Author: Kitty S Jones

I’m a political activist with a strong interest in human rights. I’m also a strongly principled socialist. Much of my campaign work is in support of people with disability. I am also disabled: I have an autoimmune illness called lupus, with a sometimes life-threatening complication – a bleeding disorder called thrombocytopenia. Sometimes I long to go back to being the person I was before 2010. The Coalition claimed that the last government left a “mess”, but I remember being very well-sheltered from the consequences of the global banking crisis by the last government – enough to flourish and be myself. Now many of us are finding that our potential as human beings is being damaged and stifled because we are essentially focused on a struggle to survive, at a time of austerity cuts and welfare “reforms”. Maslow was right about basic needs and motivation: it’s impossible to achieve and fulfil our potential if we cannot meet our most fundamental survival needs adequately. What kind of government inflicts a framework of punishment via its policies on disadvantaged citizens? This is a government that tells us with a straight face that taking income from poor people will "incentivise" and "help" them into work. I have yet to hear of a case when a poor person was relieved of their poverty by being made even more poor. The Tories like hierarchical ranking in terms status and human worth. They like to decide who is “deserving” and “undeserving” of political consideration and inclusion. They like to impose an artificial framework of previously debunked Social Darwinism: a Tory rhetoric of division, where some people matter more than others. How do we, as conscientious campaigners, help the wider public see that there are no divisions based on some moral measurement, or character-type: there are simply people struggling and suffering in poverty, who are being dehumanised by a callous, vindictive Tory government that believes, and always has, that the only token of our human worth is wealth? Governments and all parties on the right have a terrible tradition of scapegoating those least able to fight back, blaming the powerless for all of the shortcomings of right-wing policies. The media have been complicit in this process, making “others” responsible for the consequences of Tory-led policies, yet these cruelly dehumanised social groups are the targeted casualties of those policies. I set up, and administrate support groups for ill and disabled people, those going through the disability benefits process, and provide support for many people being adversely affected by the terrible, cruel and distressing consequences of the Governments’ draconian “reforms”. In such bleak times, we tend to find that the only thing we really have of value is each other. It’s always worth remembering that none of us are alone. I don’t write because I enjoy it: most of the topics I post are depressing to research, and there’s an element of constantly having to face and reflect the relentless worst of current socio-political events. Nor do I get paid for articles and I’m not remotely famous. I’m an ordinary, struggling disabled person. But I am accurate, insightful and reflective, I can research and I can analyse. I write because I feel I must. To reflect what is happening, and to try and raise public awareness of the impact of Tory policies, especially on the most vulnerable and poorest citizens. Because we need this to change. All of us, regardless of whether or not you are currently affected by cuts, because the persecution and harm currently being inflicted on others taints us all as a society. I feel that the mainstream media has become increasingly unreliable over the past five years, reflecting a triumph for the dominant narrative of ultra social conservatism and neoliberalism. We certainly need to challenge this and re-frame the presented debates, too. The media tend to set the agenda and establish priorities, which often divert us from much more pressing social issues. Independent bloggers have a role as witnesses; recording events and experiences, gathering evidence, insights and truths that are accessible to as many people and organisations as possible. We have an undemocratic media and a government that reflect the interests of a minority – the wealthy and powerful 1%. We must constantly challenge that. Authoritarian Governments arise and flourish when a population disengages from political processes, and becomes passive, conformist and alienated from fundamental decision-making. I’m not a writer that aims for being popular or one that seeks agreement from an audience. But I do hope that my work finds resonance with people reading it. I’ve been labelled “controversial” on more than one occasion, and a “scaremonger.” But regardless of agreement, if any of my work inspires critical thinking, and invites reasoned debate, well, that’s good enough for me. “To remain silent and indifferent is the greatest sin of all” – Elie Wiesel I write to raise awareness, share information and to inspire and promote positive change where I can. I’ve never been able to be indifferent. We need to unite in the face of a government that is purposefully sowing seeds of division. Every human life has equal worth. We all deserve dignity and democratic inclusion. If we want to see positive social change, we also have to be the change we want to see. That means treating each other with equal respect and moving out of the Tory framework of ranks, counts and social taxonomy. We have to rebuild solidarity in the face of deliberate political attempts to undermine it. Divide and rule was always a Tory strategy. We need to fight back. This is an authoritarian government that is hell-bent on destroying all of the gains of our post-war settlement: dismantling the institutions, public services, civil rights and eroding the democratic norms that made the UK a developed, civilised and civilising country. Like many others, I do what I can, when I can, and in my own way. This blog is one way of reaching people. Please help me to reach more by sharing posts. Thanks. Kitty, 2012

Initial thoughts on the work, health and disability green paper

November 6, 2016November 15, 2017 · 68 Comments ·

I’ve read the government’s Work, health and disability green paper: improving lives and consultation from end to end. It took me a while, because I am ill and not always able to work consistently, reliably and safely. It’s also a very long and waffling document. I am one of those people that the proposals outlined in this green paper is likely to affect. I read the document very carefully.

Here are a few of my initial thoughts on what I read. It’s organised as best I can manage, especially given the fact that despite being dismally unsurprised, I am scathing.

The context indicates the general intent

“The fact is that Ministers are looking for large savings at the expense of the poorest and most vulnerable. That was not made clear in the general election campaign; then, the Prime Minister said that disabled people would be protected.” – Helen Goodman, MP for Bishop Auckland, Official Report, Commons, 2/3/16; cols. 1052-58.

I always flinch when the government claim they are going to “help” sick and disabled people into work. That usually signals further cuts to lifeline support and essential services are on the way, and that the social security system is going to be ground down a little further, to become the dust of history and a distant memory of a once civilised society.

If the government genuinely wanted to “help” sick and disabled people into work, I’m certain they would not have cut the Independent Living Fund, which has had a hugely negative impact on those trying their best to lead independent and dignified lives, and the Access To Work funding has been severely cut, this is also a fund that helps people and employers to cover the extra living costs arising due to disabilities that might present barriers to work.

The government also made the eligibility criteria for Personal Independence Payment (PIP) – a non-means tested out-of- work and an in-work benefit – much more difficult to meet, in order to simply reduce successful claims and cut costs. This has also meant that thousands of people have lost their motability vehicles and support.

Earlier this year, it was estimated at least 14,000 disabled people have had their mobility vehicle confiscated after the changes to benefit assessment, which are carried out by private companies.

Under the PIP rules, thousands more people who rely on this support to keep their independence are set to lose their vehicles – specially adapted cars or powered wheelchairs. Many had been adapted to meet their owners’ needs and many campaigners warn that it will lead to a devastating loss of independence for disabled people.

A total of 45% or 13,900 people, were deemed as not needing the higher rate of PIP, and therefore lost their vehicles after reassessment. And out of the 31,200 people who were once on the highest rate of Disability Living Allowance (DLA) who have been reassessed, just 55%, or 17,300 – have kept their car.

In 2012, Esther McVey, then the Minister for people with disabilities, as good as admitted there are targets to reduce or remove eligibility for the new disability benefit PIP, which was to replace DLA. How else could she know in advance of people’s reassessment that “330,000 of claimants are expected to either lose their benefit altogether or see their payments reduced“ as she had informed the House of Commons.

This was a clear indication that the new assessment framework was designed to cut support for disabled people. A recent review led the government to conclude that PIP doesn’t currently fulfil the original policy intent, which was to cut costs and “target” the benefit to an ever-shrinking category of “those with the greatest need.”

The Government was twice defeated in the Lords over their proposals to cut Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) for sick and disabled people in the work related activity group (WRAG) from £103 to £73. However the £30 a week cut is to go ahead after bitterly disappointed and angry peers were left powerless to continue to oppose the Commons, which has overturned both defeats.

The government hammered through the cuts of £120 a month to the lifeline income of ill and disabled people by citing the “financial privilege” of the Commons, and after Priti Patel informing the Lords, with despotic relish, that they had “overstepped their mark” in opposing the cuts twice.

A coalition of 60 national disability charities condemned the government’s cuts to benefits as a “step backwards” for sick and disabled people and their families. The Disability Benefits Consortium said that the cuts, which will see people lose up to £1,500 a year, will leave disabled people feeling betrayed by the government and will have a damaging effect on their health, finances and ability to find work.

Research by the Consortium suggests the low level of benefit is already failing to meet disabled people’s needs. A survey of 500 people in the affected group found that 28 per cent of people had been unable to afford to eat while in receipt of the benefit. Around 38 per cent of respondents said they had been unable to heat their homes and 52 per cent struggled to stay healthy.

Watching the way the wind blows

Earlier this year I wrote that a government advisor, who is a specialist in labor economics and econometrics, has proposed scrapping all ESA sickness and disability benefits. Matthew Oakley, a senior researcher at the Social Market Foundation, recently published a report entitled Closing the gap: creating a framework for tackling the disability employment gap in the UK, in which he proposes abolishing the ESA Support Group.

To meet extra living costs because of disability, Oakley says that existing spending on PIP and the Support Group element of ESA should be brought together to finance a new extra costs benefit. Eligibility for this benefit should be determined on the basis of need, with an assessment replacing the WCA and PIP assessment.

I think the word “need” is being redefined to meet politically defined neoliberal economic outcomes.

Oakely also suggests considering a “role that a form of privately run social insurance could play in both increasing benefit generosity and improving the support that individuals get to manage their conditions and move back to work.”

I’m sure the rogue company Unum would jump at the opportunity. Steeped in controversy, with a wake of scandals that entailed the company denying people their disabilty insurance, in 2004, Unum entered into a regulatory settlement agreement (RSA) with insurance regulators in over 40 US states. The settlement related to Unum’s handling of disability claims and required the company “to make significant changes in corporate governance, implement revisions to claim procedures and provide for a full re-examination of both reassessed claims and disability insurance claim decisions.

The company is the top disability insurer in both the United States and United Kingdom. By coincidence, the company has been involved with the UK’s controversial Welfare Reform Bill, advising the government on how to cut spending, particularly on disability support. What could possibly go right?

It’s difficult to see how someone with a serious, chronic and progressive illness, (which most people in the ESA Support Group have) can actually “manage” their illness and “move back into work.” The use of the extremely misinformed, patronising and very misleading term manage implies that very ill people actually have some kind of choice in the matter.

For people with Parkinson’s disease, rheumatoid arthritis, lupus and multiple sclerosis, cancer and kidney failure, for example, mind over matter doesn’t fix those problems, positive thinking and sheer will power cannot cure these illnesses, sadly. Nor does refusing to acknowledge or permit people to take up a sick role, or imposing benefit conditionality and coercive policies to push chronically ill people into work by callous, insensitive and inept and often medically unqualified assessors, job advisors and ministers.

The Reform think tank has also recently proposed scrapping what is left of the disability benefit support system, in their report Working welfare: a radically new approach to sickness and disability benefits and has called for the government to set a single rate for all out of work benefits and reform the way sick and disabled people are assessed.

The Reform think tank proposes that the government should cut the weekly support paid to 1.3 million sick and disabled people in the ESA Support Group from £131 to £73. This is the same amount that Jobseeker’s Allowance claimants receive. It is claimed that the cut will somehow “incentivise” those people to find work, as if they simply lack motivation, rather than being ill and disabled. However, those people placed in the Support Group after assessment have been deemed by the state as unlikely to be able to work again in the near future, many won’t be able to work again. It would therefore be very difficult to justify this proposed cut, given the additional needs that disabled people have, which is historically recognised, and empirically verified by research.

Yet the authors of the report doggedly insist that having a higher rate of weekly benefit for extremely sick and disabled people encourages them “to stay on sickness benefits rather than move into work.” People on sickness benefits don’t move into work because they are sick. Forcing them to work is outrageous.

The report recommended savings which result from removing the disability-related additions to the standard allowance should be reinvested in support services and extra costs benefits – PIP. However, as outlined, the government have ensured that eligibility for that support is rapidly contracting, with the ever-shrinking political and economic re-interpretation of medically defined sickness and disability categories and a significant reduction in what the government deem to be a legitimate exemption from being “incentivised” into hard work.

The current United Nations investigation into the systematic and gross violations of the rights of disabled people in the UK because of the Conservative welfare “reforms” is a clear indication that there is no longer any political commitment to supporting disabled people in this country, with the Independent Living Fund being scrapped by this government, ESA for the work related activity group (WRAG) cut back, PIP is becoming increasingly very difficult to access, and now there are threats to the ESA Support Group. The Conservative’s actions have led to breaches in the CONVENTION on the RIGHTS of PERSONS with DISABILITIES – CRPD articles 4, 8, 9, 12, 13, 14, 15, 17, and especially 19, 20, 27 and 29 (at the very least.)

There are also probable violations of articles 22, 23, 25, 30, 31.

The investigation began before the latest round of cuts to ESA were announced. That tells us that the government is unconcerned their draconian policies violate the human rights of sick and disabled people.

And that, surely, tells us all we need to know about this government’s intentions.

Coercing those deemed to ill to work into work. It’s not “nudge”: it’s psycho-compulsion

The casual discussion in the green paper about new mandatory “health and work conversations” in which work coaches will use “specially designed techniques” to “help” some ESA claimants “identify their health and work goals, draw out their strengths, make realistic plans, and build resilience and motivation” is also cause for some concern.

Apparently these conversations were “co-designed with disabled people’s organisations and occupational health professionals and practitioners and the Behavioural Insights Team – the controversial Nudge Unit, which is part-owned by the Cabinet Office and Nesta.

Most people who read my work regularly will know by now that I am one of the staunchest critics of nudge, which is being used as an antidemocratic, technocratic, pseudoscientific political tool to provide a prop and disguise for controversial neoliberal policies. It’s very evident that “disabled people’s organisations” were not major contributors to the design. It’s especially telling that those people to be targeted by this “intervention” were completely excluded from the conversation. Sick and disabled people are reduced to objects of public policy, rather than being seen as citizens and democratic subjects capable of rational dialogue.

John Pring at Disability News Service (DNS) adds: “Grassroots disabled people’s organisations (DPOs) have criticised the government’s decision to exclude them from an event held to launch its new work, health and disability green paper.

The event for “stakeholders” was hosted by the disability charity Scope at its London headquarters, and attended by Penny Mordaunt, the minister for disabled people.

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) said in its invitation – it turned down a request from Disability News Service to attend – that the event would “start the consultation period” on its green paper, Improving Lives.

It said that it was “launching a new conversation with disabled people and people with health conditions, their representatives, healthcare professionals and employers”.

But DWP has refused to say how many disabled people’s user-led organisations were invited to the event, and instead suggested that DNS submit a freedom of information request to find out.
But DNS has confirmed that some of the most prominent user-led organisations with the strongest links to disabled people were not invited to the launch, including Shaping Our Lives, Inclusion London, Equal Lives, People First (Self Advocacy) and Disabled People Against Cuts.”

For further discussion of the policy context leading up to the green paper, see The new Work and Health Programme: government plan social experiments to “nudge” sick and disabled people into work from October 2015.

Also see G4S are employing Cognitive Behavioural Therapists to deliver “get to work therapy” and Stephen Crabb’s obscurantist approach to cuts in disabled people’s support and also Let’s keep the job centre out of GP surgeries and the DWP out of our confidential medical records from earlier this year.

The dismal and incoherent contents of the green paper were entirely predictable.

The Conservatives claim work is a “health” outcome: crude behaviourism

A Department for Work and Pensions research document published back in 2011 – Routes onto Employment and Support Allowance – said that if people believed that work was good for them, they were less likely to claim or stay on disability benefits.

It was then decided that people should be “encouraged” to believe that work was “good” for health. There is no empirical basis for the belief, and the purpose of encouraging it is simply to cut the numbers of disabled people claiming ESA by “encouraging” them into work. Some people’s work is undoubtedly a source of wellbeing and provides a sense of purpose. That is not the same thing as being “good for health”. For a government to use data regarding opinion rather than empirical evidence to claim that work is “good” for health indicates a ruthless mercenary approach to a broader aim of dismantling social security.

From the document: “The belief that work improves health also positively influenced work entry rates; as such, encouraging people in this belief may also play a role in promoting return to work.”

The aim of the research was to “examine the characteristics of ESA claimants and to explore their employment trajectories over a period of approximately 18 months in order to provide information about the flow of claimants onto and off ESA.”

The document also says: “Work entry rates were highest among claimants whose claim was closed or withdrawn suggesting that recovery from short-term health conditions is a key trigger to moving into employment among this group.”

“The highest employment entry rates were among people flowing onto ESA from non-manual occupations. In comparison, only nine per cent of people from non-work backgrounds who were allowed ESA had returned to work by the time of the follow-up survey. People least likely to have moved into employment were from non-work backgrounds with a fragmented longer-term work history. Avoiding long-term unemployment and inactivity, especially among younger age groups, should, therefore, be a policy priority. ”

“Given the importance of health status in influencing a return to work, measures to facilitate access to treatment, and prevent deterioration in health and the development of secondary conditions are likely to improve return to work rates”

Rather than make a link between manual work, lack of reasonable adjustments in the work place and the impact this may have on longer term ill health, the government chose instead to promote the cost-cutting irrational belief that work is a “health” outcome. Furthermore, the research does conclude that health status itself is the greatest determinant in whether or not people return to work. That means that those not in work are not recovered and have longer term health problems that tend not to get better.

Work does not “cure” ill health. To mislead people in such a way is not only atrocious political expediency, it’s actually downright dangerous.

As neoliberals, the Conservatives see the state as a means to reshape social institutions and social relationships based on the model of a competitive market place. This requires a highly invasive power and mechanisms of persuasion, manifested in an authoritarian turn. Public interests are conflated with narrow economic outcomes. Public behaviours are politically micromanaged. Social groups that don’t conform to ideologically defined economic outcomes are stigmatised and outgrouped.

Othering and outgrouping have become common political practices, it seems.

Stigma is being used politically to justify the systematic withdrawal of support and public services for the poorest – the casualties of a system founded on competition for allegedly scarce wealth and resources. Competition inevitably means there are winners and losers. Stigma is profoundly oppressive.

It is used as a propaganda mechanism to draw the public into collaboration with the state, to justify punitive and discriminatory policies and to align citizen “interests” with rigid neoliberal outcomes. Inclusion, human rights, equality and democracy are not compatible with neoliberalism.

Earlier this year, I said: The Conservatives have come dangerously close to redefining unemployment as a psychological disorder, and employment is being redefined as a “health outcome.” The government’s Work and Health programme involves a plan to integrate health and employment services, aligning the outcome frameworks of health services, Improving Access To Psychological Therapies (IAPT), Jobcentre Plus and the Work Programme.

But the government’s aim to prompt public services to “speak with one voice” is founded on questionable ethics. This proposed multi-agency approach is reductive, rather than being about formulating expansive, coherent, comprehensive and importantly, responsive provision.

This is psychopolitics, not therapy. It’s all about (re)defining the experience and reality of a social group to justify dismantling public services (especially welfare), and that is form of gaslighting intended to extend oppressive political control and micromanagement. In linking receipt of welfare with health services and “state therapy,” with the single intended outcome explicitly expressed as employment, the government is purposefully conflating citizen’s widely varied needs with economic outcomes and diktats, isolating people from traditionally non-partisan networks of relatively unconditional support, such as the health service, social services, community services and mental health services.

Public services “speaking with one voice” will invariably make accessing support conditional, and further isolate already marginalised social groups. It will damage trust between people needing support and professionals who are meant to deliver essential public services, rather than simply extending government dogma, prejudices and discrimination.

Conservatives really seem to believe that the only indication of a person’s functional capacity, value and potential is their economic productivity, and the only indication of their moral worth is their capability and degree of willingness to work. But unsatisfactory employment – low-paid, insecure and unfulfiling work – can result in a decline in health and wellbeing, indicating that poverty and growing inequality, rather than unemployment, increases the risk of experiencing poor mental and physical health. People are experiencing poverty both in work and out of work.

Moreover, in countries with an adequate social safety net, poor employment (low pay, short-term contracts), rather than unemployment, has the biggest detrimental impact on mental health.

There is ample medical evidence (rather than the current raft of political dogma) to support this account. (See the Minnesota semistarvation experiment, for example. The understanding that food deprivation in particular dramatically alters cognitive capacity, emotions, motivation, personality, and that malnutrition directly and predictably affects the mind as well as the body is one of the legacies of the experiment.)

Systematically reducing social security, and increasing conditionality, particularly in the form of punitive benefit sanctions, doesn’t “incentivise” people to look for work. It simply means that people can no longer meet their basic physiological needs, as benefits are calculated to cover only the costs of food, fuel and shelter.

Food deprivation is closely correlated with both physical and mental health deterioration. Maslow explained very well that if we cannot meet basic physical needs, we are highly unlikely to be able to meet higher level psychosocial needs. The government proposal that welfare sanctions will somehow “incentivise” people to look for work is pseudopsychology at its very worst and most dangerous.

