Plunder of the Commons by Guy Standing

Author:Guy Standing
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241396339
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2019-08-28T16:00:00+00:00

Another claimant emailed to say how much he had appreciated a factsheet produced by the Newcastle Welfare Rights Service in pursuing a year-long appeal. Reading the guide showed just how complex the DWP had made the process. Many vulnerable people would be put off even trying to correct a perceived injustice. One can only conclude that this was the intention.

In late 2018, under pressure from a Freedom of Information request, the DWP was forced to reveal its own statistics showing that every day about 100 people were dying while on one or other of the benefits for the disabled. Shockingly, about ten people died every day who had been deemed fit enough to move into jobs.45 And the death toll can be expected to rise with the roll-out of Universal Credit, which gives disabled people even lower benefits than the system it is replacing.

In 2017, the UK Independent Mechanism that monitors British compliance with the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities concluded that social security reforms made by successive governments since 2010 ‘have had a particularly disproportionate, cumulative impact on disabled people … and have resulted in regression of disabled people’s rights to live independently and to an adequate standard of living’.46 Their situation has worsened since then.

Beyond the treatment of the disabled, Universal Credit is a giant step in the erosion of subsistence rights. It is the endgame of neo-liberal social policy. Billed as reducing complexity by integrating six different state benefits in a single payment, it is moralistic and directive in design. Claimants, mostly vulnerable almost by definition, are obliged to sign a ‘claimant commitment’ to attend regular interviews, to inform bureaucrats on what they are doing, and to satisfy ‘case workers’ that they are spending their time appropriately. The system’s architect, Iain Duncan Smith, is a committed Catholic and was a military officer. A sense of military discipline, moralistic certainty and duty permeates the scheme, which invades people’s privacy, polices their behaviour and restricts their freedom. It epitomizes a class-based presumption that the poor do not need – or cannot be trusted with – freedom; instead they must be reformed and feel grateful for charity, if they demonstrate the required behavioural change. If not, they must be punished for their sins.

An idea behind the design, according to the DWP, is that claimants would be encouraged to learn financial discipline, so as to ‘manage’ their finances. This bizarre reason was one of the justifications for delaying entitlement to Universal Credit for six weeks once a person became qualified to receive it. Denying impoverished people money was supposed to help them to manage money. Although after widespread protest the official waiting time was later reduced to five weeks, in practice the delay in receiving benefits has often been much longer.47

In 2017 a quarter of all new entitled claimants were not paid in full on time (after their six-week wait), with payment delayed on average by an additional four weeks.48 About 40 per cent of late-paid claimants had to wait eleven weeks or more.

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