Reforming society or restoring the workhouse?

About ten years ago, I had a friend, we’ll call him Joe, who found himself out of work. He’d been doing casual labour on construction sites, but the foreman laid him, and all the other native workers, off when he found he could exploit the circumstances of undocumented immigrants, living ten to a room, who would do the work much cheaper.

Joe tried everything to find a new job, and applied for every vacancy going, including cleaning toilets at the local railway station. Yet he heard nothing back. The closest he came to a an “offer” was when a local supermarket offered him the opportunity of ‘work experience’, i.e., he could come and stack their shelves for free.

After several months of this and getting nowhere, Joe, very reluctantly, went on the dole. He reported to me what a degrading and humiliating ritual the whole thing was, and that he was desperate to get out of those circumstances and back to work as soon as he could, but - despite endless applications - he simply wasn’t being offered anything. As a white, ‘cisgender’ native British male, he was all too often passed over for someone who ticked more diversity boxes.

After he had been signing on for a few weeks, the Job Centre told Joe that he and several other claimants were required to report to a local hotel that was seeking workers, to undertake some ‘trial shifts’. They wouldn’t be paid for this, but if they performed well, they had a good chance of acquiring a paid job. Joe dutifully attended, as did the other claimants, and they completed their trial shifts, undertaking basic maintenance tasks around the hotel, and some bar work.

At the end of the trial shifts, none of them were offered a job.

Joe found out the next week, the same thing happened with another group of claimants. And the next week. And the next...

Nobody was ever offered a paid role, but the hotel did get to save a fortune, running off the back of an endless stream of free labour, subsidised by the taxpayer.

Now, please put that anecdote into perspective regarding the recent claims from Reform that, if elected to government, they will require those who have been claiming unemployment benefits for more than a year to undertake 20 hours of “community work” every week in order to keep qualifying for their benefits.

This proposal has been met with raucous, and, at times, unpalatably aggressive, applause from significant sections of society, who despise the unemployed for, apparently, being idle parasitic skivers who ought to be severely punished. As tarring and feathering is a bit old hat these days, instead, these uncouth reprobates will be mocked and degraded by being compelled to undertake that most humiliating ritual of all - cleaning the streets.

Isabel Oakeshott, fiancée of Reform’s Richard Tice, could barely contain her Cruella-De-Ville-esque glee as she pictured the pathetic serfs, being reduced to scrubbing the streets to qualify for their state pittance...

Whilst overlooking one central, and rather key, fact:

We already have street cleaners, and they are paid a wage to undertake this vital task.

Ms Oakeshott and her friends may look down their long noses at such work, having never done a day’s proper graft in their lives, but the reality is that cleaning streets, offices, libraries and other public buildings is decent, honest, and vital work, and people are, quite rightly, paid properly to do it.

We do not have a deficit of professional cleaners in the country. On the contrary. Cleaning positions, like all other vacancies, are deluged with applications, and it’s not one of those jobs that “anyone can just get until something better comes along” - as my friend Joe found when he tried to get one. That is because cleaning vacancies, like virtually all vacancies in the current climate, prefer applicants to have experience.

So, how are we going to find 20 hours a week of cleaning work for all these evil, idle unemployed people, every single week, given there are currently not huge swathes of vacancies in the cleaning profession?

It’s obvious, isn’t it: paid workers are going to be laid off and replaced with benefits claimants. By replacing a paid workforce with unpaid, compelled labour (i.e., people who are forced to do it or face starvation), councils and other companies will save a fortune, whilst the taxpayer will not save a penny, but now, instead of taxes being used to support people back into work, they will be used to keep them trapped in the benefits cycle, working unpaid in return for their small state stipend - £75.65 a week if they are under 25, under-25s disproportionately making up the unemployment statistics. Conversely, to pay someone minimum wage to do the same work would cost a business over £250 a week.

It is entirely likely and plausible, therefore, that councils and other companies will lay workers off, those workers will be forced onto unemployment benefits, and then be compelled to return to do their old job unpaid.

This won’t just apply to the profession of cleaning, however. To find 20 hours of work a week, every week, for the nearly half a million people who have been out for work for over a year, this scheme will need to branch out.

Where will it go?

Well, look around your high street. Hospitality and retail businesses are collapsing at the rate of knots, and a primary reason for this is that, relating to recent hikes in minimum wage and required National Insurance contributions, employers can simply no longer afford to pay staff.

Just a couple of weeks ago, a 60-year-old business local to me - a chain of quintessentially British coffee shops called ‘Merrie England’ - was forced to close its doors for good, and staff costs were a key reason. The owners said in a statement:

“This has been an incredibly difficult decision, reached after facing a sustained increase in the cost of goods, business rates, energy costs, and the wider rising costs associated with staffing and government policy. Alongside these pressures, we have also seen a reduction in footfall and customer spending, with many people understandably unable or unwilling to pay the prices that businesses now need to charge in order to survive.“ [Emphasis added.]

