Basic income - paying young men to "play video games and watch Internet porn"

There are many things wrong the the idea of basic income but this is, in my view, the killer reason why it is a really dumb idea:

Another major problem with the basic-income thesis is that its intrinsic vision of society is morally problematic, even perverse: individuals are entitled to a share of social prosperity but have no obligation to contribute anything to it. In the authors’ vision, it is perfectly acceptable for able-bodied young men to collect a perpetual income while living in mom’s basement or a small apartment and doing nothing but play video games and watch Internet porn.

From Aaron Renn's review of Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy, by Philippe Van Parijs and Yannick Vanderborght

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Don't give a single penny of your hard-earned, post-tax income to Oxfam

It's always a little depressing when you read something from a university - an elite university to boot - that is really dumb. And even more depressing when you discover that the author of the dumbness isn't some over-idealistic second year student but the "Director for UK Poverty" at international development charity, Oxfam.

Yes I know, I know. You all though Oxfam was all about feeding starving folk in war-torn Africa. Well think again. Oxfam's connection to its original mission of relieving famine is tenuous at best. This 'charity' (and I place it in scare quotes deliberately) has ceased to be one dedicated to such a purpose but has become instead a lobby organisation using its income to create jobs such as "Director for UK Poverty" that have precisely zero connection to the idea of relieving poverty and everything to do with promoting an odious - and discredited - political position.

Here's a taster:

So, even if it is difficult to see how people can escape from poverty without working, it is also increasingly difficult to claim with any degree of understanding that work is the route out of poverty. Lots of jobs which are essential to our society and economy – and indeed to bigger business – need wider support.

By wider support, Oxfam mean higher taxes and more welfare benefits. And the idea that there is any - even the tiniest - comparison between children growing up in the soft embrace of the UK's welfare system and children growing up in, say, Congo or Laos is utterly, criminally wrong. The life chances of UK children with access to free healthcare, free education, generous welfare payments and extensive social services is better than those for most of the world's children. Yet this man from Oxfam wants us to believe that, in global terms, what he calls poverty in Britain is comparable to actual elsewhere in the world.

The article continues for some time in this vein, presenting selected facts and gratuitously exploitative graphical comparisons all wrapped about with references to 'social justice' - as if that actually means anything. And the solution? The pathetic, risible, thoughtless, ill-informed and crass solution? The 'social justice'?

Take more money off someone else, live up to the adage, "there's always someone, somewhere not paying enough tax and it isn't me". It sickens me that the only response to inequality these people can dream up is higher taxes on an undefined group of "tax avoiders". And, in this case it reminds me why we should not give a single penny of our hard-earned, post-tax cash to Oxfam.

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So let's not talk about the 'jobs miracle', let's talk about welfare instead!

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The latest figures for employment, unemployment and jobs came out yesterday and it's fair to say that they are, without question, good figures:

UK unemployment has fallen to its lowest rate since July 2008, official figures have shown.

The number of jobless people dropped by 76,000 to 1.84 million in the three months to February, the Office for National Statistics said on Friday.

That means the unemployment rate has fallen to 5.6%, in line with forecasts.

Average weekly earnings in the three months to February, excluding bonuses, rose by 1.8% compared with the same period a year earlier.

Growth was slightly lower than the rate in January. When bonuses are included, weekly earnings rose by 1.7%.

The number of people claiming Jobseeker's Allowance in March fell by 20,700 to 772,400, the ONS said.

Add to this record numbers of job vacancies and we should be looking forward to continuing growth in employment plus, as vacancies begin to outstrip the number unemployed, rising real wages.

The New Statesman, which I guess we can describe as part of the 'intelligent left', published an article (by Jonathan Portes) with this headline:

About that Conservative jobs miracle... 

Now you'd expect therefore that the article would discuss - perhaps with some criticism or different analysis - those figures I quote above. But in a long article packed with data not one word address that 'Conservative jobs miracle'. Instead we get Portes' usual, tightly argued position on welfare reform. Or in this case benefits paid to people who are sick and disabled. And as I read it, the jobs miracle (in Portes' view) isn't down to people coming off incapacity benefit - he doesn't provide any indication as to what might have contributed and seems more interested in the budget deficit rather than why so many people have found work.

For me the positioning of an article about welfare as an article about jobs reveals the extent to which the intelligent left is prepared to ignore good economic news and to poke about trying to find something wrong with what's happening out there. I find this all a bit sad. But then the intelligent left has always been a terribly 'glass half empty' bunch.

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Big state, small state...on Simon Wren-Lewis's ideological obsession with big government

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Sometime the careful manufacture of a straw man is a useful tool to present an argument. Indeed, the thing with a hypothesised model as the basis for criticism - even if the real world is different - is that it allows people to marshall the strengths and understand the weaknesses of their ideology.

