BROWN NOSING

The Chancellor's claims that the workfare

state is an Old Labour idea, says Robert Taylor, are a fraudulent sop to the Left GORDON Brown, the 'iron' Chancellor, is as much the architect of New Labour's project to recast the social welfare system as the Prime Minister himself. But in con- trast to Mr Blair, the self-proclaimed mod- ern man, he justifies the government's strategy by claiming that it is completely consistent with the idealistic traditions of the Labour movement.

Indeed, Mr Brown goes to extraordinary lengths to justify New Labour's creation of the workfare state, as if it was a noble cause that the party's pioneers always yearned for. He claims he is 'steeped in the local Labour and trade union politics of Scotland and in particular of Glasgow where I was born'. But Mr Brown, a distin- guished scholar of modern history and per- ceptive biographer of Jimmy Maxton, that gaunt, messianic figure who dominated the Independent Labour party between the wars, ought to know better than to try and wrap Old Labour's mantle around what he is planning.

The Chancellor claims that the assault which he and his colleagues intend to launch on the 'undeserving' poor, the unemployed, single mothers and the dis- abled is what the Labour movement has always been about. 'The demand for work has been the constant, indeed the central demand of one hundred years of Labour history,' says Mr Brown. He even claims Keir Hardie's stirring campaign slogan of `work for all' is very much in line with his own 'opportunity for all'. `Keir Hardie, who was called the member for the unem- ployed, spoke about the dignity not of the dole but of work,' says the Chancellor. Mr Brown has sought to mobilise the memory of the hunger marchers of the interwar years behind his approach, insisting they walked to London campaigning 'not for benefits but for jobs'.

Even more implausibly, he has sought to identify the socialist fundamentalists of the Independent Labour party elected for Glasgow constituencies in the 1922 gener- al election with New Labour's plans to dis- mantle the welfare state based on universal provision and funded through redistributive taxation. 'I remember being told how in the 1920s a team of trade unionists, local councilors and politicians was elected to Parliament in a landslide. The Clydesiders set out with a vision of the modern welfare state, employment for all and the rebuilding of strong public ser- vices,' says Mr Brown. He claims his social policy agenda is merely the modern expression of those aspirations, aimed at `the eradication of injustice' and 'the establishment of a just society' once so central to the beliefs of the Red Clydesiders. Maxton, thou shouldst be liv- ing at this hour. Such claims may be part of a calculated attempt to convince the more gullible among what remains of Old Labour that the Chancellor has not forgotten that his own emotional and intellectual roots lie deep in the party, in contrast to those of the Prime Minister. It is, of course, possible that Mr Brown really believes this, or per- haps he thinks his audiences have such lit- tle knowledge of Labour history that they are unable to recognise his chutzpah in seeking to identify his orthodox economic policies with those of the early pioneers of British socialism.

But anybody who reads Mr Brown's own biography of Maxton will find it difficult to discover any genuine similarity between the two men other than they both happen to have been born in Glasgow. What the Chancellor's well researched book, pub- lished 11 years ago (Maxton, Mainstream Publishing £12.95), reveals is that Maxton was as much concerned to improve and protect the meagre social benefits of the needy and the unemployed from attack by cost-cutting governments as he was com- mitted to the causes of 'work for all', a 'liv- ing wage' and 'socialism in our time'. Maxton, the schoolmaster, was also a strong champion of government measures to help the children of the poor. In his early days — as Mr Brown reminds us he was called 'the children's advocate'. And even as late as the 1945 general election his manifesto contained a photograph of him holding a small child under the slogan, `Vote for Maxton and Save the Children'. It is hard to envisage him voting to cut the single mothers' .premium in the name of socialism.

Maxton was an unsparing critic of the 1929 minority Labour government. He attacked its unemployment benefit cuts, designed to reassure financial opinion, par- ticularly the decision to remove the right to welfare from those who were 'not deemed to be genuinely seeking work'. Labour's proposal to postpone the award of benefit to the new unemployed for the first six days that they were without work was also scorn- fully denounced by Maxton. In addition, he argued that the allowance for an unem- ployed man should rise to £1 a week and not the 17 shillings a week deemed neces- sary by the government, pointing out that Labour in opposition had suggested that families of the unemployed with three chil- dren should receive 45 shillings a week and not the 32 shillings proposed in its legisla- tion to prune benefits.