In the UK, the government’s welfare “reforms” have further reduced social security support, originally calculated to meet only basic physiological needs, which has had an adverse impact on people who rely on what was once a social safety net. Poverty is linked with negative health outcomes, but it doesn’t follow that employment will alleviate poverty sufficiently to improve health outcomes.

In fact record numbers of working families are now in poverty, with two-thirds of people who found work in 2014 taking jobs for less than the living wage, according to the annual report from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation a year ago.

Essential supportive provision is being reduced by conditionally; by linking it to such a narrow outcome – getting a job – and this will reduce every service to nothing more than a political semaphore and service provision to a behaviour modification programme based on punishment, with a range of professionals being politically co-opted as state enforcers.

The Government is intending to “signpost the importance of employment as a health outcome in mandates, outcomes frameworks, and interactions with Clinical Commissioning Groups.”

I have pointed out previously that there has never been any research that demonstrates unemployment is a direct cause of ill health or that employment directly improves health, and the existing studies support the the idea that the assumed causality between unemployment and health may actually run in the opposite direction. It’s much more likely that inadequate social security support means that people cannot meet all of their basic survival needs (food, fuel and shelter), and that contributes significantly to poor health outcomes.

It’s not that unemployment is causing higher ill health, but that ill health and discrimination are causing higher unemployment. If it were unemployment causing ill health, at a time when the government assures us that employment rates are currently “the highest on record,” why are more people becoming sick?

The answer is that inequality and poverty have increased, and these social conditions, created by government policies, have long been established by research as having a correlational relationship with increasing mental and physical health inequalities.

For an excellent, clearly written and focused development of these points, the problem of “hidden” variables and political misinterpretation, see Jonathan Hulme’s Work won’t set us free.

Semantic thrifts: being Conservative with the truth

Prior to 2010, cutting support for sick and disabled people was unthinkable, but the “re-framing” strategy and media stigmatising campaigns have been used by the Conservatives to systematically cut welfare, push the public’s normative boundaries and to formulate moralistic justification narratives for their draconian policies. Those narratives betray the Conservative’s intentions.

Not enough people have questioned what it is that Conservatives actually mean when they use words like “help”, “support”, and “reform” in the context of government policies aimed at disabled people. Nor have they wondered where the evidence of “help” and “support” is hiding. If you sit on the surface of Conservative rhetoric and the repetitive buzzwords, it all sounds quite reasonable, though a little glib.

If you scrutinise a little, however, you soon begin to realise with horror that Orwellian-styled techniques of neutralisation are being deployed to lull you into a false sense of security: the ideologically directed intentions behind the policies and the outcomes and consequences are being hidden or “neutralised” by purposefully deceptive, misdirectional political rhetoric. It’s a kind of glittering generalities tokenism ; a superficial PR ritual of duplicitous linguistic detoxification, to obscure deeply held traditional Conservative prejudices and ill intent.

Rhetoric requires the existence of an audience and an intent or goal in the communication. Once you stand back a little, you may recognise the big glaring discrepancies between Conservative chatter, policies, socioeconomic reality and people’s lived experiences. At the very least, you begin to wonder when the conventional ideological interests of the Conservatives suddenly became so apparently rhetorically progressive, whilst their policies have actually become increasingly authoritarian, especially those directed at the most disadvantaged social groups.

The ministerial foreword from Damian Green, Secretary of State for Work and Pensions and Jeremy Hunt, Secretary of State for Health, is full of concern that despite the claim that “we have seen hundreds of thousands more disabled people in work in recent years”, there are simply too many sick and disabled people claiming ESA.

They say: “We must highlight, confront and challenge the attitudes, prejudices and misunderstandings that, after many years, have become engrained in many of the policies and minds of employers, within the welfare state, across the health service and in wider society. Change will come, not by tinkering at the margins, but through real, innovative action. This Green Paper marks the start of that action and a far-reaching national debate, asking: ‘What will it take to transform the employment prospects of disabled people and people with long-term health conditions?’”

I think mention of the “engrained attitudes, prejudices and misunderstandings within the welfare state and across the health service” is the real clue here about intent. What would have been a far more authentic and reassuring comment is “we have met with disabled people who have long-term health conditions and asked them if they feel they can work, and what they need to support them if they can.”

Instead, what we are being told via subtext is that we are wrong as a society to support people who are seriously ill and disabled by providing civilised health and social care, social security and exempting them from work because they are ill or injured.

Ministers say: “Making progress on the government’s manifesto ambition to halve the disability employment gap is central to our social reform agenda by building a country and economy that works for everyone, whether or not they have a long-term health condition or disability. It is fundamental to creating a society based on fairness [..] It will also support our health and economic policy objectives by contributing to the government’s full employment ambitions, enabling employers to access a wider pool of talent and skills, and improving health.”

I think that should read: “By building a country where everyone works for the [politically defined] economy.”

There’s patronising discussion of how disabled people should be “allowed to fulfil their potential”, and that those mythic meritocratic principles of talent determination and aspiration should be “what counts”, rather than sickness and disability. There are some pretty gaping holes in the logic being presented here. It is assumed that prejudice is the reason why sick and disabled people don’t work.

But it’s true that many of us cannot work because we are too ill, and the green paper fails to acknowledge this fundamental issue.

Instead “inequality” has been redefined strictly in terms of someone’s employment status, rather than as an unequal social distribution of wealth, resources, power and opportunities. All of the responsibility and burden of social exclusion and unemployment is placed on sick and disabled people, whilst it is proposed that businesses are financially rewarded for employing us.

Furthermore, it’s a little difficult to take all the loose talk seriously about the “injustice” of ill people not being in work, or about meritocratic principles and equal opportunities, when it’s not so long ago that more than one Conservative minister expressed the view that disabled people should work for less than the minimum wage. This government have made a virtue out of claiming they are giving something by taking something away. For example, the welfare cuts have been casually re-named reforms in Orwellian style. We have yet to see how cutting the lifeline benefits of the poorest people, and imposing harsh sanctioning can possibly be an improvement for them, or how it is helping them.

The Conservatives are neoliberal fundamentalists, and they have supplanted collective, public values with individualistic, private values of market rationality. They have successfully displaced established models of welfare provision and state regulation through policies of privatisation and de-regulation and have shifted public focus, instigating various changes in subjectivity, by normalising individualistic self-interest, entrepreneurial values, and crass consumerism. And increasing the social and material exclusion of growing numbers living in absolute poverty.

Basically, the Tories tell lies to change perceptions, divert attention from the growing wealth inequality manufactured by their own policies, by creating scapegoats.

Another major assumption throughout the paper is that disabled people claiming ESA are somehow mistaken in assuming they cannot work: “how can we improve a welfare system that leaves 1.5 million people – over 60% of people claiming Employment and Support Allowance – with the impression they cannot work and without any regular access to employment support, even when many others with the same conditions are flourishing in the labour market? How can we build a system where the financial support received does not negatively impact access to support to find a job? How can we offer a better user experience, improve system efficiency in sharing data, and achieve closer alignment of assessments?”

The government’s brand of armchair pseudo-psychology, propped up by the Nudge Unit, is used to justify increasingly irrational requirements being embedded in policy. The government intend to merge health and employment services, redefining work as a clinical health outcome. According to the government, the “cure” for unemployment due to illness and disability and sickness absence from work, is… work.

The new work and health programme, “support” for disabled people, is actually just another workfare programme. We know that workfare tends to decrease the likelihood of people finding work.

Work is the only politically prescribed “route out of poverty” for disabled people, including those with mental distress and illness, regardless of whether or not they are actually well enough to work. In fact the government implicitly equates mental health with economic productivity. Work will set us free. Yet paradoxically, disabled people haven’t been and won’t be included in the same economic system which is responsible for their exclusion in the first place.

Competitive market economies exclude marginalised groups, that’s something we ought to have learned from the industrial capitalism of the last couple of centuries. GPs inform us that employers are not prepared to make the necessary inclusive workplace adjustments sick and disabled people often need to work.

But in a dystopic Orwellian world where medical sick notes have been  politically redefined as ”fit notes”, sick and disabled people are no longer exempt from work, which is now held to be a magic “cure”. People are already being punished and coerced into taking any available job, regardless of its appropriateness, in an increasingly competitive and exclusive labor market.

The nitty gritty

You know the government are riding the fabled rubber bicycle when they calmly propose coercing the most disabled and ill citizens who are deemed unlikely to work by their doctors and the state (via the Work Capability Assessment) into performing mandatory work-related activities and finding jobs. Previously, only those assessed as possibly capable of some work in the future and placed in the Work Related Activity Group (WRAG) were expected to meet behavioural conditionality in return for their lifeline support.

However, the government have cut the WRAG component of Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) – another somewhat Orwellian name for a sickness and disability benefit – so that this group of people, previously considered to have additional needs because of their illness and disability, are no longer supported to meet the extra costs they face. The ESA WRAG rate of pay is now to be the same as Job Seeker’s Allowance.

If the government make work related activity mandatory for those people in the ESA Support Group, it will mean that very sick and disabled people will be sanctioned for being unable to comply and meet conditionality. This entails the loss of their lifeline support. The government have the cheek to claim that they will “protect and support” the most vulnerable citizens.

Hello, these ARE among our most vulnerable citizens. That’s why they were placed in the ESA support group in the first place.

Apparently, sick citizens are costing too much money. Our NHS is “overburdened” with ill people needing healthcare, our public services are “burdened” with people needing… public services. It is claimed that people are costing employers by taking time off work when they are ill. How very dare they.

Neoliberals argue that public services present moral hazards and perverse incentives. Providing lifeline support to meet basic survival requirements is seen as a barrier to the effort people put into searching for jobs. From this perspective, the social security system, which supports the inevitable casualties of neoliberal free markets, has somehow created those casualties. But we know that external, market competition-driven policies create a few “haves” and many “have-nots.” This is why the  welfare state came into being, after all – because when we allow such competitive economic dogmas to manifest without restraint, we must also concede that there are always ”winners and losers.”

Neoliberal economies organise societies into hierarchies.The UK currently ranks highly among the most unequal countries in the world.

Inequality and poverty are central features of neoliberalism and the causes of these sociopolitical problems therefore cannot be located within individuals.

The ESA Support Group includes people who are terminally ill, and those with degenerative illnesses, as well as serious mental health problems. It’s suggested that treating this group of people with computer based Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (cCBT), and addressing obesity, alcohol and drug dependence will “help” them into work.

Ministers claim that this group merely have a “perception” that they can’t work, and that they have been “parked” on benefits. It is also implied that illness arises mostly because of lifestyle choices.

Proposals include a punitive approach to sick and disabled people needing support, whilst advocating financial rewards for employers and businesses who employ sick and disabled people.

And apparently qualified doctors, the public and our entire health and welfare systems have ingrained “wrong” ideas about sickness and disability, especially doctors, who the government feels should not be responsible for issuing the Conservatives recent Orwellian “fit notes” any more, since they haven’t “worked” as intended and made every single citizen economically productive from their sick beds.

So, a new “independent” assessment and private company will most likely soon have a lucrative role to get the government “the right results”.

Meanwhile health and social care is going to be linked with one main outcome: work. People too ill to work will be healthier if they… work. Our public services will cease to provide public services: health and social care professionals will simply become co-opted authoritarian ideologues.

Apparently, the new inequality and social injustice have nothing to do with an unequal distribution of wealth, resources, power and opportunities. Apparently our society is unequal only because some people “won’t” work. I’m just wondering about all those working poor people currently queuing up at the food bank, maybe their poorly paid, insecure employment and zero hour contracts don’t count as working.

I’ve written as I read this Orwellian masterpiece of thinly disguised contempt and prejudice. I don’t think I have ever read anything as utterly dangerous and irrational in all my time analysing Conservative public policy and the potential and actual consequences of them. These utterly deluded and sneering authors are governing our country, shaping our life experiences, and those of our children.

The sick role and any recovery time from illness or accident that you may need has been abolished. Work will cure you.

Well, at least until you die.

Pictures courtesy of Robert Livingstone

The closing date for the consultation is 17 February 2017.
You can download the full consultation document from this link.
You can take part in the consultation from this link.

I don’t make any money from my work. But you can support me by making a donation and help me continue to research and write informative, insightful and independent articles, and to continue to provide support to others. The smallest amount is much appreciated – thank you.

PR firms are becoming more powerful, but good journalism still prevails – John Jewell

October 29, 2016October 29, 2016 · 4 Comments ·

freedom-of-speech-megaphone2

Recent articles about the public relations firm Bell Pottinger are a stark reminder of the power and pervasiveness of PR in today’s fragmented media landscape.

Source: PR firms are becoming more powerful, but good journalism still prevails – John Jewell

Bedroom Max – Rupert Dreyfus

October 28, 2016October 31, 2016 · 11 Comments ·

An introduction to Rupert Dreyfus

My friend Rupert writes pretty spectacular, sardonic and transgressive fiction, (a genre of literature that centres on characters who feel oppressed by the norms and expectations of society, and who rebel against those imposed confines. Usually written from a first person perspective, too), which he uses to make insightful observation and incisive social and political commentary, blended with a distinctive brand of iconoclasm and sharp, dark wit.

No-one at the moment is doing more to break down the artificial divisions in writing – between the arts, literature, social sciences; realism, surrealism, social and political satire, commentary, alternative narratives and dissidence – than Rupert.

He also writes for the arts and culture section of Scisco Media and the occasional polemic for Consented.

He says: “Prior to the rise of the internet, artists of all stripes have previously been locked out of a nepotic creative industry, unable to reach their intended audience. The barrier is rooted in neoliberalism where a handful of businesspeople decided what the rest of us should read, watch, listen to and generally consume as entertainment. Everything else wasn’t permitted to enter the creative landscape.

This antidemocratic model would encourage creatives to follow market trends in order to increase their profitability and in turn their likelihood of getting corporate backing. Meanwhile originality would be pushed to the fringes where people rarely look.

Yet we don’t have to be art critics to know that being profitable and creating good art aren’t necessarily the same thing. Neither is the amount of sales a yardstick for authenticity.”

Rupert speaks to us about the soul-diminishing absurdity of the times we live in. It’s an era of omnipresent multimedia and we are inundated with executive memos from the establishment. Yet we are becoming increasingly unanchored, precarious, isolated and lonely – our society is unraveling; solidarity is being unpicked. Neoliberalism is individualistic, competitive and adversarial, not cooperative and collective.

Rupert pushes at boundaries to expose the fragile illusion of consensus and a facade democracy. He tells us about the tragedy of mediocrity and the outrage of blandly prepackaged dehumanisation and discloses strategies for maintaining a sense of identity and resisting the soul death of conformity in the concrete theatre of society, where there is little safety, solace and very few enclaves.

He describes the precariousness of our lived experiences in highly entropic, post industrial, very corporate, vulture capitalist, authoritarian urban contexts and the ritualistic planet-consuming preposterousness and utter claustrophobia of a toxic, cloying, overarching, totalising neoliberal ideology.

As US punk band Anti-Flag say in their 2012 track “The Neoliberal Anthem”: Strap in and watch the world decay!

However, even counterculture and contemporary agitprop are being mainstreamed, prepackaged, reduced and pre-rationalised by the ever devouring neoliberal profit culture, as Joe Strummer once observed: “They got Burton suits, ha, you think it’s funny, turning rebellion into money.”

The X Factor was one bastard child of the facile mass market mentality – a neoliberal conspiracy of the bland; we are damned to forever aspire only to the condition of muzak. Unless we recognise that we must rebel.

And democracy is not something we have: it’s something we always have to do.

Thinking about it, the same can be said of intelligence.

Power corrupts, so it must be ordinary citizens that change the world. And to do so, we must be the change we want to see. Firstly, we have to participate. We have to be responsible and we have to collaborate and cooperate. We have to promote and practice mutual aid. We have to share. We have to rebuild the spirit of social solidarity from the wreckage of competitive individualism.

If we don’t want hierarchies of wealth and power, we must be egalitarians. If we don’t want scapegoats, outgroups and stigma, we must regard everyone’s life as having equal worth, and adopt a genuinely democratic, dialogic approach built on mutual respect and grace – a transfigurative approach. Authoritarian movements don’t tend to result in democratic and equal societies, you see.

Rupert is a comrade in arms, shooting from the lip (well, from the mind, heart and keyboard) and we share a very similar philosophical anarchist perspective, so we read each other’s work and have some interesting, enjoyable and pretty inspiring chats.

I think that Rupert’s brilliant, blackly comedic and deftly written works provide us with a powerful antidote for the asininity of neoliberalism.

So, without further ado, here is an excellent short story which highlights the incoherence and irrationality of Conservatism and the neoliberal “small state”, kind courtesy of the wonderfully talented Rupester.

Enjoy!

KSJ

All images courtesy of Rupert Dreyfus

Bedroom Max

If you really must know, it all went downhill for me and the campaign one freezing cold Monday morning back in early February. Like every other Monday morning I woke up bright and early, sat in total silence, spooned salted porridge down my throat and spent a good three hours studying the financial news in great detail. I remember being saddened to learn that a once popular chain of stationery shops called Paper Cuts had gone into liquidation over the weekend resulting in nearly two thousand scheduled redundancies.

‘It breaks your heart,’ I whispered, tears building in my eyes. ‘Those poor businessmen; will this pain never end for them?’

Determined to do all that I could for the economy I headed off to Harts Close with my placard and flask of tea, ready for another day of campaigning. You may already know, but Harts Close is one of the poorest estates in the north-west which is charmingly poor when you think how poor the north-west is in general. Even some of the affluent parts of the north-west look not unlike shantytowns in the developing world so imagine what one of the poorest estates looks like. But it’s all justified when you think how shiny our capital is. We mustn’t forget that spending hardworking taxpayers’ money outside of London is like putting banknotes through a paper shredder.

That particular morning I was the first to arrive at Harts Close, beating my fellow campaigners by a good ten minutes. I began to set up the campaign stall for our Spare Bedrooms Are a Crime Against the Economy petition, hoping to recruit some new members to the cause although I wasn’t holding out on this.

As I prepped the stall and waited for the other campaigners to join me, I was taken aback when I saw one of those appalling creatures leaving his home. With such high levels of unemployment at Harts Close he clearly wasn’t off to work hard and get along; he was off to, and it punishes my gag reflex having to say it, sign on.

With a leaflet outlining all of the key information of our campaign, I approached him though being extra careful not to get too close in case he was contagious.

‘Excuse me,’ I said. ‘I wonder if you’d be interested in signing our petition.’

‘I would do but I’ve got to be on the shop floor in less than half an hour. I’m afraid I haven’t got time-’

‘Haven’t got time to learn what you can do for your country?’ I said, cutting him off.

‘Sorry,’ he replied, dropping the attitude. ‘I didn’t realise you were collecting for combat wounded veterans.’

‘I’m not.’

‘Then who are you with?’

‘My name is Maxwell Bashmore,’ I told him. ‘And I’m with the Taxpayers’ Battalion.’

‘The who?’

‘The Taxpayers’ Battalion. We’re a charity which represents all taxpayers in the United Kingdom; even those who disagree with us.’

‘I’ve never heard of you.’

I proceeded to explain that the Taxpayers’ Battalion has been on Question Time forty-nine times in the last three years and that we have a website which receives no fewer than seventy-five individual hits per quarter. But none of this seemed to impress him. He just gawped at me as if I was speaking in some obscure unga-bunga jungle language.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘That’s all very well, but what do you actually campaign for?’

‘Our main objective is to raise awareness that everybody is a taxpayer first, human being second. But once you realise that all you ever are and all you ever will be is a taxpayer, the human being in you quite rightly dies.’

‘And what about this petition?’ the panhandler asked. ‘What’s it actually for?’

‘If you really must know we are campaigning to strengthen the laws of the so-called bedroom tax so that we, the taxpayers, don’t have to subsidise you, the unemployed, with any more absurdly unfair spare bedrooms when a sleeping bag and a park bench meets the minimum requirement for a night’s sleep.’

‘But I’m not unemployed.’

‘Of course you are; you all are. And once this petition has enough signatures we’re campaigning to make sure that you’re no longer able to receive anything other than dried pasta and tins of spam after the next election. We think it’s only fair considering that we are taxpayers and you’re not, and therefore we should get to decide where every last penny is allocated which should only be towards strengthening the economy rather than funding the lifestyles of the unemployed. As non-tax paying subjects you should just be thankful that you’re allowed to breathe the same air as the rest of us although we are presently thinking of ways that we can tax oxygen for the unemployed, too. I’ve actually got some ideas which I’m going to run by our local member of parliament this afternoon. And he’s a member of the Conservative Party so there’s a good chance he’ll be on board.’

‘I’m not interested,’ this monstrosity told me while he started to walk away.

‘Not interested in saving the British economy?’ I yelped. ‘Not interested in helping your government to cut the deficit?’

‘Nope,’ he said as he continued to walk in the direction of the dole queue. ‘Not interested at all.’

