Tag: Social Policy

Government Attack on Benefits Claimants: A Message from the Counselling and Psychotherapy Alliance

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In a letter to the national news media, an organisation representing mental health professionals in the UK write:

“The Alliance for Counselling and Psychotherapy is a nationally recognised interest group of mental health professionals from diverse clinical and academic backgrounds. 

We were appalled to learn that last Friday, February 24th, without consultation or warning, the Government launched yet another vicious attack on the psychological, as well as financial resources of benefit claimants with mental health and physical disabilities (Tory ministers have rewritten the law to deny increased disability benefit payments to more than 150,000 people Daily Mirror, 24 Feb).

In response to the latest Government attack on benefits claimants with mental health and physical disabilities, the Alliance (which is part of the Mental Wealth Alliance) has written to the press and to the major psy-organisations, who we call upon to take a much more critical stance on these issues.

Emergency legislation has over-ridden the rulings of two tribunals that the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) should expand the reach of Personal Independence Payments (PIP). At stake is mobility support for over 140,000 people who suffer “overwhelming psychological distress” when travelling alone, and more than 1,000 people who need help to take medication and monitor a health condition.

The courts ruled both categories of support needed to be included in the PIP assessment of people’s needs. The DWP itself admits this will include for example those who have a learning disability, diabetes, epilepsy, anxiety or dementia.

In September 2016, Theresa May and her DWP ministers promised there would be no more welfare cuts on top of the string of draconian measures agreed last year as the final contribution of Cameron and Osborne’s campaign to punish those who cannot work. It seems her promise was another lie.

With delicious irony, Disabilities Minister Penny Mordaunt said this latest move would “make sure we are giving support to those who need it most”. Meanwhile on Marr this Sunday, Tory party chairman Patrick McGloughlin responded to criticism of the emergency legislation by stating “as far as supporting disabled people in this country is concerned, we do very proudly.

This is a government determined, come hell or high water, to strip welfare provision to the absolute bone, an ideological commitment it justifies in terms of the fiscal necessity of austerity savings and the therapeutic magic for all benefit claimants of getting themselves into work.

As mental health professionals, we find it tragic and painful to be living through a period in which the social contract between the advantaged and the disadvantaged is under full-frontal attack.

More particularly, we find it shameful that our own professional bodies – psychotherapists, counsellors, psychologists and psychiatrists – continue to participate in the abuse of human rights and of their own ethical codes through their involvement in the psycho-compulsion of benefits complainants through the DWP’s workfare and Work and Health policies.

We call on the government to reverse its policies of welfare cuts as a minimum step to honouring Theresa May’s promises for a fairer deal for those struggling to cope to maintain any decent conditions of life.

And we call upon our fellow ‘psy’ professionals to now insist on a withdrawal of all involvement in supporting the psychological coercion and punishment by the DWP of the most disadvantaged members of our society.

Yours sincerely,

Paul Atkinson and Professor Andrew Samuels (for the Alliance for Counselling and Psychotherapy)“

See both letters from the Alliance by clicking on the link below .

Source: Government Attack on Benefits Claimants: A Message from the Alliance

Select Committee says governance code for large companies with social impact is crucial, following inquiry into collapse of BHS

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Philip Green

The Work and Pensions Committee have called for new duty on company directors to have regard to pension schemes and for Insolvency Service reports to be published in the public interest. 

On 28 April last year the Committee launched its joint inquiry into the collapse of British Home Stores (BHS) and the origins of its huge pension scheme deficit. BHS was a private company but the effects of its collapse spanned widely: not least to its thousands of employees and pensioners.

The three month inquiry examined corporate governance in Sir Philip Green’s companies, which are privately held and ultimately owned offshore by Lady Green. It found a near-complete absence of the constructive challenge that is the hallmark of good corporate governance. Green, a “dominant personality”, ran his companies as a personal empire with boards taking decisions with reference to a shared understanding of his wishes rather than the interests of each individual company.

An extraordinary and scandalous tale unfolded in which the greedy main players took lavish rewards at the expense of the employees and pensioners of the company. Inter-company loans and property deals, related-party transactions and the hurried disposal of BHS to a wholly unsuitable buyer all proceeded with woefully inadequate checks and balances. The poor corporate governance in Green’s companies was epitomised by the complacent performance of Lord Grabiner, a director of several of the Green empire subsidiaries.

