What Makes Capitalism Work : Make Low Paid Work Seem More Attractive - Privatise NHS, Education - Reduce Real Value of Benefits- 1982 Cabinet Report -

What makes Capitalism work?

Update September 30th 2022.

"Kwasi Kwarteng, the chancellor, has already announced plans to cut benefits to encourage more people into the job market, saying that this was part of the government’s plan to “make work pay” by not allowing people to rely solely on welfare as their main form of income."

This is the strategic stance of the English Ruling Elite, the Aristocracy, the Land owners and the Corporate Bosses and their Shareholders.

Their strategy is to remove state provided social and economic support in order to drive people into low paid work. This planning involves privatisation of NHS, Education and Social Care, keeping wages low and undermining democratic regulation of Industry and shared commons monopolies. 

All excuses will be made, in spite of evidence of harm. Removing these three elements on their own is creating poverty in order to extract more wealth from workers. Socialism is to be destroyed as an 'enemy'.

The most brief analysis of socialism is that it is designed to abolish poverty by regulating the power of the Oligarchy using the means of the Legislature.

In practice it is 'Nudge' (introduced by Cameron, previewed by The Work Capability Assessment).  Or, more harshly, withdrawing social support to herd poor people into a situation designed entirely to maximise Wealth Extraction aka shareholder returns, irrespective of the harms it will cause, (raw sewage from Chicken Factories destroying entire river systems, polluting our shores), all the while well aware of those harms. It is brutal and purely for the purpose of Wealth Extraction. Psychopathy runs through the corridors of power in England. Lies, gaslighting, bullying, hate campaigns and grift.

In this blog I am examining a 1982 Cabinet long-term policy discussion paper, because it indicates a 40 year political operation, in incremental steps, to privatise social programs, from NHS to Education, Water to Energy and much else besides. It also gives an insight into the thinking and the sense of entitlement to Rule within the English Ruling Class and illustrates how they view ordinary people as people who can be manipulated by how the Government sets the circumstances within which we live. Nudge has evolved to pushing people over an economic and social cliff.

Looking at attitudes towards poverty, I found this article from 2016, "Is poverty in the UK in 2016 caused by employment, habit or circumstance?" prepared by the New Policy Institute, which explores those attitudes as they stood in 2016. It draws on some details of a survey of poverty carried outlined in a Survey of Poverty in East London : Labour and Life of the People Charles Booth (1889) Source

"The day after we published Monitoring Poverty and Social Exclusion 2016, Indy Bhullar, curator for Economics and Social Policy at LSE library, shared this fascinating excerpt from Charles Booth’s famous survey of the East London poor, first published in 1889. He shared it because the percentage of ‘very poor’ households categorised as being in ‘great poverty’ by Booth due to having insecure, irregular and poorly paid work was the exact same proportion of people in poverty in the UK in a working family in 2016: 55 per cent"

"Booth’s belief that some poverty is attributable to laziness (‘idleness’) or immoral habits (‘drunkenness’ and ‘thriftlessness’) also resonates very clearly today. The circumstance of being in poverty (especially if you receive any working-age social security benefits) is taken as a sign by much of the media, political establishment and the general public to be a sign that you are feckless and lazy. Problems relating to addiction, from substance misuse to smoking are still viewed by many as ‘bad habits’, as a recent proposal from a CCG in Yorkshire to limit surgeries for smokers highlights.

While Booth referred to illness, disability and family composition as ‘circumstances’, many of the policies of the last five years- from the increased scrutiny of people receiving disability benefits to the limit that only two children per family will be eligible for support through Universal Credit and Tax Credits from next year- show that what Booth termed ‘circumstance’ are increasingly seen as bad ‘habits’ which must be quashed.

There are fundamental problems with attempting to draw a line between the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor. We need to ask ourselves what price, both financially and ethically, we are willing to pay as a society in the service of this paternalistic view of the poor.  In 2015/16, 93 per cent of JSA sanctions that were reviewed were overturned- this is just one of the many indications that mechanisms within our current system for separating the ‘deserving’ from the ‘undeserving’ are applied in contradictory and inconsistent ways. Is it worth significant public money being spent on gatekeeping to ensure no one with ‘bad habits’ is benefitting from our public safety net?  Is the possibility that someone ‘undeserving’ may get support from our social security system really worth other people who are disabled, raising a young child alone, or unable to find work suffering?"

The fundamental question is this - is the suffering of so many people a harm that can be avoided, and if it is not being avoided who deems that harm worth it, and why?

