Editorial

When, during the Glasgow East by-election the Labour Government unveiled its plans to “radicalise” the benefits system, it launched one of its most brutal right wing attacks yet on the jobless, the poor and the ill.

Under the charade of emancipating people from poverty and finding much needed work for the millions of unemployed, Gordon Brown and his government have stooped to a new low.

Despite being forced into the embarrassing U-turn on the 10p tax fiasco just weeks earlier, it was work as usual for the government when it unleashed its plans to humiliate, exploit and punish those surviving on the meagre scraps that are current benefit levels in the world’s fifth largest economy.

Cabinet ministers declared they were taking the ‘financially essential’ step to end incapacity benefit and scrap income support and boasted the job will be done by 2013 – just one year after they will have ploughed the best part of £20billion into hosting the London Olympic Games.

So much is Labour’s contempt for the unemployed and incapacitated that it will dish out its retribution by forcing claimants into ‘community service’ – a programme name previously only used for convicted criminals. Recipients will be forced to cut grass, pick up rubbish and clean graffiti for below minimum wage benefits. An agreement with the Tories has been formed to ensure these grotesque pre-Victorian proposals ease through Parliament.

Meanwhile the Labour Party continues to find new ways of supporting the Northern Rock bankers, funding illegal wars, financing rogue states and even plan a multimillion-pound send off for Margaret Thatcher. Yet single-parents, the disabled, and those living in often squalid conditions on paltry benefits have been selected to make the much needed sacrifices. A society must surely be judged on how it treats its poor, vulnerable and needy. If so, this regime has clearly lost any moral right to govern, and has clearly reached its nadir.

Many of the MPs that will back these draconian and brutal proposals are the very people who earlier this year, without the slightest bit of shame, voted to keep their huge pay packages, irrational expenses and second home allowances – unearned benefits very much worth keeping, apparently.

The proposals will serve to make the lives of drug addicts more difficult and their chances of recovery less likely. Under the proposals, unemployed drug addicts who don’t admit to their addiction when seeking benefits could be forced to repay the money, or face going to jail.

Despite decades-worth of proof that imprisonment does not rehabilitate addicts, this regime will continue to fill overcrowded prisons with people who are in desperate need of help.

What this rotten government has failed to understand, or accept, or has wilfully ignored, when evaluating the role of welfare, is how the country has been changed in recent decades. Some of the areas with the highest dependency on benefits were at one point the hub of British industry. But when Labour accelerated its predecessors’ policies of closing down industries and selling off sectors to exploit even cheaper workforces abroad, mass unemployment in certain areas was inevitable. They will make moralistic noises about ‘helping people into work’ – but where are the real jobs at a time when Gordon Brown’s economic chickens are coming home to roost in the credit crunch and looming recession?

Tommy Sheridan - Glasgow east (supporting solidarity candidate Trishia Mcleish)

Perhaps the most unsurprising feature of the government’s policy of punishment for people on benefits is that the private sector – including the many big businesses who refuse to pay corporation tax on their foreign earnings to the Treasury – have been assured of benefiting from the plans.

Companies will be paid huge amounts of money for taking claimants on and “re-introducing” them to the working world. But the conditions will fall well short of any civilised standards of acceptability.

Individuals carrying out the menial tasks will not be insured, given paid holidays or even the inadequate and appalling minimum wage – they will be pushed into what is in effect, slavery, working for the private sector while earning meagre benefits.

Business ‘leaders’ - the people responsible for putting the UK economy in such precarious uncertainty – are to reap the financial rewards of this reform.

With promises of sanctions against those who reject this compulsory ‘work’, the policy has clearly set out the New Labour’s real Thatcherite view on those who cannot take on, or hold down, full time employment.

The proposals - and the wicked ethos underpinning them - are a vehicle to further use the non-working poor as a scapegoat. The longer people remain out of work the more difficult it is to find employment. New Labour has done nothing to provide people in deprived areas with real opportunities, and with a minimum wage so out of touch with the rising cost of living, it is no wonder apathy and detachment has occurred in some areas.

But despite the brutality of Labour’s latest assault, there is some hope of resistance and rebellion. With immeasurable arrogance the party took the proposals to the by-election in Glasgow East, one of the constituencies most dependent on support from our under assault welfare state, and were taught an important lesson.

Labour thought it could use its stronghold to prove to show that its policies to punish the jobless and the ill for being a drain on the resources of their wonderful capitalism were a necessary and winning combination. The people of Glasgow East rejected them, and sent out one of the most powerful signals that the reign of the New Labour machine is coming to its overdue end.

Public sector workers need our support – and the SNP needs to come off the fence

Pubic sector workers in the three major local authority trade unions – the GMB, Unite and Unison, struck across Scotland on the twentieth of August. Their action was in pursuit of a fair pay settlement to protect the value of their wages against the rampant and rising inflation caused by rising oil and commodity prices and the credit crunch. These valuable workers deserve our support. It is not an economic system of their design or choosing that has gone off the rails, but the misnamed ‘free market’ beloved of New Labour, and the false economy of easily available credit and high house prices which was created during the Blair/Brown era to maintain the illusion of modest economic growth.

Predictably, and hypocritically, New Labour in Scotland sees the union’s campaign as a potential stick with which to beat the SNP and recover some lost ground amongst people whom they consider their ‘natural’ supporters. Labour leadership candidate Cathy Jamieson attended the Glasgow strike rally and some TU speakers at rallies across Scotland appeared to place the first finger of blame at the SNP/local government concordat, rather than the failed economic policies of New Labour, and Alistair Darling and Gordon Brown’s policy of wage restraint.

Unfortunately, the fence sitting hands-off attitude of the SNP government has so far played right into Labour’s hands. Finance Minister John Swinney was busy doing his Pontius Pilate routine to the press the day before strike action. Sounding like a Blairite clone, he insisted that disruption caused by strike action was ‘regrettable’, but that it was nothing to do with the Scottish Government and was a matter for the employers and unions to resolve.

If the SNP with to continue to be perceived as a left of centre social democratic party, and continue to make progress into previously impenetrable Labour heartlands, as they did in Glasgow East, they will have to do better than that. The 200, 000 workers who struck to maintain the real purchasing power of their pay are also voters. They are more likely to be convinced of the case for independence if they see a Scottish Government that is unwilling to allow them to be used as whipping boys for Brown’s failed economic ideology.

The SNP should come off the fence, and find the extra cash required to ensure that council workers’ pay in Scotland at least keeps pace with inflation. COSLA too, could and should do more. If they can talk about finding the cash to bid for Glasgow or Edinburgh airport, they can surely work with the Scottish Government and the Trade Unions to make sure their own workers pay packets aren’t devalued by this latest crisis of capitalism.