In July last year, MPs catalogued a litany of failures culminating in an “at any cost” disposal of the company and pension deficit to a wholly unsuitable “chancer”. In their inquiry report about BHS, the Work and Pensions and Business and Innovations and Skills Committees concluded that Green chose to rush through the offloading of a beleaguered high street institution, which was losing money and encumbered with a massive pension fund deficit, to a buyer who he was clearly aware was “manifestly unsuitable”, with Green forced to finance the sale himself.

Though the ownership of Dominic Chappell and his associates was “incompetent and self-serving”, the ultimate fate of the company was sealed on the day it was sold. Advisers were paraded by both sides as an “expensive badge of legitimacy for people who would otherwise be bereft of credibility” while the Taveta group directors (owned by Green’s billionaire wife, Tina Green) failed to provide a semblance of independent oversight or challenge in a corporate group run as a personal fiefdom by a single dominant individual.

MPs heard hours of oral testimony and considered thousands of pages of written evidence in the inquiry, which began when BHS crashed into administration just 13 months after the ill-advised and under-funded sale to Chappell. The Committees said that the evidence at times resembled a “circular firing squad”, with a series of key witnesses appearing to believe they could absolve themselves of responsibility by blaming others. Green himself “adopted a scattergun approach”, liberally firing blame to all angles except his own.

The unacceptable face of capitalism

The report documents the systematic plunder of BHS at the cost of the 11,000 jobs and 20,000 people’s pensions now at risk.  Green, Chappell and the respective directors, advisers and hangers-on who all got rich or richer are all culpable, with the losers being the ordinary employees and pensioners.

The Committees said this is “the unacceptable face of capitalism” and that the story of BHS begs much wider questions about the gaps in company law and pension regulation that must be addressed. The two Committees turned to those question in subsequent inquiry hearings.

The headline figures that Green bought BHS for £200 million and sold it 14 years later for £1 cannot disguise the true picture. He did not invest in the company and then “unfortunately” failed to make it succeed. Green systematically extracted hundreds of millions of pounds from BHS, paying very little tax and fantastically enriching himself and his family, leaving the company and its pension fund weakened to the point of the inevitable collapse of both. Lady Green is still being paid tens of millions of pounds of tax free repayments on the loan that was engineered to sell BHS from one Green family business to another, and will be for some years to come.

A moral duty to act on the pension schemes

  • When Green bought BHS the pension schemes were in surplus. As these schemes declined into substantial and unsustainable deficit he and his directors repeatedly resisted requests from trustees for higher contributions. Such contributions were not charitable donations: they were the means of the employer meeting its obligations for deferred pay. Green had a responsibility to be aware of the growth of the deficit and he was aware of it. That there is a massive deficit is ultimately his responsibility.
  • The Committees say Green must act now to find a resolution for the BHS pensioners, a “moral duty” which will undoubtedly require him to make a large financial contribution. Green’s failure until now to resolve the pension fund’s problems contributed substantially to the demise of BHS, along with chronic under-investment and the systematic extraction of hundreds of millions of pounds from the increasingly ailing company.
  • The Arcadia board cited a variety of explanations for pausing Project Thor, ranging from Christmas to the Scottish independence referendum and instability in Ukraine. In fact, the primary reason was Green’s resistance to TPR’s moral hazard requests. He did not wish to respond to requests for information regarding historic dividends, management charges, sale and leaseback arrangements, inter-company loans and the use of BHS shares or assets as collateral for company purchases. At best this demonstrated a lack of willingness to act to secure the pension fund’s future.