But this is a story about the other sort of straw man. The more common one constructed in order to provide sustenance for a given position regardless of the actual truth. Perhaps the most common straw man out there is the argument against any reform of the National Health Service on the basis that the only alternative is a "US-style health system". No-one proposes such a change but the opponents of the changes that are proposed always used this straw man to frame their argument.

However, for shockingly bad straw men, this blog post from Simon Wren-Lewis is a masterpiece. The core facts are (sort of, arguably) correct but are carefully placed alongside other facts to which they do not directly relate. All this to make this point about big government:

Perhaps it reflects the power of an ideology that its protagonists want to see no evil. Perhaps it is because those hurt by austerity somehow do not count. But the claim that Osborne’s cuts have been such a success that they will cause a “deeper intellectual wound to the left than we currently understand” is simply delusional. These are fantasy ideas from those living in an imaginary world, while in reality the policies they support do serious harm.

To  arrive at this position (and I've no quarrel with people thinking big government is just grand - it's just not a viewpoint I share) Wren-Lewis has had to strangle the evidence. Because the ideological bias is revealed - the protagonists of a small state are "evil" - it is clear that this was the starting point for the construction of the straw man rather than a more considered assessment (something we'd expect from an Oxford academic but don't get here) of the arguments for and against reducing the size of government.

So let's look at Wren-Lewis's arguments:

The first one relates to the idea - widely held but wholly inaccurate - that there is no longer any constituency still arguing, on principle, for a big state. I find this odd since the majority of our public policy discourse and especially that driven by Wren-Lewis's colleagues in academia demands ever more regulation, control and direction from government.  Perhaps if he had a conversation with some sociologists this might clear up his weird belief that support for a big state "...lost all its influence with Margaret Thatcher and New Labour, and it has also lost its influence in the rest of Europe." In historical terms the state remains large - reducing the government portion of GDP to 35% from its current level approaching 50% is an argument about the size of government but doesn't fundamentally challenge the central welfarist argument of modern government - a position supported (to differing degrees) by left, centre-left and centre-right.

Wren-Lewis next claims that 'small state people' (he manages to use the preferred term of abuse 'neoliberal' as well but 'small state people' is wonderfully patronising) are not as good as him because - he claims - not to have any "fixed ideological position" about whether the state should be large or small. Whereas, of course, the sad little state people are attached to their ideology. The problem is that Wren-Lewis doth protest too much - he is absolutely wedded to the idea of big government and to the view that government actions determine the direction of the economy not the aggregated choices of private individuals. It is true that, if (for whatever reason - call it ideology if you must) government sets out to reduce its size then this will have the short term effect Wren-Lewis describes. But this is essentially an argument for the big government macroeconomy that created the very financial crisis Wren-Lewis wants to blame on 'private sector activity'. The idea that the choices of big governments had no role in wrecking the economy a decade ago is a wholly indefensible position more revealing of Wren-Lewis's ideological preferences than any assessment of the facts.

Before his final piece of ideological legerdemain, Wren-Lewis arrives at the debate over whether the reductions in government spending have had a social cost. Which he presents via this little rant about food banks:

The number of food banks in the UK has grown massively over the last five years. The Trussell Trust estimate that more than half of their clients were receiving food because of benefit delays, sanctions, and financial difficulties relating to the bedroom tax and abolition of council tax relief.

Now I'm not going to deny that changes to welfare resulted in some hardship but the frank truth was that our system was unsustainable - even in a world where big government is OK. Wren-Lewis wants to argue that the reforms have been 'duds' - yet he knows that this is not the case. It is the old methods such as the Work Programme that evolved from Labour's New Deal schemes that are duds not the use of financial incentives to drive different choices. The problem is that the system of redistribution we have in the UK is now almost entirely paid for through borrowing (or if you prefer it the other way - because so much of the money raised in taxes goes in welfare payments there isn't enough left to provide the services we actually want government to provide so we have to borrow).

Finally Wren-Lewis arrives at his intellectually-dishonest conclusion in which he calls people on the right 'evil' and argues that the polices such people propose cause 'serious harm'. What Wren-Lewis cannot admit is that not only might that supposed harm be mitigated through some welfare-enhancing private action (those food banks, for example) but also that the policies of big government might also cause 'harm'. There are a whole series of government interventions and regulations that reduce trade, undermine enterprise and limit private choices - all of which might be described as 'harm'.

Wren-Lewis built a fine straw man. Truly magnificent in its vanity. But there's no truth in the central premise that people like Wren-Lewis are not wedded to the idea of big government in the manner that others (George Osborne in the main) are wedded to the idea of small government. And Wren-Lewis clearly demonstrates his ideological commitment to big government which means his splendid straw man collapses into a shallow polemic.

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Policies that work - the benefits cap...

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We were promised destitution and other horrors but...

Between April 2013 and August 2014, 51,200 households had their housing benefit capped, according to a Department for Work and Pensions statistical release yesterday. This number had dropped to 27,200 households by August 2014. Forty per cent of those no longer subject to the cap – 9,600 households – are exempt with an open Working Tax Credit.

