A Scottish Minimum Income Guarantee could loosen the grip of a punishing welfare regime, writes Jen Bell.

Scotland doesn’t have a welfare state, it has a class warfare state, and the UK Government’s Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) are its enforcers. To build a welfare state that respects and liberates working class, unemployed, and disabled people, we must start by bending every devolved tool towards dismantling the punitive machinery of the DWP.

Since 2010, this £228 billion leviathan has been transformed beyond recognition, evolving into an instrument of cruelty under successive governments. Today’s Labour leadership shows no intention of reversing course. They are doubling down on dehumanisation, punishment, and humiliation. Between 2016 and 2023, 115,000 Scots were sanctioned, with 97% of these penalties imposed for something as trivial as missing a mandatory interview. One delayed bus, one moment of bad traffic, and entire lives are destituted at the stroke of a keyboard.

This comes on top of the arbitrary five week waiting period for payments, the pervasive culture of hostility and suspicion disseminated from the top, and the indignity of support that leaves people far below the poverty line. It’s little wonder that soul-crushing poverty and mental health crises have soared since the beginning of the austerity era.

And the cruelty is the point. Any pretense of cost-saving or incentivising well-paid work is an illusion. Policy in Practice, a social policy research organisation, estimated in 2024 that £8.3 billion in public funds set aside for Universal Credit went unclaimed. The DWP’s own 2020 report, The Impact of Benefit Sanctions on Employment Outcomes, admitted that sanctioned claimants take longer to find employment than those who weren’t, and when they do, they earn an average of £34 a month less. This isn’t incompetence. It’s ideological. In the austerity era, the government has decided that coercion, discipline, and humiliation are a price worth paying to maintain control.

The Misery Bureau

David Graeber famously wrote about bullshit jobs, and in 2015, YouGov found that 37% of British workers believed their job wasn’t making a meaningful contribution to the world. For our PCS colleagues, the reality can be far more painful. It’s one thing to feel your job is meaningless. It’s another to know it’s actively harmful. Many DWP staff, hoping to offer meaningful support, find themselves pressured to deny claim after claim. What does it say about the UK Government’s vision of a ‘just’ society when entire bureaucracies are built not to create wealth, but to destroy it? Not to offer help, but to deny it? In this warped system, workers are conscripted as enforcers of misery, chipping away at Scotland’s social fabric one sanction at a time.

The left, haunted by the Mileis and Musks who come at the state wielding chainsaws, often meets criticism of government bureaucracy with suspicion and fear. The temptation is to reflexively defend these institutions against small-state, free-market fundamentalists who seek to dismantle them entirely. But this is a trap the left must avoid.

We forget that the welfare states we defend today were never our grand design. They were born of compromise. The liberals, social democrats, and conservatives who built them were reluctant partners, creating a system not out of solidarity, but out of self-preservation. After all, it wasn’t a socialist who introduced the world’s first welfare state. It was Otto von Bismarck. He didn’t do it because he believed in the liberation of the working class. He feared the uprisings that toppled the ancien regime in France and almost succeeded again in 1871. The welfare state was never meant to empower the people; it was designed to pacify them.

Now, in an increasingly post-liberal world, these old allies—liberals and social democrats—have shown themselves incapable of defending even the halfway measures they once championed. They hesitate, they compromise, and they fold. But we don’t have to. We can be bolder. Faced with a new breed of ideological opponents who would eviscerate the welfare state entirely, we can no longer simply hold the line. If we do not dare to imagine something greater, something truly liberating, then what remains will be swept away. Independence through Income

20th-century welfare states were born of compromise. Demands for a 21st-century system must be far more ambitious than bureaucratic reform. One such demand, for a Minimum Income Guarantee (MIG), is not a reluctant concession to capital; it is a bold statement of economic justice. In an age of precarious work, rocketing living costs, and artificial intelligence threatening traditional employment, the old welfare systems, designed for a world of stable, lifelong jobs, are no longer fit for purpose.

The MIG can be agile and seamless, adapting to the realities of modern life and ensuring no one falls through the cracks. It need not be a bureaucratic maze of means-testing and conditionality, but a guarantee of security in an increasingly insecure world. The MIG can be delivered by fair, transparent rules, not rationed out by gatekeepers enforcing arbitrary and punitive conditions. The dignity of financial security should not depend on the whims of a job centre advisor or the outcome of an assessment.

Most crucially, it can start being built with the existing powers that the Scottish government has today, putting something in place that cannot be easily dismantled or warped by governments of tomorrow. We can’t wait around and wish for independence to start doing it. If we’re serious, we need to start building independence through the pay packet, not the border poll.

First, we need a rapid response system. We can’t just tear down the DWP; we must build something stronger in its place. The Scottish Welfare Fund is a start, offering Crisis and Community Care Grants to patch the gaping holes in the UK’s safety net. Right now, it’s underfunded, overly restrictive, and often too slow to catch people before they fall into crisis. Instead of treating it as a last resort, we should scale it up into Scotland’s first line of defence against poverty, offering swift, unconditional support for those left stranded by Universal Credit, when claimants are sanctioned or unfairly left to wait five weeks for support they need today.

Next, claimants need hope and a potential future. The DWP’s power over its claimants comes from the chaos and uncertainty it forces upon them. Through mandatory job searches and workfare schemes, it pushes people into low-paid, insecure and exploitative work regardless of any social good it creates. Scotland can do better by repurposing the Just Transition Fund to create a Green Jobs Guarantee, paying union negotiated rates to employ people in the crucial projects and sectors we need to decarbonise the economy, like retrofitting homes, expanding public transport, or nature restoration. Instead of putting people into work for the sake of it, we can offer people the option of taking well-paid, public jobs that address pressing social needs.

Finally, we need the structural fix. The hammer blow that will liberate workers and claimants from this machine for good. Scotland has full powers over income tax. We can bake the Minimum Income Guarantee into the tax code itself in the form of a ‘negative’ income tax band. Anyone whose income falls below the Personal Allowance could be credited a percentage of the shortfall. Under this model a single parent working part-time, earning £6,000 a year, wouldn’t have to navigate a bureaucratic maze or plead with the DWP. Instead, if there was, say, a 38% MIG, they’d automatically receive a £2,496 top-up through the tax system, ensuring their family has a stable foundation. As they earn more, support would gradually taper off, ensuring they’re always earning more if they are working, without the cliff edges of the current benefit system.

These combined measures would shift the balance of power back towards where it belongs. The threat of sanctions would be irrelevant. With a genuine tailwind of support behind them, and guaranteed career options, the workers of Scotland would be on a level playing field. The DWP would need to treat its clients as equals, or face extinction north of the border. Expanding the Scottish Welfare Fund, creating a Green Jobs Guarantee, and embedding a Minimum Income Guarantee into our tax code aren’t just policies. They’re weapons in the fight for dignity and justice. The tools to weaken the DWP’s grip on Scotland are already in our hands. It’s time for us to use them.

Jen Bell is Co-chair of the Scottish Green Party National Executive.