Incredible wealth followed by retail demise

  • In his early years of ownership, Green cut costs, sold assets and paid substantial dividends offshore to the ultimate benefit of his wife.  The so-called “King of the High Street” failed to invest sufficiently in stores or reinvent the business to beat the prevailing high street competition. The Committees found “little to support the reputation for retail business acumen for which he received his knighthood” and say “we don’t doubt that Green had some affection for BHS – to an extent it created him. Now it could also bring him down” 
  • Green’s family accrued incredible wealth during the early, profitable years of BHS ownership. Over the duration of their tenure, significantly more money left the company than was invested in it. There is no evidence of improved turnover, market share, or major increase in investment that might be expected from a leading retailer. BHS was involved in a number of transactions with a complex web of companies, many registered offshore: whether BHS benefited financially from these transactions is far from clear. What is clear is that the Green family did.
  • The report documents the ways Green was able to boost BHS’s profitability in the short-term while ultimately fatally undermining its ability to survive. The early years improvement in BHS’s profitability appears to have been achieved primarily through cost-cutting measures and squeezing suppliers. Crucially, BHS’s turnover remained flat through much of Green’s tenure and declined in the latter years. Green initially cut costs but he did not grow the business.
  • One mechanism of (tax-lite) cash extraction to other Green family companies was through the sale of property: in 2001, BHS Group sold ten BHS stores for £106 million to Carmen Properties Ltd – a Jersey-registered company owned ultimately owned by Lady Green – as part of a sale-and-leaseback arrangement. BHS Ltd then paid rent to Carmen for the use of these properties. They were ultimately sold back to BHS as part of the sale to RAL for only £70m (with the proceeds of the sale going to Lady Green as the sole beneficial owner) but, over the lifetime of the sale-and-leaseback arrangement, rent of £153 million was paid by BHS to Carmen.

Egregious failures of corporate governance

  • Green’s rush to drive through the sale of BHS – “a chain that had become a financial millstone and threatened his reputation” – was the culmination of a sorry litany of failures of corporate governance and greed.  Regulatory concerns were circumvented, advisers were heavily incentivised to progress the deal. Dominic Chappell, his friends and associates were enticed by the personal rewards on offer without taking any personal risks. The Committees published for the first time with their report the Due Diligence reports produced by Olswang (and associated RAL Board minutes), which show their advice against the purchase and express concern that RAL were reliant on Green making good his unwritten assurances. (RAL= Retail Acquisitions Ltd.)
  • The complacent performance of Lord Grabiner as the non-executive Chairman of the Taveta group boards represented the apogee of weak corporate governance. It was his responsibility to provide independent challenge and oversight. Instead he was content to provide a veneer of establishment credibility to the group while happily disengaging from the key decisions he had a responsibility to scrutinise. For this deplorable performance he received a considerable salary. It is permissible in law for a director to delegate certain functions to other persons, but if a director allows himself to be dominated, or manipulated by one of their number, he may have gone beyond the boundaries of what is proper. He could be found to be in breach of duty and subject to disqualification. All directors of Taveta and RAL have serious questions to answer about their performance in those roles.
  • Green faced a considerable challenge in finding a credible buyer for a business that was consistently losing money and had a pension scheme with a large and growing deficit. It was clear that Chappell’s team were out of their depth, woefully short of the requisite experience and expertise, notably lacking the credible senior retailer Green once insisted on. They brought no new money to the deal, took no personal risk, could offer no equity and had no means of raising funds on a sustainable basis. Ultimately, Chappell and RAL failed all of Sir Philip’s nominal tests for a buyer. They were manifestly unsuitable owners of BHS. It is inconceivable that someone with Green’s experience seriously considered otherwise.

Collapse under incompetent and self-serving RAL

  • The report documents the true numbers behind the sale. The board of Taveta Investments Ltd was presented, two weeks after the event, with a rosy picture, while the reality was very different. The balance sheet included cash for immediate liabilities, property deals that took many months to materialise, funds that went to RAL never to return and equity that was a loan on punitive terms. It was patently obvious that there was not enough cash in BHS to give it a realistic chance of even medium term survival.
  • RAL’s failures include some blame for the pension scheme, which they accepted responsibility for with a “negligent and cavalier disregard for the risks and potential consequences”, negligence which “continued into their incompetent and self-serving ownership of the company”. In putting his “home team” first, Chappell and his fellow directors were personally enriched as BHS failed around them. Two directors jumped ship on the day that RAL acquired the business with personal financial rewards that it would take many BHS employees decades to  earn. The others continued to profit handsomely from their positions without fulfilling their requisite responsibilities.
  • In effect, Chappell “had his hands in the till”. His description of £2.6 million that he personally took, in addition to an outstanding £1.5 million family loan, as a “drip” in the ocean is an insult to the employees and pensioners of BHS that he let down.

Chairs’ comments

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

“One person, and one person alone, is really responsible for the BHS disaster. While Sir Philip Green signposted blame to every known player, the final responsibility for up to 11,000 job losses and a gigantic pension fund hole is his. His reputation as the king of retail lies in the ruins of BHS. His family took out of BHS and Arcadia a fortune beyond the dreams of avarice, and he’s still to make good his boast of ‘fixing’ the pension fund. What kind of man is it who can count his fortune in billions but does not know what decent behaviour is?”