‘That’s right!’ I told him as I shook my fist at his shrinking silhouette. ‘Go and hang around the job centre all day, getting free work experience at the taxpayers’ expense! It’s because of people like you that Paper Cuts went into administration over the weekend. How you all sleep at night…!’

‘Get beeped!’ he shouted while holding up his middle finger.

It probably comes as no surprise that this was a typical exchange with the residents of Harts Close. They just don’t want to listen to common sense politics. They are overwhelmingly joyous with the thought of dousing taxpayers’ money in gasoline and then setting it on fire. Every last one of them.

Before long the other campaigners arrived slightly later than usual. Well I say others; I actually mean Trevor and George. The campaign had consisted of only three members since its inception, but back then we were utterly convinced that the rest of the taxpaying community would slowly grow to accept that we were speaking for all taxpayers. I suppose we had the producers of Question Time to thank for helping us with this. And before you say it: no the BBC doesn’t disproportionately represent members of the far right as to reinforce the impression that the whole of Britain longs to live under a dictatorship. They’re quite clearly part of the biased liberal media brigade dreamed up by Trotskyists in an effort to covertly support the red menace during the interwar period.

‘Morning, gentlemen.’

‘Sorry we’re late,’ Trevor said. ‘We were delayed by a car crash on the dual carriageway. An ambulance held us up for about ten minutes.’

‘Were there any injuries?’

‘I don’t think so,’ George said with his whiny voice. ‘The driver looked a bit shook up, but she was able to use her mobile phone.’

‘And did you get out of your car and protest?’

‘Why would we do that?’

‘Because it’s quite clearly a waste of taxpayers’ money. If this selfish crow had suffered a compound fracture or whiplash then an ambulance, at a push, might be warranted. But if she was capable of using her mobile phone then she was blinking well capable of either driving to the hospital for a check-up or not using any tax funded medical facilities whatsoever thus saving hardworking taxpayers’ money. And clearly the latter scenario would’ve been the preferred outcome for the hardworking British taxpayer who we tirelessly represent through our working hard and getting along. And I bet she wore trousers, too, which is an absolute disgrace to women everywhere. She really is the worst person I’ve ever met in my life.’

‘Of course,’ Trevor said.

‘And don’t you remember the report I wrote last summer?’ I continued. ‘The average ambulance call-out costs the taxpayer exactly three thousand and fifty-six pounds and twenty-seven pence. Which is why we need to privatise the NHS – and fast. Poor people get a headache for five minutes these days and they think they’ve got a brain tumour; it’s a complete waste of taxpayers’ money. Not to mention all those lives which they save; day in, day out. And research suggests that five percent of those survivors haven’t ever paid taxes so it’s an absurdly unfair system we have. The Americans have got it spot on: if you can’t afford healthcare then you should learn to live with your illnesses and, if necessary, die quietly. Anyway; let’s get on with helping the economy back to good health so our hypothetical children’s children don’t have to spend their entire lives cutting the deficit. The unemployed are going to be leaving their homes any minute now and I’ve only managed to set up half of the leaflets. Well I say their homes, but we all know who picks up the tab at the end of the month.’

We proceeded to spend the morning like any other Monday morning; drinking from our flasks and campaigning against the unemployed. Every time one of these spongers walked passed the stall we would wave our placards and ask them to sign our petition to strengthen the laws of the bedroom tax. But they never did; they just kept on living their economically inactive lives without a care where our money was being spent. Some of them would tell us to beep! off while others would make rude hand gestures when they walked on by. And whenever they actually tried to express their uninformed opinions, we would put our fingers in our ears and drown out their voices by repeating our motto over and over. And if you really must know, our motto goes like this: let’s all face the facts; life would be better if we didn’t support the weak with our tax!

One day very soon it’ll be the national anthem.

It was close to midday when things went from bad to worse. We hadn’t obtained a single signature, and I could tell that Trevor and George weren’t happy with my earlier comments regarding their failure to protest on behalf of all British taxpayers. But truth be told the three of us had been on bad terms for at least a month. During our last meeting it had come to light that Trevor’s eldest niece was a member of the same local library we tried to close down last year while George admitted that he’s recently had to cancel his private medical insurance. This means they both might as well be placing taxpayers’ money in a space shuttle and sending it to the moon so that future alien visitors can place it inside a museum and laugh at it at our expense. Of course I had let them both know how disappointed I was at the situation and it had been straining our campaign for some time.

‘Shall we take a break, gentlemen?’ I said. Trevor and George looked at each other and then swung their heads back to me. ‘What is it?’

‘I’m afraid we’re retiring from the Taxpayers’ Battalion,’ Trevor told me.

‘You mean you’re giving up?’

‘Yes.’

‘Both of you?’

‘I’m afraid so.’

‘But why?’

‘To be honest,’ George said. ‘We think you’re just a little too obsessed with paying taxes.’

‘What do you expect?’ I snapped. ‘I’m treasurer of the Taxpayers’ Battalion! Of course I’m just a little too obsessed with paying taxes. And I won’t stop being just a little too obsessed until the welfare state is nothing more than a lump of rock and everyone has insurance for everything – even those who can’t afford it. In fact especially those who can’t afford it. It is all of our duty to see that this something-for-nothing-culture-of-entitlement someday comes to an end. But not including the monarchy, of course, because they’re good for the economy and are rightly exempt from the bedroom tax.’

But there was no convincing the pair of them. I could only watch as George and Trevor placed down their placards and walked away from our campaign stall, leaving me all alone at Harts Close.

‘Blinking traitors!’

Right there I knew that I had to campaign harder than ever. I had to do everything I could to strengthen the British economy…

…but first it was time to visit my local member of parliament. You probably know the chap; he’s called Montgomery ‘Monty’ Pyeman-Hondo-Basildon-Skrog III. He’s a decent gentleman who understands that the only thing which is wrong with the free markets are those people who aren’t working hard enough and getting along like all decent people were born to do. They think this world is for having fun or something.

So I went to Monty’s surgery at around about lunchtime. I walked straight to the receptionist’s desk and introduced myself.

The receptionist looked up at me. ‘Hello, Mister Bashmore,’ she said while combing her mousey hair with her fingers. ‘Glad you could make it. Monty is expecting you. If you’d like to follow me.’

I trailed behind the receptionist who led me down a labyrinth of corridors. Meanwhile I told her all about my love for this green and pleasant land. I also explained how immigration is technically responsible for every crime ever committed and that the European Union headquarters is an exact replica of Stalin’s moustache if you turn it upside down so it’s a ruddy good job we got out before they made us all speak Russian. I was reassured to see that she agreed with me wholeheartedly. However, she seemed quietly offended when I told her that her job was a complete waste of taxpayers’ money.

When we finally reached Monty’s office she knocked on the door three times and waited.

From the other side of the door we heard: ‘You may enter!’

The receptionist pushed her way inside. ‘This is the one o’clock appointment,’ she said to Monty before disappearing the way she’d come.

I found Monty sitting at a Victorian writing table in his office, a quill pen in his right hand. He had a spectacular handlebar moustache and was wearing an old leather aviator hat. He was sitting beneath a large oil painting of the handsome Baroness Thatcher. Now there’s a remarkable lady! She knew the true meaning of democracy. If you really must know democracy has absolutely nothing to do with people taking control of their communities and everything to do with supporting the free markets. Every single democratic decision must strengthen the economy; no matter how many people suffer as a consequence. The economy must come first. If you don’t agree with this elementary fact of life then you’ve been brainwashed by cultural Marxism which, by the way, is a serious academic study.

‘Isn’t she a lovely piece of skirt?’ Monty said.

‘Margret Thatcher?’

‘I mean the receptionist.’

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘She might be a lovely piece of skirt, Mister Pyeman-Hondo-Basildon-Skrog III, but she’s also a complete waste of taxpayers’ money.’

‘Please,’ Monty said while fixing his Union Jack dickie bow tie and making his way over to the fridge. ‘Call me Monty. I’m one of the lads really and this is why I understand exactly what the average working man wants which is to work hard and get along. Would you like a bottle of ME, ME, ME?’

‘And what’s that exactly?’

‘Beer.’

‘Is it British?’

‘Brewed in Middle England hence the name ME, ME, ME.’

‘Then don’t mind if I do.’

I watched as my best friend Monty opened up the fridge door and grabbed two bottles of beer. As he walked back to the table he cracked them open with a bottle opener. ‘I can’t wait for the big game at the weekend. I hope they play Johnson up front again and stick with the four-four-two formation. That seemed to work marvellously for them last weekend.’

‘You’re just like a normal person.’

‘Of course I am. I smoke cigarettes; I fancy women; I studied military history at university and I go to watch football matches at the weekend. Sometimes I even hunt defenceless wild animals with my specially trained pack of wolves and then watch as they get ripped to bits. It’s what real men do. So what can I do for you, Mister Bashmore?’

As Monty handed me a beer I proceeded to reel off my shopping list of policy ideas. These included things like no votes for the unemployed, introducing the whip for unskilled workers, banning all technology which has been invented since nineteen fifty-nine, giving the vote to small to medium sized businesses, competitive Morris dancing the new national sport.

Monty looked genuinely interested, nodding his head and twiddling the ends of his moustache. ‘Sounds like common sense politics to me,’ he said. ‘I’ll certainly put some of this forward at the coming Prime Minister’s questions. Especially the policy advocating compulsory business studies at infant schools. I’m surprised we didn’t include that in our last manifesto. Or perhaps we did. I must confess I haven’t had the time to read it properly. I just liked the title: Making People Work Hard and Get Along.’

‘So how are you finding your first week as Shaftsborough’s new member of parliament even though you’re from the opposite end of the country and have never even been here before in your life?’

‘It’s been a whirl. We have the corporate media on our side so nothing can possibly go wrong. They basically tell people who to blame which is never the people in charge and always those who have minimal influence on the political process, and the little people fall for it every time. This country really is a flock of sheep and we hate them all.’

‘Excellent.’

‘It really is. And at any given moment there’s approximately thirty percent of the electorate which bought into this hilarious joke that we’re on their side if only they follow our instructions. We’re struggling to work out who this thirty percent of the electorate actually are because our policies quite clearly only benefit about six people in the entire country and they’re all worth more money than sense – hence the massive donations.’

‘That’s incredible.’

‘But do you want to know what the clincher is?’

‘Please tell me.’

‘Every time somebody writes a protest song or a ridiculous short story which is attempting to be clever but is actually a load of fluffy hippy nonsense, another fifty people join our club.’ Monty paused and then looked over at me. ‘We’re like Medusa; try to cut one of our heads off and six more will grow back in its place. And we turn people to stone.’ He then looked at me. ‘So tell me again, old boy. What is it you do?’

‘I’m treasurer of the Taxpayers’ Battalion,’ I told him. ‘A charity which campaigns against the unemployed.’

‘Fantastic. You’re a true patriot.’

‘I love my country’s economy.’

‘Me too. Perhaps I’ll make a donation. I take it you could make good use of five thousand English pounds? I say, old boy; have you heard the one about the Belgian plumber?’

‘I don’t believe I have.’

So as Monty told this hilarious joke that insults women, environmentalists, wheelchair users and Islam he wrote out a cheque. Afterwards I thanked him and left his office.

I then made my way to my only job that day. I should explain that before I ended up here I used to be a self-employed children’s entertainer. I used my profession as an opportunity to teach children how to be a true patriot. That afternoon I was performing for a room full of six year olds. I can’t remember the occasion; perhaps it was one of their birthdays.

I started with my usual puppet routine where English Bob would demonstrate the failings of multiculturalism by having to speak Punjabi whenever he visited his local corner shop because the brown-skinned non-British subject behind the till couldn’t speak a single word of English. I then went on to the next lesson.

‘Right, children,’ I said. ‘Put your hands up if you want to answer a question.’

Immediately there were thirty-something little hands waving at me and a chorus of: ‘I do! I do!’

I pointed at this one little girl. ‘What’s your name?’

‘My name is Holly.’

‘That’s a fine British name, Holly. Why don’t you tell everybody what you want to be when you grow up?’

‘I want to be a nurse.’

This is a typical example of our lefty nation gone absolutely mental. Children nearly always want to work in the public sector; policemen, firemen, doctors. It’s as if they have this innate desire to want to help others. It was my mission to make sure that they all left Maxwell’s Laissez-Faire Circus Show wanting to pursue a career in corporate management.

‘No you don’t.’

‘I do.’

‘No you don’t, Holly. Do you know what taxes are?’ Holly shook her head and furrowed her eyebrows. I then spent several minutes explaining to Holly the horrors of paying taxes only to see your hard-earned money being turned into hamster bedding by drug addicts and benefit cheats. Afterwards she agreed to show an interest in the retail sector. Another life saved from the rampant red menace.

Finally I taught them the most important lesson of all; the lesson which all true patriots learn way before they learn how to tie their own shoelaces.

‘Right, children,’ I said. ‘Who wants a sweetie?’ Predictably all the children began to scream with excitement. ‘There is just one problem. I only have this one packet of sweeties. Admittedly there are enough sweeties for everybody in the room, but that’s not how the real world works. So I’m going to give this packet of sweeties to just one of you and then I want you to eat them all. Even if you feel fat and greedy, and the other children go hungry; just eat them all and don’t share them with anybody else. Laugh in their faces and tell them that they’re not getting any sweeties. Can you do this for me?’

‘But I share with my friends all the time,’ came this squeaky voice.

‘Well you’re definitely not getting any sweeties then. Anybody else here likes to share?’

A few other children admitted to sharing so I told them that they’ve got no chance either. I then gave the sweeties to a child who promised not to pass them on to anybody else.

‘Sharing isn’t caring,’ I told them all. ‘Sharing is weakness. Be greedy, children, for this world is a wretched place and everybody is thy enemy.’

And that was the end of the show. You really have to get them while they’re young and beat out any niceness from their little hearts so they’re ready to step in to the boring world of doing business.

As I walked the streets in the direction of home I began to feel deflated. This was, of course, everything to do with Trevor and George’s sudden exit from the campaign. I told myself that the only way I could pick myself up was by going back to Harts Close with a megaphone and campaigning against the unemployed harder than ever.

It was four o’clock in the afternoon when I arrived for the second time that day. Most of the unemployed had been out on their shopping sprees and were now taking hard drugs in their mansions.

I put the speaker to my lips and began to yelp: ‘This is a message for the residents of Harts Close! We all know that you’re a complete waste of taxpayers’ money, but it’s not too late! You can turn your lives of dependency around and be free; free to work long hours and wear corporate uniforms! Free to buy things like televisions and computer games and legal drugs like alcohol if you really must; just make sure it’s British by checking the label. And everything in moderation because the British economy must come first!’

It was round about here that this little imp, dressed head to toe in cheap sportswear, tapped me on the shoulder and started to hurl abuse at me. ‘What the beep! are you going on about?’

I lowered my megaphone. ‘Would you like to sign the petition?’

‘What petition?’

‘The petition to strengthen the laws of the bedroom tax.’

‘My auntie died because of the bedroom tax.’

‘No she didn’t.’

‘Yes she did.’

‘No she didn’t. You’ve clearly read that in the biased liberal media.’

‘The biased liberal what?’

‘The biased liberal media. I’ll give you a lesson about life, little fellow; the biased liberal media is propaganda written by people who long for the days of the Soviet Union; days when everybody had to wear military clothes that didn’t fit properly and went to work on horseback even though the West had long invented the automobile because we’re far superior. And just so you know; loads of people starved to death under Stalin, too. Unlike here in Britain where nobody goes without. Is that what you really want to see happen to our green and pleasant land, little fellow? Is it?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ this misguided little scamp said to me, becoming increasingly hostile. ‘All I know is that my disabled auntie died because the government stopped paying for her home. My mum found her dead in the kitchen shortly afterwards. Apparently the stress of having to move out had caused her to have a stroke.’

‘You should be careful what you read in the biased liberal newspapers or before you know it you’ll be wearing Che Guevara T-shirts and joining a union for champagne socialists.’

‘Champagne who?’

‘Champagne socialists. Listen, basically anybody in employment who criticizes the status quo is a champagne socialist. And, yes, the concept of a champagne socialist is a logical fallacy but I’m not interested in logic; I’m interested in common sense politics.’

‘Well, I didn’t read it in the papers,’ he said. ‘I learned it from my family.’

‘But that’s how good the biased liberal media are at lying to people; they can make you believe anything. It’s almost like hypnosis. The only news we can trust these days is the financial news written by patriotic corporations that love our country. Everything else is a big, fat lie told by champagne socialists who wear red socks and hate our freedom to buy things.’

To my surprise and disgust a policeman approached us. ‘Is everything alright?’

‘This little fellow here needs his mother,’ I told the officer. ‘Although I’m presuming she’s probably long overdosed on wacky tobacky reefer spliffs or whatever they call them. Can you see that he gets home safely, officer?’

‘Actually,’ the policeman said. ‘We’ve had a complaint about you, sir.’

‘What a complete waste of taxpayers’ money,’ I muttered. ‘What’s the complaint regarding?’

‘We’ve had numerous calls from local residents who are concerned about a gentleman disrupting the local community with a megaphone. He won’t listen when they tell him to move along.’

‘That’s preposterous!’

‘Apparently it’s like talking to a sculpture made out of human excrement. They’ve all been out on the street, asking you to move along, but you won’t listen. You just parade around the estate, telling people that they’re a waste of taxpayers’ money. I’ve actually been shown the evidence on several mobile phone devices. It’s as if you’re wearing industrial headphones the way you refuse to listen to anybody. They’re asking you to go away, but you just won’t listen. So I’m asking you kindly, sir, please will you put the megaphone away and move along.’

This, of course, was an outrageous lie. Nobody had been out to talk to me; they were all too busy smoking crack heroin drug pipes and watching repeats of Jeremy Springle to worry about what I was up to.

‘This is a scandal!’ I yelped. ‘I am Maxwell Bashmore; an upstanding, taxpaying member of the taxpaying community. I work hard and I get along more than anybody in the world! In fact I technically pay your wages so you should be doing exactly what I tell you to. Officer, I demand that you carry out a thorough investigation into these slanderous comments and make the necessary arrests.’

‘You’re not my boss and that’s not how slander works. Now I’ve asked you politely to move along, but it appears that you don’t want to listen to the law either.’

‘Blinking traitor!’

But it was no use; this officer proceeded to read me my rights and then he took me to the police station. All the while I calculated how much this terrible mistake was costing the hardworking British taxpayer and kept everybody present updated.

When I arrived at the station I got one free telephone call which turned out to be a complete waste of taxpayers’ money. I made the call to my best friend Monty. It was the receptionist who picked up. When I told her who I was, she put me straight through.

‘Who is this?’ Monty said.

‘It’s Maxwell Bashmore.’

‘Who?’

‘Maxwell Bashmore. We had an appointment earlier this afternoon. You really liked my policy idea about using homeless people for military target practice.’

‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘I remember now. The true patriot. Have you heard the joke about the Polish hairdresser?’

‘I haven’t got time for jokes and I never find them genuinely funny anyway.’

‘But this one offends transgenders, donkeys and children under the age of five all in one fell swoop. It’s hilarious.’

‘Please listen to me.’

‘What is it, Maxwell? You sound a little crabby.’

‘I’m at the station.’

‘Which station?’

‘The police station.’

‘What happened?’

‘I’ve been arrested for breaching the peace, but it’s a wild conspiracy theory invented by the entire political left who want to silence any kind of sensible debate with their political correctness gone stark raving bonkers.’

‘Don’t call here again.’

And with that the phone went down.

I should probably tell you that I haven’t spoken to Monty since that call although I know that deep down we’re the best of friends. He’s just like a normal person and he thinks about me every day. He really cares about the future of the British economy.

But it’s what happened next that really hurt: using taxpayers’ money I was taken to court and was found guilty of breaching the peace. It was, of course, lie after lie after lie. All of them lying out of their backsides; including the judge and the jury. All of them blinking traitors. Regardless I was sentenced to fourteen days in prison.

But the misery doesn’t end there either! A criminal record meant that once I’d been released from prison I could no longer work with children. After using Monty’s donation to cover my legal expenses I was immediately faced with the predicament of having to either, and I loathe to have to say it again, sign on or go homeless. Like a true patriot I chose to go homeless which is how I ended up under this motorway bridge, drinking turps and huddling round this burning metal skip with you lot.

And if you really must know I’ve worked out that if I remain homeless for the next five years, three months and five days I will have technically paid back everything I have taken from the hardworking British taxpayer by refusing to receive any benefits. Then, when my life is finally back on track, I’ll be back to campaign until the welfare state is no more.

Rupert Dreyfus, 2016.

—

Rupert Dreyfus has been causing mischief in the literary world since 2014 by taking swipes at the establishment, those nightmarish corporations which seem hell-bent on turning our world into one giant supermarket and the arse end of the status quo. His first novel, Spark, was released in 2014 and his first collection of short stories, The Rebel’s Sketchbook, was released the year after, receiving widespread acclaim.