~ Pdf file of the 1982 Cabinet Report : 30 pages, carefully typed out, photographed. Take a look. It's informative. Instructive even. More about that later. Kew Archive Location CAB 184/628 (Available to view at Kew, not available online)
~
A Guardian report on the release of the Cabinet Discussion Paper, in 2012, under the 30 years rule. The Guardian were careful to not give it the attention it required, to evade the dark arrogance of the intent this document revealed, given that the plans discussed were being implemented by both Conservatives and Labour, albeit at different paces, the Cons being more openly hostile and wilfully cruel.
~
W.E Du Bois is much respected as an influential writer and thinker, of some wisdom. These are his words.
~ “We should measure the prosperity of a nation not by the number of millionaires, but by the absence of poverty, the prevalence of health, the efficiency of the public schools, and the number of people who can [and] do read worthwhile books.”

W. E. B. Du Bois - 1868 - 1963 ~ “How can wealth persuade poverty to use its political freedom to keep wealth in power? Here lies the whole art of Conservative politics in the 20th century.”
― Aneurin Bevan ~

Topical Images indicating Westminster Ruling Class policy influencers:

Map of raw Sewage Release permits voted for recently by Conservative and Unionist Party MPs; Effluence People reacted with anger when the Tory party voted to allow raw sewage release in to rivers and onto coastline. They may yet turn the tide. #Turdreich

.

The point being made in 1982 at the Cabinet Office level: Influence
Poverty levels of State assistance and the social deprivation that acknowledged as directly linked to petty crime, ill-health, bad nutrition and much else besides as a causation.
~

Cheering the passage of a 2015 Budget that maintained poverty levels of low wages, and sub-poverty levels of State Assistance to unemployed, disabled and other vulnerable citizens. 

Nonsense "Universal Basic Income would disincentives worker to take up jobs, and anyway, Universal Credit, the system I created, would be much better suited".  Iain Duncan Smith

Consequences (DWP staff admit psychological abuse of claimants, able, disabled and vulnerable) UN Report - 120,000 excess deaths 2010 - 2019 largely among vulnerable Universal Credit claimants. Poverty is a chronic stressor, and it has a huge health impacts on it's own, eg recent report on adverse birth outcomes, how poverty affects children's health, is a major factor, for millions of people in the UK. 5th Richest Country in the world, they tell us. We see very little comfort in that thought, the way things are.

Another nonsense that has caused a lot of harm is the Work Capability Assessment, introduced in 2005.

'let's get you into work, then shall we? It's for your own good, you know.' This attitude emerges from both Conservative and Labour Parties (apart from people such as Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell, Diane Abbot, Richard Burgon, Zara Sultana et al.) aligned with the establishment Civil Service Aristocrats, people like old Robert Armstrong. The establishment are behind the scenes. Class system prevails.

~

Affluence - what does a multi-millionaire understand about living in poverty? 

2021 - By removing the £20 uplift, poverty will increase among the 6 million claimants of Universal Credit. 40 percent of these claimants – over two million people - are in work

Quite a lot as it happens, and he just doesn't care much. That is the problem. That lack of concern for the welfare of ordinary people, the low aged and the poor.

Sunak reduces real value of benefits, increases support for Wealth Extraction.
~

There's a pandemic underway and Government demands that we keep on shopping and clubbing. Keep on working for the economy. The false dichotomy of a conflict between the people's health and the Economy is driven by the desire to extract wealth and enhance power. The people's health is quite clearly not a priority when we are seeing close to 100,000 cases of infection daily.

There's a lot of PR involved in all of this. Selling the product, (it's like flu, it doesn't affect children, they would have died anyway) making the sale determines elections more than does policy well  explained and thus accurately understood by the electorate.

Marketing
The world of marketing is predicated on the ability to manipulate people's emotion and perception in order to make a sale.

Consumers can be manipulated by availability, price, presentation, bias, vulnerability, 'personal choice' or by restrictions. (price increase, scarcity).
A population of consumers can be manipulated by availability, price, presentation and bias, vulnerability, 'personal choice' or by 'restrictions', (price increase, scarcity).

Workers can be manipulated into accepting just above poverty wages by lowered levels of social support programs, privatised health care and education, and much else besides, availability, price, presentation and bias, vulnerability, 'personal choice' or by 'restrictions', (price increase, scarcity). Nudge has been around for a long time indeed!
Is this a key understanding of why Power invested in the Ruling Class entitlement likes consumerism so much? Because consumer social behaviour can be more readily 'nudged'? And if you can change behaviour there, without the targets noticing it, then you can change behaviour anywhere. Without the targets understanding what is being done to them.

