The Tory view of the state: those who need it don't deserve it
This is a rehearsal for the future of the welfare state. The Conservatives' narrative is that poverty is sinful and it must be punished
The news leaked last week ? if jobcentre workers do not sanction jobseekers, and get them on to fewer benefits, or none at all, they will be disciplined. To encourage them to do so, there are targets and league tables.
This repulsive policy was swiftly denounced by the employment minister, Mark Hoban, who denied that any such thing exists. But here it is, from an adviser manager in a job centre: "As you can see, Walthamstow are 95th in the league table out of only 109 [jobcentres in London and the home counties] ?Our district manager is not pleased ? because senior managers are under pressure to improve our office output and move up the league he has to apply some pressure downwards."
Faced with the evidence in pixels, the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) said it was a mistake, and an isolated case, and it was investigating both the mistake and the isolated case ? except that by Friday more jobcentre workers had contacted the Guardian to say that targets and league tables, and incentives, are indeed in place. In one jobcentre, it was alleged, the reward for sanctioning a jobseeker is a horribly uncharitable Easter egg. An Easter egg? So Iain Duncan Smith issued a re-denial, and insisted that any jobcentre worker using targets or league tables would be, er, disciplined, although he preferred to use the charmingly punitive phrase, with its weird echoes of Norman Tebbit, "dealt with". And there the circle of madness closed.
Though it sounds like a dream from The Thick of It, it isn't fiction. How many benefits have been unfairly removed or reduced? But there is meaning behind this farce; it was no mistake. This is a rehearsal for the future of the welfare state, as seen through Tory spectacles ? they are resentful at paying for anything. Need is now irrelevant.
The PR for the project, enthusiastically pursued by the Tory press, is ongoing, if unsophisticated. Its purpose is to incite so much contempt for benefit claimants in the wider population, and so much denial about who, and who is not, a benefit claimant, that we will dumbly watch children live in revolting conditions without complaint. Any kind of state intervention is now a blissful boon deserving of a kiss on the ministerial boot. Last week Alan Milburn, the government's luckless adviser on social mobility, said it was "vanishingly unlikely" that the government will meet its child poverty targets. No it won't; of course it won't. Far better to change the way child poverty is measured or, in common speak, stop counting the bodies.
"Benefit queen" stories are dripped on the media, courtesy of DWP moles, as if they were representative; and Ukip, that wonky opportunist, jumps on the bandwagon, seeking to make benefit claimants pay for necessities by electronic card, so they cannot squander their bags of taxpayer gold on Sky TV, cider, ciggies, condoms and, presumably, membership of the Communist party of Great Britain. The project chugs on, fuelled by distortion and lies, denouncing the weak, praising the strong ? the changes to childcare funding announced last week will largely benefit the wealthy. Who is surprised?
This is the tedious narrative. Poverty is sinful, and it must be punished; wealth, meanwhile, can be irritating, but it is essentially benevolent ? to the victor, everything. Of editorials denouncing the £17.5m in shares paid last week to the chief executive of Barclays investment banking, the ludicrously named Rich Ricci, owner of the ludicrously named racehorse Fatcatinthehat, there were few. (Rich Ricci is not to be confused with Richie Rich, the comic character played by Macaulay Culkin in the live action film of 1994. His wealth did not succour him particularly, and he owned no horses.)
And so the state must shrink to a nub, because the humans who need it don't deserve it. Not that the government will say this publicly yet; it is still better, at this stage, to lie to parliament, to the media, to us all.
www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/mar/25/tories-shrink-state-wont-say-publicly
