The current reduction in welfare spending should come as no surprise. It is the completely comprehensible consequence of long-term historical developments in British politics.
Steve Latham
Welfare cuts have been extended over ever-more vulnerable groups, such as the disabled and single parents.
But the current reduction in welfare spending should come as no surprise. It is the completely comprehensible consequence of long-term historical developments in British politics.
We forget that the creation of the Welfare State was just that, a political creation, and not any sort of ‘natural’ evolutionary process. The ruling classes of the United Kingdom and the British Empire did not roll over and willingly give a piece of the national pie to the working classes just because they felt sorry for them.
No. It was as a result of years of political pressure, which compelled the establishment to buy off unrest, and the threat of revolution, with substantial concessions.
Although not full socialism, the welfare nevertheless produced a material improvement to poor people’s lives, unprecedented in world history.
To this internal factor, was added the external conflict with actually-exiting Communism, in the USSR, and later China.
While not the workers’ paradise depicted in their own propaganda, these totalitarian regimes nevertheless presented an ideological pole opposed to the free enterprise capitalist system.
In order to show their capitalism was superior to Marxism, by providing a degree of justice and equality, western nations enacted further welfare legislation.
That external threat is now gone. And so is the internal opposition, the Labour movement, emasculated by deliberate Tory enactment of anti-union restrictions.
The manual working class was also weakened by the loss of its mass base in heavy industry, as business searched globally for cheap labour.
In addition, however, the historic deal was made possible by Europe’s relative prosperity; and for Britain, its imperial domination and exploitation of poorer nations.
Shored up by the legacy of slavery, this enabled the ruling class to mine its surplus wealth, and set up the Welfare State in a fit of noblesse oblige.
As a result, the European proletariat was transformed into a global labour aristocracy, with a stake in perpetuating unequal trade arrangements. Today, however, times have changed, and Britain no longer enjoys these inherited economic advantages, overtaken initially by the United States, and more recently by Asia, and latterly China. Britain is rediscovering how small it is, a small island off the coast of a peninsula on the edge of the greater Euro-Asian continent.
In this context, it is inevitable that the elites would reduce their welfare spending, when they are no longer constrained to maintain it.
This is not some ‘natural’ development, but a deliberate political decision. We are witnessing the re-imposition of the normal (if not normative) pattern of power, common throughout the world.
It is a return to time before time, a post-historical era. But it is not one that we need to take lying down. Instead the crisis calls for a return also to the politics of class struggle, which created the Welfare State in the first place. (The Prisma memoirs)
(Photos: Pixabay)
.jpg)
