Benefit reform goes pop

''Welfare-to-creativity'', I urged upon Gordon Brown on April 3 last year: a fifth option for his New Deal, which would recognise and support the unruly energies and natural enterprise of those involved in pop culture, rather than strangle it through an overly Puritan notion of ''useful toil''. And now, it seems, the play ethic will take its place alongside the work ethic - and in Scotland before anywhere else. Young

people between the ages of 16 and 25, unemployed for six months or more, will soon have a ''creative industries'' choice in their menu of welfare options.

There is one hangover from the coercive, ''work'll-make-you-free'' mentality of a year ago, however. Prospective makars will have to jump through some interview hoops at the local dole office, passing a ''competence test'', showing evidence of ''commitment'' and ''talent''. A seminar in Glasgow on June 19 will discuss such matters as ''how to distinguish genuine artists from opportunists''.

Now, before I wax positive about this move - which I seriously believe is opening up a whole new political front on Blairism - I have to get the satire out of my system first. And like all satire, its intention is educational.

Picture the scene in a benefits office, somewhere dark and deep in the Central Belt, a year or two from now. Your six months is up, mucker: it's audition time at the Social. And you're ser-

iously worried.

Because you've been doing nothing but sit in that pokey back-room since Christmas. Which was when you chucked the soul-destroying laundry delivery job, and used the last of your hoarded cash to buy your uncle's old Mac, with the pirated Q-Base music software you got from - well, never mind who.

Maybe a bit of DJ-ing on the fly, forty quid every other night, undeclared of course . . . But basically you've been totally cocooned, footering about with samples and time-signatures and keyboard riffs, stretching the bytes and the beats this way and that, whispering weirdness into the mike.

And when you lift your head up, play the tapes to friends, you know you're

on to something new - even by the

way eight faces often screw up, look slightly ill or panicked, just don't get it. But two do understand: in fact, they've become new mates, doing favours, hanging around. Confirming that you're not entirely on Planet Nine.

But all you have to show the New Deal man for your ''enterprise'' and ''innovation'' is . . . one tape. A continuous loop of noise, 25 minutes long: out there, but magnificent.

And this wee bureaucrat's become well-known as ''Status Quo-asis'': that is, if it isn't four guys with guitars/ drums/bass, gigging hard and proud round the local dives, able to carry

''a good tune'', bearing a fistful of

flyers, reviews, and publicity photo-graphs - then you don't pass his

''competency test''.

And guess what? You don't. He fingers the cassette, puts it in his government-purchased ghetto-blaster, presses play. Your sound-world fills the air, occupies every corner, sends this pale-painted room 20 years into the future. But his face is a symphony of winces: the sound gets gradually turned down. ''Not much to go on, is it, son?'' he says, smoothing down his Caesar. ''Where's the tune? Where's the passion?''

Before he sends you out, back to the Jobseekers', he passes over the new Government pamphlet on ''Music-Making: A Guide''. You drop its Rock-School platitudes into a bin on the way out. You'll go underground, build your scene. Make it even more out there . . .

It's only one scenario, of course - you could reverse the music tastes (welfare officer into electronica, benefit claimant into Dad Rock), and the basic problem would remain. How in God's name does the Blairist state think it can measure ''competency'' and ''talent'' in pop - when it's often the most apparently incompetent (chancer with a sampler, bad guitarist with a great attitude) who make the greatest, most innovative pop?

How do they honestly think they can assess ''commitment'' to a pop career, or weed out ''genuine artists'' from ''opportunists'' - when much of the energy behind pop is about evading exactly those definitions: that is, about your own autonomy and self-direction, to create what you want when you want? Pop music is (or should be) a space in which you exercise your symbolic freedom - not some sector requiring technical apprenticeship.

And if you ask any half-decent pop capitalist, he or she would have to agree. The average music multi-national scout, looking for the next Prodigy or Oasis, won't give a damn about any band displaying their New Deal work-CV - but only about what they hear and see them doing. Most would reject any ''filtering'' mechanism that narrowed down the range of talent on the ground.

So, even when it has one of its better ideas - accepting that there are other kinds of meaningful, productive activ-ity than ''work'' as traditionally conceived, and that this might need recognition and support - New Labour can't repress its essential character: Control-Freak. Why can't they just let working-class bohemians be?

I have no doubt - in fact, I have every confidence - that no matter what the criteria imposed by this new scheme, unemployed musicians and creatives will be able to work them to their advantage. Frank Field, marauding around Scotland at the moment on a witch-hunt against welfare spongers, will probably need a term for it. Rather than disability fraud, Frank, you could call it ability fraud.

One might successfully claim money and training from the state, to serve your strictly monitored apprenticeship in the ''creative industries''. But one would actually use it to expand your sphere of personal options - artistic, social, technological, pharmaceutical, and otherwise. This act of wanton lifestyle enrichment might result in some genuine ''innovation''. Or it might not. But that, friends, is real rock'n'roll - not a National Music Apprenticeship Scheme.

Is it possible that the Blairites - having conceded that the structurally unemployed might do more with their lives than submit to a regime of hard work and decency - might take the next logical policy step? Which is to concede that, across the board, their welfare reforms are too much about enforcing social order, and not enough about encouraging freedom and autonomy?

It's cruel, but it's true: they think they can ''shape the culture'' of single mums on benefit, so that their resultant good behaviour reduces the welfare bill. But if they think they can ''shape the culture'' of thousands of shiftless, evasive, bright-eyed symbol-makers . . . then they're bigger fools than they seem. Looking forward to the ensuing chaos, I must say.

Tony may snap his Stratocaster yet.