Easter Recess: Time to take stock and give thought to rising uncertainty

Uncertainty is the new reality. With it comes rising anxiety and the prioritising of gain over wellbeing.

It's the Parliamentary Easter Recess and that means a chance to take a breath, and take stock of the present political situation. In short, uncertainty is fast becoming the new definition of life in Britain.

The formal process of Brexit has begun with the triggering of Article 50, which means the scramble to define the new UK-EU trade relationship has begun. The bill repealing EU laws, and replacing them with UK equivalents, has been announced in a white paper. And, another round of welfare cuts are set to begin.

Each of these, in their own way, is contributing to the rising sense of precarity. Each is serving to shape everyday life, and the grander framework it functions within, around the idea of uncertainty - and it is a deliberate ideological project.

Take for example the most pressing of these, the welfare cuts. Up until now, welfare cuts have been focussed on those at the very bottom, who have little voice and who the right-wing press demands be afforded little sympathy.

However, these latest cuts are going to thrust deep into the soft belly of the middle class. Restrictions to child benefit, to bereavement benefits, and to working age benefits will have real impacts even on people who have so far managed to skirt the impact of austerity (Butler & Asthana, 2017).

From those with a disability to young people, there is something in these changes that is, directly or indirectly, going to affect everyone (Cowburn, 2017). The safety net is being disassembled and the Conservatives are justifying it as a way to 'encourage' people 'back to work'.

The white paper for the so called 'Great Repeal Bill' - a name of unlimited pomposity - has only added fuel to the fire. Human rights groups, like Liberty, have already expressed deep concern at tremendous gaps it found in the paper (Liberty, 2017).

A particular controversy lies with the bill granting the government 'secondary legislation' powers - in theory, the executive power to implement and administer what is required by the primary legislation - over matters being transferred from EU supervision (Owen, 2017).

Critics are warning that this provision risks handing the government the ability to sidestep Parliament in altering legislation (Fowles, 2017). At the least, it will allow the government to shape and direct aspects of the law without proper oversight - a power of huge potential.

Those concerns will be hard to assuage, because the final bill will be so long and dense - "one of the largest legislative projects ever undertaken in the UK" (BBC, 2017). It could take years of Parliamentary time to scrutinise and this government has shown itself to be neither that patient nor transparent.

Conservatism, whatever Theresa May wants to preach about the return of Unionism, has long since given itself over wholly to an aggressive form of laissez-faire capitalism - and the sharpest lesson of that ideology is the belief that growth is achieved by rewarding energy and dynamism and punishing the 'idle' (George & Wilding, 1994).

In other words, to promote limited precarious rewards, directly at the expense of assurance. Through coercive uncertainty, to build profit on the back of anxiety - mistaking gain and accumulation for progress.

And understanding that should make any observer take a pause, consider and ask: what kind of trade deals the Conservatives are willing to drop the EU and the single market in order to negotiate?

The Conservative long term plan is now nearly fully realised. Uncertainty is the new reality. For an increasing number of people that means the life precarious, filled with anxiety about tomorrow, so some few other can exploit them.

The DWP's fake case studies are just the latest blunder in the Conservative effort to restructure welfare to be more coercive.

Ian Duncan Smith and the DWP are once more under fire as they attempt to make fundamental changes to how benefits work. Photograph: Job Centre Plus by Andrew Writer (License) (Cropped)

The discovery yesterday that the DWP, Department of Work and Pensions, had been faking case studies is just the latest blunder in the Conservative attempt to make a coercive shift in welfare policy (Rawlinson & Perraudin, 2015). It is the latest product of the destructive Conservative obsession with stamping out what they see as dependence generating collectivism, only to allow coercion to flourish.

The Conservatives have pressed along this course, even in the face of legal challenges (Neville, 2013), in pursuit of ideological aims. In the 1970s, the party began to adopt long abandoned elements of classical liberalism.

They absorbed these ideas - the free market, anti-state attitudes - to construct a modern conservatism. They have used low taxes, deregulation and the trimming back of the public sector to protect the interests of the modern establishment, which primarily consists of the finance sector and big business.

The general Conservative motivation is stated to be the discouragement of dependence and the encouragement of self-interest, all in order to spur innovation and individual excellence - in opposition to collectivism - that, in competition, they believe will lead to growth and advancement within the structure of, and beneficial to, the establishment (George & Wilding, 1994).

Within that structure comes the dismantling of the welfare system, even the privatising of it (Mason, 2015), all in the name of ending dependence - in this case by the introduction of greater coercion.

In these applications come the conservative twist on old liberal policies. They are made to serve a vast corporate structure, the UK as a PLC (Treanor & Elliott, 2015), an umbrella for other financial and business giants. In the process the liberist, laissez faire, economics lose whatever capacity they had to liberate and welfare loses its ability to act as a compassionate social security safety net.

Welfare, in particular, has a purpose, a social point, that is the reason it is provided by the public sector. It is supposed to be a common safety net, to which everyone contributes and from which everyone benefits. A kind of social bond, part of the thread that holds the patchwork of society together.

But as the Conservatives pursue their direction, shredding that social fabric, they replace the compassion and co-operation of welfare, with the a meagre and coercive social insurance (Mason, 2015) - based on individual contributions from individual work, highly personalised and so lacking the security offered by a social safety.

The Labour Party's unwillingness to oppose these directions hides the possibility of moving in a more progressive direction (Wintour, 2015). Society could do more to help, it could liberate the individual and end poverty. The means of achieving it is the Citizen's Income. However, only one party - the Greens - have taken it seriously, and even they had doubts about putting it front and centre of their election manifesto (Riley-Smith, 2015).

And yet, it is an idea that, at the very least, shows that a progressive alternative is possible. Citizen's Income shows that it is possible to reform welfare for the present and to do so without losing its social purpose: serving the common good.