George Osborne's appeal for progressives to back his 'reforms' cover an attempt to dismantle compassionate social security

An old branch of the Job Centre in London. Photograph: DSC_0107.JPG via photopin (license) (cropped)

In The Guardian on Sunday, George Osborne made an appeal to progressives and Labour Party MPs to get behind his welfare 'reforms' (Osborne, 2015).

"We are saying to working people: our new national living wage will ensure you get a decent day’s pay, but there are going to be fewer taxpayer-funded benefits.... I believe this settlement represents the new centre of British politics, and appeal to progressive MPs on all sides to support us."

Yet even as Osborne attempted this appeal to 'moderates' with his new 'Centre', Conservative ministers were floating policy ideas that made it clear the party is not content to settle for just the latest round of austerity cutbacks.

While it has become abundantly clear that austerity is the long term economic plan that the Conservative leadership has taken pains to remind us of, ad nauseum, the ambitious extent to which that plan would be extended was not.

As far back as 2013, Prime Minister David Cameron was telling guests at the Lord Mayor's dinner that austerity measures would, in the end, produce a 'leaner' state permanently (Watt, 2013). The first Conservative budget, divorced from the Liberal Democrat obstructions, then arrived with a prelude from Cameron, announcing his wish for a 'higher wage, lower welfare, lower tax' society (BBC, 2015).

But even the budget, with its cuts to welfare - which have been variously criticised as driving divisions between the old and the young (McVeigh & Helm, 2015), between men and women (Watt & Perraudin, 2015), and between the rich and poor (May, 2015) - only mask a more fundamental change being pursued.

There is a project under way to comprehensively deconstruct the welfare state and the principles upon which it was founded. From the NHS (Campbell, 2015), to welfare (Mason, 2015), to even the post office (Macalister, 2015) and public broadcasting (Perraudin, 2015), the public sector is faced with being stripped back and undone - with tax funding for services being replaced with fees charged to the 'consuming' individuals.

The big question is why? Looking beyond the temptation to suggest a colourful variety of reasons involving detached selfishness and collusion with vested interests, what ideological and theoretical motivations are there to dismantle the systems of social security?

The word that comes up, again and again, is dependency.

From around the 1970s, modern conservatism began to form itself around the long abandoned ideas of classical liberalism, absorbing its priorities of laissez-faire, that is non-intervention, and meritocracy. Those principles are used as the theoretical underpinning of a low tax, low regulation and low equality modern conservative economic system, that acts as the social framework for advancing certain deeply ideological values.

The stated aim is to encourage self-interest, or greed as Boris Johnson championed it (Watt, 2013{2}), while discouraging dependence. It is in particular dependence which these modern conservatives see as the danger inherent to systems of welfare and social security.

The practical application means divorcing the state, acting on behalf of society and particularly of its richest members, from the responsibility of securing the wellbeing of the individual members of society - passing that duty off onto the individuals themselves. Through this means, neoliberal conservatives aim to drive individuals to self-interested action, where their productive work directly links to their social security and makes them wholly dependent upon themselves.

What they do not seem to grasp is that the idea of paid work, in the form of productive labour - with success and wealth marked as the result individual character, and failure and poverty as likewise the result of a personal fecklessness - is a deeply moralistic and ideological viewpoint of how society should function.

The facts do not bear out these moral and ideological beliefs. If you are born poor, the statistics say you will likely remain poor (Harrison, 2013). Whatever merit based rewards that the market might offer are suppressed or distorted by very real social conditions. Liberties and rights become privileges far out of reach for most individuals, who are reduced to factors of production competing with each other for survival.

So busy are neoliberal modern conservatives in trying to avoid dependency (George & Wilding, 1994) - and an escalating collectivism that they fear it would lead to - they ignore, are blind to, or outright disavow, the necessity of facilitating opportunity, for competition to actually be fair and so produce meaningful outcomes, or facilitating justice, where members of community are fairly supported and rewarded for the competitive exploitation of what ultimately belongs to the community.

Neoliberalism also undermines two important factors in any progressive state: social cohesion and the principle of universality. Through progressive tax contributions that pay for general use public services, society is bound in a common obligation (Peston, 2015). A portion of what is made by the individual through the exploitation of other individuals and of community resources, is used to fund care and support for the whole community.