Iain Wright MP, Chair of the Business, Innovation and Skills Committee, said:

“BHS’s demise has created many losers, particularly the 11,000 staff facing the loss of their jobs and the 20,000 pensioners facing significant reductions to their pensions. The actions of people in this sorry and tragic saga have left a stain on the reputation of business which reputable and honourable people in enterprise and commerce will find appalling. The sale of BHS in March 2015 is crucial to its eventual collapse a year later. The sale of BHS to a consortium led by a twice-bankrupt chancer with no retail experience should never have gone ahead; and this was obvious at the time. The reason it did, however, was Sir Philip Green. He was determined to get the deal done, no matter that the buyer could not deliver what BHS needed. There was a complete failure of corporate governance, with Sir Philip bulldozing the sale through, without proper oversight or challenge from his weak and impotent board.

While BHS staff face uncertain job prospects and pensioners worry about their future entitlements, it’s clear that a large cast of directors, advisers, and hangers-on enriched themselves off the back of BHS, including Dominic Chappell and his fellow RAL directors. Chappell took no risk and put no money into the venture and yet gained huge rewards as BHS crumbled around him. His failure is bad enough but that he effectively had his hands in the till is an insult to the employees and pensioners of BHS that he let down so badly.”

In response to the Government’s consultation on corporate reform, the Work and Pensions Committee’s most recent report says that the corporate governance and reporting requirements for public listed companies should be extended to private companies that have an important social impact: large private companies and those with over 5,000 defined benefit pension scheme members.

It also says that company directors should have a new duty to pension fund trustees, as the representatives of pension scheme members, in addition to those stakeholders they are already obliged to have regard to. Allied to the more substantial recommendations on pension law and regulation in its December 2016 Report, the Committee concluded these changes would reduce the chance of another company collapsing in the manner of BHS.

The key themes that emerged during the inquiry included:

  • lamentable corporate governance in what was a large private company
  • a paucity of publicly available information about the state of the company and its pension fund
  • the absence of a voice in the running of the company for those who relied on its success for the security of their pension saving.

Committee recommendations

Holding company directors to account

  • Public listed companies are required to comply with the Financial Reporting Council Corporate Governance Code and its reporting requirements or publicly explain why they are not. This is a proportionate approach for companies of social importance. Transparency about governance arrangements, performance and risk can better equip stakeholders to hold company directors to account. Wider awareness of the state of the BHS pension schemes may have pressured Sir Philip Green into taking more reparative action, sooner.

Large companies should be subject to the Financial Reporting Council Corporate Governance Code

  • Private companies that are large, as defined by Government, or have over 5,000 defined benefit pension scheme members, should be made subject to the the Financial Reporting Council (FRC) Corporate Governance Code on a comply or explain basis. The report includes a table of the top 30 largest private companies in the UK, with many household names like John Lewis, Clarks, Matalan, Virgin Atlantic, River Island, Pret a Manger – and the Arcadia Group – that would fall under the parameters of this recommendation. Many well-governed large private companies already follow best practice on transparency.

Include pension scheme trustees in section 172 of Companies Act

  • Pension scheme trustees should be added to section 172(1) of the Companies Act 2006. The list of stakeholders company directors must have regard to – and report on the exercise of their duties to – does not include defined benefit pension scheme beneficiaries or the trustees who must act in their interests. Incomes of pensioners in retirement are reliant on the sustained success of the sponsoring company but they are at particular risk of being neglected in corporate decision making as no one makes the case for former employees. The inclusion of pension scheme trustees in section 172 might increase the chances both that directors would take into account the interests of current and future pensioners in carrying out their duties, and that those who have failed to do so will be held accountable in the courts.

Publication of Insolvency Service investigation reports

Publication of correspondence with Arcadia

The Committee publishes with the report a series of correspondence with Ian Grabiner, Arcadia Chief Executive, and the Arcadia Group pension trust, charting its efforts to get information about the group’s pension schemes into the public domain. Arcadia’s pension schemes are over £200 million in deficit, but all parties have refused to provide information regarding the 2013 valuation and recovery plan, or the levels of employer contributions.

