There is a woman I have known all my life, now in her 80s and living on a modest pension, whose moral principles I admire. So when she told me she had sent back to the Department of Work and Pensions the £300 they had given her as a winter fuel payment, I had to ask myself why I had not done likewise.
Although £300, coming just before Christmas when I am wondering what I can afford to give my six grandchildren, is very useful, I am not one of those pensioners who has to decide day by day whether to eat or heat. I cannot plead that I badly need the money. Nevertheless I feel I’ve done right. In the coming weeks I may give my payment back to people whose needs are greater than mine but I prefer to choose those people for myself rather than leaving that to a government that might spend the money on things I deplore.
But are there more profound reasons why I do not follow the example of this model citizen? I offer you my answer to that question, hoping that other readers of the Scottish Review may help me to improve it – or perhaps to change it altogether.
My reflections take me back to the 1945 election. Although I was too young to vote in it, I passionately supported the Labour Party’s determination to maintain full employment and build what came to be called ‘the welfare state’. I was inspired, like millions of others, by Beveridge more than Attlee. ‘Security from the cradle to the grave’, ‘a health service free to all’, ‘secondary education for all’, ‘abolish the poor laws’ – these were slogans that won the election for Labour.
Together they expressed a simple but powerful idea. There should be a compact between the generations that would enable us all to get help when we most need it – particularly in childhood and old age – and to pay for it when we can best afford to – through taxes levied most heavily on us when we are fit, working, and as well off as we shall ever be. Every citizen should have the same rights and the same duties. So everybody pays what and when they can, and gets help when they most need it.
The hated means tests imposed by the poor laws on those compelled to prove their poverty week by week in order to get help from the state were to be banished from our public services. National Assistance, set up to provide means-tested help for the few people not entitled to the new social insurance benefits, was to be a temporary safety net that would soon be phased out.
We know it didn’t work out like that. Our social insurance system with its flat-rate contributions and benefits could never get enough money from low paid workers to meet our needs. So it had to be topped up with continuing means-tested payments for the poorest, while other systems – funded by occupational pensions and private insurance – provided for richer people. So we came to rely increasingly on means tests – far more than our neighbours on this side of Europe – and our present government is taking us further down that road. Child benefits are the latest service to have an income test imposed on them.
Nevertheless, the ‘universal’ services, provided through various tests of need and entitlement without regard to income, have grown strongly and are surviving the present blizzard of cuts best: big services like retirement pensions, the NHS and the schools, and small ones like bus passes, fuel allowances and free television licences for pensioners. Meanwhile it is means-tested services for poorer people, like Legal Aid and subsidies for housing, that are being clobbered.
There are political reasons for that. Universal services are more popular with those who benefit from them. More of those people turn out to vote at elections. The people who work in these services are happier and more widely respected. And the services are more efficient, costing less to administer and gaining higher rates of take-up from those entitled to them.
Universal services are not ‘free’. As tax payers we all pay for them. But if the tax system is progressive (a questionable assertion we might discuss some other day) those who are at a point in their lives when they are best able to pay contribute most. Tax becomes our subscription to belong to a civilised society. Which seems a pretty fair arrangement – an arrangement that also helps to build and unite a society. My acceptance of the pensioners’ fuel allowance is a small gesture of support for the universal principle: a principle that is now under increasing threat.
But that thought poses other questions. The original compact on which the universal principle was based was more convincing in 1945 when, culturally and ethnically, the British were a more uniform lot than we now are. The great majority of us had been born in Britain and we had recently shared some deeply unifying experiences – cowering in the same slit trenches together, fighting fires together in the blitz. Some people have argued that the price we pay for staying out of major wars and creating a more open, multi-cultural society is the loss of this sense of national unity and the mutual responsibilities it helped to sustain.
I am not convinced about that. The people most passionately seeking to keep out foreigners, extricate Britain from foreign influences and talk up our national identity – to be seen in bodies like UKIP, the English Defence League and the BNP – are not at the forefront of campaigns to protect the welfare state or its universal services.
It may be true that social solidarity builds support for universal services. But powerful causal influences flow in the opposite direction. Good universal services build solidarity. There is no more constructively open and plural a society than you will find among the staff and patients in a big-city hospital, or among staff and travellers in a London bus or tube train. It is private medical care, private transport and means tests – the American rather than the Scandinavian model – that tend to divide us.
Our present leaders in Westminster use that insight quite deliberately. When they stoke social conflict by contrasting idle ‘shirkers’ with hard-working ‘strivers’ we know which services they are planning to cut. Not retirement pensions or the NHS – which cost far more money – but means-tested benefits on which the poorest people depend: Legal Aid, subsidised housing, Jobseekers’ Allowance, disability benefits…
Meanwhile Labour Party leaders are drifting in the same direction, saying they will impose means tests on more of our remaining universal benefits, and will not reverse Conservative social policies. To abandon the idea of a life-time compact between the generations on which the welfare state was built would, for many of us, destroy one of the main reasons for voting for their party.
You may feel I have made a rather long and ponderous meal out of an answer to a simple question. But that is where I was led by my attempt to explain why I decided not to return my winter fuel payment. Meanwhile I retain my admiration and affection for the woman whose principles prompted these ruminations, even though I do not follow her example in this respect.
David Donnison, whose books include ‘The Politics of Poverty’, was for five years chairman of the Supplementary Benefits Commission which had a general responsibility for Britain’s means-tested social security benefits
website design by Big Blue Dogwebsite development by NSD Web