Well, what if they didn’t have to pay their staff in order to survive?

What if, instead, local government had provided them with a readymade workforce to whom they didn’t have to pay a penny, nor make any NI contributions on the behalf of?

How many desperate businesses would leap at this chance, if the alternative is closing their doors for good?

And once businesses learn they can run on a steady stream of unpaid labour (something many businesses already do, with so-called ‘unpaid internships’, and I’ve written about this before), what possible incentive have they ever got to make paid positions available again?

Whilst skilled work like cheffing and other higher level management roles will always require paid workers, low-skill work such as shelf-stacking, waitering, bartending, washing up and all the other entry-level positions that so many rely on to get into - or back into - work, risk disappearing as paid roles.

Were Reform to enact its proposed policies, these roles would be in acute danger of becoming the preserve of an unpaid underclass, that society would be taught to despise:

“Look at those parasites, living off my hard earned taxes, yeah, it’s right they should finally do some bloody work for their money, vile scum.”

As the initiative gathered pace, and more and more struggling and/or exploitative businesses used it to staff their roles, we would come to know that anyone working what used to be termed ‘minimum wage jobs’ is now simply long-term unemployed, undergoing a modern public humiliation ritual of being forced to work unpaid, or face destitution.

“They deserve it though, the skivers. They had their chance to get a proper job and chose not to. Now they face the consequences.”

There’s nothing new about any of this rhetoric. Those who fall upon hard times have always been demonised and pathologised by the higher-ups - think Oliver Twist and the workhouse. We are taught to blame individuals on the bottom rungs of the social ladder for their struggles, rather than the power structures at the top that created them, because allocating blame that way enables those power structures to stay seamlessly, and ruthlessly, in control.

Of course, there are some cases of genuine benefit fraud and people who game the system, and there should be more checks and balances in place to stop that, but creating a slave class of (what were they called in the fake plague again?) “non-essentials” is not the way to go about it.

Not least because it won’t cut the benefits bill in any significant way. First of all, by far the biggest chunk of welfare spending goes on pensions - unemployment benefits make up just 2-3% of the total - but more pertinently because people who are doing community work for their benefits, are still on benefits, and, as we have just explored, such a model gives employers less incentive than ever to create paid roles to get them off benefits.

So, if anything, this scheme will actually increase the benefits bill, because - as will increasingly become apparent to employers - it advantages them far more to have unpaid workers subsidised by the taxpayer, than it does to create paid roles and pay wages themselves. Even for those many employers who genuinely want to create paid positions and compensate their staff fairly, increasingly large numbers are finding they can’t.

It was reported in the press today that “Vacancies are at 12-year low as firms stop hiring amid fears over Labour’s ‘attacks on business‘”, thereby underlining what a pernicious and delusional fantasy it is when people like Reform and their cheerleaders depict the unemployed as work-shy parasites intentionally evading work.

Of course there are some people like that (there always are, in any society), but the fact remains that, at present in the UK, there are far more unemployed people than there are job vacancies, and every job application is deluged with applicants. This means that, even if every vacancy in the UK was filled tomorrow, there would still be significant numbers of people out of work.

In other words, even if every claimant of unemployment benefits said “I am desperate for work and I will literally do anything that is legal”, we still wouldn’t have full employment, because it’s a buyers market and employers can pick and choose.

Someone looking for a shelf-stacker, for instance, can pick the applicant with ten years shelf-stacking experience, rather than the ex-IT worker who got laid off because of AI, and has zero retail experience. Ditto for cleaning jobs and anything the Isabel Oakeshotts of the world consider humiliating degradations, assuming these positions can’t recruit, because surely nobody would choose to do such “lowly” work. Actually, many people would and do, meaning the owners of these businesses have standards too, and don’t take just anyone - they can, more and more often as vacancies contract further and the number of unemployed people rise, take their pick.

The bottom line is, due to various technological advances, we have created a society where there is not a full-time paid position for everyone who wants or needs one. The WEF’s primary poster boy has already told us we are entering the age of “the useless class“ where many people are simply not needed by the system as workers.

Instead of addressing this problem creatively and appropriately, and structuring a society where people can still constructively contribute and be fairly rewarded, without having a conventional full-time job, we are instead being encouraged to vilify them, and subject them to a deeply exploitative scheme which will entrench the problem of long-term joblessness further, and create not just a useless class, but an underclass, who are never able to work their way out of poverty.

Meanwhile, Reform’s proposed benefits overhaul will also target those claiming disability and sickness benefits - including those claiming them for children.