The Story of Stuff : Consumerism's origins
Consumerism is undermining our environment, our social systems : bookmark this 20 minute video, because it speaks eloquently and accurately of when consumer culture was birthed, and why. And who benefits the most.

Keep buying our stuff!

Do the Ruling Class understand the individualism of the consumer, and the isolation, the addiction, the disempowerment that develops with that addiction,  and how that assists in the the political dissolution of organised workers that consumerism amidst real poverty seems to inculcate?
Did they already know this in the 1960s?
Here's a recent find, for me,  saw a reference to it in a tweet. The Paper I mentioned above.

The 1982 Cabinet Report 
Long term plans, a few words to start the ball rolling. This memorandum was released to public viewing under the 30 year rule. The original sits in the Kew Archives.

A document prepared in September 1982 for the Cabinet, discussing long term policy, including topically enough, privatisation of the NHS.   They had just 'won' the Falklands War.

I have some of my own insight to offer, having read the paper twice.

What I see here.

The report was written by a senior civil servant, the late Robert Armstrong, an aristocrat by birth, inheritance and award.

What I see here is that it is that the politicians operate as the public front, they shield the Establishment ruling class within the Civil Service, who direct and influence the the politicians as much as the corporate billionaires do.

The public facing politician's function is, in part, to take the popular ire 'on the chin' in the theatre we call The News, to protect The System, safe in the knowledge that their pension and future wealth is secured and that custodial sentencing is not likely, under any circumstances, no matter how egregious their behaviour.

The adulation of the monarchy preserves the status of the aristocracy, as a political power base rooted in the class system, and it maintains the power of the aristocracy through the undemocratic House of Lords.  Take away the monarchy and the House of Lords crumbles. Lords and robber barons dominate our political situation.
Here is a brief report from the Health Policy forum on the NHS part of  Cabinet Document. 
https://navigator.health.org.uk/theme/thatcher-cabinets-private-consideration-radical-reform-nhs
Documents disclosed in December 2012 revealed that Thatcher's Cabinet had considered radical reform of the NHS. The Central Policy Review Staff prepared a paper for a Cabinet meeting on 6 September 1982, outlining longer-term funding options of public services.
The Cabinet considered introducing private health insurance and increasing or extending user charges. The Cabinet paper suggested that some of the options reviewed in the paper would represent the end of the NHS for the majority of the population:
'Even though a free state service would be retained for the uninsured and possibly for the non-working population, for the majority the change would represent the abolition of the NHS. To save substantial sums involves raising existing charges and breaking unpopular ground in three areas - imposing charges (eg for drugs) on patients who are now exempt (eg children); charging for seeing the general practitioner; and for hospital treatment.'
Pdf file of the document, 30 pages on carefully typed paper, photographed. Take a look. It's informative. 

The Theme~Repeated throughout in this Cabinet Paper of 1982 is the concept of  using gradual withdrawal of State support on all measures that effectively abolish poverty, to 'reduce real value of benefits' and to do so as a behavioural lever, and to mask it in the language of 'saving expenditure' in order to protect Wealth Extraction.
To give people who might be in need, and on benefits, an incentive to "see the attraction of low paid work". 
Who needs low paid workers? 
Who extracts the most real value from low paid workers? Exactly. The Boss earns more by not doing any cleaning work. The cleaner gets just enough to get by, no more. More for the boss. Maybe the cleaners children will get a better job, but not all of them, They need low paid workers, and they  desire to maintain some visible poverty as a behavioural incentive. The system could be set to eliminate poverty, low wages. It's a systemic problem.
Then there's this : the relaxed sense of entitlement to impose privatisation, for profit, to render democracy safe for power by treating citizens as consumers, rather than State provision, free at point of use, accessible to all, citizens as persons, people.
The social programs that abolish real and relative poverty also include support to maintain clean water, cheap energy, mail, communications, rent capped at %  or ratio of income, social housing, education, public transport, roads and rail, health care, old age care, care for disabled and other vulnerable groups. 
The poorer you are the more likely you will face a need you cannot meet on your own, and find yourself stuck in a pretty horrible place, as a human being, a person. Think about what Health Care costs causing bankruptcy and poverty means. Think then of not being able to access further quality health care because of that poverty. Think of the slow suffering of the many, many people faced with real poverty and chronic disease. Horrible, terrifying, precarious.

