Get tough on Harman – and on the causes of Harman!
1997 will be remembered as the year that Tony Blair’s New Labour Party finally ditched any commitment to the welfare state and to the poorest people in society.
Time and again we have been told that increasing benefit rates will not help those living in poverty. Instead we are supposed to believe that cuts in benefits – or even their complete withdrawal – are in the interests of those affected!
Such a twisted sense of humour will be no consolation to single parents seeing their benefits axed or to people with disabilities who are being threatened.
Disabled people have been increasingly squeezed by draconian rules and tests for incapacity benefit. Now plans are being explored to time-limit that benefit to 13 weeks or to tax disability living allowance (DLA) and attendance allowance.
The most ‘radical’ suggestion is that DLA will be abolished all together and the £4.4 billion budget passed to local authorities to spend on community care for disabled people.
Lorna Reith, Director of the Disability Alliance has reacted to the rumours that benefits will be taxed by asking: "Is a government with a manifesto commitment not to raise taxes going to break it first by taxing disabled people?"
Some commentators have noticed that as opposition to these measures has mounted, Harriet Harman has been coming in for a fair amount of stick.
Unfair, some of her defenders have cried, Frank Field doesn’t get this kind of flack - why pick on poor (!) Harriet. Actually it’s a fiction that Field has escaped criticism for his own assaults on the welfare state.
Unusual as it is for this paper to argue this however, Field does have one quality which marks him out from boss Harman. Field’s hideous opposition to decent public services and his scapegoating of those at the bottom of society is not a new approach.
He is implementing today in government the very ideas he put forward (to the delight of Thatcher and others) when the Tories were in office, and when he himself was not in favour with the Labour Party hierarchy.
Harman, in contrast. criticised the cuts to lone parent benefits as recently as April of this year – when the Tories proposed them.
Then she said "The abolition of (One Parent Benefit) will make working lone mothers worse off and discourage work among this group. Lone Parent Premium recognises that lone parents face additional costs in bringing up their children…" She was right.
Now she is in office, singing a different tune, her crocodile tears for the hard choices she is being "forced" to make by the spending limits laid down by her predecessors cut no ice with anyone, let alone those driven further into poverty by her assault.
Any government with such a huge majority cannot with any credibility claim that its hands are tied. Any individual who acts in such a callous and two-faced way cannot claim any integrity.
Of course Harman has not done a complete about-turn. She sent her children to grant-maintained and grammar schools long before the General Election. In October last year she refused to make a commitment to increase pensions in line with inflation.
This prioritising of privilege over principle marked her out to those who were paying attention as someone who could not be trusted.
She has long been a dedicated supporter not only of Tony Blair but of Chancellor Gordon Brown, whose proposals to abolish family credit in the mini-budget deepen her own assault on women.
It seems that opposition to the assault on lone parent benefit is mounting within the Parliamentary Labour Party. Pressure needs to be mounted to ensure those MPs who are rightly hostile stick to their guns and vote against the government.
They must not be intimidated into abstaining, as many critics have done on other attacks such as the imposition of tuition fees.
What happens in Westminster will not however be decisive. A massive campaigning effort must be mounted to stop these attacks on women and disabled people. Trade unions and Labour parties must do far more than pass critical resolutions.
We need a programme of imaginative action on the streets that can involve the greatest number of people.
These attacks must be halted, and the sentiment of working people to defend the Welfare State given a coherent voice. If Harman feels insulted in the crossfire, she has only herself to blame.