Unpiggle the language and this is telling us that we capped the benefits and, lo, the people having that cap imposed went and got jobs. Well I never!

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Poverty: perhaps it's time to seek solutions rather than blame?

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Political systems must love poverty - they produce so much of it. Poor people make easier targets for a demagogue. No Mao or even Jiang Zemin is likely to arise on the New York Stock Exchange floor. P. J. O'Rourke

Julian Dobson writes, in his inimitable style about poverty in Sheffield:

A couple of weeks ago at the State of Sheffield event, with civic leaders, voluntary sector movers and shakers, academics and more, it was mentioned that one in five children are living in poverty.

This was a meeting to hear the facts, not a call to action. Yet there are some facts that can't simply be added to compendiums of data, analysed, mulled over and wheeled out the next year for comparison. 

Julian goes on to report 'anger' (I would prefer to describe it as faux-anger) and to argue that this rage must be focused to 'hard thinking' with the observation that "you can't live on anger".

The problem for me is that this anger (usually from comfortably off folk) is as much directed to finding people and institutions to blame for poverty as it is to either mitigating or eliminating that poverty. Fingers are pointed at banks, at governments, at politicians and at grand but nebulous things like 'capitalism' or 'inequality'. The problem is that none of this does anything to reduce the number of people 'living in poverty'. Indeed the endless search for bigger and bigger numbers reduces the issue to a game of poverty top trumps rather than addressing the real and pressing problem of absolute material lack.

P J O'Rourke pointed out that there should be no poverty in the USA. Not as some sort of moral statement but simply as an observation about the amount of money spent on anti-poverty programmes by the US government - the income gap (i.e. the amount of money needed to make poor people not poor) was about $50.3bn back in 1991 and the amount spent on recognised anti-poverty schemes by various agencies of government was approaching $98bn. Ergo no poverty.

The same applies in the UK. We spent around £100bn every year alleviating poverty (and this doesn't include such things as free school meals, subsidised housing or funding directed through the voluntary sector, let alone the value of free education and healthcare - it's just half the benefits bill). The Joseph Rowntree Foundation estimate that there are 13.5 million people below the 'poverty line'. A simple calculation tells us that, assuming my £100bn estimate is right, we have about £7,500 per poor person. And bear in mind that most of those people are not on zero income. It should be enough to eliminate poverty.

The problem is that we have a really inefficient and incompetent system of distributing money intended to alleviate poverty. This isn't just the amoral bureaucratic incompetence of making people wait weeks with no income at all while some sort of turgid paperchase is conducted. It's the stupidity of a benefits system that pays money to people who are not remotely poor. And it's the nonsense of spending billions on advocacy, policy and planning rather than more purposefully on helping poor people.

What we've seen recently is that ordinary people are better able to organise the alleviation of poverty than is government. There has been a great deal of nonsense talked about food banks and other voluntary or community responses to poverty but the real message is that these new institutions - private, flexible and creative - are a success in the way that the poverty relief systems and institutions of government are not.

Getting angry is a pointless response to the challenge of poverty. Nor is organising endless seminars, conferences and workshops where poverty is discussed by people who aren't remotely poor (but who make a fine living out of talking about how they help the poor). The answer perhaps lies in private action, in charity and in mutual support - in those very things that were destroyed by the nationalisation and centralisation of education, welfare, and health care.

Sharing my rage in a tweet or even in a blog post does not solve the problem. Any more than does the totting up of poor people, the categorising of their ills and the publishing of calls for government - the very institution that has proven incapable of relieving poverty - to do more. Worst of all are those who want to point the finger of blame at the blameless: at the wealthy just for being wealthy, at the banker for wearing a suit and driving a nice car and by repeating the big lie of the left again and again - that one man's wealth makes another man poor.

This simply isn't true. Poverty isn't the same as inequality and nor does inequality create poverty. Yet people repeat the lie until it corrosive envy starts to destroy the very thing - creating and adding value - that points the way out from poverty. It really is time to start looking for solutions - local, creative, flexible and caring solutions - rather than celebrating vast tomes that merely place the blame.

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Food banks, poverty and welfare - a confused debate

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The other day the Joseph Rowntree Foundation published its latest work on the impact of welfare reform. And not surprisingly, JRF paint a depressing picture:

...welfare reform may end up making tenants more, not less, dependent, and certainly more vulnerable. Cutbacks in support make people on low incomes, in work and out, more vulnerable to debt, risk of eviction and shortage of necessities, necessities, so they rely on food banks and other emergency support. 

This is not the place to criticise JRF's methodology - it repeats what I see as an approach that places being well-informed above quantitative accuracy. However, the research reminds us of an ongoing debate around the impact of welfare reforms on our society, specific groups within welfare recipients (e.g. the disabled, social housing tenants) and whether poverty has increased.

We saw another report - some research into food banks (I'll point out that the methodology here is a great example of presenting opinion as research). Again the criticism is telling:

...Lambie-Mumford's new study...says the rise in demand for charity food is a clear signal "of the inadequacy of both social security provision and the processes by which it is delivered".