The public sector, from healthcare to education, represents the individual members of society pooling their funds to provide a universal service. Everyone, who can, pays in and everyone benefits, regardless of their bank account, from freely accessible services. Communities, and society at large, are brought together on the basis of compassion, acknowledging the inherent value of one member of a society to another - with each member benefiting from the education of another and from their wellbeing, healthy and free from poverty.

Neoliberalism is neither post-ideological nor centrist. It carries very definite social aims that are focussed squarely upon the destruction of this consensus. In its place is put a highly moralised version of earning a living, where working for pay - however degrading and insufficient - is no longer a necessary sufferance, which radical reforming governments attempt to alleviate, but the focal point of an individual's life and a  marker of their worth (O'Hagan, 2012).

At a time when people are talking seriously of abolishing poverty (Ban Ki-moon, 2015), are rolling out trials of the basic income (Perry, 2015) and discussing the possibilities of a post-capitalist society based on abundance (Mason, 2015), George Osborne is trying to implement a system designed to entrench the old world - and he wants the help of progressives in rewriting that script.

But whatever iniquities the welfare state may have, including its cost, what is there to consider progressive about coercing people into paid employment, however degrading, with the threat of impoverishment? The classical liberals of old were left behind by the modern liberals (1928), who moved on to say:

"We believe with a passionate faith that the end of all political and economic action is not the perfecting or the perpetuation of this or that piece of mechanism or organisation, but that individual men and women may have life, and that they might have it more abundantly."

Dignity and self-esteem come from autonomy - which is a far throw from a life lived supported by the ever insecure low pay scraped together from working in poor conditions for exploitative employers. The austerity agenda will not achieve them for any but the very few.

References

George Osborne's 'Calling all progressives: help us reform the welfare state'; in The Guardian; 19 July 2015.

Nicholas Watt's 'David Cameron makes leaner state a permanent goal'; in The Guardian; 12 November 2013.

'David Cameron speech: I'll end welfare merry-go-round'; on the BBC; 22 June 2015.

Tracy McVeigh & Toby Helm's 'UK "failing its young" as gulf grows between generations'; in The Guardian; 11 July 2015.

Nicholas Watt & Frances Perraudin's 'Cuts to tax credits in budget hit women twice as hard as men, says Labour'; in The Guardian; 8 July 2015.

Josh May's 'IFS: Budget leaves low-income workers 'significantly worse off''; on Politics Home; 9 July 2015.

Denis Campbell's 'Jeremy Hunt raises doubts about long-term future of free NHS'; in The Guardian; 16 July 2015.

Rowena Mason's 'David Cameron open to idea of workers saving up to fund own sick pay'; in The Guardian; 13 July 2015.

Terry Macalister's 'Royal Mail: government to sell remaining 30% stake'; in The Guardian; 4 June 2015.

Frances Perraudin's 'John Whittingdale: BBC could be part-funded by subscriptions in future'; in The Guardian; 19 July 2015.

Nicholas Watt's 'Boris Johnson invokes Thatcher spirit with greed is good speech'; in The Guardian; 27 November 2013{2}.

Angela Harrison's 'Social mobility: 'Britain remains deeply divided''; on the BBC; 17 October 2013.

Vic George & Paul Wilding's 'Welfare And Ideology'; Harvester Wheatsheaf; 1994.

Robert Peston's 'Tories' curious message on work'; on the BBC; 14 April 2015.

Ellie Mae O'Hagan's 'Why did paid work become the only thing Britain really values?'; in The Guardian; 30 August 2012.

'Britain's Industrial Future: being the Report of the Liberal Industrial Inquiry'; also known as the Yellow Book; Ernest Benn Ltd, 1928. [Buy Now]

Ban Ki-moon's '"We can be the first generation that ends poverty"'; in The Guardian; 10 July 2015.

Francesca Perry's 'The giving city: Utrecht plans 'basic income' experiment'; on City links; in The Guardian; 10 July 2015.

Paul Mason's 'The end of capitalism has begun'; in The Guardian; 17 July 2015.