Links to Rupert’s books – guerrilla fiction for the Digital Age

Spark: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Spark-Mr Rupert Dreyfus/

The Rebel’s Sketchbook: https://www.amazon.co.uk/The Rebel’s Sketchbook. –Mr Rupert Dreyfus/

Website: www.rupertdreyfus.co.uk

Government backs new law to prevent people made homeless through government laws from becoming homeless

October 26, 2016January 9, 2018 · 6 Comments ·

Theresa May’s ritualistic Tory chanting: “getting people’s lives back on track”

Earlier this month, Theresa May surprisingly unveiled a £40 million package designed to prevent homelessness by intervening to help individuals and families before they end up on the streets. It was claimed that the “shift” in government policy will move the focus away from dealing with the consequences of homelessness and place prevention “at the heart” of the Prime Minister’s approach.

Writing in the Big Issue magazine – sold by homeless people – May said: “We know there is no single cause of homelessness and those at risk can often suffer from complex issues such as domestic abuse, addiction, mental health issues or redundancy.”

“So I believe it’s time we changed our approach. We can no longer focus on tackling the symptoms and immediate consequences of homelessness. We need to put prevention at the heart of a new approach.

“As a first step towards this change, I’m announcing a new £40 million package to both prevent and tackle the causes of homelessness. This will include £20 million for local authorities to pilot innovative initiatives to tackle the causes of homelessness – helping to find solutions for families and individuals before they reach crisis point.”

Earlier this year it was revealed that under David Cameron’s administration homelessness in England had risen by 54 per cent since 2010.

This reflected the sixth consecutive annual rise, with households becoming homeless in London increasing to 17,530 (9 per cent) in the last year alone and 58,000 households across the whole of England.

That’s during six consecutive years of the Conservatives in Office, and six years of savage austerity measures that target the poorest citizens disproportionately, by coincidence.

Or by correlation.

There are a few causes that the prime minister seems to have overlooked, amidst the Conservative ritualistic chanting which reflects assumptions and prejudices about the “causal” factors of social problems and a narrative of individualism. It’s a curious fact that wealthy people also experience “complex issues” such as addiction, mental health problems and domestic abuse, but they don’t tend to experience homelessness and poverty as a result.

The deregulated private sector and increasingly precarious tenancies

Patrick Butler reported in the Guardian last month that record numbers of families are becoming homeless after being evicted by private landlords and finding themselves unable to afford a suitable alternative place to live, government figures show.

The end of an assured shorthold tenancy (AST) was cited by nearly a third of the 15,170 households in England who were classed as homeless in the three months to June – a number that was up 10% on the same period last year.

The problem was particularly acute in London, accounting for 41% of all homelessness acceptances in the capital during the period, according to figures from the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG).

The quarterly statistics also reveal a sharp rise in the number of homeless households with children who had been unlawfully resident in unsuitable temporary bed and breakfast accommodation for longer than six weeks.

Although councils are required to ensure families do not stay in B&B accommodation for longer than 42 days, 1,140 households found themselves in this position in the three months to June, up 29% on the same period in 2015

Local authorities have blamed use of B&Bs on chronic shortages of affordable suitable temporary housing in their areas, a shortage caused in part by government cuts to housing benefit levels.

There are also problems in wider society arising from political decision making that contribute significantly towards homelessness. These structural causes include a lack of affordable housing; high levels of poverty, low wages, the high cost of living, unemployment and underemployment; welfare cuts, punitive sanctions and problems with the way benefits system operates; the way that social housing is rationed.

The Homelessness Reduction Bill

Sajid Javid, the Communities Secretary, announced that the Government will support reforms to England’s anti-homelessness laws and strengthen local authority duties to prevent people becoming homeless.

If the Homelessness Reduction Bill – a private member’s bill put forward by Conservative MP Bob Blackman – becomes law, it will place a duty on local authorities to help eligible people at risk of homelessness to secure accommodation, 56 days before they are threatened with eviction.

Announcing the Government’s support of the bill, Mr Javid said: “No one should have to sleep rough on the streets. We want to build a country that works for everyone, not just the privileged few. That’s why we are determined to do all we can to help those who lose their homes and provide them with the support they need to get their lives back on track.

“This Government is therefore, very pleased to support Bob Blackman MP’s Private Members Bill, with its ambitious measures to help reduce homelessness.”

Blackman, the Conservative MP for Harrow East, said he welcomed the Government’s decision. He added: “Throughout my 24 years in local government prior to becoming an MP, I saw the devastation that can be caused by homelessness first hand, with too many people simply slipping through the net under the current arrangements.

“By backing this bill, the Government is demonstrating its commitment to an agenda of social justice and also shows that it is willing to listen. I look forward to working with Ministers going forward in order to bring about this important change in legislation.”

Crisis, the national charity for homeless people, welcomed the Government’s commitment but warned that unless “MPs [need to] offer their support at the bill’s second reading on Friday, this historic opportunity could easily be lost”.

Jon Sparkes, the charity’s chief executive, added: “This is a credible and much-needed piece of legislation which now has the backing of the Government, the opposition and the Communities and Local Government Select Committee. The cross-party consensus is there, and we hope that MPs from across the political spectrum will come together on October 28 to vote on the bill.

“Helping people to stay off the streets and rebuild their lives is about basic social justice – it’s the right thing to do – but it also makes good economic sense. New research from Crisis has revealed how preventing 40,000 people from becoming homelessness could save the public purse up to £370m a year, or just over £9,000 per year for every person helped. The logic is clear: preventing homelessness saves lives, but also reduces public costs.

“For 40 years we’ve had a system that fails too many homeless people and turns them away at their time of need. The Homelessness Reduction Bill could help put an end to that injustice once and for all. It is a major opportunity to improve the rights of people currently shut out of the system, whist continuing to protect families with children.”

Lord Porter, the chairman of the Local Government Association, which represents councils and had opposed an earlier draft of the Bill, said granting councils the ability to build homes would be a more effective step towards ending homelessness and the housing crisis in general.

“Councils want to end homelessness and are already doing everything they can within existing resources to prevent and tackle it. However, there is no silver bullet, and councils alone cannot tackle rising homelessness. The causes of homelessness are many and varied and range from financial to social,” he said.

“After having worked closely with Bob Blackman, we are confident that the new Bill, if it does go through Parliament, will be in a better place.

“However, it is clear that legislative change alone will not resolve homelessness. If we are all to succeed, then all new duties proposed in the Bill will need to be fully funded. Councils need powers to resume our role as a major builder of affordable homes.”

The shortage of housing and the impact of the Government’s welfare “reforms”

The 2013 annual State of the Nation report by the charities Crisis and Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) revealed that the number sleeping rough had risen by six per cent in England this year, and by 13 per cent in London. There has been a 10 per cent increase in those housed temporarily, including a 14 per cent rise in the use of bed and breakfast accommodation.

Writing just a year after the highly controversial Welfare Reform Act was ushered through the legislative process on the back of Cameron’s claim to the “financial privilege” of the Commons , the report authors explicitly blamed the Government’s welfare cuts for compounding the problems caused by the high cost and shortage of housing as demand outstripped supply. The researchers found found that the cap on housing benefit made it more difficult to rent from a private landlord, especially in London, and claimed the controversial “bedroom tax” has caused a sharp rise in arrears for people in public housing, particularly in the Midlands and North.

A separate survey by Inside Housing magazine showed that councils and housing associations are increasingly resorting to the threat of eviction, as the loss of an adequate social security safety net is causing increasing hardship for social housing tenants. The reduction of council tax benefit for people who were previously exempt from paying council tax has also contributed significantly to experiences of material hardship, too.

Ministers have emphatically denied that their reforms have contributed to the return of homelessness. However, homelessness has now risen in each of the five years since the Coalition was formed – after falling sharply in the previous six years, and has continued to rise throughout 2016.

The government’s welfare policies have emerged as the biggest single trigger for homelessness now the economy has allegedly recovered, and are likely to increase pressure on households for the next few years, with the new benefit cap increasing the strain, according to the independent research findings in the Homelessness Monitor 2015, the annual independent audit, published by Crisis and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.

The housing minister, Kris Hopkins, said the study’s claims were “misleading”. Local authorities had “a wide range of government-backed options available to help prevent homelessness and keep people off the streets,” he said.

“This government has increased spending to prevent homelessness and rough sleeping, making over £500m available to local authorities and the voluntary sector,” he added.

It hasn’t worked. This is because, despite Theresa May’s claims, the government tends to simply address the effects and not the real causes of homelessness. Unless the government actually address the growing inequality, poverty and profound insecurity that their own policies have created, then homelessness and absolute poverty will continue to increase.

Hopkins added that the government had provided Crisis with nearly £14m in funding to help about 10,000 single homeless people find and sustain a home in the private rented sector.

Julia Unwin, chief executive of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, said: “Homelessness can be catastrophic for those of us who experience it. If we are to prevent a deepening crisis, we must look to secure alternatives to home ownership for those who cannot afford to buy: longer-term, secure accommodation at prices that those on the lowest incomes can afford.”

The Homelessness Monitor study 2015 found:

Housing benefit caps and shortages of social housing has led to homeless families increasingly being placed in accommodation outside their local area, particularly in London. Out-of-area placements rose by 26% in 2013-14, and account for one in five of all placements.
Welfare reforms such as the bedroom tax contributed to an 18% rise in repossession actions by social landlords in 2013-14, a trend expected to rise as arrears increase and temporary financial support shrink
Housing benefit cuts played a large part in the third of all cases of homelessness last year caused by landlords ending a private rental tenancy, and made it harder for those who lost their home to be rehoused.

The study says millions of people are experiencing “hidden homelessness”, including families forced by financial circumstances to live with other families in the same house, and people categorised as “sofa surfers” who sleep on friends’ floors or sofas because they have nowhere to live.

Official estimates of the numbers of people sleeping rough in England in 2013 were 2,414 – up 37% since 2010. But the study’s estimates based on local data suggest that the true figure could be at least four times that.

The Department for Work and Pensions also announced last month that it was cutting funding for homeless hostels and supported housing for disabled people by reducing supported housing benefit rent payments for three years. The homelessness reduction bill in the current policy context is yet another example of how Conservatives don’t seem to manage coherent, joined up thinking.

“The Government’s proposals will compromise the right for people with a learning disability to live independently, and must be reconsidered urgently,” Dan Scorer, head of policy at the learning disabilities charity Mencap, warned after the announcement.

Meanwhile Howard Sinclair, the chief executive of the homelessness charity St Mungo’s, said the cut would leave the homeless charity with £3 million a year less to spend on services.

“The rent reduction will threaten the financial viability of some of our hostels and other supported housing schemes and offers no direct benefit to vulnerable tenants who mostly rely on housing benefit to cover their housing costs,” he said.

It’s just not good enough that the Government simply attempts to colonise progressive rhetoric, claiming they stand for social justice, when they very clearly don’t walk the talk.

Conservative neoliberal “small state” anti-welfare policies are increasing homelessness. The bedroom tax, council tax benefit reductions, housing benefit reductions, welfare caps, sanctions, the deregulation of private sector, the selling off and privatising of social housing stock have all contributed to the current crisis of homelessness.

It was particularly remarkable that May claimed the government are “doing the right thing for social justice” yet the Conservative policy framework is, by its very design, inevitably adding to the precariousness of the situations those people with the least financial security are in.

Someone should explain to the prime minister that “social justice” doesn’t generally entail formulating predatory policies that ensure the wealthy accumulate more wealth by dispossessing the poorest citizens of their public assets, civilised institutions and civilising practices gained through the post-war settlement.

Devolving responsibility for the housing crisis and lack of adequate social security provision to local authorities that are already strapped for cash because of government cuts, and with an ever-dwindling housing stock, won’t help to address growing inequality, or alleviate poverty and destitution.

Update

Let’s Pressurise MP’s To Attend the Vote On the ‘Once In a Lifetime Homelessness Bill’ – template letter to MPs, courtesy of the Dorset Eye

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The Nudge Unit’s u-turn on benefit sanctions indicates the need for even more lucrative nudge interventions, say nudge theorists

October 20, 2016September 24, 2025 · 26 Comments ·

Some context: the new neuroliberalism and “behavioural insights”

The behaviourist turn in government administration – the use of targeted citizen behavioural conditionality in neoliberal policy making – has expanded globally and is linked to the growth of behavioural economics theory (“nudge”) and a New Right brand of “libertarian paternalism.”

Reconstructing citizenship as highly conditional stands in sharp contrast to democratic principles, rights-based policies and to those policies based on prior financial contribution, as underpinned in the social insurance and social security frameworks that arose from the post-war democratic settlement.

The fact that the poorest citizens are being targeted with behavioural theory-based interventions also indicates discriminatory policy, which reflects traditional Conservative class-based prejudices. It’s an authoritarian approach to poverty which simply strengthens existing power hierarchies, rather than addressing the unequal distribution of power and wealth in the UK.

Some of us have dubbed this trend neuroliberalism because it serves as a justification for enforcing politically defined neoliberal outcomes. A hierarchical socioeconomic organisation is being shaped by increasingly authoritarian policies, placing the responsibility for growing inequality and poverty on individuals, side-stepping the traditional (and very real) political/structural explanations of social and economic problems.

Such a behavioural approach to poverty also adds a dimension of cognitive prejudice which serves to reinforce and established power relations and inequality. It is assumed that those with power and wealth have cognitive competence and know which specific behaviours and decisions are best for poor citizens, who are assumed to lack cognitive competence (because they are poor and therefore make “the wrong decisions”). Apparently the theories and insights of cognitive bias don’t apply to the theorists applying them to increasingly marginalised social groups. Policy has increasingly extended a neoliberal cognitive competence and decision-making hierarchy.

It’s very interesting that the Behavioural Insights Team now claim the state using the threat of benefit sanctions may be “counterproductive”. The idea of increasing welfare conditionality, enlarging the scope of its’ application and increasing the frequency of benefit sanctions originated from the behavioural economics theories of the Nudge Unit in the first place.

The increased use and rising severity of benefit sanctions became an integrated part of welfare conditionality in the Conservative’s Welfare “reform” Act, 2012. The current sanction regime is based on a principle borrowed from behavioural economics theory – an alleged cognitive bias we have called loss aversion.

It refers to the idea that people’s tendency is to strongly prefer avoiding losses to acquiring gains. The idea is embedded in the use of sanctions to “nudge” people towards compliance with welfare rules of conditionality, by using a threat of punitive financial loss, since the longstanding, underpinning Conservative assumption is that people are unemployed because of alleged behavioural deficits and poor decision-making. Hence the need for policies that “rectify” behaviour.

I’ve argued elsewhere, however, that benefit sanctions are more closely aligned with operant conditioning (behaviourism) than libertarian paternalism, since sanctions are a severe punishment intended to modify behaviour and restrict choices to that of compliance and conformity or destitution. At the very least this approach indicates a slippery slope from “arranging choice architecture” in order to support the “right” decisions that are felt to benefit people, to downright punitive and coercive policies that entail psycho-compulsion, such as sanctioning and mandatory workfare.

Psychology is being misused by the government to explain unemployment (it’s claimed to happen because people have the “wrong attitude” for work) and as a means to achieve the “right” attitude for job readiness. Psycho-compulsion is the imposition of often pseudo-psychological explanations of unemployment and justifications of mandatory activities which are aimed at changing presumed beliefs, attitudes and dispositions. The Behavioural Insights Team have previously propped up this approach.

Welfare conditionality and its experimental approach to behavioural change doesn’t operate within an ethical framework, citizens cannot withdraw from behavioural experiments, nor is this framework based on informed consent. The impact of state directed psycho-compulsion and potential harm that it may cause citizens is not being monitored.

The Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) is composed of mostly behavioural economists, who also claim the title of libertarian paternalists (and who have a clear and distinct ideological premise for their behavioural theories, while attempting to claim “objectivity”.)

They claim that while it is legitimate for government, private and public institutions to affect behaviour the aims should be to ensure that “people should be free to opt out of specified arrangements if they choose to do so.” Apparently, that proviso doesn’t apply to poor citizens.

The nudges favoured by libertarian paternalists are also supposed to be “unobtrusive.” That clearly is not the case with the application of extremely coercive and punitive Conservative welfare sanctions.

When it comes to technocratic fads like nudge, it’s worth bearing in mind that truth and ethics quite often have an inversely proportional relationship with the profit motive. It’s a cognitive bias, if you will.

And when one nudge theory fails, there are always lucrative and political opportunities to generate more.

Of course Dr Kizzy Gandy, a leading researcher at the policy unit says: “We are optimistic that behavioural science can help government departments to better design policies to help those who are ‘just managing’ in order to prevent and overcome poverty.”

In a new report released today from the Behavioural Insights Team, the authors say: “There is evidence that welfare conditionality in the UK – mandatory behavior requirements such as attending meetings with work coaches or providing repeated evidence of disability in order to receive benefits – is associated with anxiety and feelings of disempowerment.”

“However, as far as we know no one has examined whether welfare conditionality has cognitive depleting effects.”

It’s particularly worrying that there is a proposal in the report for further experimental pseudo-psychological approaches to policies aimed at the poorest citizens. The researchers call on the Department for Work and Pensions to conduct experiments into whether welfare conditionality actually had any positive effects and suggested that “self-set” and “enforced goals” might be a better way of “helping people into work.” Although this allows for a little tokenist self-determination and permits a little autonomy, it is still an approach ultimately based on coercion and enforcement.

There is a clear distinction to be made between “behavioural science” – which is almost entirely about economic outcomes; what is politically deemed “best” for citizens and social conformity, and mainstream psychology – which embraces a much broader and deeper perspective of the complexities of human potential and wellbeing.

For anyone curious as to how such tyrannical behaviour modification techniques like benefit sanctions arose from the bland language, inane, managementspeak acronyms and pseudo-scientific framework of “paternal libertarianism” – nudge – here is an interesting read: Employing BELIEF: Applying behavioural economics to welfare to work, which is focused almost exclusively on New Right small state obsessions.

(Update 27/10/17 – the link to the original document no longer works. But I found a copy with the same page layout here, luckily: – https://www2.learningandwork.org.uk/sites/default/files/publications/CESI_employing_BELIEF.pdf).

Pay particular attention to the part about the alleged cognitive bias called loss aversion, on page 7.

And this on page 18: “The most obvious policy implication arising from loss aversion is that if policy-makers can clearly convey the losses that certain behaviour will incur, it may encourage people not to do it,” and page 46: “Given that, for most people, losses are more important than comparable gains, it is important that potential losses are defined and made explicit to jobseekers (e.g.the sanctions regime).”

The recommendation on that page: “We believe the regime is currently too complex and, despite people’s tendency towards loss aversion, the lack of clarity around the sanctions regime can make it ineffective. Complexity prevents claimants from fully appreciating the financial losses they face if they do not comply with the conditions of their benefit.”

The Conservatives duly “simplified” sanctions by extending them in terms of severity and increasing the frequency of use. Sanctions have also been extended to include previously protected social groups, such as lone parents, sick and disabled people.

The paper was written in November 2010, prior to the Coalition policy of increased “conditionality” and the extended sanctions element of the Tory-led welfare “reforms” in 2012. I wrote about this at length earlier this year, here: Nudging conformity and benefit sanctions: a state experiment in behaviour modification.

The Behavioural Insights Team, (otherwise known as the Nudge Unit) was set up by David Cameron in 2010. In their most recent report called Poverty and decision-making: How behavioural science can improve opportunity in the UK, the nudge researchers now say that burdening unemployed people with responsibilities, using the threat of sanctions might actually be making it harder for them to get jobs.

According to the behavioural economist theorists authoring this highly jargonised report, government policies designed to help people are reducing and impairing people’s so-called cognitive scope and abilities.

However, it’s difficult to imagine how punitive sanctioning, which entails the removal of people’s lifeline income, originally calculated to meet the costs of only basic survival needs, such as for food, fuel and shelter, could ever be seen as “helping people.”

I don’t believe that Orwellian semantic shifts (or ‘thrifts’, in this case) can ever provide a genuine and effective solution to poverty and inequality.

Some major inconsistencies and incoherences in the report

In the latest BIT report, loss aversion is mentioned again: “People dislike losses more than they like equivalent gains. Babcock, Congdon, Katz, and Mullainathan (2012) hypothesise that people may experience loss aversion if they consider taking a job paying below past earnings. Therefore, they may stay on unemployment benefits longer than they should. Unrealistic wage expectations may be reinforced when the social status and personal identities of workers are strongly tied to their previous job.” [My emphasis]

Note the phrase “unrealistic wage expectations” and later incoherent comments in the report about in-work poverty, which I will highlight.

The summary report states in the introduction: “A third of the UK population spent at least one year in relative income poverty between 2011 and 2014.

