13.03.1997

New consensus attacks welfare

It is getting harder and harder to remember the days when Tory and Labour were agreed that the welfare state was a good idea and ought to be preserved. ‘From the cradle to the grave’ welfarism was the dominant bourgeois ideology and it was only those on the fringe who said anything else. Yes, it seems very distant, but it was not that long ago.

Now, the goalposts have been moved firmly to the right, if not removed from play altogether. Amongst the ruling class, and the establishment in general, the more zealously you attack welfarism - ie, the notion of universal state benefits and support - the more you are applauded as a radical. To be even dimly associated with welfarism (or so-called corporatism) is to be treated with scorn and derision. The new consensus which is rapidly emerging from the Tory/New Labour laboratory is firmly turning its back on the despised days of Butskellism.

The ‘big idea’ now being trumpeted by the Tories is an obvious and dramatic example of this shift. Namely, the privatisation of pensions - or, as the bourgeois press likes to say, “the great pensions revolution”. John Major’s plan, under the heading, Basic Pensions Plus, aims to phase out the state pension and replace it with compulsory private pension funds - something long advocated by maverick Labour MP Frank Field and long put into practice by such an enlightened democracy as Singapore.

Under Basic Pensions Plus, which would not start before the last days of another Tory term of office, people then under the age of 25 would lose entitlement to the state pension (hardly a princely sum) and would have to pay into private funds by means of rebates on their national insurance contributions, which would amount to £9 a week, plus five percent of earnings. According to official statistics - and we all know how reliable they are - a person on average earnings would build up an investment fund sufficient to pay a pension of £175 a week in today’s money.

This is clearly a reactionary utopia. In reality Basic Pension Plus guarantees that a low paid worker will become an impoverished pensioner.

As if that were not enough, Stephen Dorrell is about to launch his plans to sell off all remaining local authority old people’s homes, and contract out other social services. Dorrell is annoyed that social service spending rose in real terms from £900 million in 1970-71 to £7.3 billion in 1995-96. When the transferred costs of the community care system are added, total spending in 1995-96 reached £9.2 billion.

Dorrell is determined to stop this ‘waste’. His white paper will outline plans for a ‘purchaser/provider’ split in social services, as in the health service. Local authorities now run fewer than 75,000 beds - one in seven of all those in the residential care sector - but Dorrell has his beady eye on those that remain. His white paper will also push for the widespread privatisation of home helps. Nothing is sacred, it seems.

On top of all this, Gillian Shepherd has been promising that the Tories would introduce a more “elitist” education system, with a wider variety of selective secondary schools. She also said she was “very excited” at the prospect of creating hundreds more grammar schools - an institution which the old Butskellite consensus assumed would wither away in the near future.

This is no doubt excellent news for a small minority - but very bad news for the majority. Working class pensioners in this grim new world will have to eke out an even more miserable living, while working class children will receive an ‘education’ not really worthy of the name - and all in the name of ‘choice’.

After this barrage, it is almost a relief to be faced with the distinctly ‘old fashioned’ bigotry of Tory MP David Evans. In an interview with schoolchildren he gave them a lesson in sexism, racism and general obnoxious prejudice. Not surprisingly, seeing how the Tory Party likes to market itself as an ‘anti-racist’ and feministic organisation, John Major had to hastily disassociate himself from Evans’s comments.

However, for all the liberal outrage which greeted Evans - such as the unbearably pompous declaration that he was not ‘fit’ to be an MP - he was only articulating the sentiments which bubble away beneath the surface of the Tory Party, and the British establishment as a whole. Just take a look at almost any tabloid, and quite a few broadsheets, on almost any day of the week and you will encounter an Evans, proudly displaying their prejudice and ignorance. Who could be a better symbol of bourgeois society than David Evans?

As the Tory Party disintegrates into faction fighting, the “great pensions revolution” is hardly going to inspire voters. Nevertheless the Labour Party, as in all things, is not far behind. Gordon Brown has solemnly pledged that public spending (and cuts) will be kept at ‘Tory’ levels and David Blunkett is a born-again convert to selective education.

Socialist and communist candidates are unlikely to make big gains in this election. However, it is essential that the left mounts a vigorous and united campaign against the new Tory/Labour consensus.

Paul Greenaway