Chair’s comment

Frank Field MP, Chair of the Committee, said:

“For a company with a big social and economic footprint like BHS it is simply not enough to be accountable to shareholders – particularly when one shareholder owns most of the stock. The sorry tale of its sale and collapse, putting 11,000 people out of work and leaving a pension fund £571million in the red, with 20,000 pensioners facing an uncertain financial future, was a result of gross failures of corporate governance. Would the story have played out the same way if its directors had to be open about the financial decisions they were making for its future? The finances and leadership of a company with so many people depending on it should be open to scrutiny.

We have already expressed our grave concerns about corporate governance in the Green empire, and we know the Arcadia pension fund is also now in substantial deficit. We have been pressing Arcadia’s directors and pension trustees for detailed information on their schemes but very little is published and neither the company nor the trustees – who unlike the BHS schemes do not have an independent Chair – will tell us. Does Sir Philip not want us to know that he was being relatively generous to the Arcadia schemes while the BHS schemes floundered and the company headed inexorably for insolvency? Was he neglecting both? It can’t be right that basic information like the schedule of employer contributions and the length of the recovery plan is not in the public domain. If it goes under then levy-payers and pensioners foot the bill.”

You can read the full consultation response on corporate governance reform from the Work and Pensions Committee here.

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You can watch Philip Green present evidence on the collapse of BHS to the Business, Innovation and Skills Committee and Work and Pensions Committee, Wednesday 15 June 2016 here:  https://goo.gl/eeUggP

Related

In 2010, UK Uncut’s spokesman, Daniel Garvin, said: “Philip Green is a tax avoider, and yet is regarded by David Cameron as an appropriate man to advise the government on austerity. His missing millions need to be reclaimed and invested into public services not into his wife’s bank account.”  See: Philip Green to be target of corporate tax avoidance protest – The Guardian.

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Study of welfare sanctions – have your say

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National Audit Office (NAO) is currently undertaking a study of benefit sanctions, in order to:

“… examine whether the Department for Work and Pensions is achieving value for money from its administration of benefit sanctions. This includes how benefit sanctions fit with the intended aims and outcomes of DWP’s wider working age employment policy, whether sanctions are being implemented in line with policy and whether use of sanctions is leading to the intended outcomes for claimants.”

I wrote two days ago about the Department for Work and Pensions document about the Randomised Control Trial (RCT) they are currently conducting regarding in-work “progression.” The document was a submission made to the Work and Pensions Committee in January, as the Committee have conducted an inquiry into in-work conditionality. The document specifies that: “This document is for internal use only and should not be shared with external partners or claimants.” 

The Department for Work and Pensions claim that the Trial is about “testing whether conditionality and the use of financial sanctions are effective for people that need to claim benefits in low paid work.” The document focuses on methods of enforcing the “cultural and behavioural change” of people claiming both in-work and out-of-work social security, and evaluation of the Trial will is the responsibility of the Labour Market Trials Unit. (LMTU). Evaluation will “measure the impact of the Trial’s 3 group approaches, but understand more about claimant attitudes to progression over time and how the Trial has influenced behaviour changes.”

Worryingly, claimant participation in the Trial is mandatory. There is clearly no appropriate procedure to obtain and record clearly informed consent from research participants. Furthermore, the Trial is founded on a coercive psychopolitical approach to labour market constraints, and is clearly expressed as a psychological intervention, explicitly aimed at “behavioural change” and this raises some serious concerns about research ethics and codes of conduct.

Sanctions are “penalties that reduce or terminate welfare benefits in cases where claimants are deemed to be out of compliance with  requirements.” They are, in many respects, the neoliberal-paternalist tool of discipline par excellence – the threat that puts a big stick behind coercive welfare programme rules and “incentivises” citizen compliance with a heavily monitoring and supervisory administration. The Conservatives have broadened the scope of behaviours that are subject to sanction, and have widened the application to include previously protected social groups, such as sick and disabled people and lone parents.

There is plenty of evidence that sanctions don’t help people to find work, and that the punitive application of severe financial penalities is having a detrimental and sometimes catastrophic impact on people’s lives. We can see from a growing body of research how sanctions are not working in the way the government claim they intended.

Sanctions, under which people lose benefit payments for between four weeks and three years for “non-compliance”, have come under fire for being unfair, punitive, failing to increase job prospects, and causing hunger, debt and ill-health among jobseekers. And sometimes, causing death.

