Efforts to extinguish the light of human progress sometimes cause the candlelight to flicker, but it always burns the brighter after

Peace for Paris. Photograph: From Subjectif Art, design by Jean Jullien (License)

The world is moving inexorably forwards. More freedoms, more rights, more equality. That progress has been tempered time and again by horrifying bouts of violence and war, psychotic acts of terror and ruthless acts of sectarian cleansing. Yet humanity has continued to stumble its way out of the darkness.

Acts of violence, counter-revolutionary reaction and suppression by those would keep the world trapped in the darkness, rear up with each step forward. They attempt use fear to control and dissuade, to put out the light. Yet each act of violence has changed humanity. It forges an ever growing, ever spreading, solidarity against violence, ignorance and selfishness. It simply makes the case, and support, for peace, liberty and tolerance stronger.

Vaclav Havel was a writer and playwright who became a political dissident against totalitarian communist rule and went on to became the first President of the Czech Republic. At the height of the constant, suppressive, threat of arrest and imprisonment, Havel wrote The Power of the Powerless. In it, Havel described how under the rule of even the most desperate and tyrannical of police states, the light of dissent and liberty can flicker into life through simple acts of disobedience and the refusal to comply with the wielders of power and fear. That in these simple acts, an individual:

"...rejects the ritual and breaks the rules of the game. He discovers once more his suppressed identity and dignity. He gives his freedom a concrete significance. His revolt is an attempt to live within the truth."

For many, the events in Paris, or in Beirut, have extinguished their ability to see that light - or so dimmed their sensitivity to it beneath a howling storm of pain and loss that they may never see it again. For those people, there is perhaps little comfort in knowing that despite, and maybe in spite of, atrocities, the statistics say that there are only positive trends when it comes to human health and prosperity.

To those people, it may well be cold comfort that the light continues to flicker, let alone that it will grow stronger. Even so, we cannot give up on, or ignore, that flame. By its light, people have changed the world for the better with even the smallest acts of freedom.

Whether it's the struggle for human rights, civil rights and liberties, and democracy around the world, or their particular manifestations in the rising visibility of struggles for Women's rights, LGBT rights or for recognition that Black Lives Matter, the movement towards equality and respect is irresistible.

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.