DECLINE: what are the cuts?

DECLINE:
What are the proposed cuts?
What will their impact be?

The Government is well on the way to implementing a totally unprecedented cuts programme which will radically change what it’s like to live and work in Britain. Every government department will have its budget cut by a greater or smaller amount, in order to reduce overall government spending. All departments have now announced how they intend to make the savings demanded of them. The following attempts to clarify just what will change and in what way.

There is an effort by some political factions to contest the ‘necessity’ of these cuts. Lots of bright people have decided that they are necessary, to some degree, too. We don’t feel equipped to decide, although we’re trying to learn about it (and we think those who are interested should.) But we maintain that, in the case that these reforms strike us as monstrous, it is reasonable to start organising and thinking amongst ourselves about how to prevent them. It isn’t our job to manage the economy – but it may well be our duty to defend ourselves and our friends against attacks which seem quite likely to have a huge and largely negative effect on all of our lives. Whatever they do for the ‘economy’ five years from now. Meanwhile hundreds of thousands of workers are losing their jobs or taking cuts in hours which amount to wage cuts.

EDUCATION MAINTENANCE ALLOWANCE (see clarification)

The government have announced the abolition of the EMA, a means-tested payment of £30 per week made to 620,000 college students in exchange for their attendance at a further education (FE) institution. It’s necessary to look at this cut in the context of welfare cuts and the huge scale of redundancies still underway, which are reducing families’ ability to support their children through FE. This amounts to a huge attack on the poorest; it’s also worth noting that anyone forced to leave college by these changes will then have to deal with the worst job market in decades or a dole system rapidly being turned into a hellish pit (otherwise known as ‘welfare’, discussed below.) EMA (budget £550m) will be replaced by an as-yet unspecified £50m “targeted” programme, distributed by local authorities to those in the direst need.

WELFARE

Welfare reform, begun by the Labour government 15 years ago, is aimed at making being unemployed so unbearable that people become willing to take any job. Labour Party reforms (notably the 2009 Welfare Reform Act) have been going this way for a long time; the new Tory programme is the same thing but starker, more unashamed. It’s important to recognise that this isn’t just targeted against the long-term jobless: this will affect everyone who loses a job and struggles to find a new one, and their families and other dependents.

The headline reforms are: suspension of Job-seeker’s Allowance for anything between 3 months and 3 years if any work whatever is refused; powers to impose up to 30 hours of forced labour per week on JSA recipients as a condition of receipt of the benefit; absolute caps on housing benefit which will force many families to move home, and an increase from 25 to 35 of the age when full housing benefit will be paid; the combination of working tax credit, child tax credit, housing benefit, income support and job seekers’ allowance into a ‘universal benefit’ that will be capped at £26,000 per annum for any family, no matter how large; and sickness benefit limited to a maximum of 6 months, with a new emphasis on ‘fitness to work’ rather than ‘illness’ which will give the (privatised) JobCentre much more latitude to force people back into work. Meanwhile, new council house tenants face a huge increase in rent, to 80% of market rates.

The government wants to make sure it ‘always pays to work’. But the crisis has caused huge losses of jobs, public and private. Most of the jobs created in the last boom were in the public sector which is now being attacked, with hundreds of thousands of redundancies planned. The government believes that the private sector will grow to replace those jobs, but there is little sign of that happening yet. Meanwhile everyone sacked or struggling to find work is in for a tough time. The government’s aim: ensure that people will take any job, no matter how bad, in order to escape the punitive disciplinary systems they’re putting in place. The system’s guaranteed to be there but the jobs aren’t.

PENSIONS

The age the state pension will begin to be paid will be increased to 67 by 2016. But most people won’t work those extra 2 years: they’ll just have to save more from their wages on the way there, if they have wages. So it amounts to a wage cut or the curse of a few more years in the welfare system before the very sparse state benefit starts.

HIGHER EDUCATION

Fees are scheduled to treble to £9000 per year at most universities, payable with a loan issued at market rates of interest, to be paid back after graduation. These increases are widely seen as a stepping-stone to a total removal of the fees cap. Government funding for undergraduate teaching will be cut from £4.9bn to £700m for ‘core subjects’ (Medecine and the Sciences), meaning the state will no longer fund most teaching in the universities, and the survival of mass teaching outside those core subjects is radically put into question. It’s highly likely that arts and humanities teaching will retreat to its elite centres (Oxford, Cambridge, London: which means far fewer places to study non-core subjects) while new market mechanisms force students to study degrees which will offer them ‘value for money’ – high wages. It’s the end, for better or worse, of the autonomy of HE from the market. Meanwhile many, many academic and non-academic jobs will be lost or made harder across the country as universities adjust to this new market-led reality.

Notes On Organisation

From BTON 1:

Some of us have been through a few long & difficult political struggles. We want to offer you some of the things we think we learned, for you to think about, criticise, reject or adopt in your own efforts to organise.

::Keep safe. Maintain open communication with people you trust and have your meetings in secure, well known spaces. There’s no need to be paranoid, but know your surroundings and your friends.

::Try to rely on argument and intelligence. Slogans are a staple for all sorts of political factions, but we’ve seen them alienate many more people than they’ve won over. Be smart, be funny, be approachable, and a lot of the resistance you might have come up against will start to soften.

::Don’t get isolated. You’re surrounded by people who are angry and sad about what’s going on, inside and outside of your sixth form; but they keep quiet most of the time: that could be the basis for a huge movement in the coming weeks and months. But the same issues don’t affect everyone, and not everyone can act like a student. So talk to people, find out how they feel about the situation – and what they might like to do. There are one thousand reasons for walking out and doing more (and reasons not to, as well.)

::Have confidence in your judgement. Don’t be afraid to back out of a situation which you no longer agree with. Things move quickly, they can get out of control and you should never be told that maintaining a critical stance is a bad thing or is letting people down. Remember that a good group is a collection of individuals working together.

::Consider the possibility that political activity could be a condition of happiness. Be wary of ways of acting that only feel like a burden – and ways of discussing which always feel like placing a burden on others. They don’t often go anywhere pleasant.

When will the cuts happen?

When this has been handed out people have been asking about the precise timetable for the cuts. In some cases – as with university fees – this has been specified in the last budget (students starting 2012); in others it hasn’t, and isn’t clear. There has not, for instance, been any public notice we were able to find specifying when EMA would be cut. The idea’s floating around that it could be after Christmas but the only semi-official thing to mention it that we could find was this article by an FE NUS type. He doesn’t cite any sources so in the cirumstances we should just admit that we don’t know. But it’s unlikely to be until next year at the earliest, if not the same year as £9k fees, 2012.

We want to try and clarify the timing of some of the other reforms mentioned in the text ‘decline’. We’ll try to over the next few days.