Using intentional restriction of support as a behavioural modification utility.

here is a comment from page 7, paragraph 16 :

"Some of the options would make some people word off. But it is very difficult - sometimes impossible - to effect changes in the role of Government without making some people worse off, particularly where public expenditure and hence taxation are involved. It is therefore necessary to accept that possibility, whilst always recognising that it is the proper function and duty of the Government to ensure that no-one is made so much worse off that he or she is subjected to undue hardship.

If poverty is thought of as a relative condition, adverse redistributive effects become hard to accept. If, however, it is recognised that there is such a thing as an absolute level of poverty from which people should be protected. and that poor people should share in the increasing wealth of the country, but perhaps mot in full proportion, then some redistributive effects can be accepted - as they must be if the amount of wealth for distribution is to increase."

In other words in order to maintain poverty as a whip, as a nudge, the system will need to offer just enough support to people to avoid destitution, just enough support to make low paid work attractive and they will use media to portray that choice to work as being 'honourable'  and that all of this subterfuge and rigging is essential to the continuation of that which generates their Wealth.

The tone between 'redistribution' and 'distribution' of wealth is worth noting.

Poverty as an incentive to push the population into work. Sado-Monetarism.

Poverty level benefits to force people to accept low paid jobs.
"The reduction in the real value of benefits for those of working age would increase incentives to work and increase the attraction of low paid work."
That would cause few problems: 
"There would be an increase in real poverty and the current problems of social deprivation would be worsened (crime, poor care of children, illness from cold homes and poor nutrition."
Note they make no mention of the emotional and psychological stresses and chronic mental health of the people affected by poverty levels of support...
How it effects the people who must subsist on so little, how it afflicts their minds and hearts and bodies, as persons. That metric informs Corbyn and most decent people's naturally benign disposition. Most people are decent enough to recoil at that image, the suffering person, suffering because of Government policy that is designed to support the extraction of wealth.
That humane empathy is absent in this document.

Shunak is operating the old tradition to the tee!
The writer, Robert Armstrong, a life long civil servant, and very much a member of the ruling class, mentions in the document the problems they'd have to spend more on, the symptoms of increased real terms poverty - the social, community level stressors of poverty and the behavioural change as poverty impacts peoples lives and causes harm.  They acknowledge that poverty causes low level criminality, neglect and disease.
Because it's a money thing. The person at the other end of this power transaction is not in the room. They are not valued.
Take away a little slice of support at a time via reform to nudge to citizen along a behavioural track, based on a deeply biased mis-understanding about people and our needs... as in rating and relating to people as economic units, as workers in the industries the ruling class own, and their children as future workers, whose work is needed in order to increase wealth 'redistribution', which as we see with Shunak's Autumn Budget 2021.
Less support for the poor, more support for the very, very rich.
Cash flow into the coffers of the billionaires. That money tree remains, always.
Government's role in the mind of  The Owner Ruling Class is to funnel State revenue - currency, taxation, subsidies into the Wealth Extraction system, it's job is to legislate to protect that Wealth Extraction, and it is to never cede that legislative power to workers. Make concessions if we must, but never cede power.

Here's an excerpt on the NHS from the planning discussion document.

"As living standards rise, individuals are likely to demand more and better health care. There is some social gain from improved health care, but mostly it is a matter of individual wants and choices (income-elastic demand). Hence it is arguably not appropriate for public finance, and puts a strain on the Exchequer by distorting choices and shifting the burden from the consumer to the taxpayer. Public health services also tend to be led by the producers rather than consumers.
It is therefore worth considering whether over a period the provision health care for the bulk of the population could be shifted from the State to privately owned and run medical facilities. Those who could not afford to pay would then have their charges me by the State, in the form of rebate or reimbursement. As an exception to the general rule, it might be judged more efficient for the stay to provide institutional care for long stay patients (mentally handicapped, elderly) who clearly could not afford to contribute.
This would mean leaving to individuals how far they insured against facing high costs of health care, and it would be important to monitor the growth of private health insurance over the intervening period.
Given that the State would in the last resort meet the costs of necessary health care, they could be a danger of under-insurance by  a large part of the working population, and thought might therefore have to be given to a scheme for compulsory private insurance.
If ministers accept the broad concept as a longer-term objective, they will want to judge more immediate health options as steps along the road. In particular they will want an examination of how far the switch from public to private provision of health care could be promoted, and whether there are an institutional changes, within the NHS, that could make this switch easier.
1. Increased and extended health charges
2. Private Health Insurance."
The document discusses Social Care. 

