An identity crisis seems to be looming in Number 10. I’ve already commented on David Cameron’s startling adoption of quasi-Marxist rhetoric, so his attempt to morph into a combination of Lord Kitchener (‘Your country needs you’), and Winston Churchill (‘We must come together in the interests of our nation!’) during his speech the other day shouldn’t really have been surprising.
Increasingly, though, Dave’s starting to remind me of Jim, the leading character of the wonderful TV series Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister. Jim was a nice if somewhat vague chap who found himself in charge of the country despite never actually having won a general election. Once ensconced in Downing Street he came up with what he called his Grand Design, a plan to revolutionise the country which he loved, but nobody else could summon up any enthusiasm for. Eventually it was quietly dropped – it’ll be interesting to see if the Big Society goes the same way. The clincher for me in the Dave-as-Jim thing is that, crucially given what Cameron has in store for us in terms of cuts, Jim’s surname was Hacker.
I got grumbled at on Facebook recently for complaining that the Tories have sounded surprisingly reasonable at their conference, on the grounds that they haven’t. But really – being reasonable? No. Sounding reasonable? Yes, I think so. Dave’s Marxist moment was one example, while in his big speech he said, effectively, that it’s not fair for the state to offer a blank cheque of support to people who refuse to work if they’re actually able to – benefits should not be unlimited.
Well, even as somebody who spent quite a long time signing on while having no real intention of getting a job (in my defence I should point out I haven’t claimed any kind of benefit in over eleven years, even during a five-month period out of work not long ago), I can see that on face value that seems absolutely reasonable. No mature person could truly justify that sort of premeditated sponging and scrounging, could they? (Then again I would say the same thing about music and movie piracy, and I’m fully aware I’m in the minority about that.) But as with the removal of universal child benefit it’s when you get down into the details of the policy and its ramifications that things start to look a bit less clear-cut.
Cameron seems to want to draw a line between people on low incomes – oh, damn it, I’m just going to write ‘poor people’ from now on, for all that it sounds immensely patronising – who deserve to receive state benefits, and poor people who don’t. As a result he conjures an image of the undeserving poor, sunk in moral turpitude, set on effectively stealing from harder-working types. It’s enough to make the average Daily Mail reader quake. How many of these people does he think actually exist?
I’m reminded of George Orwell’s comments on the mythical ‘tramp monster’ from Chapter 36 of Down and Out in Paris and London:
‘In childhood we have been taught that tramps are blackguards, and consequently there exists in our minds a sort of ideal or typical tramp–a repulsive, rather dangerous creature, who would die rather than work or wash, and wants nothing but to beg, drink, and rob hen-houses… This tramp-monster is no truer to life than the sinister Chinaman of the magazine stories, but he is very hard to get rid of. The very word ‘tramp’ evokes his image.
And the belief in him obscures the real questions of vagrancy. To take a fundamental question about vagrancy: Why do tramps exist at all? It is a curious thing, but very few people know what makes a tramp take to the road. And, because of the belief in the tramp-monster, the most fantastic reasons are suggested.’
You could substitute ‘poor person’ for ‘tramp’ and ‘poverty’ for ‘vagrancy’ in there and I suspect you’d have a pretty good summary of attitudes to poverty amongst some Britons today, except that poverty has a more obviously economic basis (though not much more).
I’m not saying there are no fraudulent recipients of state benefit in this country. You could probably argue that I used to be one (many years ago). If Cameron was just announcing the Coalition will be zero-tolerant when it comes to benefit fraud, I’d have to say that was unobjectionable. (Then again it would’ve been quite fatuous, as no serious politician would hold any other position.) The trouble is, I don’t think that’s quite what he’s on about. The Tories are talking about setting benefit caps, regardless of the claimant’s situation, so that you’ll always be better off working than claiming dole.
So, presumably this is a mechanism to try and compel people into finding jobs. This seems to be predicated upon the belief that significant numbers of benefits claimants are, for want of a better expression, work-shy. For a party which claims to be optimistic about the nation it currently leads, that seems to be a rather negative view of human nature, amongst the poor at least. It also begs the question of what would happen should there not be enough jobs to go around.
There is also the issue of how this stacks up with the issue of child benefit. Cameron’s (easy) target is the unemployed couple who have eight children and rake in huge quantities of state benefit as a result of their enviable fertility (once again, this kind of example plays very well on the front of the Mail but I’d love to know how many there really are). It’s very difficult to argue with his assertion that the state shouldn’t subsidise this sort of lifestyle, until you realise that the consequence of such a subsidy being withdrawn is probably going to be child poverty.
So, presumably, in Dave’s Big Society the value we attach to children, even new-born babies, depends entirely on who their parents are. I don’t know about you, but no matter how lazy and lacking in self-respect a couple are, I still don’t think their kids deserve to suffer as a result. Not content with channelling the spirits of Karl Marx, Winston Churchill, and Jim Hacker, Dave seems to be going for the big one and imagining himself to be Jehovah circa the Book of Exodus, ‘punishing the children for the sin of the fathers .‘
As long as you give people the right to have as many children as they want, there’s always the potential for some couples to plop ‘em out relentlessly regardless of their ability to support themselves. As long as you provide the right to a dole of any kind, there will always be people who claim it frivolously. It’s part of the price you pay for living in a modern and humane society. Should you try and minimise that price? Of course. Are there things that can be done to reduce it? Yes. But lazy generalisations about a social group completely alien to you, not to mention the apparent writing off of actual human lives as necessary wastage? If this is Dave’s Big Society I’m glad I can’t quite grasp his drift.
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