It seems to me that the subsequent debate (and I'm with the DWP, asking the opinion of 25 people, however well-informed they might be, doesn't help understand the nature or scale of a problem) is conducted by a process where I say 'yep' and you say 'nope'.  Or more precisely, one set of folk are saying; 'these reforms are working', while another set claim they're making things worse.

It remains a fact that food aid provision in the UK has grown over the past decade and that this reflects a growth in need for this kind of aid. However, when some people suggest that the 'need' might be in part created by the provision of food aid they should not be dismissed out of hand. It seems possible that this might be the case and it doesn't detract from the observation that much of the need is entirely genuine.

Part of the problem here is that (again this is entirely understandable) we have focused on what we see as a problem rather than on the somewhat secondary issue of evaluation - Lambie-Mumford et al acknowledge this:

At the time of the research there was no systematic peer-reviewed evidence from the UK on the reasons or immediate circumstances leading people to seek food aid 

So, in the lack of real evidence of what drives demand for food aid (and food banks specifically), we fall back on the views of the well-informed - those working in the food banks:

The factors identified by these organisations as important drivers leading people to seek food aid include both immediate problems which had led to sudden reduction in household income (two examples often cited by these organisations were job losses and problems associated with social security payments), and on-going, underpinning circumstances (such as continual low household income and indebtedness) which can no longer support purchase of sufficient food to meet household needs.

In our debate therefore we need to distinguish between the two types of 'need'. Short-term need (anecdotally this seems to be the biggest part of demand) goes away - we shouldn't defend the bureaucratic uselessness that sits at the bottom of the issue but it should resolve itself.  And we should also recognise that food aid represents an admirable response from the wider society to need within its midst.

When we discuss whether welfare reform works, this short-term problem, shouldn't be our focus. Rather we should look at the persistence of low income amongst food aid recipients. If the problems relate to welfare reform - most commonly changes to housing benefit or the benefits cap - then we need to understand why this is so. On one level the best response is to get a job since this ends the cap and 'single room supplement' but this isn't always as easy as it sounds especially for someone who hasn't worked since god knows when.

Another option is to reduce other outgoings (getting rid of debts is a good start but again rather easier said than done) such as housing costs. But again this is not as straightforward as it seems. What appears entirely missing is the support to get these families from their current unsustainable poverty to a more sustainable, directed future. The stress on human intervention (mostly aimed at moving people from welfare dependence to work) ignores the impact that short-term financial intervention might produce.

I've said before that we need to have a better debate about poverty than the one we're having right now. This debate is confused by the lack of clear statistical analysis of the problem's scale (made worse by the unquestioning reporting of qualitative work as if is absolute proof) as well as by a continued confusion between 'poverty' and 'inequality'. I'm more bothered about the fact that some in our society lack for food - real poverty - than by contested measures of inequality or questionable arguments claiming inequality lies at the root of all societal sins.

Our response to poverty is made worse - much worse - by our inability to agree that poverty is absolute material deprivation not some economic assessment determined by the Duke of Westminster's wealth. We rightly include things in our meaning of 'absolute material deprivation' that wouldn't have been there in times past (or indeed in a similar assessment in Nigeria or Bangladesh) and depriving people of pleasures - TV, beer, cigarettes - is as much as aspect of poverty as depriving them of food, shelter or clothing. But poverty - as JRF show with their minimum income calculation - isn't something we assess relative to the earnings of others but something we determine by describing what people shouldn't go without.

I'd like some more research - rigorous, quantitative research - that starts to answer the questions we all ask - what's driving the need for food aid, how many people are in a state of absolute material deprivation and whether changes to welfare benefits are making matters worse. Right now this information seems (other than the ever creative DWP figures) lacking resulting in the debate being more about anecdote and political knock-about than a search for ways to eliminate the need for food aid.

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Basic income, human nature and freedom

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I thought about this basic income idea - it sounds, as these things do, wonderfully Utopian:

A basic income is an income unconditionally granted to all on an individual basis, without means test or work requirement.

And, for it to make any sort of sense, it has to be big enough for people not to have to work so as to live. According to some this is a good thing but I'm not so sure - it does rather depend on the nature of the choices made by individuals whose only options are low paid work at a level slightly above the basic income.

I recall a lecture on crime and social conditions during my masters degree study. The lecturer (I'm afraid I forget his name) began by asking us: "would you work 35 hours a week for £7?" That was - give or take a few pence - the difference then between what we might get on benefits and what we might earn in a low paid job. The response was mixed - some said 'yes' arguing that this might lead to opportunities for still more lucrative work while others said 'no' since there is no real prospect of advancement (and we could earn a little on the black).