Reform’s Danny Kruger said on X:

“Claims for disability benefits for children - Child Disability Living Allowance - have doubled in the last 10 years. This trajectory is unsustainable.”

Mr Kruger does not elaborate on why these claims have doubled, and I do not believe it is because huge numbers of parents have developed Munchausen by proxy syndrome and believe their children are disabled when they are not.

Whilst there are always a small minority of parents who may try to claim their child has difficulties they don’t have in order to receive increased financial assistance or other advantages, in reality, the main reason the number of claims for disabled children are soaring is because the number of disabled children is soaring.

The primary reason for that is the ever-increasing number of neurological poisons being injected into children from the earliest weeks of life.

I told Mr Kruger I agreed with him that the trajectory of ever-more disabled children was “unsustainable” and asked whether he was therefore going to call a halt to the vaccine schedule to stop it, but I did not receive a reply.

What is clear, then, is that reforms to welfare spending as proposed by Reform are going to target the most vulnerable in society, without offering realistic solutions to improve their situations, and therefore put many of them in desperate, likely impossible, positions.

Leaked government analysis shows that even those dealing with terminal illness, blindness, and profound learning disabilities would stand to lose up to £10,000 a year under Reform’s plans.

How will struggling families cope?

How is a parent to manage the care of a disabled child if they cannot afford to access the help they need?

How is a young person to work themselves out of poverty if employers benefit from keeping them in it?

How can the long-term sick and disabled, who may rely on certain benefits to enable them to undertake any work at all, survive if those benefits are slashed?

The implications of these policies are as ominous as they are obvious, with one Reform councillor already resigning in protest, stating:

“Today I have resigned from Reform UK and also I have resigned as a Councillor. I cannot in good conscience support the Making Welfare Work policy. These changes will cost lives of people especially those who have suicidal ideation.”

As always with these type of schemes, it’s important to realise that driving people to suicide isn’t an unfortunate side effect of otherwise well-intentioned policy: it is the intended effect.

The ruling classes make no secret of the fact they consider there to be far too many of us “useless eaters” and would like there to be less of us around, so, as always, they’re going for the least protected and most vulnerable in society - the sick, the disabled, and the unemployed - as they’re the easiest to finish off.

Indeed, PIP (personal independent payment) assessors are already known to ask claimants, “if things are so bad, why haven’t you killed yourself yet?“

It’s of course no coincidence that “assisted dying” programmes are also being instituted in many countries at this time, and have recently been considered in our own, and will likely soon be considered again.

So, that’s the plan to ‘reform’ the country - make conditions so intolerable for the most vulnerable that large swathes of them end their lives, which is exactly the same “model” workhouses operated under. The thinking was, if you were such a pathetic reprobate failure as to require the state’s assistance to survive, you deserved as hard and cruel a life as possible, and it it killed you, well, that served you right, quite frankly. Indeed, workhouses were referred to at the time as the “antechambers of the grave“, and it wasn’t just the elderly and infirm who perished - children frequently did, too.

(There is lots of excellent literature on this subject, but I recommend the particular vivid portrayals of workhouse life as depicted in Jennifer Worth’s Shadows of the Workhouse.)

There really isn’t anything new under the sun, and Reform is looking to reinvigorate an archaic social attitude to disadvantaged and vulnerable people, that never truly went away, but that was for a while suppressed. Now, those who despise the vulnerable, simply for being vulnerable, and would really prefer them dead (an attitude that can otherwise be described as ‘eugenicist’) are being emboldened to express themselves vigorously once again.

Reform (or any other party for that matter) doesn’t actually want people in work, enjoying stable, autonomous and fulfilled lives. That’s just the PR to get the public to accept their policies.

What they really want is the same thing the ruthless ruling classes have always wanted - immense power, immense wealth, and the ritual humiliation and annihilation of anyone who gets in their way.

The good thing is that, now more people than at any previous stage in history are abundantly aware of this fact, and how nefarious power structures really work, we may be at the tipping point, where there are, finally, enough of us prepared to get in their way, and stop them.

Thanks for reading! This article was originally published at miriaf.co.uk, which is entirely reader-supported, with no paywalls, adverts, or wealthy corporate backers, meaning your support is what powers this site to keep going. If you enjoyed this article, and would like to read more in the future, please consider…

1. Subscribing monthly at Substack or Patreon (where paid subscribers can comment on posts)

2. Making a one-off contribution via BuyMeACoffee

3. Contributing in either way via bank transfer to Nat West, account number 30835984, sort code 54-10-27, account name FINCH MA (please use your email address as a reference if you’d like me to acknowledge receipt).

Your support is what allows these articles to keep being created and is enormously appreciated. Thank you.