N ew Labour is in a quandary. Certainly the powers that be wanted Frank Field . to 'think the unthinkable' in his Green Paper on Welfare Reform published on March 26. And there can be no doubt that the 'unthinkable' in this regard meant the scrapping of universal benefits: And yet, despite all the pre-publication hype, Disability Living Allowance (DLA) and attendance allowance have so far escaped the means-testing guillotine. Second pensions have not been made compulsory - though the white paper makes clear that the government is 'seriously' considering the many submissions it has received to do so.
Gordon Brown would dearly have liked to tread the same path in his Budget that Field eschewed Darren Williams (Wales Labour Party Executive member - personal capacity)
Wales Welsh political establishment, is preparing for the first elections - but maternity and child benefits have not been taxed this time round.
For the time being at least it seems as if the protests of people with disabilities, lone parents, pensioners and other claimants have managed to ward off the evil day a little longer. Blair surely knows that hundreds of thousands of those who voted for him last May Day did so to protect the welfare state and the principle of universality.
But if campaigners can take some pause for breath that neither the budget nor the White Paper introduced some of the most feared attacks, there is certainly no room for complacency.
The budget itself (as we explain in more detail on page 8) was full allows the party bureaucracy to filter out anyone considered politically undesirable.
Furthermore, the removal of any requirement for nomination by ward parties or union affiliates, means that the lack of a real support base need not hinder ambitious opportunists hoping for a seat. Their path has been of hand-outs to business. Britain may not be going into the monetary union at the beginning, but New Labour is determined to keep to Tory spending limits in line with the Maastricht convergence criteria.
Pensioners continue to see their real incomes fall, and their needs were ignored by Brown. Last year's cut in lone parent benefits has by no means been reversed -just masked by subsequent changes.
While moderate disabilty groups such as SCOPE and RNIB may be relieved by the fact that DLA and Attendance Allowance have survived, new claimants for Incapacity Benefit will face more stringent testing than the current hated 'All Work Test', which has been the subject of many recent press scandals.
In a recent report, the Joseph Rowntree Trust expressed conand the country's politics is gripped by a macho, sexist culture, not least within the labour movement.
The system proposed by Labour's NEC to address this problem is more questionable, however. Parliamentary constituencies would be twinned, Laughing all the way to the bankers... Brown cern that unless benefits are raised by more than the rate of price inflation, the poor will go on getting poorer. So much for fighting social exclusion. At the same time as all this, Blair is trumpeting his message of labour flexibility to the rest of Europe. We can't think of a series of betWales. ter reasons for marking the end of his Presidency of the European Union in Cardiff in June with a massive demonstration of protest. The Cardiff demonstration needs to be built, up and down these islands, both as a massive show. of rejection of the single currency and of Blair's record in government. is a troubling aspect of the situa-