The idea of basic income makes this even more stark. That £7 a week job is now gone since the basic income is far in excess of the previous level of benefits. And because that income is enough to live on (that's the whole point after all), the number of people who become drones - living off the efforts of others - increases and is not tolerated. It may seem cute to say this:

Jobs are scarce, so it's better for workers if some are subsidized not to seek them, leaving more opportunities for those who do want to work.

...but that little tic of common sense suggests that those idling their lives away on basic income will be resented by those working and paying for their idleness. And that more and more people would seek such a life - after all most people see their job as a means to an end rather than an end in itself. So if the reason for working - providing for self and family - is removed, these people will stop working. And will be resented by those who are working.

All this is wrapped up in the view that there are too many people - or rather, too many workers. And that this problem will increase as technology finds more ways to do things without people that now require people to do them. Hence we need to either find things for the surplus to do ("the government must create jobs") or else we pay them to sit around doing nothing.

In the end, if we pay people to do nothing (in the mistaken belief that there's nothing productive for them to do) what we'll end up with is the corvée. The workers (assuming there's a sufficiency of them) will expect those idling around on a basic income to do something. And government will find that something. The drones stop being an escape valve for supposed excess labour and become a slave resource for the wealthy governors.

Welcome to the new slave state, the 21st century oikos society!

So a glimpse at the possible future. In his monumental “History of Government”, Finer used the Greek word oikos to describe ancient world governments. Oikos means “the household” which for the Greeks meant family under a male head including slaves and other dependents. We are headed back towards such a polity – where we are free in our daily actions within the constraints placed on that freedom by the government and its advisors. And the product of our labour belongs not to us but to the group and to the state – not through confiscation but through a combination of taxation and benefit dependency. It may even be the case that those out of work will be directed toward “socially useful” labour – a precursor of which we see in Labour’s “Future Jobs Fund”. Future jobs are not wealth creating but have a social purpose paid for either through taxation or (less likely) through philanthropy.

It may be "efficient" but it won't be free.

I prefer free.
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Thoughts on work, welfare and Bradford...

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So I'm sat at the breakfast table in a North Yorkshire B&B where, by happenstance, everyone present has a current or past connection with Bradford. The conversation chitters back and forth, what people do (or don't do), memories of Bradford and inevitably a discussion about Bradford's 'problems' such as they are.

What struck me however wasn't the shared concern about Bradford but the near universal view that, at the heart of the problems - 'grooming' of young girls, crime, city centre decline, the persistent failure of estates like Ravenscliffe, Holme Wood and Allerton - sits the benefits system. Not immigration, not the corruption of youth by radical clerics and not even the legacy of industrial decline. The benefits system.

The discussion touched on using pregnancy as a route to housing, on why Bradfordian's don't take jobs killing chickens despite the lack of work and how the Asian community now seems to have a more enterprising outlook that the white population. And we kept coming back to there being no - or insufficient - incentive for someone to take that chicken-killing job.

What my fellow politicians need to understand is that, if we proceed to ignore these views and listen to the welfare industry's special pleading, we reveal ourselves to be just as out-of-touch as that industry. Everyone but us seem to see a world filled with people living off benefits, cash earnings and petty crime - a world of smuggled booze and fags where social and family arrangements are determined by the best way to maximise income from benefits rather than by the desire to support a future generation to success.

Those people sat round that table may be wrong - for sure we aren't representative. But those voices remind me that the need for benefits reform isn't about saving money. It's not about cuts. And it's not about "demonising the poor" as so many advocates of welfarism claim. No.

We need benefits reform so as to give the people - and especially the young people - of Bradford's inner city and Bradford's estates the right chances and incentives to succeed, to get to a place where an Incommunities flat in Buttershaw isn't the only choice.

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This is (largely) true...

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From The Clown:

If you look back at anything that the British state has done, it has inevitably taken functioning, competing businesses that delivered good services, nationalised them, let them become an overgrown complicated bureaucratic mess with utterly shitty service and a jobsworth corporate culture and then outsourced it equally badly.

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We need to talk about poverty...

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There is no poverty. Really there isn’t - or at least that is what the numbers should tell us.  But take a moment to glimpse at reality and you will see poverty. Not just the “relative poverty” that characterises the ‘living wage’ debate but real poverty - people who genuinely don’t know how they’ll afford to put food on the table tomorrow, people who really don’t have anywhere to live.

Two days ago an old cinema in Shipley caught fire – it’s now being demolished as an unsafe building. One tweet I saw suggested that it might have started from a tramp lighting a fire to keep warm on a cold, snowy night. It may turn out that there was some other cause but, sadly, this suggestion could very well be true. For whatever reason there are people sleeping rough on even the coldest night – and this is poverty.

Too many of us look at this and throw up our hands in despair. After all we’ve had a welfare system for over 100 years and a welfare state for nearly 70 – and still there are people who end up unable to heat their home, wondering whether they can feed their children and lacking in any hope or aspiration. So when I see people “defending” the welfare state, I want to scream and point to the terrible injustice of poverty. 

