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Who will speak up for the universal welfare state now?
Interesting article from John Harris in the Guardian, pondering the future (or otherwise) of universal benefits in the increasingly harsh rhetoric around welfare reform these days. Here’s some extracts, but the whole thing is worth a read.
Funny, isn’t it, how the Westminster government claims that help has to only be targeted at those most in need, while not only savagely cutting benefits for exactly those people, but sending out poisonous campaigning materials aimed at stirring up resentment among the more affluent, so they can cut even more? “The average working person pays a total of £3,100 per year to pay for benefits,” runs an online Tory document released a couple of weeks back, doing exactly what the universal principle was designed to avoid: cynically playing one part of the population against the other, and making out that “welfare” is something that happens to other people.
Funny, too, that such high-ups as George Osborne bemoans “taxing people on low incomes to pay for the child benefit of those earning so much more” when, as he must know, a progressive taxation system ensures that this has never actually happened. Strange, also, that so much noise is being made about the supposed iniquity of millionaires getting relatively trifling universal benefits when the government has just given them such a big tax cut.
This is the poisonous context in which the conversation about universalism is happening, and people on the left – nominally or otherwise – ought to be very careful indeed.
....we have to wearily go back to first principles. As the child benefit fiasco proves, means-testing and selectivity cost huge amounts of money and governmental effort. In stigmatising help and demanding engagement with a labyrinthine machine, selective benefits often fail to reach the people they are meant for (which is why over 25% of kids entitled to free school meals don’t get them, and the means-testing of winter fuel payment would be dangerous).
To use the language of the right, selective benefits also punish success. And yes: if nearly all pay in, most of us ought to get something out, and not just in the context of disability, unemployment, or old age.
Now, if anyone tells you that universalism can’t be afforded, think on this. The winter fuel payment costs an annual £2.2bn; free travel about £1bn; TV licences £600m. The child benefit cut will save £2bn a year. But the annual housing benefit bill, so much of which is a sticking-plaster for a private-rented sector that has spiralled out of control, stands at £22.4bn. Meanwhile, the cost of tax credits, which includes a vast de facto subsidy to poverty pay, runs to just under £30bn. These things denote the deep, structural issues that need to be addressed before any debate about universalism starts.
To read the whole article, see Who will speak up for the universal welfare state now?