Traditionally policymakers and anti-poverty organisations such as the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) have focused on boosting people’s economic capital (e.g., income) and human capital (e.g., educational attainment) to reduce poverty. While investments in these areas have led to important gains in opportunity for many Britons, emerging research from behavioural science shows that other less tangible resources, which derive from psychological, social and cultural processes, significantly influence people’s ability to overcome disadvantage.

BIT was commissioned by JRF to examine the role of individual decisions in shaping people’s experiences of poverty in the UK and to identify the drivers of these decisions. This reflects JRF’s interest in looking beyond traditional, structural drivers of poverty. Our findings, based on a review of the published literature, are presented in a new report, launched today.”

Let’s cut to the chase. The entire document is framed by the use of a distinct and established narrative; it’s composed of a pre-loaded ideological language, references and signposts, using comments and phrases like “[…] we explain some of the ways that cognitive, character and social capital influence social mobility, via decision-making.”

And a sub-heading: “Character capital: Self-efficacy and responsive parenting.” Apparently, “home visits by health workers have had positive effects in preventing intergenerational poverty.” That’s quite a remarkable claim, given that the document acknowledges poverty is actually increasing in the UK.

The whole concept of character capital is itself founded on the notion that people with an “internal locus of control” tend to perform tasks better than those with an “external locus of control.” This is about where people place the responsibility for what they achieve – either “inside” individuals, based solely on notions of merit, specific skills and talents, or external to individuals – “outside” of them, based on environmental conditions such as competition, chance, opportunities, socioeconomic, employment market context and so on. However, the cited evidence to support this theory was later contradicted in the report.

One of the key features of poverty is loss of choice and a steady erosion of control over one’s decisions, of course.

It’s also worrying that it is implied those who believe that achievement is linked with structural conditions are “under-performers.” It reads a little like a Samuel Smiles Victorian treatise on “thrift, character and self-help.”

It’s also an almost subliminal method of dismissing the impact of structural constraints on the opportunities available to individuals. It serves to make invisible what was once a key consideration in public discussions about poverty: the unequal distribution of power, wealth, resources and opportunity.

Also of note: “low levels of financial literacy” was conflated with notions of “human capital”, which “potentially exacerbate the effects of depleted cognitive capital among low income groups when choosing between credit options.” Nothing to see here, then, regarding the behaviour of lenders. I mean whoever heard of a bank offering an overdraft to people who actually need one. Still, thank goodness there are generous companies like Wonga, always ready to step up to the mark, with eye-watering interest rates to offer those on low incomes.

The research authors seem to think that the only human potential worth recognising is that of our economic decision-making. Yet when people are materially poor, budgeting and decision-making are invariably constrained – that’s intrinsic to the very nature of poverty.

Limited decision-making and reduced available choices don’t cause poverty: they are the subsequent exclusion effects of poverty.

It’s telling that none of the recommendations made in this document actually address the structural and political causes of material poverty and growing inequality in the UK.

There is a substantial incoherence in some of the claims made, too. For example: “The world of work is possibly the single most important policy area for maximising individual and household resources to prevent and overcome poverty.”

Yet: “Just under half of those in poverty in the UK live in a workless household (Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 2014)”. So work clearly doesn’t pay for over half of those people in poverty.

In fairness, it is later acknowledged that: “However, simply being in work is not sufficient to prevent or overcome poverty. Nearly two-thirds of children in poverty live in working families.”

This heavily jargonised rhetoric is, on the whole, about looking for cheap individualist “solutions” to poverty that disregard the need for improving people’s material and financial situations, by extending on an existing neoliberal narrative of alleged individual fault, character deficits, cognitive bias and decision-making flaws.

None of this will raise the profile of crucial issues such as the conditions imposed by austerity and neoliberal policies, socioeconomic organisation and political decision-making, that are having a profound impact on growing inequality and increasing poverty in the UK. The persistent use of the word “workless” rather than “unemployed” is another linguistic signpost for neoliberal competitive individualism, too.

Geographer David Harvey describes neoliberalism as a process of accumulation by dispossession: predatory policies are used to centralise wealth and power in the hands of a few by dispossessing the public of their wealth and assets. The report does not refer to the mode of political-economic organisation of which growing inequality and poverty are an intrinsic and inevitable feature.

Proposed solutions: more of the same

Summary of recommendations:

MINIMISING COSTS

Consumer credit

1 Make it easier to access low cost credit through extending access to interest-free Budgeting Advances; assisting credit unions to expand online services; and providing tax relief to individuals taking out payroll loans.

2 Further restrict practices by high cost credit providers that play on consumer biases, and test remedies that will improve consumer credit decision-making.

3 Continue to evaluate financial capability programmes through initiatives like the Money Advice Service What Works Fund.

(Access to credit does not alleviate poverty in the long-term.)

Savings

1 Test ways of automating rainy day savings through employer enrolment, default savings accounts with banks, and Universal Credit payments.

2 Evaluate the effectiveness of financial apps for helping people save.

3 Optimise the Help to Save matching scheme, through testing auto-enrolment and prizes for regular saving, to encourage low-income groups to save.

(Poor citizens do not have sufficient funds to make savings. And research shows that absolute poverty is growing in the UK, which means that many people often don’t have sufficient funds for meeting even fundamental survival needs, such as for food and fuel.)

MAXIMISING RESOURCES

Work

1 Use identity-building activities in Jobcentres to cultivate intrinsic motivation for work in order to improve the quality and sustainability of jobs that people find.

2 Collect longer-term and more holistic outcome measures of labour market interventions to understand their full impact on poverty.

3 Develop a simple tool for Jobcentres to identify capital deficits in order to match interventions to individual job seeker needs.

Entitlements

1 Develop a common “cognitive load stress test” that measures how easy it is for eligible groups to access government entitlements.

2 Use annual entitlement summaries to prompt existing welfare recipients to apply for other assistance they may be eligible for, and to help them budget.

3 Experiment with the design of welfare conditionality to boost cognitive capacity and self-efficacy, such as having claimants set their own payment conditions.

PREVENTING INTERGENERATIONAL POVERTY

Parenting

1 Provide families in or near poverty with free access to evidence-based online parenting programmes.

2 Develop community to strengthen social ties between parents from different backgrounds.

3 Conduct research into whether small and inexpensive adjustments to housing conditions can reduce cognitive load and improve parental decision-making.

Post secondary education

1 Make the application process for post-secondary education as simple as possible, for example, by pre-populating application forms.

2 Use personalised assistance and prompts to encourage students and parents to apply to post-secondary education.

3 Link formal information about returns to post-secondary education with informal information (from peers) about what post-secondary education will be like.

Every single intervention recommendation fails to address the structural causes of poverty, which lie outside of the control of people experiencing poverty. Yet most of these recommendations are aimed at prompting the state to act upon individuals.

Proposals such as providing access to parenting programmes, “identity-building activities in Jobcentres to cultivate intrinsic motivation for work”, “rainy day savings”, and to “develop a simple tool for Jobcentres to identify capital deficits in order to match interventions to individual job seeker needs” all sound like a New Right blame-storming exercise. Again, the problem of poverty is regarded as being intrinsic to the individual, rather than one that is about material deprivation which arises in a wider political, economic, cultural and social context.

Post secondary education costs money and isn’t supported by the state. The Education Maintenance Award (EMA) was withdrawn by the Conservatives, and the cost of a university education is now far too much for many young people from poorer backgrounds because of the tripling of fees and reduction in maintenance support. It’s the government that need a nudge, here. This is a good example of how opportunities and choices are being limited for poorer citizens by cuts and constraints imposed by the neoliberal ideologues in office.

The government never question the decision-making of the powerful and wealthy, yet it certainly wasn’t the poorest citizens that caused the global recession in 2007, nor was it the poorest citizens that imposed damaging austerity policies. The poorest people are burdened with a disproportionate weight of austerity cuts to their income and support. The wealthiest citizens have meanwhile been gifted with substantial tax cuts.

Nudge is a state prop for neoliberalism, inequality and social control

Neoliberalism organises societies into hierarchies. Inequality is therefore an inevitable feature of the UK’s current mode of socioeconomic organisation.

The UK currently ranks highly among the most unequal countries in the world.

Inequality and poverty are central features of neoliberalism and the causes therefore cannot be located within individuals.

Neoliberals see the state as a means to reshape social institutions and social relationships based on the model of a competitive market place. This requires a highly invasive power and mechanisms of persuasion, manifested in an authoritarian turn. Public interests are conflated with narrow economic outcomes. Public behaviours are politically micromanaged. Social groups that don’t conform to ideologically defined outcomes are stigmatised, and outgrouped.

Shamefully, in a so-called first world, wealthy liberal democracy, othering and outgrouping have become common political practices.

Replacing spent micro-managementspeak with more micro-managementspeak

The Nudge Unit, which was part-privatised in 2014, have now warned that some Government policies were reducing so-called “cognitive bandwidth” or “headspace” of the people they were designed to help. So more theoretical psychobabble to overwrite the previous psychobabble which didn’t work when applied via policy.

This is bland neoliberal managementspeak at its very worst. The policies are causing profound damage, harm and distress to those they were never actually designed to “help”. Let’s not permit an evading of accountability and techniques of neutralisation: the use of rhetoric to obscure the real intention behind policies, as well as the consequences of them. It’s nothing less than political gaslighting.

Of course the report attempts to apply “the latest findings from behavioural science to improve government services.” In a neoliberal framework, there are many lucrative opportunities for private companies to experiment in the psychological management of populations who have become the casualties of political decision-making, for political ends. The ethical relativity, moral entrepreneurship and sheer financial opportunism on display here certainly reflect some fundamental neoliberal values and principles. The main one being profit over human need.

Dr Kizzy Gandy proposes that cost-effective “simple tweaks” to services could help improve the way services worked. “Government policies should help people to have less on their mind, not more,” she added.

However, I propose that government policies in democratic societies should also be designed to meet the public’s needs, including alleviating poverty, rather than being about impoverishing targeted social groups and then undemocratically acting upon individuals, without their consent, directing them how to behave in order to accommodate government ideology and meet politically defined neoliberal outcomes.

Material poverty steals aspiration and motivation from any and every person that is reduced to struggling for basic survival. Abraham Maslow (a real social psychologist) explained that when people struggle to meet their basic physical needs, they cannot be “incentivised” to fulfil higher level psychosocial needs – that includes job seeking.

Further criticism

Labour Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary, Debbie Abrahams, said: “Even the government’s own Behavioural Insights Team now recognise the mountains of evidence that the widespread use of sanctions is not leading to better outcomes for people seeking work. Indeed, this government team’s report suggests that sanctions may be operating as a barrier to finding a job.

“This government should be ashamed of their persistent failure to act on this issue over many years, after I, and other campaigners, have provided evidence of the devastating impacts of their sanctions policy. I have committed to putting an end to Tories’ cruel and unnecessary sanctions regime, as part of our work to transform the social security system.”

In fairness to the BIT, the report does say on page nine, among the listed areas of proposed future research: “A significant portion of behavioural science research focuses on improving the decisions of end-users – in this case people in poverty. But what about the decisions of service providers and policymakers? How can we improve the quality of their decisions to support people [to] escape poverty? And how can we build their empathy with those whose opportunities are at stake?”

But who is nudging the nudgers? I would think nudgers are “incentivised” by those providing the contracts that pay their salaries, on the whole. The government part-own the nudge unit.

Researchers from a variety of universities across the UK, using qualitative longitudinal interviews with nine groups of welfare service users from across England and Scotland, aim at determining longer-term effects of sanctions. The first wave findings from this collaborative ongoing study regarding the effects and ethics of welfare conditionality were released last year

It was found that linking continued receipt of benefit and services to mandatory behavioural requirements has created widespread anxiety and feelings of disempowerment. The impacts of benefit sanctions are universally reported by service users as profoundly negative, having severely detrimental financial, material, emotional, psychological and health impacts. Some individuals disengaged from services, some were even pushed toward “survival crime”.

The most surprising thing about these findings was the general lack of surprise they raised.

A recurring theme is that sanctions are grossly out of proportion to “offences”, such as being a few minutes late for an appointment. Many reported being sanctioned following administrative mistakes. The Claimant Commitment was criticised for not taking sufficient account of individuals’ capabilities, wider responsibilities and vulnerabilities. Many saw job centres as being primarily concerned with monitoring compliance, imposing discipline and enforcement, rather than providing any meaningful support.

Power relations, class and economic organisation have now completely disappeared from public conversations about poverty. Neoliberal anti-welfarism, amplified by a corporate media, has aimed at reconstruction of society’s “common sense” assumptions, values and beliefs. Class, disability and race narratives in particular, associated with traditional prejudices and categories from the right wing, have been used to nudge the UK to re-imagine citizenship, human rights and democratic inclusion as highly conditional. 

This is not just about shifting public rational and moral boundaries to de-empathise the electorate to the circumstances of politically defined others. It also obscures the consequences more generally of increasingly non-inclusive, anti-democratic, prejudiced and extremely punitive policies.

The bottom line is that government policies are expressed political intentions regarding how our society is organised and governed. They have calculated social and economic aims and consequences. In democratic societies, citizens’ accounts of the impacts of policies ought to matter.

However, in the UK, the way that policies are justified is being increasingly detached from their aims and consequences, partly because democratic processes and basic human rights are being disassembled or side-stepped, and partly because the government employs the widespread use of linguistic strategies: euphemisms, superficial glittering generalities and techniques of persuasion to intentionally divert us from aims and consequences of ideologically (rather than rationally) driven policies. Furthermore, policies have become increasingly detached from public interests and needs.

For example, the state has depoliticised disadvantage, making it the private responsibility of citizens, whilst at the same time, justifying a psychopolitical approach that encodes a punitive Conservative moral framework.

According to the behavioural economist theorists, in their highly jargonised and fairly meaningless report, government policies are reducing so-called “cognitive bandwidth” or “headspace” of the people they were designed to help.

That the government imposes additional “cognitive costs”, as well as material and financial ones, on low-income groups, is hardly a groundbreaking revelation.

I can put it much more plainly, and strip it of neoliberal psychobabbling: imposing sanctions on people who already have very limited resources is not only irrational, it is absurdly unjust, damaging, distressing and spectacularly cruel.

The compliance framework: Concentrix’s ‘reign of terror’ and ever-decreasing tax credits

October 15, 2016October 16, 2016 · 5 Comments ·

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A US outsourcing company, Concentrix, which was awarded a £75m contract by Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) – the department responsible for collecting taxes and paying out certain benefits – has been accused of exercising a “reign of terror” over people who claim tax credits.

The private company was contracted to “reduce fraud and error” in the tax credit system, and to carry out “compliance checks” in a bid to save the government money. More than 500 civil servants have been deployed to help the private company resolve problems it caused by stopping people’s tax credit payments. This includes tax credit awards for the children of both in work and out of work parents, as well as child care payments.

The company has issued an apology for failures that have left many people with no benefit payments for up to two months, leaving them without money for essentials. The US firm has been accused of “incorrectly” withdrawing tax credits.

Officials from HM Revenue and Customs told a committee of MPs that a breakdown in customer services at Concentrix had resulted in only 10% of calls being answered on some days.

Many thousands of people had their tax credits stopped after Concentrix said they were making “fraudulent claims”. In what can at best be described as Kafkasque taunting, one poor woman was told she was in a relationship with a chain of newsagents, another with the philanthropist and poverty researcher, Joseph Rowntree, (who died in 1925,) according to a BBC report. A teenage single mum receiving tax credits was told she was married to a dead pensioner, after having her child tax credit withdrawn. Another mother was told she was living with the previous tenants of the house that she had lived alone in for two and a half years with her son, after her child tax credit was also withdrawn.

It’s difficult to conceive that these allegations could possibly have been made in genuine error. Mumsnet, an online forum for parents, has had over a thousand comments from parents who received letters from Concentrix demanding evidence out of the blue that they live alone. This was just on one page of ten on the site about the unreasonable demands for “compliance” that the company has been making of parents.

Many have been forced to print off documents like utility bills which were online, or pay for numerous backdated bank statements, to provide endless evidence of their circumstances. This is a costly process for people who need additional support in the first place, and many had already had their payments ended. The main reason for “compliance checks” has been suspicion of an “undisclosed partner,” challenging the legitimacy of a single claim, based on other data indicating that another adult is living at the address.

In October 2010, HMRC and the Department for Work and Pensions released a joint error and fraud strategy. As a result, HMRC increased its compliance activity across the tax credits system and introduced the use of data from credit reference agencies to inform compliance decisions. Through this process, single claims were identified where there was an indication that there may be a second adult living with the claimant – an “undisclosed partner”. However, credit reference agency data is notoriously unreliable.

Compliance

The “compliance framework” is a government method of preempting and preventing “non-compliance”, based on data collection and “analysis” by private companies that are hired by the public service sector. Instead of being “reactive” and acting after a “transaction”, the private companies are using “insights” to calculate “high risk” claimants. Ultimately, the aim is to cut costs, “through real-time auditing and prevention of fraud and error, agencies can collect the right amount of taxes to help ensure the right people receive the benefits they deserve.” (My bolding).

And: “Services can be embedded in processing functions to prevent non-compliance.”

The rationale: “Struggling with increasing demand for services amid widespread economic constraint, human services organizations face a major dilemma—how to minimize costs while improving services and ensuring accurate benefit distribution.

By using analytics, forward-thinking human services organizations are rising above this challenge. They are preventing, detecting and mitigating transactions where there is error, fraud or abuse. And they are using information gleaned from analytics to significantly reduce operating costs and drive business results.” (From: Accenture Intelligent Processing Services).

I’ve discussed elsewhere that the increasing use of a narrative of “objectivity” and emphasis on “analytics”, detachment and quantification, associated with small state ideology and austerity, tends to place some social groups at a psychological distance from administrators, and objectifies them, as if people claiming support because they can’t work, or because their wages are low and exploitative, are a homogenous group of people, bound by characteristics rather than circumstances in a context of political decision-making.

It becomes easier to disassociate from someone you view “objectively” and to distance yourself from the impact of your calculated and target-led decision-making, constrained within a highly political framework. Such an objectification of a person or group of people serves to de-empathise us, which is a key characteristic requirement of neoliberal ideology, embedded in inhumane “small state” policy and extended via administrative (and outsourced, privatised) practices. It leaves us much less likely to relate to the circumstances, emotions or accept the needs and choices of others. Such interactions become much more open to bureaucratic abuse and political exploitation.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) have previously undertaken research into the costs of compliance on individuals, and their report refers to the time, money and psychological costs that are being imposed on applicants for, and recipients of, benefits and tax credits and on others by meeting all the various rigid requirements placed on them by social security and tax credit law and statutory authorities.

However, this study was undertaken before the Conservatives increased conditionality and compliance requirements further, in the radical Welfare Reform Act 2012. The burdens on those needing welfare support have grown substantially since the research was completed. (See: Understanding the Compliance Costs of Benefits and Tax Credits. )

Some of the people affected gave emotional testimonies, as they told the work and pensions select committee that they had been forced to borrow money and go to food banks as a result of the hardship caused by Concentrix’s actions.

The committee was told that of the 45,000 payments stopped, nearly 15,000 had appealed so far and that “90% – 95%” had been successful in overturning the decision.

HMRC officials said they first became concerned of problems at Concentrix in August when they started receiving reports that only 10% of calls were being answered within five minutes – the target was 90%.

Jon Thompson, chief executive of HMRC, said “a collapse in basic customer service” had occurred caused by too few staff being on hand, and that he’d personally taken the decision not to renew Concentrix’s contract. It ends in March next year.

Frank Field, the chair of parliament’s work and pensions committee, has said that a company’s “reign of terror” over tax credit recipients will be drawing to a close, after HMRC decided not to renew its contract.

On Thursday, the work and pensions committee heard from claimants who wrongly had their tax credits stopped and suffered the distress and humiliation of having to borrow money or visit food banks to feed their children.

The committee also heard that, at the height of the crisis, only 1% of the calls being made to Concentrix were actually being answered.

The committee issued a comment on the “extraordinary” evidence it heard, from four single parents who had wrongly had their tax credits stopped, senior staff from Concentrix, including senior Vice President Philip Cassidy, and HMRC, including Chief Executive and Permanent Secretary Jon Thompson.

Claimant humiliation and appalling customer service

The Committee heard about:

The humiliation of claimants who were forced to borrow money from friends and family in order to feed their children as they were left without benefits, to which they were ultimately found to be entitled, for up to seven weeks
Appalling customer service which saw claimants calling up to 70 times to get through as just 1% of calls were answered by Concentrix at the height of the crisis. One claimant finally waited 90 minutes to speak to a Concentrix adviser on an 0845 number, at great personal expense
Appeal success rates of 73% according to HMRC or 90-95% according to Concentrix; either way a terrible indictment of the original decision-making process
Refunds to claimants taking place over a series of months. In one case, a single mother lost housing benefit because a refund of wrongly withdrawn tax credits took her over an income threshold. Others will have taken on debts in the meantime
Repeated buck-passing between Concentrix and HMRC, who signed the contract, as to who was responsible
HMRC Permanent Secretary Jon Thompson was unable to explain what had gone wrong and why

Committee to seek clarifications from Concentrix and HMRC

The Committee has agreed to write to both Concentrix and HMRC demanding urgent information regarding:

How the performance of Concentrix was monitored by HMRC
Levels of staffing at Concentrix, in particular during August 2016, and the training provided to staff
Steps HMRC will take to compensate claimants, ensure they are not further disadvantaged, and review decisions taken by Concentrix
Assurance that Concentrix will not be compensated for HMRC taking much of their responsibilities back in-house

The Committee also plans to issue a report into the scandal.

