A Freudian Defection

It has been widely reported that investment banker David Freud, a descendant of the great Sigmund, and who is credited with being the architect of New Labour's welfare proposals about to wend their way through parliament in the form of the Welfare Reform Bill, has upped sticks and joined the Tories. He probably felt more at home with the real thing rather than their imitators. It is also reported that Cameron will grant him a peerage and appoint him as Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary. All of this is rather a damp squib for Labour and Purnell about to announce 101 new methods of punishing the idle and feckless.

It is interesting that it requires extra money and bonuses in order to encourage the rich to work but dire penalties and penury in order to encourage the poor.As Brendan Barber of the TUC argued, "At a time of rapidly rising unemployment the government needs to stop talking as if every benefit claimant is a potential scrounger." The proposals put forward by Freud and now supported by the government involve shifting huge amounts of money from the public to the private sector in order to 'incentivise' these companies to get the unemployed back to work. But as we have seen, every time this transfer of public wealth to the private sector occurs, as with PFI or the privatisation of the health service, it is the taxpayer who pays at the end with the only profit being made by those companies ripping off the system. Surely now the failure of this neo-liberal privatisation agenda is clear for all to see? So while the Tories praise Freud and offer to go even further with his 'reforms', New Labour like a sleepwalker stumbles on into the territory of punishing the poor and disabled and increasing the profits of the fat cats and their cronies in the City. This is a hugely regressive agenda and will cause untold damage, as it has already done in the US. One need only see the documentaries of Michael Moore and others to envisage the disaster that lies ahead.

It was Oscar Wilde who wrote in The Soul Of Man Under Socialism: "Under Socialism all this will, of course, be altered. There will be no people living in fetid dens and fetid rags, and bringing up unhealthy, hungerpinched children in the midst of impossible and absolutely repulsive surroundings. The security of society will not depend, as it does now, on the state of the weather. If a frost comes we shall not have a hundred thousand men out of work, tramping about the streets in a state of disgusting misery, or whining to their neighbours for alms, or crowding round the doors of loathsome shelters to try and secure a hunch of bread and a night's unclean lodging. Each member of the society will share in the general prosperity and happiness of the society, and if a frost comes no one will practically be anything the worse." Those words written over a century ago still hold true today. What is happening once again is the victimisation of the poor and the transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. It is effectively the dismantling of the welfare state built up the reforming Liberal government before World War I and the Attlee government after 1945. The Green Party proposes a Citizen's Income, which is an

Make your voice heard - join the lobby of parliament on Tuesday 3 March 2009 from 12.30 - 2.30, committee room 14.organised by the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS) and the TUC. I will be there.