16.03.2000

Brown's new clampdown

Publication of The informal economy, commissioned by chancellor Gordon Brown and written by Lord Grabiner QC, has provided the excuse for another attack on the unemployed by the government.

The 40-page report estimates that 120,000 people are claiming benefits while working in undisclosed jobs, often with the collusion of employers who can thereby pay wages below subsistence level. Lord Grabiner proposes a new criminal offence of evading income tax, and recommended that people suspected of working while claiming benefits should be obliged to sign on more frequently at random times. To the enthusiastic approval of the rightwing press, Gordon Brown has welcomed the report and announced a crackdown on benefit "cheats".

To facilitate this, the government wants the department of social security to be networked onto the computer system of the clearing banks to enable officials to check on the financial circumstances of claimants. So far the banks have resisted this for their own commercial reasons. We must do so because it represents an appalling infringement of democratic rights. In the meantime the inland revenue is to be given new powers to make 'reverse searches' of the telephone directory to identify those who are signing on while providing services for 'cash in hand'. Those caught doing so twice, even if it is only a small job for a neighbour for a few pounds, will be denied some or all of their benefit.

With the backing of papers like the Daily Mail, which constantly reminds its readers that they each pay an average of £15 a day towards the "bloated social security budget", Brown feels confident he will have the support of "all decent citizens" for his attack on "the idle and deceitful". Phone numbers people can ring to anonymously inform on their neighbours who may be working while signing on continue to be widely advertised.

Many tabloids have a policy of blurring the distinction between 'dole cheats' and those claiming benefits lawfully, by railing against "spongers". The government goes along with this vilification of benefit claimants by preaching that there is no excuse for idleness since there are supposedly enough jobs to go round, and in the words of the Daily Mail promises "not only to demand that the idle seek work, but to stamp out the something-for-nothing society" (March 9). Gordon Brown declared: "I say to the unemployed who can work, you must now meet your responsibility to earn a wage." He justifies this demand by claiming there are almost as many job vacancies - one million - as people looking for work - 1.15 million.

If this were true, one could ask why it is that the best the state can offer job-seekers is compulsory attendance at job clubs, where they are schooled in interview techniques, shown how to write a CV, and told to 'cold call' employers in the hope that there may be a vacancy somewhere. If it is true that the numbers of unemployed and vacancies are roughly equal, why not match up the jobs and the job-seekers and offer people work, rather than blame them for not being able to find it and seek to harass and humiliate them into signing off?

The answer of course is that the figures are fiddled. The million-job total is obtained simply by arbitrarily multiplying by three the actual number notified to job centres. The 1.15 million estimate of job-seekers is the old-style Tory measure of people "out of work and claiming benefit", rather than the figure of 1.7 million obtained by the International Labour Organisation method, which is now the internationally agreed method of calculating official figures.

The TUC estimates that the true number of people out of work is around four million. Even the ILO figures exclude for example the 1.3 million men aged between 50 and 65 (28% of the age group) classified as "economically inactive", either because they are described as disabled or because they have saved too much to qualify for benefits. Many would like to return to employment but have given up hope of finding a job, knowing employers prefer younger workers.

Employers also want people with experience and ready-made skills, to avoid the cost of training; as a result the young are also hard hit by unemployment. According to a study published by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development reported in The Guardian (February 11), Britain has one of the worst records in the industrialised world for getting young people successfully from school into work.

In the present moral climate, where those at the sharp end of capitalism are blamed for their own poverty, asylum-seekers have joined dole "spongers" as targets for tabloid hate and government meanness. Almost every day the popular press incites the anger of its readers by describing thousands of pounds being paid in benefits to a yet another asylum-seeker's family, and fulminates against the houses, TVs, and other comforts provided to it by the state. A team of 40 police officers has been appointed to "clear out" asylum seekers begging on the London Underground, and magistrates threaten to jail them. Under the 'buy-pass' scheme to be introduced next month as part of Jack Straw's draconian new asylum law, asylum-seekers will be given vouchers worth £36.54 a week to exchange for food in shops, with only £10 of the vouchers exchangeable for cash.

For the Tories under Margaret Thatcher, unemployment was a "price worth paying" for economic prosperity. New Labour under Blair is no longer prepared to pay that price. Previous Labour administrations claimed to be in favour of a measure of redistribution from rich to poor. Today Labour wholly embraces the Thatcherite creed that the poor are to blame for their own poverty. Blair actively encourages a shift in moral perspectives. The pariahs now are those wicked people who "sponge" off the rest of society.

Yet of course capitalism has always needed the unemployed as a reserve army of labour to hold down wages and keep the working class under control. Moreover, as Blair has found, the unemployed, asylum-seekers and other claimants can also be used as scapegoats.

Such methods of dividing and weakening the working class are essential for capitalism.