Abstract
It is easy to see now that the introduction of a comprehensive welfare state after 1945 was no permanent settlement. It appeared then, after the devastation of Europe, the Communist seizure of Eastern Europe, the revolution in China and the dissolution of the European empires, most countries of which affixed socialism to their banners of liberation, that capitalism, if it were to survive, would have to make some more humane accommodation with the people.
That the welfare state was only a temporary expedient is now evident. The unravelling began at least 35 years ago, with Thatcher’s demolition of the industrial base itself; and it has proceeded with increasing velocity with the current Coalition’s present triumphal state-shrinking rhetoric.
Mary O’Hara has chronicled this process with unsparing lucidity in Austerity Bites, having spent a year interviewing individuals, community activists and in particular, victims of the most comprehensive assault on the welfare state anyone living has yet seen: people with disability, women, ethnic minorities, the unemployed, the young and those who sometimes defy categorisation – the frightened and defeated, those unable to compete.
She looks at the now-familiar characteristics of an ideologically-aggravated poverty throughout the land – food poverty (and its twin, commerciogenic malnutrition), the effect of cuts to benefits, the introduction of the so-called ‘bedroom tax’, and the use of ‘sanctions’ against those insufficiently zealous in their search for (often non-existent) work. ‘Sanctions’ are more usually imposed by the democratic West on ‘outlaw states’ – Iran, North Korea, Putin’s Russia: calculated to bring them into line. The application of this term to the poor within Britain is the most transparent expression of government contempt for them, since ‘sanctions’ aim to coerce them into the ‘proper behaviour’ it desires to press upon outside ‘enemies’ of the State. O’Hara describes the increase in domestic indebtedness (despite ‘deficit-reduction’ programmes), and how poor people depend upon unscrupulous loan companies for items of daily survival; and she dissects the ‘debate’ (which requires little labour, since it is little more than sustained propaganda) over those whose ‘lifestyle choice’ is for a life of luxury on starvation benefits, as opposed to ‘hardworking families’ (six million of whom now depend upon government supplements to survive.) She also points out that almost half of all Britain’s alleged ‘prodigal’ welfare spending goes to pensioners.
The hollowness of schemes designed to get people ‘back into work’ comes in for particular scorn, since irregular, part-time, zero-hours under-employment are behind the screen on which a manipulated employment rate is projected. She reserves her most excoriating criticism for the harsh measures taken against those who must pass the Work Capability Assessment, a triage of the most sick, disabled and vulnerable people in society, and the declaration of some as ‘fit to work’, who actually die before they receive the happy news that they are competent to joint the rough-and-tumble of the employment system. She quotes one Work Capability assessor asking a claimant ‘Are you suicidal?’ Claimant: ‘Yes’. Assessor: ‘Well then, why haven’t you achieved it?’
The book shows that the ‘Two Nations’ which Disraeli described in 1845 are alive in contemporary Britain, even if the poor – a minority now, unlike the period in which Disraeli was writing – languish in the punitive rainshadow of wealth. It demolishes many of the myths with which we British like to flatter ourselves: our commitment to ‘tolerance’. ‘fairness’, ‘sympathy with the underdog’, when all of these things – however they may linger in popular sentiment – are being actively junked by the present administration. This has its effect, as many people with disability, who have been victims of hate-crimes and public vilification, vividly attest.
Mary O’Hara records both the anger and incomprehension of people faced with what looks like an arbitrary assault upon already precarious lives. The people she interviews are often bewildered by government policy: how ‘unfair’, ‘cruel’, ‘heartless’ it is. They frequently ask of politicians ‘What planet are they living on?’. This is perhaps a measure of the capacity for dissembling (or public relations) of government, for it knows very well its place in the economic solar system: it is – at least in fantasy – the proud ideological heir of laissez-faire, which believed that market forces, left totally undisturbed, will bring about that perfect equilibrium which may be described as capitalism’s realm of freedom. The poor are the principal obstacle to the realisation of this beneficent vision; and as such, must always come under attack. ‘Human nature’, that constant justification of the defenders of social injustice, is mutable indeed compared to the nature of capitalism.
It would have been helpful if some of this ideological background had been sketched in. As it is, the puzzlement and resentment of people remain essentially reactive – the principal alternative to the cuts envisages only a more just capitalism, a system tempered by a little mercy and humanity. No doubt this would be a fine thing, but given the asper-ities of globalisation and the determination of the leaders of Britain to offer up the country as a haven for a mobile, supraterrestrial financial system, and its people as labour to compete with the legions of hungry and desperate of the earth, a milder, more just world is unlikely to emerge in the foreseeable future.
Mary O’Hara has produced a fine record of how it feels to be among those who have been selected to pay the highest price for a crisis they had no part in producing. We are living through a dismantling of a great humanitarian institution, the welfare state, which was a (historically brief) reaction to a passing existential threat to capitalism. O’Hara casts an unblinking look upon the desolation wrought by the rehabilitation of a system which is no longer afraid to demonstrate its basic values; which have little to do, either with the fine words we offer up to the world about liberty, democracy and choice, or with ideals of justice and fair play which we still, quaintly, claim as our most distinctive characteristics.