Iain Duncan Smith & 1834 revisited

Benefit caps, less eligibility and 1834
The Coalition Government looks like it will be partly successful in carrying plans to cap benefits for claimants at £26,000 a year. The cap will impact relatively small numbers of people nationally but will hit over 1,000 in each of seventeen London Boroughs.
The Government has claimed that it cannot be right for people who do not work and are on benefits to be able to get more money than numbers who are in work. This is the return of the Victorian less eligibility principle.
Much play has also been made of the fact that since most of the benefits at such levels go directly to landlord for rents that it cannot be right that those who do not work can afford to live in desirable London locations while those who work have to move ever further out of the centre to find somewhere affordable to live.
Whether the Government will actually succeed in implementing a benefit cap remains to be seen. However polls suggest that there is some public support for it and opposition in the Lords to some elements of the cap was left not to Labour but to the Bishops.
It stretches belief that the Government cares about what happens to relatively small numbers of people on benefits of over £20K a year and the reality is that as with the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act which was meant to be about encouraging people to work for a reasonable wage there are other agendas at work here.
In fact the benefits cap has exactly the same basis as that 1834 Act.
What the Government is concerned to promote is a market economy in labour not one where there is a safety net of welfare. In particular it probably has an agenda to shift workers away from London to other locations on the basis that there is some evidence of an imbalance.
A recent article in the bosses paper the Financial Times reported that many teaching jobs in London attracted several well qualified candidates while similar jobs outside London sometimes attracted none. This despite the fact that the jobs outside of the Capital might pay a bit more. The article put this down to the pull of the London labour market.
This story might not be all that it seems but the basic point is nothing new. In the nineteenth century the Capital was known as the Great Wen. As long ago as the 1960s Eric Hobsbawm wrote a famous article on the history of the London labour market and the wage rates attracted by skilled workers.
The issue of labour markets- the Government is also focusing on regional pay- fascinates liberal ideologues now just as it did in the 1830s because they seek a ‘free market’ in labour. That is the freedom to exploit workers as they will
The other key element to the benefits cap is precisely the idea of less eligibility that led after 1834 to the Workhouse.
That is that any form of relief from official sources during periods of unemployment or wages below the subsistence rate should be less attractive than what could be earned by working. Liberal ideologues such as Jeremy Bentham and Nassau Senior pushed this principle hard in the early decades of the nineteenth century.
Historically the question, still debated, is whether it really worked. Less eligibility and the Workhouse were hated and in reality capital needed surplus or a reserve army of labour to cope with periods of explosive expansion.
In 1834 as now reality turned out to be more complex than the market ideologues bargained for