Politics: Dispelling the myth of the underclass

[adderslj]

My American readers may delight in this statement:

The British welfare state is not working. I've become aware of that in the last couple of years, as I've seen the lifestyle of those who have no intention of working, yet are quite happy to siphon as much money out of the Government as they can, while subisdising their lifestyle with some drug dealing on the side. Somehow, in the minds of such people, the link between Government money and the taxpayer has been lost. They have no awareness of where the money comes from, and see it as their right to have it.

The current policy of the Labour Government has been based on the assumption that there is a persistent underclass of poor people, stuck in a poverty trap. This idea has been thoroughly debunked. Indeed, it has been debunked by a left wing think tank. Instead, it raises the notion that we have a lot of people in short-term unemployment and a hard-core of people who have no interest in working. We have a duty to support the former. We have no obligation to support those who sponge off the state without any desire to give anything back to the society around them.

Let's hope this is a first step towards a wholesale reform of social policy in the UK.

Comments

[eyebeams.livejournal.com]

As a Canadian reader, I think you might want to consider that the reason you're seeing these results are because your system is in fact working -- and that the concept of the welfare cheat may be slightly exaggerated in your mind.

I work with welfare recipients for a living. Every weekday, I meet them, work with them and help them learn vital skills. I would say that I end up meeting, all told, a sizeable percentage of welfare recipients in my community. I have only ever met a small minority of people whose relationship with social services is what I would call problematic -- from their end, at least. Government mandates usually result in caseworkers unduly harrassing their charges to the detriment of providing focused service. All this to catch Dreaded Welfare Cheats. Meanwhile, post-reform Ontario has record levels of homelessness; the increases directly correlate with reforms.

Further, I have to say that if your definition of "underclass" is "people on welfare," then it might to to revise. Most of the people I meet on the job are intermittently employed; many only collect partial benefits to shore up a budget that their job can't fill. Looking over their employment and family histories, most of them were born into lower class families and aren't "working their way up" any ladder. There isn't one.

This fashionable obsession with a relative minority ignores that penurious, punitive, guilty until innocent treatment of the poor has been tried -- and it failed. The history of the post-Malthusian welfare state is not one that wholly came about as a result of Dickensian weeping. Poorhouse systems are ineffecient and serve everyone badly. Their new iterations don't fare any better. For the most part, reductions on the welfare rolls that governments claim are a result of policy are the direct consequence of the reclassification of clients -- as Dreaded Welfare Cheats or the more bland, but just as harmful "ineligible." This may make taxpayers feel good, but the truth is that going after welfare chaets with special vigour simply wastes money and results in pooer service.

What does make a difference is access to educational services. Welfare recipients tend to have serious educational deficits compared to average citizens. Claiming that someone who is innumerate, illiterate and has never touched a computer is somehow not a member of an "underclass" because they can manage occsional labour is baffling.

[point5b.livejournal.com]

"Delight" wouldn't be my reaction. At most, I'm glad someone aside from a right-winger or libertarian in the UK acknowledges the problems of a welfare state.

[point5b.livejournal.com]

I don't want to sound belligerent, but your thoughts "the reason you're seeing these results are because your system is in fact working" and "reductions on the welfare rolls that governments claim are a result of policy are the direct consequence of the reclassification of clients" strike me as contradictory. What sense of "working" do you have in mind, if you think reductions in welfare rolls are simply governments refusing service?

As an American, I really don't know how your welfare system compares to ours. I do think that American welfare agencies have managed to perpetuate and expand serious poverty here through policies that deter people from becoming capable of supporting themselves and their families (the most famous examples being cutting off certain benefits to women with children if they marry, expanding benefits to women with children if they have additional children they can't support, and cutting benefits to people who take jobs that don't pay as well as those benefits did). I don't take a punitive or resentful view towards welfare "cheats", as most of them do nothing fraudulent. To remain on welfare instead of working at a job that doesn't pay as much, especially if one has children, is perfectly reasonable. The welfare system itself traps people in the lowest income levels and prevents generational advancement.

[point5b.livejournal.com]

At least in the history of the US, there has been a ladder of advancement, especially over the course of generations. The poorest of us have struggled to improve their own lives and provide a springboard for their children. We still have immigrants who come here and work multiple menial jobs in order to give their children the opportunity to become educated and do better. Those members of the first generation often didn't and don't manage more than modest success for themselves, but their children tend strongly to do much better.

People have done this consistently across the US and throughout its history with excellent overall success - except when actively suppressed by government, either through hostility (as in the deliberate state- and local-level suppression of black progress through the late 19th and much of the 20th century) or good intentions gone awry (as in US bilingual education programs that prevent immigrants from gaining a command of English or the destruction of working-class black neighborhoods through "Urban Renewal" that created impoverished, crime-ridden housing projects).