Is Liam Byrne leaving the shadow cabinet?

Have the welfare reforms made by Purnell/Cooper/Freud and now in a souped-up form by IDS/Grayling/Freud actually improved the life of many of the sick and disabled people affected by giving them into careers and getting them into all of those well-paid jobs as promised? No. Have any of these programmes actually cut the welfare bill? No. In point of fact all of these welfare reforms have cost a fortune, done much harm to certain sections of society, and hardly any good to anyone at all, although they have precipitated the death and worsened the health of countless ATOS victims and visited homelessness, misery, and near destitution on thousands of innocent others.

How could this have happened?

These catastrophes have happened because the “public” are clueless about welfare.

After all of the convulsions and miseries and failures associated with all kinds of spurious welfare reform Byrne has stated his intent to carry it further, not because he wants to help benefit claimants into work or improve their lives in any way, although I’m sure he would claim so, but because he thinks by penalising benefit claimants even more than the Tories, by giving the “public” more bloodshed, more bread and more circuses to gawp at, such policies could help Labour to be more popular with certain sections of the electorate because the Labour Party would be more visibly harsher on the fabled “underclass” than the Tories have been. None of this nonsense has anything to do in “preserving” the “welfare state” by making “people love it again” by persuading them that benefit go to “hard working families” and not to members of a much despised semi-mythical “underclass”. (That garbage is straight out of the mouth of the utterly loathsome failure James Purnell.) Hence Byrne’s threats about the “contributory principle” and unending “workfare” schemes and such, all of which have been proven to be completely unsuccessful as far as getting people into decent jobs go across the globe. Byrne doesn’t want to address the plight of the excluded and help them to improve their lot, Byrne  wants to punish them because he believes that sacrificing certain kinds of helpless individuals on the altar of populism could be good for Labour electorally.

It’s that simple.

It’s nasty and dishonourable and very, very Byrne.

I really, really, really hope to God that Byrne’s political career is coming to an end.

 yes it’s called the sack

That’s incredibly unfair on Rachel Reeves, whose chapter on pensions was probably the best contribution to the Purple Book. She’s also done some excellent work on reform of the financial sector and the role of QE in the response to economic downturns. I’m much happier with her performance so far than Byrne’s.

I suspect the media are going to portray Byrne as some sort of lonely intellectual who was sacked because he dared to ‘challenge’ Labour’s views on welfare. He did nothing of the sort. His only significant contribution appears to have been to skim read Beveridge and decide that the contributory principle was the way, the truth and the light as far as welfare reform was concerned. In doing so, he made a number of pretty elementary errors ( http://opinion.publicfinance.co.uk/2012/01/byrne-beveridge-and-welfare-myths/ )

If  you want a better, more nuanced analysis of the value of the contributory
principle, then Touchstone’s recent pamphlet is a good place to start:  http://www.tuc.org.uk/tucfiles/292/Contributory_Benefits.pdf 

Jon. We have had our disagreements and our makings up, but I do have to disagree very strongly with you here.

As I said elsewhere, obviously there are “benefit cheats”, but for every cheat there are half a dozen genuine cases – I know of some, both at first hand, and through my voluntary work.  Byrne seeks to “punish” – to discourage, to embarrass and humiliate, because he knows that there are not the jobs around – and he knows – as well as you and me do – that with such a dearth of jobs most employers will not take on somebody who is long term unemployed especially if they have had physical or mental health issues.

Ninja has made a first class post about this.

All this would be bad enough for an entirely honest man (I hope I am and I am sure you are), but for a man who, you admit yourself, has issues with personal financial integrity, it is just about the worst example of hypocrisy imaginable – he is exactly the same as Purnell and Grayling and Duncan-Smith in that regard – strange that men who demand total honesty in others (“no ifs, not buts” as Purnell put it)  are so dishonest themselves. If only like those wretched claimants who make “mistakes” they too had had their day in court.

I must be frank: Byrne getting the sack will be equal to the day in November 1990 when Mrs Thatcher left Downing Street.

* Stan Sulzmann (1948 –   )

So what type of Welfare state would you think would be good, remembering that every twenty five minutes in the UK a child is born with a life changing disability, and whether you agree or not with Welfare  of the 1948′s,if you do not then look after these children in some way, the name of the party should then perhaps be changed.

The idea that an eighteen year old who has come home from work losing his legs he’s not even paid enough stamps or tax to get a decent  amount of welfare, if he had died he’s be a hero but sadly he lived. (iraq)

Many many people get cancer many more get HIV and AID’s some children are born HIV, what would you do with people like this, keep them on what JSA, because they cannot get JSA.

Interesting your new labour view, mine is more real labour or old labour.

perhaps Hitler did not get everything wrong.