M2RB: The Rolling Stones
It is a safe bet that Sir William Beveridge was not thinking of people like Mrs Heaton when he wrote his report
According to a YouGov poll for Prospect magazine, a staggering 74 per cent of us think that the Government should slash benefits. Young and old, Labour and Tory, rich and poor: every single social group believes it is time to cut back.
By
Dominic Sandbrook
Britain now spends 7.2 per cent of GDP on it's welfare system, and the costs of supporting the, supposedly, needy continue to rise.
As the Whitehall empire grows, drowning the noble intentions of welfare
in red tape, so too do the number who chose to abuse the system.
The Heaton family recieves £30,000 in benefits but wants a bigger
house. Seventy years after Sir William Beveridge began our welfare
system, Dominic Sandbrook argues that, if we are to protect the truly
needy, the welfare state needs massive reform.
Seventy
years ago, with Britain locked in battle against the armies of Nazi
Germany, one of the most brilliant public servants of his generation was
hard at work on a report that would change our national life for ever.
Invited
by Churchill’s government to consider the issue of welfare once victory
was won, Sir William Beveridge set out to slay the ‘five giants’ of
Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness.
When
his report was published at the end of 1942, it became the cornerstone
of a welfare state that supported its citizens from cradle to grave,
banishing the poverty and starvation of the Depression, and laying the
foundations for the great post-war boom.
For
years the welfare state was one of the glories of Britain’s democratic
landscape, a monument to the generosity and decency of human nature,
offering a hand up to those unlucky enough to be born at the bottom.
Seven decades on, however, the British people seem to be falling out of love with Beveridge’s brainchild.
According
to a YouGov poll for Prospect magazine, a staggering 74 per cent of us
think that the Government should slash benefits. Young and old, Labour
and Tory, rich and poor: every single social group believes it is time
to cut back.
As
the pollster Peter Kellner points out, such public unanimity is almost
unprecedented. And what’s more, 69 per cent believe our welfare system
has ‘created a culture of dependency’, and that ‘people should take more
responsibility for their lives and families’.
On the face of it, such findings are
not surprising. At a time when ordinary families are struggling to make
ends meet, people are bound to resent those who seem to be getting
something for nothing.
Dr Barbara Longley walked free from court after fraudulently claimed more than £100,000 in benefits
Only
two days ago, the Mail carried the story of Dr Barbara Longley, a
welfare cheat who fraudulently claimed more than £100,000 in benefits
while secretly holding an NHS pension and owning a Spanish holiday home.
And with similar stories appearing almost every week, it is little
wonder so many people shake their heads in angry disbelief.
Even
so, the turn against welfare is unprecedented. In previous times of
austerity, public attitudes have always remained remarkably generous.
Even in the straitened late Seventies, for example, seven out of ten
people told pollsters they would like to see higher taxes to pay for
higher social spending.
The
truth is that we have reached a watershed. Seventy years after
Beveridge’s landmark report, the British people appear to have lost
confidence in the welfare state.
The
current system has become bureaucratic, sclerotic and ineffective,
trapping thousands of people in a cycle of dependency. New ideas and a
new approach are long overdue.
The
irony is that Beveridge himself could never have foreseen how welfare
would look in the 21st century. For even when he wrote his famous
blueprint, he was looking backwards.
His
mission was to eradicate the grinding poverty of the Hungry Thirties,
when three out of four people in some industrial towns were out of work,
when thousands of children suffered from disease and malnutrition, and
when rickets, dental decay and anaemia were widespread in inner cities.
And
to his credit, Beveridge’s system was an overwhelming success. Thanks
to Clement Attlee’s post-war Labour government, institutions like the
National Health Service, as well as innovations such as national
insurance, transformed the lives of millions.
Yet
like so many top-down initiatives, the welfare state gradually became a
gigantic exercise in Whitehall empire-building. The figures tell the
story.
When
Attlee left office in 1951, we spent just £700 million a year on
welfare (not including health and pensions), which amounted to 4.7 per
cent of Britain’s GDP. Yet in 2011 we spent a whopping £110 billion a
year, which works out at 7.2 per cent of GDP.
