Sir Keir Starmer-oid isn't afraid of doing a U-turn
as he makes his slippery journey towards power. He's been slimming down and
flip-flopping on policies and pledges since he first became the leader of the
Labour Party. He's now doing it with workers' rights. Sharon Graham, the
General Secretary of Unite, said Starmer-oids New Deal for Working People, had
more holes in it than Swiss cheese.
Among his abandoned pledges were the proposal to scrap the charitable status of public schools. I knew that was never really going to happen with an establishment man like Sir Keir Starmer-oid. In 2020, he said that Labour would scrap Universal Credit and the Work Capability Assessment (WCA). The WCA was introduced by the New Labour minister for Work & Pensions, James Purnell. Labour promised to scrap tuition fees and the two-child limit benefit cap. Starmer-oid abandoned his pledge for a £28 billion 'green prosperity plan', freedom of movement, and the nationalisation of public services. He even abandoned a pledge to abolish the House of Lords and replace it with an elected chamber and tax hikes for the rich.
Not long very long ago, Starmer-oid was banging on about something that he called the "contribution society." He said that people wanted to see a contribution society "where people who work hard and play by the rules can expect to get something back," This seemed to imply that there were the deserving and undeserving in society and the ones who really matter, are the people who work hard and don't rock the boat.
This could signal a move away from a welfare system based on need to one based on individual contribution and your work history - a social insurance scheme that was never introduced in Britain. In the UK, pensions and benefits are paid out of taxation and not as some people seem to think, a pot that you paid into.
It's highly disconcerting that he continues to be afforded a free ride by the media on these issues. This is unsurprising, as he is clearly quite comfortable in continuing with the neo-liberal narrative. Many have forgotten that under Blair that the WCA was introduced, very much influenced by Clinton's Welfare to Work policies in the US. They also reduced the period of time for which Contributory JSA could be paid, from 12 to 6 months. The very foundation of " social security" has been systematically dismantled since the 1980's. I see no reason to believe that there would be any change in this direction, should Starmer be elected. What astounds me is the lack of joined up thinking. Once you start to dismantle the provision that supports the most vulnerable in our society, the cost factors increase in other areas. Around twenty years ago, I was conducting some research into the cost to the public purse of making a family homeless. As part of this research I wrote to an academic at Newcastle University. He had written a paper on this matter. At the time the distributive cost to the public purse equated to 4k. This took into account, inter-alia, the health, education, social services budgets. The total cost to the public purse was at the time exceeding that needed for a family to retain their accommodation and receive appropriate support in order to sustain the tenancy. I suspect that we could find many similar examples across government policies.
ReplyDeleteEditor. This comment was made by David Ormsby. Apologies for the error.
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