Understand that this welfare system of ours does not work if there are food banks. The welfare system does not work if charities have to pay for kids to get breakfast. And does not work if disabled people have to – almost literally – jump through hoops to get the support they need to play a full part in our society.

This is not the welfare system created by the current government – for sure, the Coalition has tinkered a bit round the edges - but the substance of the system is an accumulation from decades of responding to poverty. A tweak here, an adjustment there, a new benefit for some ‘problem’ group – single mums, old people, young people: whoever has the loudest voices shouting their case.

And it doesn’t work. If it worked there wouldn’t be any poverty.

But there is poverty. And something should be done about it.

Not just ameliorating its effects when they manifest themselves but answering the question “why?” Why, when we are richer than we’ve ever been, do so many people seem to miss out? And why is that failure – that poverty – persisting down the generations?

The debate is sterile – on one side we have the advocates of welfarism telling us that we should simply spend more money. That benefits should be higher. That more people should get benefits. And that we should take more money off other people to make this possible. This is a depressing argument – we’re spending over £200 billion on welfare, half of which can be seen as seeking to alleviate poverty. Yet we still have poor people – if that isn’t an indicator of a failed system, I don’t know what is.

Set against this “just spend more” approach is the contention that the poor are undeserving and that, if you just took away the drip-feed of benefits, they’d all go off and get jobs. And there is a grain of truth there – welfare benefits do act as a disincentive to work for some people. But the substance of the argument is not just uncaring but unjust and irresponsible too.

It seems to me that, as Conservatives, we need to stop responding to the welfarists’ cries of pain with a sort of “tough love” – payment cards, bans, controls, mandation: ordering the poor about because we can. Instead we should develop our own narrative of poverty – recognising that it exists, appreciating both its scale but also the extent to which each story represents a little human tragedy.

However, we need first to get across – to repeat until we’re blue in the face – that one person being rich doesn’t make another person poor. Indeed, that man’s success is more likely to get people out from poverty than to push people into that state.

Secondly we need to explain – on the give a man a fishing rod principle – that we must give priority to stopping tomorrow’s poverty rather than simply dealing with today’s poverty. This means facing down the education mafia who think it’s OK that the children of poor people get a worse education – or rather claim that the education they’re given isn’t worse despite all the evidence to the contrary. And it means that schools must see it as part of their role to get children into work.

I recall an English teacher from what some would call a “sink school” describing how teaching the bottom set of fifth-formers was soul-destroying until he decided to try and get them jobs rather than push them through an exam most of them would fail. And he did that until the head teacher stopped him – getting the exam results up, rising through the league table was more important than seeing to it that the children leaving at 16 did so with a bit of a start in life.

The third thing we need to say is that too many people get benefits they don’t really need. This isn’t to say that child benefit, for example, isn’t very useful, a real blessing for many families but it is to say that those families wouldn’t be tipped into poverty – unable to feed the kids – if that benefit was lost to them. And the same goes for a lot of the “in-work” benefits, for winter fuel payments and free TV licenses.

And then we need to say that we will focus on poverty – on people who, for whatever reason, really are poor. Not just giving them money but sitting down with them, talking about what they want to do, how they got into the pickle they’re in and how they might find a way out. Right now our approach – and this has been true for years – is dominated by nannying, hectoring and finger-wagging. Rather than understand the problem we tell them off for drinking, for smoking and for getting fat.

This isn’t to say that these lifestyles are good but to suggest that condemning them without offering a route out is wrong. That single mum in a council flat probably hates her life more than the nannies can know – she doesn’t want to be overweight, she knows she drinks too much and the smoking has given her a cough. But just telling her off for these bad decisions doesn’t help – in probably makes it worse. And her life is still crap.

I don’t know the solutions – for some it may be too late. But I do know that the debate we’re having – whether it’s endless burble about “the cuts” or the language of “strivers” and “scroungers” – misses the point entirely. There are lots of people out there – some working for bits of the government, some for private businesses and many for charities – who are doing creative, thoughtful and productive things to help alleviate poverty. Perhaps we should work a little more with these people – find out what they’re doing, spread the good word and the great work.

Our current system has failed. You don’t need to go to Easterhouse to find this out – just take a look around your town. But the poverty that failure allows will not be resolved by throwing more cash in to the welfare system – not least because we can’t afford to do that. We need to refocus welfare so most of it goes to the genuinely needy rather than to people for whom it nice but not essential. And we need to give the children of those poor people the tools for them not to be poor when they grow up.

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The poor can't be trusted with money, can they?

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Alec Massie is a pretty mild-mannered writer. So it is a shock to read this:

I  wonder how many poor people, far less people on welfare, Mr Shelbrooke encounters. Some, presumably. But, my, what a vile little authoritarian he is. It has evidently escaped his notice that the reason many poor people spend a disproportionate quantity of their meagre resources on gambling is that they have such limited resources in the first place. It may not be an advisable or profitable policy but it is at least an understandable one.

