In 1834 the British ruling class brought in the Poor Law Amendment Act. It was demanded by bourgeois ratepayers in the towns (newly given the vote in 1832). They wanted to put a stop to the system of payments to rural labourers to make up their wages which had led to a quadrupling of the Poor Law rates in twenty years. Farmers had used this system to lower wages since 1792 knowing that the Poor Law would then subsidise the pittance they paid their workers. This was known as the Speenhamland system. In 1834 the Poor Law Amendment Act brought in a new principle, that of “less eligibility” or to put it plainly making the conditions for poor relief so bad that you might choose to starve to death. The way they did this was to introduce prisons for the poor, new “bastilles” as they were called, the workhouses. Every town built one. Their inhuman regime was to cast a shadow of terror over the whole working class until well after the First World War. It thus had a second useful purpose in disciplining those still in work from getting too demanding …

Every social phenomenon has to be understood in the context of its time but sometimes the pattern of history seems uncannily similar. Ironically, campaigners in London are currently trying to have the workhouse used as the model for the one in Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist scheduled as a listed building (to avoid its destruction by “redevelopers”). And at the same time the Lib-Tory coalition is bringing in its own form of New Poor Law. Curiously too the background has some of the similarities of 1834. The cry for reform of the current welfare system is not new but the depth of the crisis, and (following the bank bailout) the size of the hole in Government revenues, has suddenly made the issue more urgent. The welfare budget was over £100 billion in 2010 so the clamour for cuts has become noisier.

But like the Speenhamland system we should also remember that the swelling welfare budget has had a social purpose for the ruling class. Not only did it keep the unemployed consuming at a basic level (thus keeping others in jobs) but it also subsidised low wages (through things like the Working Tax Credit). The widespread use of the Disability Living Allowance (DLA) did not arise from the workers who were put on it but from the Thatcherite state (in both its original and Blair versions) which used it as a way to keep the headline unemployment figure down. How much easier was it to restructure British industry if you neutered older miners and steelworkers with DLA payments rather than tried to reintegrate them into the workforce (or leave them dangerously roaming around in discontent). Over the last few years the regime for DLA has already toughened up but that is not enough for the economic reality of a capitalist state in ever-deepening crisis. Now they are trialling new tests for disability which are basically going to put pressure on seriously ill and disabled people to try to work when they cannot. As Zoe Williams reported in The Guardian (March 10) a trial under the new rules of the work capability allowance (WCA) has just ended in Burnley. She reports

The focus so far has been on the absurdities of the physical disabilities that have been discounted by the WCA: claimants have to score 15 points to stay on the full allowance. A person with multiple sclerosis scored zero, despite a surgeon's letter stating he was too ill to work. Someone who was registered blind was found to have "mild visual impairment".
… the assessment for those with mental illness is even more bafflingly inadequate. Atos, the company responsible for the assessments, does not require staff to have any training in or understanding of mental illness. There's an anecdote about an assessor telling a claimant that because he wasn't rocking or sitting in a corner, he obviously wasn't unwell. Claimants are asked how they arrived at the appointment: if they managed to take public transport alone, and are presentably dressed, this counts strongly against them. Likewise, if they are articulate. So there's no acknowledgement that mental illness fluctuates, and someone might be fine on one day, but incapacitated the next.

And if you are struck down by cancer you will only be given an employment support allowance (ESA) for one year. 75% of all survivors of cancer take more than one year to recover. This is the modern version of “less eligibility”.

According to a study by Scope, the disabled people’s charity (see the Financial Times Oct 8 2010), people with disabilities will have lost a total of more than £9bn in income by the end of this parliament even before the latest cuts are added in. A lot of this will be because of the cuts in housing benefit as the disabled need to claim for specialist accommodation.

At the same time about a quarter of the 2.2 million on incapacity benefit will be shifted on to the dole or jobseekers’ allowance. The main idea behind this is to cut the welfare bill by £35 per person per week since they lose attendance allowance. For claimants it also means the humiliation of having to constantly prove that they are “actively seeking work”.

This isn’t the last of the consequences of this new poor law. According to the Independent on Sunday 1 Aug 2010

The National Housing Federation (NHF) claimed the cap on housing benefit payments amounted to an "onslaught on the vulnerable", which would cost more than 900,000 low-paid people an average of £624 a year – forcing them into debt or homelessness.

The right wing press for years has been full of stories of dole scroungers. Leaving aside the fact that more benefit goes unclaimed than is lost to fraud the new poor law has other aims than hitting the workshy. Superficially it seems to be forcing people to get a job at a time of mounting unemployment. This is the old principle of “less eligibility” in a new guise. In reality there is no possibility of a system in crisis reintegrating the reserve army of labour. 2.5 million UK unemployed is now considered normal and acceptable. Consequently the new legislation will reduce the reserve army of labour to penury.

But it is not just those out of work who will be hit. Iain Duncan-Smith recognises that “One of the biggest problems is that for too many people work simply does not pay”. Well done IDS! However he does not then draw the obvious conclusion that this is because wage rates have gone down in real terms for 35 years. No, the problem is that benefits are too high (even though no-one can live comfortably on them). Whilst a major short term aim is to save the debt-ridden state £15 billions a year from it annual outgoings, the new welfare regime is also intended to keep forcing down the cost of wage labour to increase capitalist profitability.

The idea of capitalism looking after you “from the cradle to the grave” was always a bit of myth but we should remember that the welfare state was only brought in 1945 to head off what was seen as the social threat of returning working class servicemen demanding that there should be no return to the 1930s. The introduction of the welfare state headed off demands for real change in the social order then. Now we are faced with a new capitalist crisis. This time round we should demand more than crumbs from the capitalist table - the working class operate the capitalist bakery. It is time we began to prepare to take it over…