Reinventing the Welfare State. Ursula Huws

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      But even when, after years of paying off their mortgages, people have managed to remain in possession of their properties, do they really get to leave them to their children as the enticing promises led them to believe? The answer is only yes if they are fortunate enough to die suddenly. Because of the pernicious distinction that has been drawn in the neoliberal welfare state between ‘treatment’ (which, although increasingly narrowly defined, is still provided free by the NHS) and ‘care’ (which most emphatically is not), the chances are very high that the house will have to be sold off, either before or after death, to pay for the rocketing costs of social care – provided by private companies which, in a further irony, are very likely to be employing workers on such low wages that they require tax credits to survive, and which may or may not be paying corporation tax.

      So much for the baby boomers who scrimped and saved to pay off their mortgages. What of those who remained in their social housing and paid rent instead? Well they have been punished in another way – by the ‘bedroom tax’ introduced in 2013, whereby tenants’ benefits are cut by 14 per cent if they have one spare bedroom and by 25 per cent if they have two or more. In other words, if they have any spare space whatsoever apart from their own bedroom (whether used to house medical equipment, a study or for any other purpose) then they have to pay an unaffordable extra sum of rent for it. So, although they may have faithfully paid rent for many years and put money and effort into maintaining and caring for the property, they are no more secure in their housing than anyone else.

      GENERATION SET AGAINST GENERATION

      What, meanwhile, has been the experience of younger generations? Let’s look at the generation born in the early 1980s, now approaching their forties, too young to benefit from the advantages conferred by the post-war welfare state and too old to benefit from the softening of the Thatcherite policies introduced under the New Labour government of the 1990s. They were born too late, for example, for their parents to take advantage of the more generous funding for state nurseries in the pre-Thatcher era but too early to benefit from tax-deductible childcare costs and the Sure Start Programme. Their childhood was played out against a background of progressive cuts. Every year, something was withdrawn that had been available to older children, such as free music lessons, school trips or bus passes for travel to secondary school. They were the guinea-pig generation for much experimental governmental interference in schools, such as SATS examinations and the National Curriculum, and if they went to university they were denied the possibility of being subsidised by a local authority grant and were then hit with the requirement to pay tuition fees as well.

      Not only did this generation suffer right through their education; once educated, they also entered a labour market in which the concept of a job for life had vanished. Apart from a lucky few, there were no apprenticeships or protected graduate trainee positions to be applied for. Suddenly, they had to compete, not just with the contemporaries they had been schooled with, but in a global labour market, with similarly qualified workers from all over the world. Without experience it was almost impossible to secure a decent job, and without employment it was impossible to demonstrate experience. The only solution to this Catch 22 on offer to the majority was ‘work experience’ – an unpaid internship that was supposed to confer ‘employability’ (in the process further undermining wages and conditions for the lucky workers who were actually paid).

      The punishment of this squeezed and neglected generation, now in middle life, was also, of course, a punishment for their baby-boomer parents, though the young were encouraged to think of their elders as a privileged generation with interests opposed to theirs, on the one hand blocking the career ladder for ambitious juniors at work, on the other, a demographic time-bomb representing an unsustainable cost to the state and an impossible burden on younger generations.

      CONCLUSION

      We can conclude that, in the six decades since its establishment, the post-war welfare state has been transformed in character from one that, albeit to a limited extent, achieved a modest redistribution from capital to labour and provided a universal set of social protections, to its opposite: a state that redistributes wealth from labour to capital and, far from providing a safety net for its most vulnerable citizens, actually drives them into destitution if they fail to conform to its increasingly punitive terms. This transformation has been achieved under cover of an ideological subterfuge, with blame for misfortune being deflected onto other workers, or other groupings within an increasingly fractured working class. Different sections of the population have been played off against each other, while corporate interests have been rendered invisible, with the institutions of the welfare state playing a crucial role in the hidden transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich.

      If we are to envisage positive ways forward, there is a need to look beyond these institutions and take a long hard look at what has actually happened in the labour market. Is it still even appropriate to think in terms of a ‘core’ workforce of organised workers and a peripheral army of casual workers waiting to take their place? This question is addressed in the next chapter.

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