The shadow minister wants to further stigmatise benefit recipients in her party’s quest for ‘squeezed middle’ voters
‘Rachel Reeves’
rhetoric is going to further stigmatise benefit recipients and further
discourage applications for benefits from people who need them.’ Photograph:
Christopher Thomond
The new
shadow work and pensions secretary Rachel Reeves has said that Labour would be tougher on benefits than the
Tories.
I really wish she had been in the South West UK Youth Parliament meeting in Taunton last
weekend, as I was, and heard a speaker from the floor, who is visually impaired,
explain how he had been desperately seeking a job, without success. But, he
said, he wasn’t claiming jobseeker’s allowance, because he wasn’t a
scrounger.
Now all credit to the Labour party speaker on
that occasion, Kate Taylor, the youngest female councillor in the country (on
Plymouth city council), who said what I had been going to say: “Claim that
money. You are entitled to it.” I repeated that urging.
It would appear, however, that Reeves would
not have said that. Her rhetoric is going to further stigmatise benefit
recipients and further discourage applications for benefits from people who need
them, who are – or should be – entitled to them. People like that young speaker,
who had already absorbed the toxic, misleading focus of the Mail, the Telegraph,
Sky and others on the few who cheat the system (while they ignore the many who
don’t even claim what they’re entitled to).
Benefits are there – must be there in this
rich country (we are the sixth-richest country in the world after all) – to support
those who need help, those who are being failed by the economy, who through ill
health or accident are unable to support themselves, who the economy is failing
to provide opportunities for, or who are contributing to society through caring
for others.
With nearly a million young people
unemployed, and a 30% gap in the employment rates between non-disabled and
disabled people, that youth parliament speaker is facing an uphill struggle, no
matter how hard he tries.
He did nothing to contribute to the state of
our economy. He wasn’t in charge of the banks in the noughties. He hasn’t been
raking profits into tax havens and paying workers less than a living wage, or
promoting the spread of zero-hours contracts. He’s just suffering the
consequences in an economy in which the share of GDP going into wages – into the
pockets of ordinary men and women – has been going down, as company profits have
gone up.
One aspect of fixed-term parliaments that
we’re just now coming to terms with is the fact that election campaigns are
going to start early – very early. We’re clearly in the 2015 campaign now. The
Tory party has lined itself up as the party of big business. We always knew that
of course, it’s just that with its plans for corporation tax, its failure to
lift the minimum wage to levels that workers can live on and its comforts for
tax-evaders, David Cameron has made his allegiance to the City that funds his
party crystal clear.
And Labour is going to repeat “cost of
living” like a mantra. But it’s clear that it has no plans to tackle the
critical structural issue that means we have an economy of increasingly low
wages and insecure employment; it’s not going to encourage the small businesses
and co-operatives that are being squashed under the oppressive weight of
market-abusing multinationals that could provide the varied, decent employment
opportunities that we need.
Labour has laid out its slate: it is going to
try to set the struggling against the poorest – to further stigmatise and
penalise the millions of households that are going under in this dysfunctional
economy. It’s going for the “squeezed middle” of swing voters in seats in the
south of England, not telling them that their problems come from our still
out-of-control finance sector, our tax-avoiding, high-profit multinationals.
Labour’s blaming the people hardest hit by our economy.
Any one of us, except the super-rich, is only
one medical incident, one accident, one redundancy, away from needing the
support of society to get back on our feet, or to survive for the long haul.
Labour is identifying itself as a party that wants to beat down anyone in that
situation, wants to demonise and stigmatise them.