Chair’s comment

Frank Field MP, Chair of the Work and Pensions Committee, said:

“The Committee was astonished by the extraordinary evidence we heard. From Concentrix we saw a company desperately out of their depth and unable to deliver on the contract awarded to them by HMRC. From senior HMRC officials we saw a palpable disregard for the human implications of this gross failure of public service. From the tax credit claimants we saw dignity in the face of appalling and traumatic experiences.

We have no doubt that many people similarly affected have been unable to come forward. I welcome HMRC’s swift action on the Concentrix contract, but that does not excuse them for ever having allowed this to happen.”

—

You can listen to the work and pensions committee meeting about the Concentrix and tax credits controversy here: https://goo.gl/q0mGiR

See also:

The government’s tax credit Claimant Compliance Manual

Tax credits: undisclosed partner interventions – Child Poverty Action Group

I don’t make any money from my work. But you can help by making a donation and support me in continuing to research and write informative, insightful and independent articles, and to provide support to others. I’m disabled because of my illness (lupus) and co-run support groups for other disabled people going through the assessment and appeals processes. The smallest amount is much appreciated – thank you.

Government guidelines for PIP assessment: a political redefinition of the word ‘objective’

October 14, 2016February 21, 2019 · 40 Comments ·

Thousands of disabled people have already lost their specialist Motability vehicles because of Conservative PIP cuts and many more are likely to be affected.

Personal Independence Payment is a non means tested benefit for people with a long-term health condition or impairment, whether physical, sensory, mental, cognitive, intellectual, or any combination of these. It is an essential financial support towards the extra costs that ill and disabled people face, to help them lead as full, active and independent lives as possible.

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) have issued a guidance document for providers carrying out assessments for Personal Independence Payment (PIP), which was updated last month. It can be found here: PIP Assessment Guide.

The DWP Chief Medical Officer states that this is a supplementary guidance, in addition to “the contract documents agreed with providers as part of the commercial process, providing guidance for health professionals [HPs] carrying out assessment activity and for those responsible for putting in place and delivering processes to ensure the quality of assessments.”

Words like “fair”, “quality”, “support”, “reform” and even “objective” have been given a very subjective, highly specific Conservative semantic make-over, to signpost and reference a distinctive underpinning ideology, and to align them with neoliberal and New Right anti-welfare discourse and outcomes, over the last five years.

There is some preemptive dodging of criticism and patronising get-out clauses in the document, for example: “It must be remembered that some of the information may not be readily understood by those who are not trained and experienced HPs.”

This comment is indicative of the lack of transparency in the terms, conditions and process of assessments, and how they are generally carried out. It also emphasises the professional gap between the “health professional” employed by the state to carry out the “functional capacity” assessments in the context of a neoliberal welfare state, and medical health professionals, whose wider work is generally not directly linked to the politically defined conditionality of welfare support.

If you fundamentally disagree with any of the approach outlined in the content of the document, or the policy, it’s because you “fail to comprehend it”, simply because you haven’t trained as a HP.

I had no idea that HPs are the only people who can work out policy outcomes and who recognise government cuts, small state ideology and general cost-cutting measures for what they are, despite the thumping Orwellian semantic shifts and language use that is all about techniques of neutralisation (where the rhetoric used obscures or “neutralises” the negative aims and harmful consequences of the policy.)

Firstly, the HPs are not so much “health professionals”, but rather, “re-trained disability analysts.” Their role entails assessing the impact of illness and disability on the “functional capacity” of individuals in direct relation to justification or refusal of a PIP award only. Furthermore, it is the decision of the HP to “determine whether any additional evidence needs to be gathered from health or other professionals supporting the claimant.”

Often at the appeal stage, it turns out HPs frequently decide not to ask for further evidence. The DWP must take all medical evidence into account when making a decision about PIP claims. Yet the DWP say: “In many cases, appeals are granted because further medical evidence is provided.”

However, neither HPs nor the DWP decision-makers contact people’s GP or other professionals for more information about their health condition very often. This indicates that people are having to go to court, often waiting months for their appeal to be heard, because of deliberately under-informed, poorly evidenced DWP decisions.

Furthermore, it says in the government guidance to GPs: “Your patient should complete the forms to support their [PIP] claim using information that they have to hand, and should not ask you for information to help them do this, or to complete the forms yourself.”

It seems that the DWP are determined to continue making ill-informed, medically unevidenced decisions as long as they can get away with it.

The ‘functional’ assessment

From the document: “The assessment for PIP looks at an individual’s ability to carry out a series of key everyday activities. The assessment considers the impact of a claimant’s health condition or impairment on their functional ability rather than focusing on a particular diagnosis. Benefit will not be paid on the basis of having a particular health condition or impairment but on the impact of the health condition or impairment on the claimant’s everyday life.”

This process of assessment, however, is a very speculative one, with inferences drawn from seemingly unrelated questions and assumed circumstances, such as “do you have a pet?” This translates into “can bend from the waist to feed a cat/dog” on the HP’s report to the DWP.

During examination, people are asked to perform a series of movements, and inferences are drawn from these regarding the performance of day to day tasks. The movements bear no resemblance to ordinary day to day tasks, nor do they take into account the use of aids and adaptations that people may use to carry out daily tasks.

Furthermore, the person being assessed isn’t presented with the assumptions drawn from the examination and questions, which means they are not provided with an opportunity to verify any claim made by the HP, or to say if they can manage to feed their pet “reliably, safely and consistently”, or if their family have to feed the animal for much of the time.

From the document: “The HP should check the consistency of what is being said by using different approaches, asking questions in different ways or coming back to a previous point. When considering inconsistencies, HPs should bear in mind that some claimants may have no insight into their condition, for example claimants with cognitive or developmental impairments.”

I know of a lady who wore a gold locket. It was simply assumed at her assessment that despite her extremely arthritic fingers, and information about her pain and the lack of movement in her hands from her GP, that she had sufficient dexterity to fasten and unfasten the clasp. Had she been asked, she would have informed the HP that she never took the locket off, even in the shower.

This approach – “checking for inconsistencies” by using indirect questioning and assumption is NOT “objective”. It is a calculated strategy to justify a starting point of disbelief and skepticism regarding the accounts provided by ill and disabled people about the impact of their conditions and disabilities on their day-to-day living. As such, it frames the entire assessment process, weighting it towards evidence gathering to justify refusing awards, rather than being “objective”.

It’s simply a method based on side-stepping and discounting people’s own accounts and experiences of their disability, and any medical evidence submitted to verify that.

This approach is also mirrored in the Work Capability Assessment, reflecting Conservative cynicism and prejudice towards sick and disabled people. (See: What you need to know about Atos Assessments – it provides a good overview from a whistle-blower of how responses to seemingly casual observations and apparently conversational questions are re-translated into “inconsistencies” which are then used to justify refusing a claim.)

The introduction of PIP was framed by New Right anti-welfarism

Secondly, “PIP is replacing Disability Living Allowance (DLA), which has become outdated and unsustainable. The introduction of PIP will ensure the benefit is more fairly targeted at those who face the greatest barriers, by introducing a simpler, fairer, more transparent and more objective assessment, carried out by health professionals” [All boldings mine].

In other words, PIP is aimed at cutting welfare costs and support for people who would previously have been eligible for Disability Living Allowance (DLA). We are told that it’s no longer possible as a society to support all disabled people who need help with the additional costs that they face simply because they are ill and disabled, so the government propose to establish those “with the greatest need” by using a more stringent assessment process, which is claimed to be fair and more “objective”.

A recent review led the government to conclude that PIP “doesn’t currently fulfil the original policy intent”, which was to cut costs and “target” the benefit to “those with the greatest need.” That originally meant a narrowing of eligibility criteria for people formerly claiming Disability Living Allowance, increasing the number of reassessments required, and limiting the number of successful claims.

Controversially, the cuts to disability benefits (including the £30 per week cut from those claiming ESA in work related activity group) will fund tax cuts for the most affluent – the top 7% of earners. The chancellor raised the threshold at which people start paying 40p tax, in a move that will probably see many wealthier people pulled out of the higher rate of income tax. Osborne said he wanted to “accelerate progress” towards the Conservative’s manifesto pledge of raising the threshold for the 40p rate to £50,000 in 2020.

Prior to the introduction of PIP, Esther McVey stated that of the initial 560,000 claimants to be reassessed by October 2015, 330,000 of these are targeted to either lose their benefit altogether or see their payments reduced. Of course the ever-shrinking category of “those with the greatest need” simply reflects a government that has made a partisan political decision to cut disabled people’s essential income to fund a financial gift to the wealthiest citizens. There is no justification for this decision, nor is it “fair.”

Fiona Colegrave, who is chief medical adviser, clinical governance and in charge of training for PIP at Capita, says: “As a disability assessor (DA), you are required to assess objectively how someone’s health conditions affect them and submit a report that is fair, reliable and can be justified with evidence because, if necessary, it may need to be scrutinised through an appeals process.

For these reasons, it is essential we equip DAs with the skills required to manage the assessment process, including: time management; questioning techniques; non-advocacy; collating all available evidence and identifying contradictions; and using an analytical but empathetic approach.

It is important for DAs to establish a rapport with the claimant, so that claimants feel like they have been able to express, in their own words, how their disability affects them and so they know that a DA will produce a report that accurately reflects their functional ability.”

Only “feel like”? Feedback from “claimants” says that DAs do NOT accurately reflect their “functional ability” in reports. And note the reductive use of the word “claimant” – language use that places the other at a psychological distance from the author and administrators, objectifying them, as if people claiming PIP and other benefits are a homogenous group of people, bound by characteristics rather than circumstances, in a context of political decision-making.

Surely a considerable part of our experience of being objectively diagnosed as ill and/or disabled, in any case, is a person’s subjective experience of it, rather than categories and counts; quantifiable, reductive and speculative statements about how we may perform highly specific tasks.

Quantitative medical evidence is important, because it does often give a general indication of conditions that would entail loss of function. But considering medical evidence isn’t a central part of the assessment process. Whether or not we can perform certain tasks, and inferences drawn from that are the central considerations for PIP eligibility.

Many conditions “fluctuate” – they vary so much that it’s difficult to assess performance of specific tasks consistently. Many conditions become progressively worse at a varied pace, often leaving little scope for a person developing coping strategies and adapting their everyday lives to the changes as they happen, such as a progressive loss of mobility, cognitive impairment, mood changes, anxiety, depression, sleep disruption and other psychological impacts, and the increasing pain and fatigue that they may experience.

If the process were genuinely “fair, accurate and objective” then there would be no need for mandatory reviews and scrutiny through the appeals process. The introduction of the mandatory review – another layer of bureaucracy and a barrier to justice, where the DWP decide whether their first decision should be changed – has deterred many from appealing wrong decisions.

Those making the decisions about PIP awards are: “trained DWP staff who are familiar with the legislation governing PIP, but who do not have a healthcare background. The HP enables CMs to make fair and accurate decisions by providing impartial, objective and justified advice.“

The PIP assessment is geared towards looking for “inconsistencies” in “functional limitations”. For example, if you say you can’t sit unaided for half an hour, but then say that you watch soaps on TV, it will be assumed you sit unaided for at least half an hour to watch TV, and that will be classed as a “discrepancy between the reported need and the actual needs of the claimant.”

The whole assessment is set up and designed to look for “inconsistencies.” In other words, the assessor is looking for any excuse to justify a decision that you are not among those in “greatest need” for a PIP award. The entire process happens within a framework of reducing welfare costs, after all. This makes a mockery of the government’s fondness for using the word “objective.”

What can we do to try to counter the state bias towards political cost-cutting, which is embedded in the assessment process?

Well, we can use the guidelines and existing legislation to ensure that we are heard clearly. We can also raise awareness that, whilst most ill and disabled people tend to emphasise how well we cope, and remain positive about what we can do independently, and we often tend to understate our needs for support, in assessment situations, that tendency is likely to be used to trivialise the impact of our condition and disabilities on day-to-day “functioning.”

Reliability

The government says in the PIP handbook: “For a descriptor to apply to a claimant, they must be able to reliably complete the activity as described in the descriptor. Reliably means whether they can do so:

 safely – in a manner unlikely to cause harm to themselves or to another person, either during or after completion of the activity

 to an acceptable standard

 repeatedly – as often as is reasonably required, and

 in a reasonable time period – no more than twice as long as the maximum period that a non-disabled person would normally take to complete that activity.”

If you cannot complete an activity reliably, safely and repeatedly, as outlined, then you must be regarded as unable to complete that task at all. The reliability criteria are an important key protection for disabled people claiming both PIP and Employment and Support Allowance (ESA).

From the document: “Symptoms such as pain, fatigue and breathlessness should be considered when determining whether an activity can be carried out repeatedly. While these symptoms may not necessarily stop the claimant carrying out the activity in the first instance, they may be an indication that it cannot be done as often as is required.”

And: “The following situations highlight examples where an individual may be considered unable to repeatedly complete a descriptor in the way described due to the impact this would have:

A person who is able to stand and move 20 metres unaided, but is unable to repeat it again that day cannot do it repeatedly as you would reasonably expect people to move 20 metres more than once a day • A person who is able to prepare a meal, but the exhaustion from doing so means they cannot then repeat the activity at subsequent meal times on the same day. This means they cannot complete the activity repeatedly as it is reasonable to expect people to prepare a meal more than once a day.”

This also applies to people with mental health conditions, which may also impact on a person being able to carry out tasks reliably, repeatedly and safely.

Time periods, fluctuations and descriptor choices

The document says: “The impact of most health conditions and disabilities can fluctuate. Taking a view of ability over a longer period of time helps to iron out fluctuations and presents a more coherent picture of disabling effects. The descriptor choice should be based on consideration of a 12-month period.

This should correlate with the Qualifying Period and Prospective Test for the benefit – so in the 3 months before the assessment and in the 9 months after. A scoring descriptor can apply to claimants in an activity where their impairment(s) affect(s) their ability to complete an activity, at some stage of the PIP regulations.

The following rules apply: If one descriptor in an activity is likely to apply on more than 50% of the days in the 12-month period – the activity can be completed in the way described on more than 50% of days – then that descriptor should be chosen.

If more than one descriptor in an activity is likely to apply on more than 50% of the days in the period, then the descriptor chosen should be the one that is the highest scoring. For example, if D applies on 100% of days and E on 70% of days, E is selected. Where one single descriptor in an activity is likely to not be satisfied on more than 50% of days, but a number of different scoring descriptors in that activity together are likely to be satisfied on more than 50% of days, the descriptor likely to be satisfied for the highest proportion of the time should be selected.

For example if B applies on 20% of days, D on 30% of days and E on 5% of days, D is selected. If someone is awaiting treatment or further intervention, it can be difficult to accurately predict its level of success or whether it will even occur. Descriptor choices should therefore be based on the likely continuing impact of the health condition or disability as if any treatment or further intervention has not occurred.

The timing of the activity should be considered, and whether the claimant can carry out the activity when they need to do it. For example, if taking medication in the morning (such as painkillers) allows the individual to carry out activities reliably when they need to throughout the day, although they would be unable to carry out the activity for part of the day (before they take the painkillers), the individual can still complete the activity reliably when required and therefore should receive the appropriate descriptor.”

Again, “fluctuating conditions” include many mental health conditions.

Risk and safety

“When considering whether an activity can be carried out safely it is important to consider the risk of a serious adverse event occurring. However, the risk that a serious adverse event may occur due to impairments is insufficient – the adverse event has to be likely to occur.”

Even if complex probability calculations were used – and I am certain HPs are unlikely to have been trained to use such formulae – there is no “objective” way of calculating risk of serious “adverse” events over time.

However, it is not such a big inferential leap to recognise that continually cutting essential lifeline support for sick and disabled people will ultimately lead to harm, distress, hardship and other negative consequences for individuals and will have wider social, cultural and economic “adverse” consequences, too.

“Making work pay” for whom?

Personal Independence Payment handbook

Government Toolkit of information for support organisations

Relevant:

PIP and the Tory monologue

Government plans further brutal cuts to disability support

Consultation as government seek to limit disabled people’s eligibility for Personal Independence Payment

Second Independent Review of Personal Independence Payment assessment

Department for Work and Pensions Recruits Staff to Reduce ESA and PIP Appeal Success Rates

Request For Evidence – PIP: Mobility Criterion – Politics and Insights

I don’t make any money from my work. I’m a disabled person with lupus, and I’m stuggling to get by. But you can help by making a donation and enable me to continue to research and write informative, insightful and independent articles, and to provide support to others going through disability benefit assessment processes and appeals. The smallest amount is much appreciated – thank you.

Welfare, Conditional Citizenship and the Neuroliberal State – Conference Presentation

October 11, 2016October 24, 2025 · 32 Comments ·

Full conference programme – Psychologists and the Benefits System.

Abstract

The consolidation of neoliberalism with Conservative moral authoritarianism has resulted in welfare policies that are designed with a reductive and punitive citizen behaviour change agenda. This ignores the structural context of citizens and personalises responsibility for circumstances of socioeconomic hardship caused by ideological prerogatives and political administration.

The emergent psychopolitical form of governance, founded on expressions of an established hierarchy of power and influence, has profound implications for traditional notions of welfare, democracy, cognitive autonomy, citizen agency, equality and human rights. Not only does this behaviourist mode of administration fundamentally change the relationship between state and citizen, it extends inequality, prejudice, stigma and outgrouping, with damaging consequences for sociopolitical inclusion, self-perception and selfhood.

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Introduction: context, subjectivity and neoliberalism

R.D Laing once said that madness was a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane society.

The parameters of psychological experience are defined by cultural, social, economic and political structures. This context has  a profound impact on individual subjectivities and the key institutions and organisations that have formed the basis of the Western social democratic consensus.

The context I want to discuss is neoliberalism: an ongoing, totalising ideological and political-economic project of a resurgent political right that gained ascendancy in the US under Ronald Reagan and in the UK under Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. 

Humans are social beings. We thrive best when we have a social rationale which tends towards the promotion of cooperative and collective creativity. This was perhaps expressed best in our civilised, progressive institutions and civilising practices, facilitated by the social gains and economic organisation that arose from the post-war democratic settlement.

Those gains are now being systematically dismantled. Our culture has been saturated with conceptual schema that demand we remain committed to an economic Darwinism: a neoliberal competitive individualist obsession with our private, inner experiences, the pursuit of economic self-interest, and ultimately, this embellishes our separability from other human beings. It alienates us.

Neoliberalism scripts social interactions that are adversarial and hierarchical in nature, rather than social and cooperative. It is the antithesis of collectivism, mutual support, universalism, cooperation and democracy. Neoliberalism has transformed our former liberal democracy into an authoritarian state that values production, competition and profit above all else; including citizens’ lives, experiences, wellbeing and social conditions.

However, citizens are seen and are being politically defined in isolation from the broader political, economic, sociocultural and reciprocal contexts that invariably influence and shape individual experiences, meanings, motivations, behaviours and attitudes, causing a problematic duality between context and cognition. This also places responsibility on citizens for circumstances which lie outside of their control, such as the socioeconomic consequences of political decision-making, while at the same time, the state is steadily abdicating responsibility for the welfare and wellbeing of ordinary citizens.

The art of character divination: justification narratives, stigma and neuroliberalism

Stigma is a political and cultural attack on people’s identities. It’s used to discredit, and as justification for excluding some groups from economic and political consideration, refusing them full democratic citizenship.

Stigma is being used politically to justify the systematic withdrawal of support and public services for the poorest – the casualties of a system founded on competition for allegedly scarce wealth and resources. Competition inevitably means there are winners and losers. Stigma is profoundly oppressive. It is used as a propaganda mechanism to draw the public into collaboration with the state, to justify punitive and discriminatory policies and to align citizen “interests” with rigid neoliberal outcomes. Inclusion, human rights, equality and democracy are not compatible with neoliberalism.

Back in the nineteenth century, phrenology was the preferred “science” of personality and character. The growth in popularity of “scientific” lectures as entertainment also helped spread phrenology to the masses. It was very popular among the middle and working classes, not least because of its simplified principles and wide range of social applications that fit with the liberal laissez faire individualism at the core of the dominant Victorian world view. It justified the status quo. Even Queen Victoria and Prince Albert invited  George Combe to feel the bumps and read the heads of their children.

