Article by Michael Portillo on the jobless, for The Sunday Times,
30 August 2009.

The state “should not stifle incentive, opportunity, responsibility,” wrote Sir William Beveridge in the 1942 report that inspired the post-war welfare state.  “In establishing a national minimum it should leave room and encouragement for voluntary action by each individual to provide more than that minimum for himself and his family.”

Those cautionary words haunt us now as we discover that five million adults have not worked since Labour came to power twelve years ago.  Even excluding those who are in education or have only recently completed it, and discounting those who have now left the labour market through age or ill-health, two-and-a-half million have been jobless since 1997 at least.  There are now 3.3 million households – one in six – with no one over the age of 16 in employment, and 1.9 million children living in families without a parent in work. 

Whilst the recession is increasing the numbers, it clearly did not cause the problem.  Those millions remained idle during ten years of boom when the economy created many jobs which immigrants happily filled. The workless have been immune to programmes of training and mentoring.  No reform in our education system has dented their numbers, and repeated efforts to tighten the criteria for invalidity benefits or “sharpen” claimants’ contact with the labour market have failed.

Beveridge was not the first to spot the risk that providing benefits for people out of work could encourage dependency.  In 1834 followers of the philosophical radical Jeremy Bentham succeeded in shaping the poor law absolutely to discourage idleness.  The reform offered only relief in workhouses whose conditions would be worse than existing on even the most meagre wage.  Such stony-hearted attitudes could not survive into the more democratic twentieth century.

Even so, before World War I Beveridge was certainly not advocating that the state should look after people from cradle to grave.  He believed in practical measures and self-help.  He persuaded Winston Churchill to create labour exchanges on the German model and to require workers to insure against unemployment.  It was only when the inter-war slump exhausted the insurance fund that the government was forced to introduce uninsured handouts.

That dole was deeply resented as undermining a man’s dignity.  He wanted work because that enabled him to support his own family.  Depending on state or private charity carried a heavy stigma. 

Having seen the impact of the Great Depression, it must have been unimaginable to Beveridge that anyone would choose to live on benefit in preference to being in work.  Given the strong ethos of the age it was not just wishful thinking to assert that the state should not stifle incentive or responsibility.

Society today is very different.  Stigma has been abolished.  To live on benefit has become a lifestyle choice.  In many families there is no memory of anyone working.  Ours is a culture of entitlement, a word coined to minimise shame and maximise claiming.  As a result, taxpayers have spent £346 billion on payments to those out of work since Tony Blair entered Downing Street.

The money is not the main concern, even in hard times.  Clearly, we can afford unemployment financially, since we have dished out the money year after year.  Until recently it has not even excited much comment.  All that idleness has been economically manageable too, as there has always been a supply of willing workers from abroad to clean the streets and hospitals, serve us our burgers and pull our pints.

The question is whether it is morally affordable.  Is a society not corrupted when a large part of it is happy to live off the efforts of others?  Should we not be concerned about the spiritual poverty of so many lives spent unproductively?  Even if self-interest were our only concern, doesn’t an aimless underclass pose a serious threat to all through crime and disorder? 

More than twenty years ago I was already wrestling with those questions as a social security minister, and they are undoubtedly still more acute now.  I was strongly affected then by the studies of trends in the United States identified by the conservative polemicist Charles Murray.

I thought of his work again last week as praise was heaped on the late Senator Ted Kennedy for his work to improve the standing of black Americans.  Constitutional reforms in the 1960s under the presidencies of his brother John and of Lyndon Johnson undoubtedly transformed the political rights of minorities; and the senator’s own efforts back then cleared the way for a black president to enter the White House.  But the welfare reforms of American liberals in that era paralysed the economic progress of millions.

To quote Murray: “During this period fundamental changes occurred in the philosophy, administration and magnitude of social welfare programmes for low-income families, and these changes altered – both directly and indirectly – the social risks and rewards, and the financial costs and benefits, of maintaining a husband-wife family.”

Because black families were amongst the poorest – but not because they were black – they fell victim to spiralling welfare budgets.  Money from the state devalued education, discouraged work and marriage, encouraged teenage pregnancy and undermined parental authority. 

The same has happened to the poorest people in Britain, only more so.  At least in the United States the destructive advance of welfare has been questioned and slowed because most Americans still have an antipathy for government intervention in people’s lives. Also, for many poor Americans religious faith has sustained their sense of purpose and self-esteem. 

In Britain – maybe throughout Western Europe – belief in work, vocation, community, family and God have declined together.  Being workless and feeling worthless often go together.   For a large group of people today life has no goals.  At best, the unrealisable hope of winning the lottery or appearing on Big Brother has supplanted the traditional appetite for qualifications and careers.

Murray’s book Losing Ground, his influential 1984 analysis of American social policy, was closely followed by Lawrence Mead’s Beyond Entitlement, the title of which summarises what would need to be done.  We ought not to be handing out benefits as a matter of right.  They should help people through misfortunes, not subsidise slobbery.  They should go to the deserving not the undeserving.  They should pull people up not push them down. 

It might have been possible for the state to fine-tune benefits in that way in the days when parishes organised relief and every claimant was known to the local poor law guardians.  It is much more difficult today in systems that are nationalised and standardised. 

But perhaps, at least, we ought to assume that fit young people are not entitled to anything.  If a few young men from sink estates are now heroes in Afghanistan, why should we presume that all the others are capable of nothing useful at all?  Maybe we should generally make benefits conditional on progress in education or training.  We could endow charities to deal at their discretion with exceptional cases. Undoubtedly, we should find out why teenage pregnancies in Holland, for example, run at a fraction of the rate here, and stop offering free housing as an incentive to embark on motherhood. 

Last week the Conservatives raised a hue and cry against the government for its welfare failures.  But it is unclear how brave a Tory government could be.  While I served in Margaret Thatcher’s governments we made no progress in reducing dependency, while lobby groups howled that we were destroying the benefits system.  Whenever I asked Murray what to do, he was pessimistic that a democratic society could take measures tough enough to halt our moral degeneration.

He is probably right.  But at least we should face up to what is happening.  Beveridge wanted the welfare state to tackle squalor, ignorance, want, idleness and disease.  I would guess that after six decades it has failed to reduce ignorance, and I feel sadly confident that it has boosted idleness.