For that matter, cigarettes and alcohol are not necessarily luxuries. They might instead be considered small pleasures that make life a little less ghastly. Especially when you lack means.

I notice, mind you, that Mr Shelbrooke makes no comment on whether it is OK for middle-class mothers to spend their child benefit on gin.

It may well be that Mr Shelbrooke has some support in these proposals. They are just the sort of saloon bar policy – I can picture him, G+T in hand at some golf club do, holding court with ways to make the unemployed behave properly. And it is this image rather than the policy that causes the problem. It is the moralising, patronage of the ruling classes to those less fortunate. We kindly provide these indigents and unfortunates with the means to sustain themselves and they promptly toddle off and spend it on cheap lager and superkings.

I lose count of the times when I’ve described the circumstances of the poor and why this leads to – almost requires – the consumption of small pleasures: booze, fags, sex and TV are what sustains these folk in what is a crap life. But people like Mr Shelbrooke from their blazered comfort choose instead to try and order the choices of the poor since, in his view, they are unable to make such choices without his help and direction.

"When hard-working families up and down the country are forced to cut back on such non-essential, desirable, it is right that taxpayer benefits be only used for essential purposes."

This approach describes entirely the problem facing the Conservative Party. People support benefits reform – the objective of making working financially more attractive that a life on the dole is admirable and overdue. But this is not about condemning the lifestyles of the poor, it’s about the practicalities of allowing these people to live while they – hopefully – sort their lives out. Patronising and judgemental policies such as this “welfare card” idea (and other idiocies that include minimum pricing for booze) just get people’s backs up.

Put simply, it isn’t the government’s job to judge other people’s lifestyle. And when a wealthy MP does this, the ordinary person looks up, shakes his head and mutters obscenities under his breath. If people like Mr Shelbrooke want to get re-elected in their marginal Northern seats they’d do well to take heed of this and start talking instead about responsibility rather than about dictating the choices for people with the misfortune to need benefits.

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Perhaps the RSPCA might like to actually help out?

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The RSPCA is a very large, very wealthy and very powerful organisation. It effect it acts as a private police force in matters relating to animal welfare. According to the 2010 Report & Accounts for this charity it has over £90 million in investments and an annual income of nearly £110 million.

Benfleet animal sanctuary is closing. Closing because the RSPCA wants it to close:

David Bowles, head of communications for the society, said: "There is a thin line between people wanting to do their best for animals and them getting into difficulties.

"When these places are set up, they get a reputation locally and get more people giving animals to them. Things can spiral out of control very quickly. That is when we tend to get called in.

"A lot of people may have run sanctuaries for a long time. They are getting old. They can no longer raise the funds that they used to raise. They can no longer feed the animals they used to feed." 

Maybe it's competition, perhaps this is just bureaucratic jobsworthiness, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't need to happen. Rather than beating up the owners of sanctuaries with the law:
 

But their life's work came to an abrupt end after the RSPCA visited on a routine inspection and accused them of animal cruelty.

Although they denied all the charges, they did not have the resources for a costly court case. To their continuing anguish, they agreed to close down the sanctuary and get rid of all the animals, in exchange for the case being dropped.

Maybe, just maybe, the RSPCA might like to consider dipping its paws into that nest egg of 'investments' - investments that were provided by the generosity of the charity's donors - to support sanctuaries rather than acting like the worst sort of bureaucratic nightmare and closing them down?

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The BBC - making the case for benefits reform (without meaning to)!

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The words are the regular BBC, soft soap, tear-jerking, sob story:

The family receive a total of £30,284.80 a year in benefits - well over the £26,000 cap proposed by the government. But, says Raymond, "If these proposals go through we will take a massive hit to our finances - and it's not as if we could move into a smaller or cheaper premises.

"I see eight people here having to choose between eating or heating."

Oh dear, this is terrible - how can the wicked coalition government inflict such suffering on this poor family!

Look again - the BBC provide a handy guide to the families expenditure - which includes:

Sky TV subscription - £15 per week
Mobile phones (plural) - £32 per week

...and a weekly shopping bill including 24 cans of lager, 200 cigarettes and a large pouch of tobacco. That's nearly £100 a week on booze and fags alone! And I'm guessing these aren't essentials to life?

After the cap is introduced this family will lose £82.40 per week. Seems to me that just cutting down on booze and fags plus moving to freeview telly would go most of the way to closing that gap - no need to turn the heating off or starve the kids, is there!

Bring on the welfare reform - if this is typical (and the BBC suggests that it is) there's plenty of room for savings without kids going without food or grandma dying of cold.

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What's the point of social enterprise then?

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The "third sector" often tells us how much more caring and socially aware it is. How the ethos of "not-for-profit" is so much superior to the dog-eat-dog world of for profit business. And, of course, how they're not in it for the cash. It seems they lied - or that's what is implied by these words from top Scottish social enterprise bod, Laurence Demarco:

“When you are paid if you get results, you will be inclined to select people who will give you a result, which will lead to whole groups of people which no-one will work with - it's inevitable,” he warned.  "I'm surprised at the lack of outrage from voluntary sector leaders."

