Some of my best friends think Polly Toynbee is terrific. I do too.
However, I can’t tune into a debate about welfare without hearing about Polly Toynbee’s bus pass. This might be some selective attentional bias on my part, and indeed it is an important debate as to whether benefits should be means-tested. As regards the universality of benefits, including child benefit or bus passes, I don’t particularly understand why the debate never goes full circle; in other words, why wealthy people in London are not asked to make a contribution to paying for overstretched acute medical services in London, if they happen to use them?
As it happens, I am a passionate believer in full access to social justice and the NHS, and I am an eternal optimist is that there are some wealthy people who wish to pay their way. In a Guardian politics podcast this year, Michael White provided an excellent example of a millionaire who paid substantial tax, but I haven’t been able to find this reported anywhere.
I have never had a regular salaried job for the last five years. However, I have never claimed unemployment benefit. My disability living allowance, despite me still remaining disabled, was stopped last year, but I am in the process of having my disability reassessed. I can well understand how people would have reacted to the news I received this year, of outright refusal of mobility and living allowance, in a state of shock, but my legal training has taught me not to take official decisions too seriously. It’s like receiving yet another parking ticket (I don’t drive by the way.)
Last election, the debate revolved around ‘fairness’, as Labour launched its manifesto, “A future fair for all”. Fairness is possibly a notion that unites Labour and the Liberal Democrats. Justice too, I should imagine, but equality is more Labour’s terrain. Nick Clegg has often argued (shouted, really), “what’s fair about landing a future generation with a quantity of debt?” Equally, I could ask off Mr Clegg what’s fair about a modest reduction in the deficit due to complete lack of growth (understandable if you throttle infrastructure investment and consumer demand), landing future generations with a dire borrowing requirement?
Mr Clegg, and Mr Cameron, you have failed, in thought, word and deed. Zoe Williams, I feel, has nailed it by saying that the language has to evolve. George Osborne’s vehement spluttering about feckless feral scroungers staying in bed with their curtains closed has backfired spectacularly in his face, as people rightly have pointed out that he has been attacking a system which was meant to support the working ‘deserving poor’. Likewise, Zoe Williams has referred to the system as a ‘social security system’, rather than a ‘benefits system’. This is precisely what Labour needs to have tattooed on his or her forehead; that there are millions of disabled citizens who need support for their living and mobility, and some of them feel basically demonised by this current government.
It’s possible Iain Duncan-Smith’s exit has not been as speedy as some might have wished. George Osborne has tried to assume responsibility for the benefits system as an accounting exercise, possibly encouraged with his recent 4G receipts con trick (implemented vicariously by the “independent”, but eternally optimistic, OBR). However, social security has not been the problem of the UK’s economic woes.
Labour strictly speaking has nothing to apologise for as regards the exploding deficit, as the deficit run during the last term of Labour was comparable to that run by Norman Lamont and Ken Clarke, had it not been for the emergency measure of recapitalising the banks in 2009 because of the global financial crisis. However, it needs to rectify its impression of being too carefree of spending money, particularly money it doesn’t have. It needs also to distinguish between reckless spending and necessary investment for growth, a distinction which the Conservatives seem pathologically unable to make. A spend on the construction industry, building new housing, would kill two birds with one stone: stimulate the economy, while providing new housing, assuming that the banks are forced to lend or do so on their own initiative. Of course, the argument goes out that ‘we can’t force them to lend’, in the same way ‘we can’t force the utilities not to make excessive profits’, but this goes to the heart as to whether the markets have primacy, or real people do.
As for Polly Toynbee? Well, she’s brilliant!