The Heaton's council house has a flat-screen TV, a computer, a Nintendo Wii, a digital camera and iPhone
To the outside observer, the
welfare state now seems a bewildering carousel of benefits and tax
credits. The Department of Work and Pensions alone employs 130,000
people to administer this Byzantine system, costing the taxpayer around
£60,000 per employee when office costs are taken into account.
Not
surprisingly, waste and fraud are widespread. A few years ago, even the
DWP itself admitted that the level of fraud in the jobseeker’s
allowance was almost 10 per cent. Year after year, as the former
chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, Edward Leigh, remarked, ‘the
story has been the same: the DWP loses enormous sums of money to fraud
and error . . . Year after year billions of pounds are going into the
pockets of people who are not entitled to them.’
Of
course, no government can entirely eradicate fraud and error. And the
abuse of the system should never blind us to our moral responsibility to
help those in genuine need.
Still,
it is worth remembering that when Tony Blair came to power in 1997, he
claimed that we had ‘reached the limits of the public’s willingness
simply to fund an unreformed welfare system through ever higher taxes
and spending.’ Urgent welfare reforms, he said, would ‘cut the bills of
social failure’, releasing money for schools and hospitals.
Resistant to change: Osborne's plans to cut child benefit for high earners provoked a great deal of anger
Not even Mr Blair’s partisans would
claim that such reforms were forthcoming. Instead, the leviathan
staggered on, quietly eating up more and more of our national income.
For an example of the way good intentions can have very unsettling
results, look at the case of incapacity benefit. Of course, those people
who are genuinely disabled deserve infinite compassion. To look after
the weak is the first duty of any decent government; to abandon them
would be unconscionable.
Still,
given the British people are better housed, fed and cared for than any
generation before, it beggars belief that today more than 2.5 million
people of working age are paid almost £8 billion in disability benefits.
Tens
of thousands are apparently unable to work because of dizziness,
depression, headaches and phobias, while 2,000 people claim benefits
because they are ‘too fat to work’.
Embarrassingly,
Britain now has the highest proportion of working-age people on
disability benefit in the developed world. And while just 3 per cent of
Japanese people and 5 per cent of Americans live in households where
no one works, the figure in Britain is a humiliating 13 per cent.
Are
British people really more likely to be disabled than their
competitors? Is there, perhaps, something in the water that renders us
more incapable?
Of
course not. The truth is, Whitehall uses incapacity benefit to massage
unemployment figures, effectively pretending that people are unable to
work rather than simply out of work.
The
people who really lose from this, incidentally, are those who are
genuinely disabled. They deserve boundless public sympathy; instead,
thanks to the abuse of the system, they are too often treated with
scepticism.
But
behind all this lies a deeper issue. Beveridge designed the welfare
state for a tightly knit, deeply patriotic and overwhelmingly
working-class society, dominated by the nuclear family.
Britain
in the Forties was an old-fashioned, conservative and collectivist
world, in which divorce was exceptional and single parenthood so rare as
to be practically unknown.
Though
millions of people had grown up in intense poverty, they were steeped
in a culture of working-class respectability and driven by an almost
Victorian work ethic. In the world of the narrow terrace back streets,
deliberate idleness would have been virtually unthinkable.
Seventy
years on, we live in a very different Britain. Collective class
identities have largely broken down; in an age of selfishness, the bonds
of the family have become badly frayed.
The father of Welfare: Sir William Beveridge set out to slay the 'five giants' of Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness
Even relatively poor families
enjoy creature comforts, such as central heating and digital
televisions, that their forebears could barely have imagined. Yet this
has bred a sense of entitlement and eroded the sense of civic duty which
once guided so many people. And as our culture of debt suggests, many
of us demand the good life without being prepared to work for it.
Take,
for example, Iona Heaton, a mother of nine from Blackburn, whose story
was revealed in the Mail last week. Mrs Heaton might be a poster-girl
for everything that is wrong with the current welfare system. Every year
she receives almost £30,000 in benefits. By comparison, the average
salary in Britain last year was just £26,000.
Her
council house has a flat-screen TV, a computer, a Nintendo Wii, a
digital camera and iPhone, and she takes her family to Pontins for two
weeks every year. Yet she feels hard done by: the council, she says,
should give her a bigger home.