So the voluntary sector - all those well-paid "leaders" to the fore - isn't interested in doing things voluntarily or being incentivised by delivering outcomes that benefit people? And, so long as the payment exceeds the cost, the market (for that's what it is) will continue to find people to help - only when either there's no-one left requiring assistance or the marginal cost exceeds marginal income will things stop.

But if you're a social enterprise - not-for-profit and all that jazz - this boundary doesn't matter. After all you have huge margins on helping the easy-to-help clients that, because you're not paying evil shareholders, you can invest in subsidising support to the really hard-to-help people.

That's the whole point of social enterprise, surely?


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In which I try to explain truth and reality to an archbishop

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I am worried. I appreciate that some may not see it my way but I really do prefer my bishops – when they comment on the political world – to have at least some connection to truth and reality. Sadly the Archbishop of Canterbury has lost this connection somewhere in his beard.

"With remarkable speed, we are being committed to radical, long-term policies for which no one voted," he writes. "At the very least, there is an understandable anxiety about what democracy means in such a context."

There are two ways to respond – the first one is to point out that, in our electoral system we vote for people not policies.  But I suppose that might get the riposte – “why do political parties have manifestos then?”  So there is a second response which is to ask – “so tell me, Your Grace, what policies did people vote for then?”

The Archbishop cites some policies – such as education:

"[T]he comprehensive reworking of the Education Act 1944 that is now going forward might well be regarded as a proper matter for open probing in the context of election debates."

Strangely enough Your Grace, by this very statement you have undermined your own argument. The idea of ‘free schools’ was in the Conservative Manifesto as was the need to do something to support schools in maintaining discipline and to make changes to the national curriculum. As to the continuing academy programme – that was legislation passed by the previous Labour Government, of course.

While the “we didn’t vote for this” line can be argued, the Archbishop’s comments on education policies are simply wrong. The proposed changes were probed “in the context of election debates”. For example here between “experts” and here between politicians. So you’re talking rubbish, Archbishop.

And then welfare. Here the Archbishop simply invents a straw man and attacks it with vigour:

Williams also launches a sustained attack on the government's welfare reforms, complaining of a "quiet resurgence of the seductive language of "deserving" and "undeserving" poor". In comments aimed at the Work and Pensions Secretary, Iain Duncan Smith, the Archbishop criticises "the steady pressure" to increase "punitive responses to alleged abuses of the system"

I admit to listening closely to the debate about welfare – after all, welfare reforms are very popular:

A new YouGov poll for Channel 4 News yesterday found strong public support for many of the government’s planned cuts to benefits. 73% of respondents supported the idea of making the long term unemployed do compulsory work placements or risk losing benefits, 66% supported withdrawing jobseekers allowance from people who turn down job offers or interviews, 69% supported more stringent testing of people claiming disability living allowance and 68% supported capping housing benefit at £400 a week, “even if this means people are forced to move house if they live in an area where the rent is high”. In all these cases the policies weren’t just popular amongst Conservative and Liberal Democrat supporters, they were also backed by a majority of Labour voters.

I appreciate that popular doesn’t equate to right but that polling – whatever you think of opinion research – does indicate something of a popular mandate for the policies being pursued. And making up opinions for Iain Duncan Smith (who I’m sure can arrive at an opinion without ecclesiastical assistance) simply doesn't look well on a bishop.

Finally, there’s the “Big Society”:

The Archbishop also questions David Cameron's "big society" agenda, a phrase which he describes as "painfully stale". He writes that the policy is viewed with "widespread suspicion" as an "opportunistic" cover for spending cuts, adding that is not credible for ministers to blame the last Labour government for Britain's problems.

Yet again we see the bishop simply parading his ignorance. Perhaps this is because he wasn’t listening when David Cameron first talked of the “Big Society”. However, the Archbishop has changed his tune just a little. Last September he had this to say on Newsnight:

"The positive side of the big society agenda in the present Government's language is I think not just about saving money or cutting corners - it's about some kind of effort to get hold of a strong sense of civic responsibility".

Maybe also the Archbishop spends too much time with the great and good rather than among ordinary people. On Tuesday evening I was at a Neighbourhood Forum in Denholme witnessing the big society:

·         The Town Council were recruiting volunteers to run the library – not just taking over from the Council but extending the hours and the services

·         A call was made for more volunteer drivers for the community transport scheme – taking the infirm, disabled and isolated to appointments, shopping and to the hospitals

·         The Community Association briefed the meeting about plans – at an early stage – to take over running the Mechanics Institute from the Council

This, dear Archbishop, is the ‘Big Society’ – it really is that simple. Perhaps you should get out of Lambeth Palace and into the real world once in a while – you might just learn something about people. 

It seems to me that the Archbishop should check his facts and try to adopt a logical approach to argument.  Or maybe just stick to god-bothering and marrying princes.

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