Maxton also opposed Labour's move to disqualify casual workers and married women from receiving unemployment ben- efit. As he told the House of Commons, `The government's big mistake was to sub- mit to the mean propaganda that was car- ried on by the Conservatives. They cannot wash their hands of it. The responsibility is permanently theirs.'

But it was iri the early 1930s that Maxton was at his most uncompromising in opposition to attacks on the welfare sys- tem, with a relentless exposure of the National government's moves to introduce means testing for the unemployed and their families. As Mr Brown wrote, Max- ton was then the 'Member for the Unem- ployed'. 'He and others protested about the inadequate benefits, the reduction of benefits and above all the ubiquitous means tests,' explains Mr Brown. Maxton said on one occasion that he was unable to understand how the state could say, 'Our resources are so limited that we must drive down the income of the whole working class to one dead level of poverty while other classes are left in affluence.'

Many of his emotional speeches quoted by,Mr Brown — provide a graphic picture of the grinding poverty of the Glasgow slums where working-class fami- lies fought to survive on inadequate bene- fits and little hope of stable and paid work. Unlike Mr Brown, Maxton believed the lack of adequate maintenance was just as important as the lack of a job.

Moreover, as the Chancellor knows full well, the hunger marchers of the Thirties were concerned primarily not with demanding employment but with trying to defend existing benefit levels from attack by the state. He wrote himself in his Max- ton biography that the first hunger march- es were 'against the means test and the 10 per cent cut in unemployment benefit'. The largest demonstrations of social protest were made against the National government's decision to centralise unem- ployment relief under the Unemployment Assistance Board and establish new relief scales in 1934 which would make many of the jobless worse off. Maxton told the Commons on that occasion, 'There was among the working people of the country a feeling that a tremendous injustice has been done to people who were already down in their depths.'

But if the historical truth does not justi- fy Mr Brown's curious attempt to identify his own recent role with Maxton and the ethical socialism of the Independent Labour party, there is one effective com- parison today with Labour's early years in government which is of contemporary rele- vance. It is the disturbing similarity between Mr Brown and Labour's first 'iron' chancellor, Philip Snowden. Like Snowden Mr Brown is a man of impeccable moral rectitude, outwardly dour in his Calvinistic enthusiasm for the work ethic justified in the language of socialism. He is also like Snowden in the depths of his hair-shirt conviction about the righteousness of financial orthodoxy, the sin of excessive public spending and in his Gradgrind enthusiasm for cutting welfare benefits, especially for the most vulnerable in our society.

However, unlike Snowden, Mr Brown cannot excuse his austere behaviour by ref- erence to adverse external conditions. He presides over a bountiful inheritance bequeathed from the Conservatives. In contrast, Snowden was forced to wrestle with a capitalist system in deep crisis. Moreover, Mr Brown at the Treasury enjoys a huge parliamentary majority, faith- fully behind his policies; Snowden had to run the Treasury in a fragile government without an overall Commons majority.

The Chancellor really ought to drop his unconvincing attempt to justify the unjusti- fiable in suggesting that his plans for the welfare state stem from any recognisable socialist tradition. Mr Blair is at least more intellectually honest about what New Labour intends to do to those who have looked to the party in the past for support and protection.

Mr Brown, in the conclusion to the Max- ton biography, quotes his hero, speaking as ILP chairman to its 1927 conference. He ought to remind himself of what Maxton said on that occasion: 'Human love, human sympathy, human understanding, is an absolute necessity of the socialist make-up. At the same time what socialist worthy of the name does not feel in his heart a tremendous pity, a tremendous desire to relieve immediately the sufferings of the victim?'

Those words reflect the humane values Labour once believed in unquestioningly and which Mr Brown and his modernising colleagues who think and act like him are bent on destroying. It makes it no easier to accept today's transmogrification of Labour into something to the right of the political spectrum when the Chancellor seeks to defend what is happening with his absurd claim that it is wholly consistent with the movement's finest traditions.

Robert Taylor writes for the Financial Times