A New Leadership? - Part 9 of 11

The lobby of the DHA was well attended. At the time, I was still a Stoke City Councillor, and the local media covered the DHA meeting, which was open to the public, and also covered our lobby of it, at which I made a speech setting out the opposition to cuts and hospital closures. We produced another leaflet for the lobby, which had been produced using material in Socialist Organiser, for use by local groups in such activities. 

Here, is where the welfare state comes to be used as a means of disciplining class fighters. Between 1981 and 1985, I worked as a part-time, temporary lecturer. In the period after I qualified as a teacher in 1981, it was a very difficult time. Unemployment was soaring generally, eventually reaching around 6 million in real figures, and more than 3 million on official figures. The Labour controlled Staffordshire County Council had begun closing schools, and slashing teachers jobs. Bob Cant, the MP for Stoke Central was also a County Councillor, and Chair of the Education Committee. They used excuses about falling school rolls as a justification for closing schools, but the truth was that this was simply an exercise in which compliant Labour Councils once more acted as managers of the system, complying passively with Tory instructions for cuts and closures. They could, for example, have taken falling school rolls as an opportunity to reduce grossly inflated class sizes, to reduce the disparity with those in private schools. 

With thousands of teachers being laid off, it was not the best time to be starting to look for work teaching. On the other side of the coin, the government, to hide some of the effects of soaring youth unemployment, introduced its Youth Opportunities Programme (YOP), and later Youth Training Scheme (YTS), which also had an educational component, requiring the participants to undertake college based training. That opened up lots of the kind of part-time, temporary lecturing posts that I did in the following period. The problem was that, although these posts had very good hourly rates, to compensate for no tenure, and no sickness or holiday pay, they were extremely precarious. There would be a reasonable amount of work at the start of the academic year, when all these courses started, but by Christmas, when many had dropped out, the hours were cut substantially, by Spring, you might have only a couple of hours a week of work. Moreover, from one year to another, you did not know whether you might find any work or not. 

Fortunately, at the start of all this, it was possible to sign on the dole for those days of the week when you had no work, provided it amounted to at least three days. Later, the government changed this, so that, even if you worked just 2 hours per week, and it was the same 2 hours, this was taken to be a regular contract of employment, so that you could not sign on at all. It was necessary, every time you signed on, to provide the dole with the details of what work you had done, which I made sure I did scrupulously. During this period, I was also involved in producing an unemployed newsletter, called Dole Mirror, which was produced in the newly opened Unemployed Workers Centre in Hanley, sponsored by the North Staffs Trades Council. 

When I became a City Councillor, it was also required to provide the dole with details of what official council meetings you had attended. Again I did this scrupulously. On going to sign on, shortly after the lobby of the DHA, I was called into a back room, and told to sit down, and that I was under official caution for the statements I provided to them. I was asked if I had attended the meeting of the DHA. I said that I had. Attendance at this meeting was not listed in your notification of meetings they replied. Do you have any explanation as to why you did not list this meeting, they asked. “Yes”, I responded, “it was a meeting that was open to the public, and I attended it as a member of the public, not as a Councillor.” They looked somewhat downcast, and with that, the interview came to an end, without them offering any kind of apology. 

The implication, here, was clear that the representatives of the state were looking for grounds with which to use the welfare state as a means of disciplining class fighters, as resistance to the cuts and attacks on workers intensified. It was an equivalent of the witch-huts against, and sacking of, militants in industries across the country, such as at BL. If, it had been an official council meeting, then I would have listed it, as I had done scrupulously with every other, and if I had not, it would have been purely an oversight, an error. Yet, had they had any grounds for their interview, I have no doubt that I would have been charged with Benefit Fraud. But, the only reason I was needing to sign on, in the first place, was because of the mass unemployment that capitalism had created, and that, in the case of teaching, Labour Councils themselves were contributing to, by placidly implementing those Tory cuts. Being paid between £20-£25 an hour for such teaching, I would have been highly delighted to have had a full week's work, and to have foregone £20-£30 of dole money! 

This is the way the welfare state operates in general. It atomises people, which was one reason we set about creating a collective for the unemployed, via Dole Mirror, the UWC, and attempts to create unemployed sections of trades unions. But, the welfare state, is the same kind of paternalistic state that existed under feudalism, and which breeds dependency upon it, turning those reduced to such dependency to the same kinds of conditions of serfs. It might also be worth noting that one of the more pernicious, senior members of the soft left, at the time, also sat on one of the DHSS Benefits Appeals Panels.

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