Welfare and vouchers: the Right’s denial of citizenship attack

There’s an excellent piece by Zoe Williams in today’s Guardian in which she describes the impact of the decision that crisis loans – now administered by local authorities – will be paid by vouchers or card; or in some cases will be given straight to a foodbank charity.  Williams is right to point out that a line has been crossed; that even though this scheme represents a minuscule element of total welfare spending, the belief that benefits should be paid effectively in kind rather than in cash is an important one.  It represents the triumph of an ideology – one that I have blogged about before – that seeks to deprive the poor of full citizenship, and to make citizenship instead dependent on income.

Neoliberalism is an ideology that places choice at its heart.  It is founded on the idea that freedom is based on the ability to make choices; thus to deny people choice about how they spend is, in the Right’s own terms, to turn those people into second-class citizens. I blogged a few days ago about how workfare is the workhouse of the twenty-first century; the mentality behind this voucher system is identical.  You are poor; you have therefore sinned.  You do not have the rights of the virtuous, and you are not deserving.  The humiliation of presenting your card or voucher at the checkout is to steel your character.

And, as Williams mentions, this is all of the piece with the lie of the poor living a life of ease in front of the Sky box and the flat-screen TV; a lie, and one that is fully in the worst traditions of the nastiest propaganda of the twentieth-century, but an essential one in order to ensure that those hit by austerity continue to back it at the ballot box, and one that is legitimised every time a politician from anyhwere in our (appallingly narrow) mainstream polity referes to “hard working families.”

Williams mentions cost, and notes in passing that the original Demos report advocating a welfare card system was sponsored by Mastercard; but does not quite draw the obvious conclusion, that this system will be a milch-cow for the private sector.  The point about cash is that it is free; it does not bring with it specific administration costs other than those – like the costs of minting coins and printing notes, and of handling cash – that are spread across all transactions.  Card transactions bring costs; not least to the merchant.  Who will bear the costs of these cards? The retailers, as in the case of credit and debit card transactions? Taxpayers? Or will there be a service charge added to the items that those on emergency loans buy, adding to the burden that poor people already face in paying more for services? The reason why the railways cost more in public subsidy for a worse service, and why healthcare on the US model is more expensive than the NHS model that will in a few days be abandoned is because of the administration and transaction costs between private entities in a world that is regulated by private contracts. Why would a Government that claims to be motivated by reducing costs create a system of benefit payments that is inherently more expensive?  The answer, quite obviously, is ideology.

It is a reminder that the return to the nineteenth-century vocabulary of pauperism and desert is almost complete. And I make one prediction – that you will not hear a syllable of complaint about this scheme from Liam Byrne and One Nation Labour, because the return to that vocabulary is in the warp and weft of the Westminster ideological consensus.

Welfare reform and the cultural production of ignorance

I’ve recently encountered an important and fascinating paper by Tom Slater of the Edinburgh University Institute of Geography which considers welfare reform and mythmaking.  It’s important because it goes right to the heart of the way in which policy is made on this – for the Right at least – totemic issue, and reveals much about the wider divergence between reality and ideology which sits at the centre of both coalition policy and the neo-liberal project at large.

It’s a paper that demands to be read in full but in summary Slater seeks to contrast the way in which Ian Duncan-Smith’s rhetoric and analysis changed between his investigation of poverty in Britain for the Centre for Social Justice  - especially his visit to the Easterhouse estate in Glasgow – and his actions as Secretary of State for Welfare and Pensions in the Coalition government.  He places this in the context of a programme of what he calls wilful institutional ignorance – or, to use a term derived from Robert Proctor, “agnotology”.  Slater cites Proctor on the need to understand

“how ignorance is produced or maintained in diverse settings, through (for example) media neglect, corporate or governmental secrecy and suppression, document destruction, and myriad forms of inherent or avoidable culturopolitical selectivity, inattention, and forgetfulness. The point is to develop a taxonomy of understandings and uses of ignorance, but also tools for understanding how and why diverse forms of knowledge do not or did not ‘come to be’ or are delayed or neglected at different points in history.”

He then seeks to apply this approach to the development of Coalition welfare policy – citing in particular the importance of right-wing think-tanks in capturing political discourse for market ideology,  and in particular the ways in which big government and the decline of traditional families have been presented as the cause of social breakdown; the use of results from loaded surveys to allow the authors to claim an evidence base while neglecting theoretical work; the way in which New Labour prepared the ground for the Coalition by undermining the belief that benefits were a matter of right, rather than something that had to be earned.

He indicates, crucially, that what characterises coalition policy is not the withdrawal of the state from welfare but the expansion of its coercive powers; and that New Labour is wholly acquiescent in this approach.  And he points to what he describes as irrefutable evidence that workfarist welfare reform does nothing to take families out of poverty, but simply removes swathes of the poor from the welfare system, with the use of aggressive sanctions often making it more difficult for those on benefits to move out of welfare into sustainable work.

Agnotology, according to Slater and the sources he cites, is about how a mythology has been developed around welfare that flies in the face of rigorously-established fact; it is about using media and political discourse to hammer out a mythology that serves particular ideologically-driven narratives, using resonant and morally-loaded language.  To those on the left who view society from outside the mainstream political and media consensus, there’s a strong sense of the bleeding obvious in much of this.  But it’s extremely important to have this documented with such rigour and force – it’s the starting point for a hard-headed analysis of our political situation.  I’d draw a number of conclusions:

• It points out the way in which political discourse is increasingly unrelated to empirical reality.  In political terms, the mainstream parties – competing as they are on increasingly narrow ideological grounds – simply cannot offer any challenge to neoliberalism; they can’t even handle the language which describes the everyday realities of life.
• This means that to challenge market capitalism means rejecting its language and rhetoric and finding something more grounded in experience – which is difficult because it means getting past an ideological use of language which is, in almost a literal sense, Orwellian.
• Crucially, New Labour and the coalition are part of the same project. For all the noise of political debate this is work that points to the consensus they share.  For people who want to change society it points to the utter futility of assuming that, in the current circumstances, the Labour Party is a force for change. As I’ve written before, the Left in Britain has got to get over the Labour Party.
• And, linked to this, it is in political activism outside the mainstream that hope lies (which, as I’ve suggested before, seems to account for the extreme hostility towards the Occupy movement and the extreme force used to suppress it).  Redefining politics in the language of everyday experience is an incredibly subversive and liberating thing to do.

Neoliberalism, seen from outside the whale, is an ideological system that has comprehensively failed.  Taking back political language for experience is a first step in exposing that failure.