Welfare For All?

David Willetts in his book, The Pinch, writes: "We know that each generation is going to move on… we know its chances of doing better… are greatest if it is standing on our shoulders." Standing on our shoulders, in this current climate, requires solidarity. Baby boomers, beneficiaries of a free university education and housing boom, the more affluent among pensioners should give up their personal tax allowance if it spares the young a further diminishing of their prospects. However, Willett's language of civic virtue, interdependency and mutualism needs to resonate much more strongly to wipe out the toxic aftermath of the bankers' excessive appetite for profit .

Their greed has torn the social fabric. A YouGov poll this month indicates that we believe the government spends too much on benefits; "scroungers" are an issue and the universalism that glues the welfare state – such as child benefit for all – needs modification. Recession always sees a reduction in empathy; greater prosperity improves it. Nonetheless, the demonisation of those on benefits, including the sick, the disabled and those unemployed because of structural changes to the economy, undermines us all. Gradually, every unemployed person transmutes into "the other"; the underclass, the dispossessed, victims of their own behaviour, not the catastrophic misjudgments of governments.

While the so called "underclass", living without what Adam Smith called "regard" , are easily damned, admiration is shown for the excesses of the "overclass", the stateless nomads, seeking the next tax-free domain, "earning in their sleep"; making money from money, contributing pitifully little to the public coffers. While few of us will ever meet the likes of Sir Philip Green, who spent £6m on his birthday bash, many of us will soon know men and women, trying hard, who have lost a job. Will that personal contact with those drawing for now on the welfare state help to revive social solidarity and draw some of the poison injected by political rhetoric?

When social cohesion is replaced with envy, mistrust and suspicion, we increasingly believe what we wish to believe rather than what the facts reveal. The sad truth of this budget is that it is the poorest who are proportionately paying by far the highest premium for the national albatross of the multibillion pound deficit. Once all the tax, credits and benefits alterations are churned in the budget mixer, the poor will be 63p better off a week; a couple with a joint income of £80,000 may benefit by over £8 a week while those on a salary of half a million pounds or more will have £357 extra in their pockets. Even given the Liberal-Democrats achievement in removing two million from paying income tax altogether, these figures – against a backdrop of the huge cuts still to come – do not add up to social justice.

Full article HERE

There is little else that I can add to this that I haven't previously said, of the rich getting richer, and of society feeling that anyone on benefits is nothing but a scrounger or a liar.

I think it's going to become a recurrent theme on this blog, and quite likely on The Guardian and numerous other newspapers.

"Osborne picks the pocket of pensioners," read the Daily Mail.

It's interesting that perhaps other, less reputable (in my honest opinion) newspapers are also joining in and trying to build some sort of solidarity between the public and those that are currently claiming benefits. Though I feel it's unlikely to last for long with these papers.

As a part of the welfare reform that is being pushed for at the moment, my wife received another form to fill in to see if her circumstances or her disability had changed at all. Many would probably find it funny that the government, the jobcentre, whoever sends these forms out, is of the belief that someone with Asperger's Syndrome will suddenly get better...we just find it infuriating, given that we last filled one of these forms in in December.

I am still searching for work, and I am currently attempting to increase my prospects by learning to drive (which in itself is costing a ridiculous amount of money). The job I applied for, and interviewed for, in London didn't come together in the end, so I am once again searching every day for work or experience.

Despite all of this, my wife and I are made to feel terrible for the lives we live, and it's building to the point where we stop even caring or trying anymore (for all the difference that it would make), leave the country, or end our lives.

It's great that a welfare system is able to push people to this point.

Have a good day.