A great evil spawned in ghetto-land
THE biggest evil in Britain today is welfare dependency. And if you think that's an exaggeration, consider this:
Britain is one of the richest countries on the planet. But welfare ghettoes are incubating heartbreaking poverty.
Knife crime is high, life expectancy low. A boy born in central Rochdale is likely to die younger than one in India, Iraq or Iran.
Same for a boy in Byker, Newcastle. Or Clairville, Middlesbrough. All neighbourhoods scarred by welfare dependency.
It's an expensive business, all this poverty. Paying six million people not to work costs an absolute bomb.
And no, it's not about the recession. Right now, more than a million on benefits have not worked for TWELVE YEARS.
There are almost half a million people under 35 who are on incapacity benefit, deemed unable to work.
We are writing people off. Leaving them to rot in council houses, while asking immigrants to do the jobs.
Dirty
Why do so many foreigners come? To fill jobs that British people won't do (or used to do before they emigrated).
So much of our 'broken society' problems - drugs, street violence - can be traced to a welfare ghetto.
And no politician will spring the welfare trap because it's regarded as the toughest, dirtiest job in politics.
Tough love is hard. You need to say to people: "Get a job, or we'll take away your benefits".
Get it right - as the Americans did - and poverty will plunge. Get it wrong, as Britain does, and the problem is huge.You get social segregation, where those on benefits slowly live in their own world of dole. They tend not to vote, so are quickly forgotten by politicians.
Before he was elected, Tony Blair vowed to change all this.Transform welfare in Britain as Bill Clinton had in America.
But he chickened out as soon as disabled protesters chained themselves to railings in Westminster.
At least Blair tried, unlike Thatcher. It was her government that piled people into incapacity benefit in the first place.
Recently, Labour has made brave moves, especially under John Hutton and James Purnell. Both have resigned, of course, because the Labour Party is in the process of committing a slow, political suicide.
Yet, right now, on welfare reform and healthcare, I'd say Labour has the edge over the Tories as they go further on single mothers.
Yet neither party will embrace a simple, urgently-needed reform: To guarantee work always pays.
Yvette Cooper says that work pays for "pretty much" everyone. The words "pretty much" mask an admission.
Consider a young bloke on the dole. Right now he gets £96 a week via Jobseekers, housing benefit and what have you.
Say he goes to work in a shop for five hours a week at six quid an hour. His income rises to just £101. Why? Because while he earns £30, he loses £25 of benefits. So he's working five hours for just five quid.
Say he doubles his shift to TEN hours. Then his income stays at £101 because he loses the Jobseekers' Allowance.
And if he TREBLES his hours to 15 hours a week, he loses even more benefits and takes home £106 week.
Idiot
Do we need to spell it out further? This means his "work pays" an effective rate of 66p an hour.
What idiot would do that? Not me. I'd stay at home with the JSA and Sky Plus. So, I suspect, would Yvette Cooper.
This is why I hate the word "scrounger". People respond to incentives - and for too many, there's no incentive to work.
It's not people's laziness that's the problem, it's government incompetence.
They simply don't understand their own system.
Little wonder. The UK welfare system has 51 different payments, explained by 14 manuals over 8,900 pages.
The complexity has created a net in which millions of British people are now trapped. Freeing them takes effort.
At first it was simple. In the post-war years the benefit system would end the "giant evil" of worklessness.
Now, it bankrolls worklessness. The welfare state is incubating the very "giant evil" it was set up to destroy.
That's why we don't just need welfare reform.
We need to tear up the whole rotten system and start again.
FRASER NELSON is also Editor of The Spectator.
This article has 3 comments
Well put, as someone who has been on incapacity benefit since a heart attack in 97 I agree with what has been said.I became a community volunteer working at the local Community Centre trying to regenerate an estate falling in the most deprived 5% in the country.
The problem of engaging people in searching for employment is that there is no belief that it will make a difference to their lives. The lack of employment for people with poor academic levels, that pays a living wage, is almost impossible to overcome.
We had more success with women re training than with the men; The women would take courses to improve their maths and english, the men looked only for driving licences or for fork lift truck licences.
Overall the team of agencies we had got around 250 people into jobs over 5 years, we were able to alter the environment and a few minds as to what was possible but of course we ran out of funding and the Government said sorry but there is no more funding for your area. Were we cost effective, I don't know but it was certainly less than what the Government paid to open the computer chip factory in Tony Blairs constituancy with its high quality jobs!!
If the Government really wants to change the system they should stop the annual attack on people on benefits turning us into villains when the majority would give their all to be healthy once more, and talk about making the system more efficient and take us out of the poverty trap we are left in with little hope of escape.
By Dave Preston. Posted November 15 2009 at 12:38 PM.
The Brits are damm lazy,how it is the forgeiners seem to do well ,when they come & work here.sadly the true Brits dont exsist anymore.
By susan. Posted November 8 2009 at 2:21 PM.
You're right. It's not people's laziness, but neither is it Government incompetence. The basic problem lies in the class system that is still prevalent in English society, inherently built into the English psyche from birth that affects, mainly, young males.They are made to feel inferior if they did not have the opportunity or the intellectual capacity to go on to higher education, which leads to a lack of self-confidence. I was on a coroners jury for one week hearing different cases each day. Almost all involved were young males having committed suicide and I believe because they just didn't see a future for themselves.
The welfare safety net should remain in place for those who need it. Not everyone is the same, not everyone can take care of themselves, and in a civilised society we must look out for them. You wrote about a new idea the tories have about independent schools being made available to all. What we need is to get back to the quality State education that was in place not that long ago, a quality that produced professionals whose parents didn't need to fork out shed-loads of money in order to educate their children. A very successful Canadian friend said that all they did in Canada was to walk down the road to the local school.
Young people don't want to be talked down to and patronised.They may act tough but inside they're frightened little children. We must give them confidence to live a decent life within their capabilities and then we'll begin to see the dependency culture loosen its grip.
By Alexandrina. Posted November 8 2009 at 12:30 AM.