During the early 20th century, there was a revival of interest in phrenology, partly because of studies of evolution, criminology and anthropology (pursued most notably by  Cesare Lombroso). 

Some people with political causes used phrenology as a justification narrative for European superiority over other allegedly “lesser” races. By comparing skulls of different ethnic groups it supposedly allowed for ranking of races from least to most evolved. During the 1930s Belgian colonial authorities in Rwanda used phrenology to explain the so-called superiority of Tutsis over Hutus.

Phrenology is now largely regarded as an obsolete and curious amalgamation of primitive neuroanatomy, pseudoscience and Conservative moralising.

Any system of belief that rests on the classification of physical or other distinctive “characteristics”, including speculation about personality “traits” being related to socioeconomic status, is almost always used to stigmatise, to justify prejudice, inequality, social stratification and the artificial ranking of human worth. And sometimes, this process results in genocide, as Gordon Allport recognised, when he identified the political and psychosocial processes unfolding stage by stage that resulted in the growth of prejudice and ultimately, the Holocaust.

164204381 The process highlights “what” we are perceived to be at the expense of the more important “who” we are. It dehumanises us. It also stifles our potential, progress and development as a society.

As Erving Goffman said: “The normal and the stigmatised are not persons, but perspectives.”

The Conservatives have simplified the art of character divination. They established a new economic department of morality and personality in 2010 called the Nudge Unit, which houses the  Behavioural Insights Team. This fits with the Conservative motif of a “broken Britain”: an obsessive fear of social “decay” and “disorder.” Apparently, our society is always on the point of moral collapse. This of course preempts an authoritarian response.

Of course it isn’t political decision-making or socioeconomic organisation that are problematic: poor people are entirely responsible for the poor state of our country. Those with the very least are entirely to blame. So targeted, class contingent austerity policies are needed to ensure they have even less. We can’t have the poor being rewarded with not being poor, that’s just bad for them and bad for big business. And big business shapes the neoliberal policy agenda.

After all, we really need the privatisation of public wealth and resources and a regressive public policy agenda. Why on earth should an economy meet the needs of a general population?

Under every neoliberal government, we suddenly see the proliferation of bad sorts; “scroungers”, “skivers,” cognitively biased and morally incompetent people making “the wrong choices” everywhere, and generally being inept, deficient and faulty characters. The way to diagnose these bad sorts is to establish whether or not someone is “hard working”. This is usually determined by the casting of chicken bones, and a quick look at someone’s bank balance. If it lies offshore, this generally indicates “a jolly good sort.”

If you need to claim social security, be it in-work or out-of-work support, then you are most definitely a “wrong sort”; in need of corrective state “treatment.” Poor people are the new “criminal types.” The only cure, according to the government, is to make poor people even poorer, by a variety of methods, including a thorough, coercive, “incentivising” nudge: “remedial” income sanctioning and increased “conditionality” to eligibility for support; benefit cuts; increasing welfare caps and an incremental dismantling of the welfare state more generally.

Such state measures are called “reforms” and claimed to be “fair”, to “help” people into work, and to “make work pay.” Using those terms and phrases in such a draconian policy context is a technique of neutralisation: the rhetoric obscures the real intention behind policies and the social and economic consequences. It’s nothing less than political gaslighting.

The Conservative shift in emphasis from structural to moral and pseudo-psychological explanations of inequality and poverty has far-reaching consequences. Such a partisan reconceptualision of poverty makes it very difficult to define and measure. This conceptual change disconnects poverty from more than a century of detailed empirical research. There’s been a shift towards an  experimental approach to policy-making aimed at controlling the behaviour of individuals rather than alleviating poverty and improving social conditions.

Material poverty steals aspiration and motivation from any and every person that is reduced to struggling for basic survival. Abraham Maslow explained that when people struggle to meet their basic physical needs, they cannot be “incentivised” to fulfil higher level psychosocial needs – that includes job seeking. The Minnesota semi-starvation experiment supported Maslow’s theory of cognitive priority with empirical evidence. A behaviourist approach, using punishments such as benefit sanctions, cannot possibly motivate people to find work.

The increasing focus on social control and conformity in public policy design and governing has been dubbed “neuroliberalism”, reflecting something of a behaviourist turn. It draws on social marketing as a policy tool, in which principles from private marketing and advertising are applied to the definition and promotion of “good” behaviours. Deviance (“bad” behaviour) is defined politically through the intentional and systematic stigmatisation of already marginalised social groups, leading to the creation of folk devils and moral panic which is amplified and perpetuated by the media. 

Othering and outgrouping have become common political practices.

This serves to desensitise the public to the circumstances of marginalised social groups and legitimises neoliberal “small state” policies, such as the systematic withdrawal of state support for those adversely affected by neoliberalism, and it also justifies inequality. By stigmatising the poorest citizens, a “default setting” is established regarding how the public ought to perceive and behave towards defined outgroups.

Neoliberals believe that wealthy people are “incentivised” differently from the rest of us: apparently they need rewards of even more money, tax breaks and large bonuses to ensure they are “responsible citizens.”

Behavioural economics theory is the new phrenology. “Cognitive bias”, making “the wrong decisions” and “faulty behaviour” are what differentiates poor “bad” sorts from those who are righteous and wealthy.

I’m half expecting an announcement that the Department for Work and Pensions is to be renamed the  Malleus Maleficarum. 

Sometimes the best way to highlight the absolutely outrageous is to ridicule it.

Who is nudging the neoliberal nudgers?

Institutions structure political struggles, providing models, schemas and scripts for citizen behaviours. Bureaucratic norms within the welfare state have become increasingly about moral and behavioural rectification. The debate about the causes of poverty has been personalised and reduced to political rhetoric about “incentives.” Welfare dependency and worklessness are now Conservative synonyms for disability, unemployment, vulnerability, poverty and inequality, with perceived dimensions of moral and psychological dependency accepted as “character traits”, such as the controversial Welfare Trait recently proposed by neurobiologist Adam Perkins.

Yet research tells us that most people claiming social security move in and out of insecure jobs, and those in low-paid and precarious employment due to structural constraints are queuing at food banks too.

Things ain’t what they ought to be

Perkins claims that the welfare state will erode the nation’s “work ethic” by increasing the proportion of individuals in the population who possess an “employment-resistant personality profile.” Welfare, in this eugenic view, encourages the “reproduction” of people with “undesired traits”.

However, Conservatives often present structural patterns and social circumstances as “natural” and moral laws. Yet the naturalistic fallacy (is-ought distinction) informs us we cannot use descriptive statements – of what “is” – to make or justify prescriptive ones – what “ought” to be).

It’s become “common sense” that the neoliberal world view of competition, mysterious “market forces” and the “invisible hand”, economic Darwinism and Randian self-interest is simply how things are:  that these qualities are somehow fundamental to our social and “human nature” – presented as a fait accompli. Yet philosophers, specialist social and cognitive scientists are still debating the nature of “human nature” after a few centuries of controversial discussion.

The government’s armchair pseudo-psychology is used to justify increasingly irrational requirements being embedded in policy. For example, the government plan to merge health and employment services, redefining work as a clinical health outcome. According to the government, the “cure” for unemployment due to illness and disability and sickness absence from work, is… work. The new work and health programme, “support” for disabled people, is actually just another workfare programme.

Labor is the only prescribed “route out of poverty” for disabled people, including those with mental distress and illness, regardless of whether or not they are actually well enough to work. In fact the government implicitly equates mental health with economic productivity. Work will set us free. Yet paradoxically, disabled people haven’t been and won’t be included in the same economic system which is responsible for their exclusion in the first place.

Competitive market economies exclude marginalised groups, that’s something we ought to have learned from the industrial capitalism of the last couple of centuries.

GPs inform us that employers are not prepared to make the necessary inclusive workplace adjustments sick and disabled people often need to work.

But in a dystopic Orwellian world where medical sick notes have been  politically redefined as ”fit notes,” sick and disabled people are no longer exempt from work, which is now held to be a magic “cure”. People are being punished into taking any available job, regardless of its appropriateness, in an increasingly competitive and exclusive labour market.

The politics of punishment: sanctions

Policies directed at the poorest and some of the most vulnerable citizens are being used to extend behaviour modification techniques, based on methodological behaviourism. This is a psychocratic approach to administration: the government are delivering public policies that have an expressed design and aim to act upon individuals, with an implicit set of instructions that inform citizens how they should be. 

Aversives and punishment protocols are being used on the public. Coercive and harshly conditional welfare policies are one example of this. Recently a eugenics by stealth policy entailed the restricting of welfare support to two children only. This was introduced with the explicitly stated political intention of “changing behaviours” of poorer citizens. Those that cannot or will not conform are “disciplined” by state-imposed economic sanctions.

Power relations, class and economic organisation have now disappeared from public conversations about poverty. Neoliberal anti-welfarism, amplified by a corporate media, has aimed at reconstruction of society’s “common sense” assumptions, values and beliefs. Class, disability and race narratives in particular, associated with traditional prejudices and categories from the right wing, have been used to nudge the UK to re-imagine citizenship, human rights and democratic inclusion as highly conditional. 

This is not just about shifting public rational and moral boundaries to de-empathise the electorate to the circumstances of politically defined others. It also obscures the consequences more generally of increasingly non-inclusive, antidemocratic, prejudiced and extremely punitive policies.

The state has depoliticised disadvantage, making it the private responsibility of citizens, while at the same time, justifying a psychopolitical approach that encodes a punitive Conservative moral framework.

The government is currently at the centre of a United Nations inquiry  into abuses of the human rights of disabled people. The UK is also in breach of the rights of women and children, because of profoundly anti-humanist welfare cuts. Human rights are the bedrock of democracy. Observation of them distinguishes democrats from despots. Targeted social groups are experiencing political discrimination and the failure of a government in a wealthy first-world liberal democracy to observe what are meant to be universal human rights. That ought to be cause for our concern.

Neoliberals argue that public services present moral hazards and perverse incentives. Providing lifeline support to meet basic survival requirements is seen as a barrier to the effort people put into searching for jobs. From this perspective, the social security system, which supports the inevitable casualties of neoliberal free markets, has somehow created those casualties. But we know that external, market competition-driven policies create a few “haves” and many “have-nots.” This is why the  welfare state came into being, after all – because when we allow such competitive economic dogmas to manifest without restraint, we must also concede that there are always  “winners and losers.”

Neoliberalism organises societies into hierarchies.

The UK currently ranks highly among the most unequal countries in the world.

Inequality and poverty are central features of neoliberalism and the causes therefore cannot be located within individuals.

Addressing stigma, exclusion and disempowerment: a prefigurative framework

Government policies are expressed political intentions regarding how our society is organised and governed. They have calculated social and economic aims and consequences. In democratic societies, citizens’ accounts of the impacts of policies ought to matter.

However, in the UK, the way that policies are justified is being increasingly detached from their aims and consequences, partly because democratic processes and basic human rights are being disassembled or side-stepped, and partly because the government employs the widespread use of linguistic strategies: euphemisms, superficial glittering generalities and techniques of persuasion to intentionally divert us from aims and consequences of ideologically (rather than rationally) driven policies. Furthermore, policies have become increasingly detached from public interests and needs.

The government has denied there is a causal link between their welfare “reforms”, austerity measures and an increase in mental distress, premature death and suicide. However, there is a well-established correlation which warrants further investigation.

But the government are refusing to be accountable, denying any association at all between policy and negative impacts.

It’s not unreasonable to be concerned about policies that have profoundly unethical dimensions presented by state action that involves removing lifeline support that was originally calculated to meet only the costs of basic survival needs, such as for food, fuel and shelter. It doesn’t take much of an inferential leap to recognise that such policies will inevitably have some “adverse consequences”, materially and psychologically. 

There has been no cumulative impact assessment or monitoring of welfare cuts.  No government research regarding the  established correlation with extremely negative consequences and “impacts”, and a longstanding refusal from the government to undertake any of these. There is no evidence for government claims that their policies are justified.

There have been calls for an independent review to examine controversial benefit sanctions policy and to ensure vulnerable people are protected. Ministers have refused to examine the effect of sanctions on mental health, claiming there is no evidence that sanctions particularly affect people with mental health problems – a claim contrary to the evidence of independent research.

The government have persistently refused to engage with criticism of the effect of sanctions on mental health outcomes. The highly critical study by Mind last year found 83 per cent of Work Programme participants with mental health issues surveyed said the scheme’s “support” made their mental health problems worse.

Professor Jamie Hacker Hughes, then President of the British Psychological Society, has also raised concerns about benefit sanctions and a number of other issues concerning the psychological welfare of those on benefits.

He said: “We have repeatedly sought a meeting with the Secretary of State and his team and now repeat that request so that his Department may become aware of the most up-to-date psychological research and opinion on these issues”.

He also pointed out that many people suffering mental health problems are sanctioned for failing to meet rigid behavioural requirements, many of which are inappropriate because people find it difficult to participate consistently in work-related activities due to the nature of their health problem.

Jamie also raised concerns about the WCA , along with many others, pointing to the now significant body of evidence that it is failing to assess people’s fitness for work accurately and appropriately, with people who are seriously physically and mentally ill being found fit for work.

Political denial of causality does not reduce the possibility of it. If policy impacts cannot be measured, then it is not good policy.

What can we do?

It isn’t appropriate to expect people to simply re-rationalise their unlivable experiences. What are we if we fail to promote human welfare and wellbeing? What are we if we cannot ensure and extend kindness to our fellow humans?

Paul Atkinson, writing for The Alliance for Counselling & Psychotherapy, in his article called  NOTHING ABOUT US WITHOUT US? ARE YOU BONKERS? said:

“Poverty and mental illness [are the] handmaidens of hell. What they have in common is their contagion. We psychotherapists are scared of this. We fend it off with the technologies of our trade, our magic words like “countertransference” and “projection” – spells we cast to keep the horrors at bay. They make it clear that it’s your problem not ours.”

Perhaps another such spell is “value neutrality.” Paul also said: “When people move us, it’s not necessarily into worlds we want to visit.”

Value neutrality permits us to safely remain outside, as onlookers.

In social research, quantitative methods emphasise maintaining objectivity and “value freedom.” However, the area of study is intentionally selected by researchers, funded by interested parties and there are problems related to the connections between observation, those being observed and interpretation. 

Social phenomena cannot always be studied in the same way as natural phenomena, because human beings are subjective and intentional. One problem with quantitative research is that it tends to impose theoretical frameworks on those being studied. It limits responses from those participating. It’s not very inclusive. Nor does it encourage ethical authenticity.

Politically, there’s been a marked shift away from understanding the intersubjective, lived experiences of citizens in context.

There are distinctions between facts, values and meanings. Qualitative researchers are concerned with generating explanations and extending understanding rather than simply describing and measuring social phenomena, to establish basic cause and effect relationships. Qualitative research tends to be exploratory, potentially illuminating underlying intentions, responses, beliefs, reasons, opinions, and motivations to human behaviours. This type of analysis often provides insights into social problems, helps to develop ideas and establish explanations, and may also be used to formulate hypotheses for further quantitative research.

The dichotomy between quantitative and qualitative methodological approaches is not nearly so clear as it once was, however, with many social researchers recognising the value of  both means of data and evidence collection, reflecting a commitment to methodological and epistemological pluralism. (Epistemology being an underpinning branch of philosophy that extends various theories of the nature and grounds of knowledge in the social sciences, particularly with reference to its limits, reliability and validity.)

Qualitative methods tend to be more inclusive and authentic than quantitative analysis, lending participants a dialogic, democratic and first hand voice regarding their own experiences.

Yet the government have tended to dismiss qualitative evidence from first hand witnesses of the negative impacts of their policies – presented cases studies and accounts – as “anecdotal.”

Old school positivism always struck me as kind of epistemological totalitarianism when I was a student. It’s very conservative. I have issues with how it is sometimes used to exclude criticism and debate.

Qualitative research may provide insight, depth and richly detailed accounts. It’s coherent and comprehensive, because it explores beneath surface appearances, and above causal relationships, delving much deeper than the simplistic analysis of ranks, categories and counts. It provides a reliable and authentic record of experiences. It prompts an openness. It is expansive, whereas quantitative methods are somewhat reductive, tending to impose limits.

Importantly, qualitative methods may be used prefiguratively, to bypass problems regarding potential power imbalances between researchers and subjects, by permitting participation and creating space for genuine dialogue and reasoned discussion to take place.

Research regarding political issues and policy impacts must surely engage citizens on a democratic, equal basis, permit participation in decision-making, to ensure an appropriate balance of power between citizens and government.

However, that assumes governments want citizens to engage and participate. There are no safeguards from a government deliberately exploiting a research framework as a way to test out highly unethical and ideologically driven policies, and to avoid democratic accountability and transparency. How appropriate is it to apply a medical model of prescribed policy “treatments” to people experiencing politically and structurally generated social problems, such as unemployment, inequality and poverty, for example?

Praxis makes perfect:  Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Perhaps we ought to move away from purely individualist models in psychology and draw inspiration from the ideas and critical praxis most famously articulated by Spanish-born Salvadorean Jesuit priest, activist and psychologist Ignacio Martín Baró, who developed liberation psychology in response to suffering and oppression in Latin America. Briefly, praxis is action which embodies a commitment to human wellbeing, the search for truth and empowerment. It’s a synthesis of critical reflection and action.

Martín-Baró emphasised the psychological dimensions of political repression, the role of ideology in obscuring the political and socioeconomic forces, and the power relations that create and maintain oppression. He proposed that one key task for psychologists is to de-ideologise reality, making dominant ideology, designed to obscure, transparent.

He worked with marginalised populations to support the promotion of their own interests rather than those which are hegemonic, enabling citizens to act for themselves. From this perspective, the behaviour of oppressed people is conceptualised not through intrapsychic processes, but as a result of an alienating environment. Distress is understood in the context of an oppressive environment that psychologises and individualises distress.

Paulo Freire strongly influenced this perspective, with an emancipatory education approach, providing a lens through which to understand systems of oppression in order to transform them. He flipped mainstream pedagogy on its head by insisting that true knowledge and expertise already exist within people.

Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed frames education as a practice of freedom, which contrasts with education as a practice of domination. Education is a political act. Freire says that the system of power relations creates a  culture of silence that instills a negative and suppressed self-image  which is internalised by the oppressed, resulting in fatalism - people become resigned to their social circumstances. Freire proposed a genuinely dialogical, participatory and democratic approach to learning that was distinctly prefigurative.*

From this perspective, we are all activists, working towards raising awareness and inspiring critical, collective and cooperative action to transform oppressive sociopolitical realities.

This approach has inspired community-based professionals to develop a vision for including the values of self-determination, distributive justice, collaboration, and democratic participation in psychology, but nonetheless we often shy away from raising political awareness in our work, and in doing so, we overlook the sociopolitical and historical dimensions of pathology and oppression.

I started my professional life in a youth and community role. Pedagogy of the Oppressed was required reading back then. Recognition of the sociopolitical conditions which lead to distress and poor mental health is crucial in developing a consciousness and language of critique, and in dismantling prevailing mythologies to reach an awareness of oppression. The oppressed being objects of political intent rather than self-determining, autonomous “subjects.”

Prefigurative framing offers us an opportunity for invaluable mutual learning experiences in therapeutic settings. Practices designed to meet an expectation that changes should happen within complicit individuals avoid addressing the need for change at context level, and alienates people.

We know that poor mental health is linked with poverty (Melzer et al. 2004) poor community integration, and competitiveness among social groups (Arrindell et al., 2003). Research suggests community based work may be much more effective than working with individuals only. (Orford, 2008).

For example, the Beacon Project (Stuteley, 2002), pioneered by health workers who supported people with depression and a range other health problems by working with their whole community – addressing their basic social needs and developing mutual social support systems, extended significant changes in physical and mental health for the whole community, showing the benefits of fostering a psychology of mutual support, altruism, cooperation, solidarity and building social capital. At the very least, this approach encourages positive role modelling, participation and empowerment.

Human needs, public services and provisions, developmental processes, and social relationships are crucial to any comprehensive model of mental health.

Community based work offers something that perhaps individualist “firefighting” approaches can’t: an unlimited scope and reach, sustainable, self-perpetuating, long-lasting mental health provision with an inbuilt preventative agenda, which addresses alienation, disempowerment, and rebuilds democracy and social solidarity.

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*Prefigurative – by this, I mean engaging in ways of working, modes of organisation and social relationships that strive to reflect the positive changes and the kind of future society we want to see. A prefigurative approach embodies those forms of social relations, decision-making, culture, and human experience that are our ultimate goal. It’s a co-creative approach and one of breaking with hierarchy. Historical experience shows that movements arising and conducted in an authoritarian fashion do not lead to open and democratic political systems and societies.

It means we have to practice what we preach.

It also means we each share the responsibility of activism, and of making a positive difference.

As James Guillaume wrote: “How could one want or expect an egalitarian and free society to issue from authoritarian organisation? It is impossible”

“… All being in each being

Each being in all being

All in each

Each in all

All distinctions are mind, by mind, in mind, of mind

No distinctions no mind to distinguish.”

