From destroying the environment to betraying the disabled, the government is running the same play—will people fall for it?
~ punkacademic ~
There’s the old adage that goes: the first time people show you who they are, believe them. Over a decade ago, Rachel Reeves, today the Chancellor of the Exchequer, then Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary, proudly boasted that she’d be ‘tougher on benefits than the Tories’.
Fast forward twelve years and the story remains the same, one which Labour’s Wes Streeting proudly celebrated as he goaded the Tory opposition in Parliament—we are doing things you wanted to, but never could, on welfare, he claimed.
There’s no doubt that the garbage served up in the government’s Pathways to Work Green Paper is a Tory fantasy. A sentiment of ‘punish those cripples’, all shrouded in some nineteenth century moralising bullshit about helping people help themselves.
We anarchists do believe in a particular form of self-help, but ‘direct action gets the goods’ doesn’t seem to be what Whitehall PPE drones or their Labour confederates have in mind.
The key planks of it are by now well-known, and have drawn an outcry, all the more impressive to centrist pundits because the outcry isn’t just coming from ‘the Left’ (which BBC house style now sees fit to capitalise as some sort of mortal enemy).
Cuts to Personal Independence Payment (PIP) by ‘tightening’ eligibility criteria (namely raising the scoring threshold for award on the daily living component) and denying Universal Credit’s health element altogether to younger people (and reducing the value of it for new claimants) are central to the government’s real ambition—to save money. Having imposed ‘fiscal rules’ to buy off the media, Reeves and Liz Kendall now want to sacrifice the disabled for the sake of their own political aspirations.
But that was also true in 2013, when Reeves made her statement that she’s now bringing into practice. The truth is, despite the brief Corbyn interregnum when Labour had a leader (but not a party apparatus) that genuinely did want something demonstrably different, this is who Labour are. It’s who they have been since at least the mid-1990s.
And yet, in 2024, at least some voters chose to live in a land of make-believe and think otherwise. Why?
It’s hard not to think at times that sections of the electorate actively want to be lied to. It saves having to do anything difficult, like stand up for people in your workplace against the employer trying to ‘manage out’ a disabled member of staff, for instance, or object to a new policy dehumanising trans people imposed by management to ‘avoid legal risk’.
It’s to that constituency that Labour still appeals with a sop; we’ll put more money into Access to Work, they say, a scheme that doesn’t work as it stands and which some employers choose to ignore.
Besides, it’s also being reported that they are actually cutting it. But the people Labour are appealing to here don’t use it, don’t know what it is (as with PIP) and can salve their consciences with it.
Ditto for the environment. Labour’s going to tear up planning restrictions and the local planning approval system in its ‘dash for growth’, because apparently bats and newts are the new ‘enemies within’. At first glance, planning regulations might seem an odd hill for an anarchist to die on but they’re not. You don’t have to follow Murray Bookchin’s ideas about libertarian municipalism to their conclusion to get that the highly-imperfect planning system at least affords a veneer of engagement with both the needs of actual people and the environment, over the whispers (or shouts) of the CEOs from whom Starmer takes his lead.
And besides, Murray Bookchin’s point was always about the evils of domination, and that social ecology properly implemented meant a rejection of dominance and hierarchy in all spaces. Needs need to be considered. Even those of newts, Keir.
But there’s a sop for that too. Whilst eradicating environmental concerns in the particular, specific, cases of actual schemes being built and landscapes destroyed, they tell us there’ll be money for environmental remediation in general through a ‘nature levy’. Again, this should help those who are still Labour apologists sleep at night.
The list goes on. Freeports and enterprise zones, but expanded workers’ rights too (that are being watered down as we speak). Keep that conscience water trickling on to eager lips. Tell me lies.
For anarchists, it’s easy to see that electoral politics is bankrupt, that promises are cheap and lies are easy (though few of us were born anarchists and took more or less time to realise). One point to note, however, regarding the constituency for whom these lies are designed is that it’s shrinking all the time.
People are increasingly aware that solutions to the problems we face aren’t available through parliamentary politics. The government is also aware of this growing awareness, hence the ongoing criminalisation of protest.
And yet resistance is not futile, but as ever it has to be collective. As the editorial in the latest print edition of Freedom asks, how are we powerful today?
As a queer cripple who regularly feels powerless, I feel power-in-action every time we are ungovernable. When I become we. When we refuse, and we create.
When we tell our truths, and reject their lies. In an era where the bankruptcy of electoral politics is playing a role in the rise of the far right, it’s critical that we talk – one-to-one if necessary – with those who will listen. That we work together in our shared struggles. That we fight to share joy even in these bitter times.
That might seem trite, but it isn’t. The privatisation of the self that digital social media encourages can be soul-destroying. Often, talking to people isn’t.
Joy on our terms. Life on our terms. Now and always. That is part of how we come together, heal, and build a power free of hierarchy, domination, and lies.
Image: Bart Hawkins Kreps (public domain)