Liz Kendall & the Less Eligibility Principle. A return to the Workhouse?
The 24 hours news media of 2025 is notoriously bad at history, special investigations aside.
So when Liz Kendall revealed her cuts to benefits on 18th March no one mentioned the ‘less eligibility principle’. Part of what Kendall was after was making it clear that being in a job, even if this was a tough choice for an individual, would be better in some cases than being on a health related benefit.
The principle is not new, although it was officially abolished in 1929 in Britain. It was at the centre of the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act, Carried not by a Tory but a Liberal Government it set up Workhouses.
In the 1830s Workhouses were called Bastilles by radicals and attempts were made to destroy them. The principle was that if someone could not support themselves then they could go to a Workhouse. Central to that was that life was so unpleasant in the Workhouse that anyone even vaguely capable of working would endeavour to do so rather than enter one.
E P Thompson in the Making of the English Working Class touched on the Utilitarian principles on which Workhouses were run.
He quotes one Poor Law Commissioners as reporting that the ‘intention was to make the Workhouses as much as prison as possible. Another said the idea was to make the discipline ‘so severe and repulsive as to make them a terror to the poor’.
Given the Government cant find enough prison places, largely thanks to the previous Tory regime but also due to sending people like climate protesters to jail who shouldn’t be there building and staffing a 2025 Workhouse won’t be happening.
The perspective of making life without a job as miserable as possible however remains, even if that is, as often, because employers will not make the adjustments they are legally required to do to make jobs do-able. Labour’s right to try a job is perhaps a sort of nod to that but its certainly not the headline story.
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