the theme of disability, the benefits system, and, in particular, in response to the proposed Green Paper, from the perspectives of claimants and those sympathetic to their plight, to be submitted for a forthcoming anthology, The White Envelope Book: Poems in Opposition to the Pathways to Work Green Paper, please send your poem/s, along with a brief biog, to: books@culturematters.org.uk