It
is a safe bet that Sir William Beveridge was not thinking of people
like Mrs Heaton when he wrote his report. But then Beveridge was not
quite the handout-happy do-gooder modern Left-wingers often imagine.
A
man of personal austerity, who rose every morning at dawn, took an
ice-cold bath and worked for two hours before breakfast, he hated the
thought people might ‘settle down’ to a life on benefits.
‘The
State in organising security should not stifle incentive, opportunity,
responsibility,’ he wrote. ‘In establishing a national minimum [income],
it should leave room and encouragement for voluntary action by each
individual to provide more than that minimum for himself and his
family.’
Embarrassing: Britain now has the highest proportion of working-age people on disability benefit in the developed world
Tellingly, Beveridge was also
an early supporter of ‘workfare’ — the system the Coalition Government
is trying to promote, under which the unemployed, while keeping their
jobseeker’s allowance, work for nothing for a few weeks to gain
experience — arguing that to prevent ‘habituation to idleness’, men and
women should be ‘required as a condition of benefit to attend a work or
training centre’.
At
a time when the Government is desperately trying to cut our public
debt, and when we are facing decades of spiralling health and pension
costs, getting back to Beveridge’s original spirit might seem like
common sense.
Yet when governments try to reform the welfare state, they provoke hysterical shrieks of protest.
Absurdly,
Margaret Thatcher is still derided as the ‘Milk Snatcher’ because of
her decision to withdraw free school milk, a relic of the battle against
malnutrition that looked simply ridiculous in the context of the
Seventies.
George
Osborne’s plans to cut child benefit for high earners provoked similar
howls of fury, while the Left seethes with rage at the thought of
capping welfare payments at £26,000 — even though millions of people in
full-time employment take home considerably less than this.
Even
the current crisis of the Government’s workfare scheme — under fire
from Left-wing groups who, wrongly, argue it is unfair to the jobless —
reflects the same spirit of entrenched refusal to change.
To
my mind, though, it is frankly bizarre that we have entered the 2010s
with a welfare system designed to solve the problems of the Forties,
handing out child benefit to millionaires and allowing some people to
make more on benefits than their neighbours do by sheer hard work.
With
foreign competitors eating into our markets, the harsh truth is that
21st-century Britain will need to work harder than ever to earn its
living. Even meeting our health and pensions bills for the next 50 years
will be daunting.
Paying current welfare costs on top of that would stretch our finances beyond breaking point.
Yet
this is not just a matter for government. What we need is not just a
leaner and more efficient system, more carefully targeted at those who
really need assistance, but a new spirit of collective social duty, from
the nation’s boardrooms to its living rooms.
Going
on as we are, as the Prospect poll shows, is no answer. For if public
dissatisfaction with the welfare system continues to mount, then the
real losers will be the people who really do need a hand: the genuinely
sick, the abandoned, the weak and the unlucky.
Those
were the people William Beveridge sought to help. Tragically, 70 years
on, they may well be the ones who end up paying the price if Britain
refuses to change.
Related Reading:
The Welfare State Is Destroying America - I
The Welfare State Is Destroying America - II
Europe: The Canary In The Welfare-State Coal Mine
Is The U.S. A Land Of Liberty Or Equality?
It's All Over Now - The Rolling Stones
Well, baby used to stay out all night long
She made me cry, she done me wrong
She hurt my eyes open, that's no lie
Table's turnin' now her turn to cry
(chorus)
Because I used to love her, but it's all over now
Because I used to love her, but it's all over now
(verse 2)
Well, she used to run around with every man in town
She spent all my money, playing her high class game
She put me out, it was a pity how I cried
Table's turnin' now her turn to cry
(chorus)
Because I used to love her, but it's all over now
Because I used to love her, but it's all over now
(verse 3)
I used to wake up in the morning, get my breakfast in bed
When I got worried she would ease my aching head
But now she's here and there, with every man in town
Still trying to take me for that same old clown
(chorus)
Because I used to love her, but it's all over now
Because I used to love her, but it's all over now
Because I used to love her, but it's all over now
Because I used to love her, but it's all over now
http://tinyurl.com/cf8umgg
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