The Conservative shift in emphasis from structural to psychological explanations of poverty has far-reaching consequences. The reconceptualision of poverty makes it much more difficult to define and very difficult to measure. Such a conceptual change disconnects poverty from more than a century of detailed empirical and theoretical research, and we are witnessing an increasingly experimental approach to policy-making, aimed at changing the behaviour of individuals, without their consent. This turns democracy completely on its head. Policies are meant to meet public needs, rather than being used simply as tools of government to have the public meet ideologically-determined government outcomes.

This approach isolates citizens from the broader structural political, economic, sociocultural and reciprocal contexts that invariably influence and shape an individuals’s experiences, meanings, motivations, behaviours and attitudes, causing a problematic duality between context and cognition. It also places unfair and unreasonable responsibility on citizens for circumstances which lie outside of their control, such as the socioeconomic consequences of political decision-making.

It’s clear that the government intends to continue embedding sanctions in policies which were meant to provide a minimal income for people needing support. This is policy based entirely on ideology and traditional Conservative prejudice, aimed at punishing sick and disabled people, unemployed people, the poorest paid, and part-time workers, inflicting conditions of hardship, distress and absolute poverty on those social groups. Meanwhile, the collective bargaining traditionally afforded us by trade unions has been systematically undermined by successive Conservative governments, showing clearly how the social risks of the labour market are being personalised and redefined as being solely the economic responsibility of individuals rather than the government and profit-driven big business employers.

It’s important that we gather and present as much evidence as possible about the detrimental impact of welfare sanctions. The NAO study will run until the Autumn, so that gives us some time to have our say about our own experiences.

It is easy to make a submission to the study. Just go to the contact page and select welfare and benefits as the topic, and write “FAO Colin Ross” or “Max Tse” in the subject field. Alternatively,  you can email Colin Ross, the audit manager, directly at Colin.ROSS@nao.gsi.gov.uk

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Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs. If we can’t meet our basic physiological needs, it isn’t likely that we will be able to meet higher level psychosocial needs.

Related

We would like to hear your stories about how the cuts have affected you and your service. We want the wider public and politicians to understand the real life costs of public sector cuts. It can be hard to speak up alone, so we are collating everyone’s stories – together we have more power and a louder voice. We all have stories of frustration, fear and anger, so please use this as a way to tell the world about how the cuts have impacted on you and/or the people you work with. We are interested in stories from everyone who works in, uses, or needs Psychology services:–

Psychologists Against Austerity campaign – call for evidence

Stigmatising unemployment: the government has redefined it as a psychological disorder

The politics of punishment and blame: in-work conditionality

Nudging conformity and benefit sanctions

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

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

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

Sanctions can’t possibly “incentivise” people to work. Here’s why

 

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The just world fallacy

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The Tories now deem anything that criticises them as “abusive”. Ordinary campaigners are labelled “extremists” and pointing out flaws, errors and consequences of Tory policy is called “scaremongering”.

Language and psychology are a powerful tool, because this kind of use “pre-programs” and sets the terms of any discussion or debate. It also informs you what you may think, or at least what you need to circumnavigate first in order to state your own account or present your case. This isn’t simply name-calling or propaganda: it’s a deplorable and tyrannical silencing technique.

The government have gathered together a Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) – it is a part of the Cabinet Office – which is comprised of both behavioural psychologists and economists, who apply positivist (pseudo) psychological techniques to social policy. The approach is not much different to the techniques of persuasion used in the shady end of the advertising industry.  They produce positive psychology courses which the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) are using to ensure participants find satisfaction with their lot; the DWP are also using psychological referral with claims being reconsidered on a mandatory basis by civil servant “decision makers”, as punishment for non-compliance with the new regimes of welfare conditionality for which people claiming out of work benefits are subject.

Positive psychology courses, and the use of psychological referral as punishment for non-compliance with the new regimes of welfare conditionality applied to people claiming out of work benefits are example of the (mis)application of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT).

CBT is all about making a person responsible for their own thoughts and how they perceive events and experiences and can sometimes be used to empower people. But used in this context, it’s a political means to push an ideological agenda, entailing the “responsibilisation” of poverty, with claimants being blamed for not having a job or for being ill and/or disabled.

However, responding with anger, sadness and despair is normal to many events and circumstances, and to deny that in any way is actually grotesque, cruel and horrendously abusive – it’s a technique called gaslighting – a method of psychological abuse that is usually associated with psychopathic perpetrators.

Gaslighting techniques may range from a simple denial by abusers that abusive incidents have occurred, to events and accounts staged by the abusers with the intention of disorienting the targets (or “victims”.)