R.D. Laing

Additional

Arnstein’s Ladder of Citizen Participation and Power

Citizen participation is a vital aspect of democracy. Sherry Arnstein was especially concerned with the problem that while many people applaud participation, it can be used as a euphemism or an empty ritual instead of a marker of real citizen power. She said that citizen power is “the redistribution of power that enables the have-not citizens, presently excluded from the political and economic processes, to be deliberately included in the future… the means by which they can bring about significant social reform.” In the ritual of participation, power-holders can claim that all sides were considered, but still retain power.

Some relevant links:

The importance of citizen’s qualitative accounts in democratic inclusion and political participation

What you need to know about Atos assessments

G4S are employing Cognitive Behavioural Therapists to deliver “get to work therapy”

The power of positive thinking is really political gaslighting

Nudging conformity and benefit sanctions: a state experiment in behaviour modification

The new Work and Health Programme: government plan social experiments to “nudge” sick and disabled people into work

GP practices to provide advice on job seeking in new pilot scheme

New return to work service goes live to help GPs, employees and employers across England

A critique of benefit sanctions: the Minnesota Starvation Experiment and Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

Let’s keep the job centre out of GP surgeries and the DWP out of our confidential medical records

The Psychological Impact of Austerity – Psychologists Against Austerity

I don’t make any money from my work. I am disabled because of an illness called lupus. If you want to, you can help by making a donation to help me continue to research and write informative, insightful and independent articles, getting to conferences and Westminster to raise issues and awareness, and to provide support to other disabled people going through claim, assessment, review and appeal processes.

I’m currently working on a very old, borrowed, temperamental and slow laptop as mine has broken. It’s so old that the operating system is XP. I’m trying to raise a little money to by a reconditioned machine.

The smallest amount is much appreciated – thank you.

Dr. Robert J. Lifton’s Eight Criteria for Thought Reform, Cult Thinking and how they relate to Neoliberalism

October 4, 2016September 24, 2020 · 6 Comments ·

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Dr Robert J. Lifton is a psychologist who studied and identified the techniques of mass persuasion and groupthink used in propaganda and in cults (from political to religious). I found his interesting article about the eight criteria for “thought reform” on the International Cultic Studies Association (ICSA) site.

What struck me immediately about Lifton’s criteria is how easily they may be applied to neoliberalism – a totalising, authoritarian New Right ideology, imposed by an elite of very financially secure and powerful oppressors. Neoliberalism is incompatible with democracy, values of equality and human rights. It also requires narratives of othering in order for governments to justify the inequality that neoliberalism is designed to cause.

Over the last few years, much of the population in the UK have experienced growing inequality and increasingly precarious socioeconomic circumstances, exacerbated by class-contingent neoliberal austerity and ‘small state’ policies.

The neoliberal approach to public policy has become naturalised. Political theorist Francis Fukuyama announced in 1992 that the great ideological battles between “east and west” were over, and that ‘western [neo]liberal democracy’ had triumphed. He was dubbed the “court philosopher of [post-industrial] global capitalism” by John Gray.

In his book The End of History and the Last Man, Fukuyama wrote:

“At the end of history, it is not necessary that all societies become successful liberal societies, merely that they end their ideological pretensions of representing different and higher forms of human society…..What we are witnessing, is not just the end of the cold war, or a passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalisation of western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”

I always saw Fukuyama as an ardent champion of ultra-neoliberalism, he disguised his conservatism behind apparently benign virtue words and phrases (as part of a propaganda technique called Glittering Generalities), such as “Man’s universal right to freedom.”

He meant the same sort of self-interested “freedom” as Ayn Rand: “a free mind and a free market are corollaries.” He meant the same kind of implicit social Darwinist notions long held by Conservatives like Herbert Spencer – where the conditions of the market rather than evolution decides who is “free,” who survives, and as we know, the market is rigged by the invisible hand of government.

Fukuyama’s ideas have been absorbed culturally, and serve to normalise the dominance of the right, and stifle the rationale for critical debate. Additionally a political context has been created to pathologize the left.

Fukuyama’s work is a celebration of neoliberal hegemony. It’s an important work to discuss simply because it has been so widely and tacitly accepted, and because of that, some of the implicit, taken-for-granted assumptions and ramifications need to be made explicit.

Neoliberalism requires an authoritarian approach to public administration. Rather than an elected government recognising and meeting public needs, instead, we now have a government manipulating citizens to adapt their views, behaviours and circumstances to meet the politically defined needs of the state, in the form of ‘nudging’ and behavioural economics.

This turns democracy on its head. It is also presents us with a political framework that is incompatible with the UK’s international human rights obligations and equality legislation.

Government policies have become increasingly irrational. We have a government that has decided work is a health outcome, for example. In an absurd world where medical sick notes have been politically redefined as fit notes, sick and disabled people are apparently no longer exempt from work, which is now held to be a magic “cure”. The only way out of the politically imposed punitive and increasing poverty for those who cannot work is… to work. (See: Let’s keep the job centre out of GP surgeries and the DWP out of our confidential medical records.)

Neoliberalism has become a doxa in the Western world. Here in the UK, citizen behaviours are being aligned with politically defined neoliberal outcomes, via policies that extend behaviour modification techniques, based on methodological behaviourism. Policies that “incentivise” have become the norm. This is a psychocratic approach to administration: the government are delivering public policies that have an expressed design and aim to act upon individuals, with an implicit set of instructions that inform citizens how they should be.

Aversives and punishment protocols are most commonly used. Coercive welfare policies are one example of this. The recent eugenics by stealth policy entailing the restricting of welfare support to two children only is another. Both were introduced with the explicitly stated political intention of “changing behaviours” of poorer citizens. Those that cannot or will not conform are politically stigmatised and outgrouped, as well as being being further “disciplined” by state-imposed economic sanctions.

Another particularly successful way of neutralising opposition to an ideology is to ensure that only those ideas that are consistent with that ideology saturate the media and are presented as orthodoxy. Every Conservative campaign has been a thoroughly dispiriting and ruthless masterclass in media control.

Communication in the media is geared towards establishing a dominant paradigm and maintaining an illusion of a consensus. This ultimately serves to reduce democratic choices. Such tactics are nothing less than a political micro-management of your beliefs and are ultimately aimed at nudging your voting decisions and maintaining a profoundly unbalanced, pathological status quo. (See also: Inverted totalitarianism and neoliberalism.)

As a frame of analysis, Lifton’s criteria are very useful in highlighting parallels between cult thinking and how political dogma may gain an illusion of consensus; how it becomes a dominant paradigm and is accepted as everyday “common sense.”

Kitty.

Lifton’s criteria for “thought reform” are:

Milieu Control. This involves the control of information and communication both within the environment and, ultimately, within the individual, resulting in a significant degree of isolation from society at large.
Mystical Manipulation. There is manipulation of experiences that appear spontaneous but in fact were planned and orchestrated by the group or its leaders in order to demonstrate divine authority, spiritual advancement or some special gift or talent, such as claims of having a high IQ, that will then allow the leader to reinterpret events, scripture, and experiences as he or she wishes. (This can include “natural order” ideas and political doxa.)
Demand for Purity. The world is viewed as black and white and the members are constantly exhorted to conform to the ideology of the group and strive for perfection. The induction of guilt and/or shame is a powerful control device used here. (Stigma and political outgrouping is used to deter and exile non-conformists.)
Confession. Sins, as defined by the group, are to be confessed either to a personal monitor or publicly to the group. There is no confidentiality; members’ “sins,” “attitudes,” and “faults” are discussed and exploited by the leaders. (Mainstream media have bombarded us with “confessions” of “scroungers”, for example. The lives and experiences of those out of work have become public moral “property.”)
Sacred Science. The group’s doctrine or ideology is considered to be the ultimate Truth, beyond all questioning or dispute. Truth is not to be found outside the group. The leader, as the spokesperson for God or for all humanity, is likewise above criticism. (Ties in with Conservative notions of a “natural social order.” But also, pseudoscience may be used to justify controversial policies.)
Loading the Language. The group interprets or uses words and phrases in new ways so that often the outside world does not understand. This jargon consists of thought-terminating cliches; slogans which serve to alter members’ thought processes to conform to the group’s way of thinking. (See Glittering Generalities and The Conservatives are colonising progressive rhetoric.)
Doctrine over person. Member’s personal experiences are subordinated to the sacred science and any contrary experiences must be denied or reinterpreted to fit the ideology of the group.
Dispensing of existence. The group has the prerogative to decide who has the right to exist and who does not. This is usually not literal but means that those in the outside world are not saved, unenlightened, unconscious and they must be converted to the group’s ideology. If they do not join the group or are critical of the group, then they must be rejected by the members. Thus, the outside world loses all credibility. In conjunction, should any member leave the group, he or she must be rejected also. (Lifton, 1989)

*Italics in blue added by me.

The new Work and Health Programme: government plan social experiments to “nudge” sick and disabled people into work

Cameron’s Nudge that knocked democracy down: mind the Mindspace.

Link: The Government Communication Service guide to communications and behaviour change gcs-guide-to-communications-and-behaviour-change1

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Thanks Mr Green, but we want more than token gestures and political opportunism

October 1, 2016February 15, 2017 · 9 Comments ·

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The work and pensions secretary, Damian Green, is expected to announce at the Conservative conference that those people with severe, lifelong conditions will no longer face six-monthly reassessments.

Employment and support allowance (a misleading title for sickness and disability support for those people whose doctors say are too unwell to work) will now continue automatically for people who have lifelong, severe health conditions, with no prospect of improvement, according to Green.

However, the retesting of chronically ill or disabled people for another key disability benefit – personal independence payments – is to remain, and thousands with unchanging or degenerative conditions are preparing to be put through that pointless assessment again.

I can’t help wondering how “chronic” and “degenerative” will be defined and how exemption from reassessment will be decided. It’s unclear which medical conditions will be considered grounds for a reprieve from further WCAs, but apparently the criteria will be drawn up by “health professionals“. There were no details provided about who these “health professionals” will be. Many people have no faith whatsoever in the medical judgments of the assessors themselves – especially when they have previously been known to ask woefully ignorant questions like “how long are you likely to have Parkinson’s disease?”

It may be the case that those claiming Employment and Support Allowance, placed in the support group will be exempt from the reassessments. However, as Samuel Miller, a human rights specialist and campaigner for disabled people, points out:

“The Department for Work and Pensions says that it is scraping retesting for people with severe, lifelong conditions at the same time that there has been a sharp drop in Support Group awards and a sharp increase in people placed in the Work Related Activity Group (WRAG). Charities report that 45% of people who put in a claim for Employment Support Allowance (ESA), and had Parkinson’s, Cystic Fibrosis, Multiple Sclerosis, or Rheumatoid Arthritis, were placed in the WRAG.“

Disability rights campaigners are concerned that the figures show the government is cutting spending on disability benefits “below the radar”, after being forced to abandon its attempts to reduce expenditure on personal independence payment (PIP) in April.

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) statistics, released last month, show the proportion of disabled people applying for ESA who were placed in the support group – for those assessed with “the highest barriers to work” – plunged by 42 per cent in just three months. There are concerns that the Work Capability Assessment has been made even more harsh by stealth.

For assessments completed during November 2015, 57 per cent of claimants were placed in the support group; but by February 2016 that had dropped by 24 percentage points to just 33 per cent.

Far too little far too late

This small change will not undo the suffering of sick and disabled people who have already been caught in the revolving door of the assessment and reassessment process. It’s not uncommon for people fighting a wrong “fit for work” decision to wait for many months before they win at tribunal, only to find that within three months of their successful appeal, they have another appointment for reassessment.

You would think that if someone has just won an appeal, common sense would prevail – that someone at the DWP would acknowledge that it’s highly unlikely these people have suddenly got better in such a short space of time. The strain of being put through this callous revolving door process has an adverse impact on people with chronic conditions, exacerbating their symptoms. It is profoundly stressful and anxiety-provoking.

This political token gesture will not undo the profound physical and psychological damage that the WCA has caused some of our most vulnerable citizens. And for many who did not feel vulnerable – those who felt they coped pretty well with their illness ordinarily – the constant strain of having to prove themselves ill and the loss of lifeline income whilst they await mandatory review and appeal, has led to increased vulnerability.

It’s also tragic and painful that it’s far too late to help the people who have died as a consequence of being told they are fit for work when they are not, and being forced to fight for lifeline social security to meet their basic needs.

I am happy to see the announced decision to stop reassessing chronically sick people every six months, because it’s unlikely they will get better. (The clue was always in the word “chronic,” curiously enough). If that brings about a reduction in the widespread suffering caused by the callous cost-cutting WCA , it’s a small step towards much needed positive change. This move would have been more credible as a signal of good intentions had Green also intended to announce the reversal of the cuts planned for those in the work related activity group, claiming ESA.

That a UK government feels it’s acceptable to financially penalise and punish a previously protected social group – comprised of people judged as too ill to work by doctors – shows how far our society has regressed in terms of equality and human rights. And democracy.

Labour have already pledged to abolish the Work Capability Assessment

Call me a cynic, but didn’t the Labour party pledge to completely scrap the Work Capability Assessment at their conference? Debbie Abrahams, shadow work and pensions secretary, spoke of strong ethical and empirically evidenced reasons for doing so.

She says: “As ever with this government though, the devil is in the detail. While the end to repeated assessments will be a relief to those that have been affected, this announcement falls far short of the fundamental shift to a more holistic, person-centred approach we so desperately need.

“Too many sick and disabled people will remain subject to this harmful, ineffective assessment. We will continue to push the Tories for a better deal for disabled people.”

After years of people suffering and evidenced feedback from victims of their policies, campaigners and academic researchers, the government decide NOW that chronic actually means “chronic”?

Duncan Smith, whose resignation from the role of work and pensions secretary was seen as an attack on the then leadership of David Cameron and George Osborne, told the Today programme he “completely agreed with the changes.”

“We worked to change this process, it was one we inherited and it just functioned badly on this area,” he said.

That isn’t true.

Some historical context

The Work Capability Assessment was piloted under the last Labour government, but Duncan Smith passed it into law after disregarding the concerns that the Labour party had raised following their review, regarding the assessment process being insensitive to fluctuating conditions and mental health status. In fact Duncan Smith modified the assessment process, making it even less sensitive. In early 2011, the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government initiated the planned expansion of the programme to reassess 1.5 million people whom previous governments had judged to be entitled to Incapacity Benefit.

At the same time the DWP introduced long-planned revisions to the test’s eligibility criteria, which became more stringent overall: most notably, the 03/11 version awarded no points when a claimant who had difficulty walking could overcome the disability by using a wheelchair, if reasonably practicable. When Atos were recontracted in 2010, targets to remove the higher rate benefits from seven out of eight claimants were built into the new contract. Dr Steven Bick reported that “experts” testing Incapacity Benefit claimants were told they should rate only about one in eight as so disabled they will never work. The “quota” was enforced by French firm Atos, paid £100 million a year for the testing, and was revealed by undercover GP Bick on Channel 4’s Dispatches.

In February 2011, Professor Paul Gregg, an economist and one of the original architects of ESA, warned that the WCA was “badly malfunctioning” and urged further pilot studies before the more stringent 03/11 version was used as the default assessment. Nevertheless, the mammoth Incapacity Benefit reassessment programme got under way in the spring of 2011, using the new version of the test.

In January 2016, the National Audit Office (NAO) published its evaluation of the DWP’s health and disability assessment contracts. It said the cost of each WCA had risen from £115 under Atos to £190 under Maximus.

The report went on to say that Maximus was facing “significant challenges with staff failing to complete training requirements” and revealed that in July 2015 – less than six months into the new contract – the DWP had been obliged to draw up a “performance improvement plan” with Maximus because “volume targets were not being met”.

Perhaps the real reasons for stopping the six-monthly assessments are entirely financial – merely cost-cutting measures. As well as the heavy cost of each assessment to the public purse, there is also the considerable cost of many tribunals, because of the many “wrong decisions”.

Green told the Press Association: “We are building a country that works for everyone – not just the privileged few. A key part of that is making sure that all those who are able to work are given the support and the opportunity to do so. But it also means ensuring that we give full and proper support to those who can’t.”

(You can laugh now. I’m just wondering when an assessment for tax-dodging millionaires who were awarded at least £107,000 each per year in the form of a “tax break” will happen. This was at the same time the first round of welfare cuts were announced. It would be refreshing to see the minority of privileged citizens shouldering some of the burden of austerity and “paying down the the deficit” for a change. It would be fair to expect those who have gained the most from society to put something back, after all.)

He went on to say: “That includes sweeping away any unnecessary stress and bureaucracy – particularly for the most vulnerable in society.

“If someone has a disease which can only get worse then it doesn’t make sense to ask them to turn up for repeated appointments. If their condition is not going to improve, it is not right to ask them to be tested time after time. So we will stop it.”

I find it incredible that it’s taken six years for this “revelation” to hit home. Overwhelming empirical evidence that the assessment process is harming sick and disabled people has been presented to the government on many occasions, only to prompt what is, after all, a very small and inadequate policy change.

Green has almost always voted for a reduction in spending on welfare benefits, generally voted against raising welfare benefits at least in line with prices, almost always voted against paying higher benefits over longer periods for those unable to work due to illness or disability, and almost always voted for reducing housing benefit for social tenants deemed to have excess bedrooms (the “Bedroom Tax”), which has disproportionately affected sick and disabled people and their carers.

Earlier this year, a report for the Social Market Foundation thinktank recommended that the government entirely scrap the work capability assessment. The report also said the government should introduce a properly funded system – making use of trial projects and extensive consultation with benefit claimants – which would identify those disabled people closest to being able to get a job, while those too ill or disabled to work should have a “level of benefit provided … sufficient to allow them to live comfortably and engage fully in society.”

It also recommended that the government abandon the failing benefit sanction system for people with chronic illness or a disability – instead putting an emphasis on support meetings and financial incentives through a “steps to work wage” on top of their unemployment benefit.

Remarkably, the report was written by Matthew Oakley – a former Treasury adviser who until 2013 was head of economics at the right-of-centre Policy Exchange thinktank. He was also on Iain Duncan Smith’s own social security advisory committee.

What Green has offered falls far short of Oakley’s recommendations.

Let’s not accept politically opportunistic sops and scraps of small comfort.

Sick and disabled people deserve so much better than this. The Work Capability Assessment is not only consistently empirically demonstrated as being unfit for purpose, arbitrary and cruel, but it is also one of the most shocking political betrayals of those most in need that has ever been allowed to go unchecked.

The Tories are epistemological tyrants: about the DWP’s Mortality Statistics release

Labour pledge to scrap punitive Tory sanctions and the Work Capability Assessment

The Government’s brutal cuts to disability support isn’t ‘increasing spending’, Chancellor, but handing out tax cuts to the rich is

Government Finally Reveals That More Than 4,000 Died Within Six Weeks Of Being Deemed ‘Fit For Work’

Research finds strong correlation between Work Capability Assessment and suicide

What you need to know about the Work Capability Assessment

I don’t make any money from my work. But you can help me by making a donation and support me to continue to research and write informative, insightful and independent articles, and to provide support to others. The smallest amount is much appreciated – thank you.

The context indicates the general intent

Watching the way the wind blows

Coercing those deemed to ill to work into work. It’s not “nudge”: it’s psycho-compulsion

The Conservatives claim work is a “health” outcome: crude behaviourism

Semantic thrifts: being Conservative with the truth

The nitty gritty

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An introduction to Rupert Dreyfus

Bedroom Max

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Theresa May’s ritualistic Tory chanting: “getting people’s lives back on track”

The deregulated private sector and increasingly precarious tenancies

The Homelessness Reduction Bill

The shortage of housing and the impact of the Government’s welfare “reforms”

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Some context: the new neuroliberalism and “behavioural insights”

Some major inconsistencies and incoherences in the report

Proposed solutions: more of the same

Nudge is a state prop for neoliberalism, inequality and social control

Replacing spent micro-managementspeak with more micro-managementspeak

Further criticism

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Compliance

Claimant humiliation and appalling customer service

Committee to seek clarifications from Concentrix and HMRC

Chair’s comment

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The ‘functional’ assessment

The introduction of PIP was framed by New Right anti-welfarism

Reliability

Time periods, fluctuations and descriptor choices

Risk and safety

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Introduction: context, subjectivity and neoliberalism

The art of character divination: justification narratives, stigma and neuroliberalism

Who is nudging the neoliberal nudgers?

Things ain’t what they ought to be

The politics of punishment: sanctions

Addressing stigma, exclusion and disempowerment: a prefigurative framework

Praxis makes perfect: Pedagogy of the Oppressed

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Far too little far too late

Labour have already pledged to abolish the Work Capability Assessment

Some historical context

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Praxis makes perfect:  Pedagogy of the Oppressed