Then the document looms over privatisation of Education, page 4, paragraph 11, discussing the move towards wholesale privatisation, slowly, slowly, starting promoting more private schools, reducing State spending on State Schools. 1 982.

Fast Forward to 2021

https://www.tes.com/news/heads-condemn-dfe-plan-cut-school-improvement-fund

"Plans to remove a £50 million school improvement fund for councils will be seen as a “thinly veiled attempt to turn up the heat” on maintained schools to convert to academy status, a headteachers' union has said this afternoon.
The Department for Education has launched a consultation today on removing the local authority School Improvement Monitoring and Brokering Grant.
Instead, the plan would be for councils to fund all of their school improvement activity by taking a slice of funding directly from school budgets."
Defence: Annexe K, page 29
A warmer discussion in tone. We have money for the Military. Military is growing. Maybe we can persuade NATO to increase the mandatory spend. Background is that Defence spending was increasing in real value and budget had to find ways maintain 'real value'. 
Previously they were discussing cuts to social programs as incentives in to work. Now they are the discussing the impact of 'an absence of real growth in the defence budget, as against the increase of complexity and cost of major equipment, would entail a reduction in United Kingdom Military Capabilities."
No cuts to their real value budget, to incentivise the military into peace, then?

Cuts to social support designed to nudge behaviour by the stress of real poverty.
Would eschewing maintaining an expeditionary army incentivise a country to behave more like a peacemaker? Perish that thought, now!

One rule for the Rulers, a swath of rules and sanctions for us. To get us to behave. Behaving didn't get the Unions far in the 1890s onwards, that's for sure.

Misinformation, preventing manipulative political grooming.
It is maddening how disruptive Oligarchy funded think tanks and their proxy movements, led by guile and grooming, cry 'Freedom' for all the elements that support the long term strategic planning of the Ruling Class thinking they are doing the exact opposite.
The opposite of that strategic operation is grass roots cohesion, which itself is based on accurate understanding of the situation. awareness of how division is encouraged, how emotions are exploited, how lack of information can be a vulnerability and a curiosity to see that we the wage earning ordinary folk build an equitable culture amongst ourselves that translates into votes and healthier legislators. 
How to make government safe for people?

So I have been thinking many years on this - as have many, many others, and far more education and knowledgeable than I could ever be. I set out in 2017 a metric for healthy governance.

"I think of Healthy Governance as being focused on the practical realities of administering a communities shared resources for the equal benefit of all members of that community. 

Healthy governance sets the context of governance as operating within as a shared responsibility of duty of care for one another.  In that regards healthy governance has to be evidence led at all times. Opinion and belief are insufficient to meet the responsibility of duty of care.

Healthy governance sets the global context of governance as nurturing, caring for and stewarding of the habitat within which the community lives and from which that community draws living materials and other resources."

Now consider the policy choices of this Westminster Government during the past 20 months on managing the national epidemic and the global pandemic, in the light of all of the above, and perhaps some of what that have and continue to do makes more sense - "let the Herd take it on the chin, protect the Hoard."

In my view there's a degree of cruelty and callous recklessness in all of this that is deeply, profoundly uncivilised bordering on sado-monetarism. The gaslighting and lying to maintain that trajectory is a huge red flag.

I know that the only way for the people to counter this is to build a united grass roots front, from  a shared sense of human solidarity, as persons, from the poorest to the most comfortable that elects decent men and women into our legislatures.

Stephen Reicher on why elimination of community transmission prevents surges, lockdowns and restrictions - precisely because the protocols when carefully set, give the population more choice, more freedom.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/oct/28/covid-measures-choice-restrictions-science-freedom-infections-safe

"What we need right now, to supplement the vaccine rollout, is a set of protections and support measures to reduce the harm inflicted by Covid and relieve pressure on the NHS. In order to make that clear, politicians and journalists need to reframe the way they talk about the pandemic. Stop asking: will the public stick to the restrictions? Instead ask: will the government protect and support the public to keep one another other safe?

The real irony is that, by conflating protection with lockdown and refusing to implement the protections necessary to bring infections down, keep people safe and relieve the pressure on the NHS, this increases the likelihood, as Sage noted this month, that more draconian measures will be needed in the future.

In the end (and as we saw last year), the true lockdown party would be the 'do nothing' party."

Mr, Reicher is on point, and utterly correct.

What say you?

Kindest regards

Corneilius

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