In 2014/15 (and, despite recent speculation, almost certainly not before) Labour are going to go to the voters of Britain with a vision for Government. This is my second in an occasional series where I give my best attempts to think about what I’d like to see articulated in that vision. These are not policy ideas, though I will offer those elsewhere, but principles that should form the basis of Labour’s policy making. Here I will be posing questions that should help Labour to establish how we move the arguments for Socialism forward and make it relevant to the 21st century and it’s new challenges. I will also start to offer my answers to those questions.

Note: I started writing this post last week, before I even know Ed would be making his speech today, but dallied over it for too long to have the kind of foresight I might have been afforded had I published on Thursday. However, some of my rewriting and completion of this post today has been coloured by Ed’s speech and even more by the response to it.

Welfare is an area absolutely fraught with dangers for Labour. We have to be honest about that if we are to take power again and create a system fit for purpose. Of the many apparently controversial policies the Tories are pushing through, welfare reforms rountinly poll extremely highly. Like it or not, at present and as it stands, the welfare state is not popular with the general public who fund it.

Labour is not a Party that can only do what’s popular. We must be a Party that also does what is right. But if we become a Party with a tin ear, we’ll be a Party that will never have the opportunity to do anything at all. There must be a balance.

Labour has a historic duty to protect the poorest and weakest in society. But we need to be honest about how we do this better than we have, and how we make sure we are doing the best by everyone.

Firstly we need to accept that some years ago, a generation of claimants of incapacity benefits were parked there because at one time this was an easy short-to-medium term solution to a range of wider social problems. These decisions weren’t made by one group of people, but were made by a group of stakeholders and only sometimes by the claimants themselves.

To an extremely large extent, this wasn’t about people themselves deciding to defraud the system, but systemic support for people whose joblessness itself was diagnosed – sometimes by doctors, sometimes by staff within the welfare system – as chronic. As the pendulum returned back to an economy of far greater employment opportunity, and the Government started to speak in real terms of the goal of full employment, the culture changed. There were clearly more people on incapacity benefit than statistics proved was realistic and so draconian measures were brought in to try to pinpoint those who were claiming a benefit they were not entitled to. Clearly from the horror stories we have seen the pendulum swung far too far the other way. Genuinely sick and disabled people are and have been treated with suspicion and contempt. There has been an assumption that people were shirking, which is massively out of proportion to the percentage of people who are – for whatever reason – claimin benefits when they could be working.

Labour is a Party that was founded on the basis of the value of work – of Labour – above and beyond the monetary value, important though that is. Though we are also a Party that must take our responsibility to those who cannot work seriously, we should not do so at the cost of denying the value that work brings us. If people cannot work they should be supported. If people can work they should be supported to do so. For the benefits their doing brings to society and to themselves. This isn’t about sending the disabled up ladders, or children up chimneys, but is about ensuring that as many of our citizens as possible get to experience the tangible and intangible benefits of work that cannot come with the simple monetary exchange of any form of benefit.

As a society, we should encourage as few people as possible to be on benefits. As a party based on the dignity and value of work, this should not be a controversial statement. We should work with those who can’t work to try to find other ways for them to experience the postive aspects of a contributory relationship with society. But if there are those who could experience this and are not, that should be a situation we strive to change.

If Labour is to protect the welfare state which we so value, we need to ensure that the buy-in to the system is as universal as the safety net it provides. If we don’t accept that we are not currently employing arguments in the favour of this that are working with the general public, we will lose the fight to protect the value of a universal welfare state and any recognisable and workable mechanism for providing it. If we continue to lose the argument, we will end up like Tories faced with a minimum wage. They don’t want it, they’ll try to stymie it, but they won’t be political able to abolish it. We will find ourselves similarly powerless in the face of a welfare reform jugganaught if we do not learn how to duck and weave.

Labour have to learn to be able to better talk abour welfare. The response I saw today to what was a pretty reasonable speech that outlined the values I’ve stated above was a wailing and gnashing of teeth because we’ve become so unaccustomed to talking about welfare that we expect every conversation to happen only through the prisms or ultra-violet and infrared. But the public – before whom we must make a case for a reasonable prospectus on welfare – just don’t view things that way.

If we don’t get this right, we will lose the welfare state. We will let the perfect pitch be the enemy of good provision. We will be so timid about stating that a work ethic is a Labour ethic, we’ll lose those we should be supporting.

Tags: Colourful vision, Ed Miliband, Incapacity Benefit, Welfare state, work

This entry was posted on Monday, June 13th, 2011 at 21:53 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.