By Brendan O’Neill in the Daily Telegraph:
"The Left won't thank him for it, but in the Guardian Liam Byrne has tried to kickstart a potentially interesting debate about the welfare state.”
“Byrne's mistake is that he seems motivated by a narrow desire to save the state money. The financial cost of social welfare is "simply too high", he says, and we should "bring down [the] benefits bill to help pay down the national debt". That is a Scrooge's approach to the problem of the welfare state. The really terrible cost of ever-expanding welfarism is measured not in cash, but in the impact welfarism has on working communities, on those who have been made increasingly reliant upon the charity, largesse and therapeutic meddling of the massive and monolithic welfare machine. Relentless financial and therapeutic intervention by the state into poor people's lives has, not surprisingly, had a pretty devastating impact both on social interaction and individual aspiration.”
O’Neill highlights a mistake that conservative critics of the welfare state often make: taking the “Scrooge approach”. As O’Neill points out, the real cost of welfare is the human cost. By sticking to dollars and cents issues, conservatives are try to stay away from controversy but what they are really doing is playing to type: mustachio twirling cardboard villains out of central casting who only care about the bottom line, vs. compassionate crusaders who care about the People (i.e. the liberals).
"When people come to be more reliant on the state than they are on each other, community bonds fray and social solidarity falls into disrepair. When the struggling mum looks to the state for help, rather than turning to family, friends, neighbours, the end result is that she becomes more isolated from her community. When a 17-year-old school student short of cash turns to the state for a weekly handout, he never really develops skills of self-sufficiency or dependency on friends and neighbours. When young men looking for work know that the state will sustain them for long periods of time, especially if they make a performance of being "ill" or "depressed" at the dole centre, then their instinct to work becomes frayed. The old healthy working-class habits of pulling together, "getting on one's bike", offering one another work and advice have slowly but surely – and tragically – been replaced by the "helping hand" of the ever-watchful state. People start to rely less on their own wits and mates, and more on the faceless keepers of charitable cash.”
To roll back the welfare state, we need to start making arguments like this. Conservatives instinctively avoid this kind of talk because it is controversial. And they are right. It is controversial. The liberals will scream. But they scream because they realize that the opponents of the welfare state are getting to the heart of the matter, and challenging the welfare state’s raison d’etre. The financial arguments are important but they leave the legitimacy of founding principles of welfarism intact, allowing “have-you-no-heart!” appeals to continue to be made.
“The radical Left once believed in the power of the working man not only to hold down a job but also to remake society and the future – to watch them now fight tooth-and-nail in defence of the idea that much of the working class is pathetic and weak and in need of permanent care by the welfare state is genuinely depressing.
It is always those with ample cash and cushy jobs who rush to defend the welfare state. That's because they have no idea what living under the welfare state is like, and how harshly it impacts on community life and the individual soul.”
“Community life” and “individual soul”, those are the kinds of words that need to be on the lips of welfare state critics more often.
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