The government is preempting any reflection on widening social inequality and injustice by using these types of behavioural modification techniques on the poor, holding them entirely responsible for the government’s economic failures and the consequences of  class contingent policies.

Sanctions are applied to “remedy” various “defects” of individual behaviour, character and attitude. Poor people are being coerced into workfare and complicity using bogus psychology and bluntly applied behavioural modification techniques.

Poor people are punished for being poor, whilst wealthy people are rewarded for being wealthy. Not only on a material level, but on a level of socially and politically attributed esteem, worth and value.

We know from research undertaken by sociologists, psychologists and economists over the past century that being poor is bad for mental wellbeing and health. The government is choosing to ignore this and adding to that problem substantially by stripping people of their basic dignity and autonomy.

The application of behavioural science is even more damaging than the hateful propaganda and media portrayals, although both despicable methods of control work together to inflict psychological damage on more than one level. “Positive psychology” and propaganda serve to invalidate individual experiences, distress and pain and to appropriate blame for circumstances that lie entirely outside of an individual’s control and responsibility.

Social psychologists such as Melvin Lerner followed on from Milgam’s work in exploring social conformity and obedience, seeking to answer the questions of how regimes that cause cruelty and suffering maintain popular support, and how people come to accept social norms and laws that produce misery and suffering.

The “just-world” fallacy is the cognitive bias (assumption) that a person’s actions always bring morally fair and fitting consequences to that person, so that all honourable actions are eventually rewarded and all evil actions are eventually punished.

The fallacy is that this implies (often unintentionally) the existence of cosmic justice, stability, or order, and also serves to rationalise people’s misfortune on the grounds that they deserve it. It is an unfounded, persistent and comforting belief that the world is somehow fundamentally fair, without the need for our own moral agency and responsibility.

The fallacy appears in the English language in various figures of speech that imply guaranteed negative reprisal, such as: “You got what was coming to you,” “What goes around comes around,” and “You reap what you sow.” This tacit assumption is rarely scrutinised, and goes some way to explain why innocent victims are blamed for their misfortune.

The Government divides people into deserving and undeserving categories – the “strivers” and “scroungers” rhetoric is an example of how the government are drawing on such fallacious tacit assumptions – that utilises an inbuilt bias of some observers to blame victims for their suffering – to justify social oppression and inequality that they have engineered via policy.

The poorest are expected to be endlessly resilient and resourceful, people claiming social security are having their lifeline benefits stripped away and are being forced into a struggle to meet their basic survival needs. This punitive approach can never work to “incentivise” or motivate in such circumstances, because we know that when people struggle to meet basic survival needs they are too pre-occupied to be motivated to meet other less pressing needs.

Maslow identifies this in his account of the human hierarchy of needs, and many motivational studies bear this out. This makes the phrase trotted out by the Tories: “helping people into work” to justify sanctions and workfare not only utterly terrifying, but also inane.

Unemployment is NOT caused by “psychological barriers” or “character flaws”. It is caused by feckless and reckless governments failing to invest in growth projects. It’s not about personal “employability”, it’s about neoliberal economics, labour market conditions, political policies and subsequent socio-structural problems.

Public policy is not a playground for the amateur and potentially dangerous application of brainwashing techniques via the UK government’s Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) or “nudge unit”. This is NOT being nasty in a nice way: it is being nasty in a nasty way; it’s utterly callous.

The rise of psychological coercion, “positive affect as coercive strategy”, and the recruitment of economic psychologists for designing the purpose of  monitoring, modifying and punishing people who claim social security benefits raises important ethical questions about psychological authority. Psychology is being used as a prop for neoliberal ideology.

We ought to be very concerned about the professional silence so far regarding this adoption of a such a psychocratic, neo-behavourist approach to social control and an imposed conformity by this government.

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Pictures courtesy of Robert Livingstone 

Related reading:

AFTER FORCED-PSYCHOMETRIC-TEST DEBACLE, NOW JOBCENTRES OFFER ONLINE CBT – Skywalker

The Right Wing Moral Hobby Horse:Thrift and Self Help, But Only For The Poor

From Psycho-Linguistics to the Politics of Psychopathy. Part 1: Propaganda.

The Poverty of Responsibility and the Politics of Blame

Whistle While You Work (For Nothing): Positive Affect as Coercive Strategy – The Case of Workfare by Lynne Friedli and Robert Stearn (A must read)

 

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