If you live on welfare, should your life be nice?
The big problem with the benefits debate is that neither Left nor Right dares to say what it really thinks
?Why do they call it the ?welfare state??? Ali G once asked Tony Benn. ?Is it because it is well fair??
Ignoring for a moment the way that one of these people is a comedy character you?re only supposed to laugh at (the other, of course, being the bloke who found subsequent fame in Borat), this was a very knowing way of making a deeply partisan point.
?Well fair? is better than fair. Which, of course, isn?t fair at all.
This is also what David Cameron thinks. And, as he made plain in his speech at Bluewater yesterday, it?s what he thinks lots of other people would think, too, if only they were honest. The trouble is, hardly anybody ever is honest about welfare. Even Mr Cameron wasn?t quite, while urging everybody else to be.
?A culture of entitlement?, he said, ?has led to huge resentment among those who pay into the system.? As though he was unbothered personally. ?I?ll tell you who resents this,? he could have said. ?I do. Me.?
Cowardly dissembling is the norm on welfare, to the extent that politicians only really discuss it via buzzwords that quietly mean suitably different things to suitably different people. The Left thinks the word ?scrounger?, but never says it, for fear of sounding as if it agrees with the people on the right who say it all the time, but often about those whom the Left believes to be ?hard-working? but who just require ?a little extra help?. The Right reckons that these people can?t possibly be that ?hard-working? if they require extra help, because if they were, they wouldn?t. Unless they?re a business.
On that side of the spectrum, this ?hard-working? status starts shortly before you are able to buy your own house, by which point, as far as the Left is concerned, you lost that status so long ago that you have virtually become the Prince Regent out of Blackadder.
And GHod alone knows who the ?middle? are. Putting disability benefit and pensions to one side, the UK welfare bill is about ?84 billion. Or, if it helps you to visualise it, roughly the amount that Jimmy Carr would earn in 21,000 years. Isn?t this something worth discussing a bit more clearly? What, exactly, are we buying?
According to Mr Cameron, ?the time has come to go back to first principles; to have a real national debate and ask some fundamental searching questions about working-age welfare?. He?s right, but he?s not quite taking his own advice. In yesterday?s speech he kept comparing those who work with those who don?t; the working couple on ?24k, the jobless family on ?27k. It wasn?t fair, he kept saying, that working pays less.
He?s not wrong, in my view, but he?s also not being quite honest in claiming that?s where his principles start. The Tories keep saying ?work must pay? and it?s a ruse. It?s not the differential that bothers them entirely. It?s the concept. It?s not that you can live more comfortably off the State than you can by working, but the idea that you can live comfortably off the State at all.
The Left will never understand how much this concept appals the Right, and the Right will often not let on, because it doesn?t want to sound like somebody with a talk show on Fox News. But that?s a first principle right there. Even on a more mundane level, for those who have lived lives mercifully free of such interaction, the very concept of state help can seem baffling. I spent at least half of my first two years in London unemployed and living on biscuits. The thought that this might have been somebody else?s problem never really occurred to me.
If I?m honest, the true scale of the State?s largesse didn?t properly kick me until about a year ago, when I went to look around the primary school where I plan to send my daughters. ?But it?s wonderful here,? I kept thinking stupidly. ?Surely I have to pay something??
Free education is a given across our political spectrum, much like free healthcare. Welfare is different. Very few people would argue that the welfare state should not be a safety net, scooping people up before they crash into rock bottom. But should it go any farther? Making life not just survivable but tolerable? For much of the public, I suspect, first principles quite vehemently say not.
My own first principles are a little softer, I think, although I do worry that, as with most of my political beliefs, this is just down to kneejerk compassion, guilt and a desire for people to like me.
It?s hard, though, to triangulate. What does the British Left have to say about today?s welfare state? Not much. And sooner or later, it?s going to have to say something.
On the BBC Today programme yesterday Liam Byrne, the normally credible Shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, was twisting like a worm on a hook. Did Labour want to cut welfare? He couldn?t say. Did Labour oppose cuts to welfare? He couldn?t say that either. In the end, he started bleating that housing benefit costs had risen because the economy was suffering. So what, Liam? What if it wasn?t? Housing benefit has been capped at ?20,800. Is that enough or isn?t it?
This is where you need first principles. Like I said, I?ve never lived on benefits, but I doubt it?s terribly pleasant. The crucial question, though, is whether it ought to be.
Does Ed Miliband believe that a life supported by the State should be as nice as the life lived by people for whom the State doesn?t have to bother? And if not, and he believes it should be a bit less nice, then how much less nice? Half as nice? A quarter less nice? Or does he believe that it should be exactly as nice as the State can afford? Pretty wonderful, that, in boom time. Not now. I think you would be paying in.
It?s not a right-wing point, today, that the welfare bill needs to go down. As Mr Byrne said himself: ?There?s no money left.? Even if there was, though, Mr Cameron is broadly right. We?ve lost track of the compact between people and State; the distinctions between what we are owed, what we get and what we decide, in our compassionate largesse, to give. Before we decide what we are doing with welfare, we need to remind ourselves why we are doing it.
