The Welfare State makes me proud to be human - so why are ‘Benefits’ being used as a weapon against the poor?

There’s not much that makes me proud to be human, but the Welfare State was Britain’s finest creation, as compassionate and civilised a route as any society might hope to choose.

Clement Attlee's 1945 Labour government went to war on what the Beveridge Report called ‘The Five Giant Evils’ of squalor; ignorance; want; idleness and disease. They introduced laws to provide for the people "from the cradle to the grave”.

Nobody ever need be homeless, hungry, or uneducated. Why you fell ill, you were cared for. Wonderful.

(Sorry, colyoomistas - just have to pause here and say ‘Health, housing and education. Health, housing and education. Health, housing and education.’ for the umpteenth time in my life. Write it off as a nervous tic, a Socialist Obsessive Compulsive flicking his moral light switch three times, to make himself feel better.)

There was no need for Communism. Give everyone a safe, informed and healthy start, then let the human race rip. We’ll all go off in different directions, but we’ll live without fear. Well, we would, but the rich like to hold on to their riches, and the Tories turned our right of support into a privilege.

Now Cameron's Conservatives are throwing lumps of bloody red meat to the wolves baying for rioters’ blood. If you riot, your family loses its benefits. If you play truant from school, your family lose their council house. That’ll bloody show the scum, eh chaps! Can’t sit back and let the anarchists control the streets, what!

Quite apart from the simple fact that hundreds of middle class rioters and truants have families with neither benefits nor council houses to lose, there’s an elephant in the room: the real cause of the riots, which was simply rampant materialism.

These kids have grown up in a society where stuff counts and to be a face, a hit on the street, you need the bestest most superlative hyperbolic all-new must-have stuff at all times. Come the recession, come the heinous Conservative cuts, and the kids ain’t getting their stuff.

This week at their party conference, the Tories blamed the riots on poor parenting and ‘Benefit Culture’, but ironically it was the very same acquisitional Capitalist society that the Conservatives have always encouraged which drove those angry young people to steal trainers and TVs, and all the other stuff they can’t afford.

And what of this ‘Benefit Culture’? The only people who say how easy it is to live on the dole in England are those who never have. Over here in Ireland the dole is set at €188 a week, but in the UK you get £65, and still politicians talk of benefit culture. It drives me crazy. Yes, of course, there are out there some few professionals who screw the system for every penny they can get, but mostly it’s just poor decent people trying desperately to keep their heads above water.

Those who talk of ‘Benefit Culture’ tell their researchers to look up how much you can get with a family of four on full housing benefit, full family credit and all the other benefits they can find, and then come out with absurd stories about how the poor are living it large on the backs of the middle classes.

What they might not know, and certainly have no desire to find out, is that you might well claim for all that stuff, but you’re a rare person if you actually get it.

Murdoch’s Irish Sunday Times last week ran a front page piece under the headline ‘Welfare Wage €28,000. According to the piece, there’s no point in getting a job for less that €28,000, because you’re better off on the dole. If you have 4 children and are in receipt of every possible available benefit to its highest threshold, that may be the case, but what the journalist doesn’t bother to explain is that the partner of that recipient will only receive a pittance in proportion to the main claimant, who most likely isn’t getting half of it anyway.

Most likely that recipient is sitting on a plastic chair, in a soul-sapping queue, watching the numbers go round, deciding whether it’s the wife or the son who’ll receive no birthday present this year, waiting to be called, and the rich call that ‘Living It Large’? They dare to threaten the poor with the withdrawal of these cash dribbles while they award themselves gold mountains ...oh  ah eeee I’m starting to feel angry.

Calm down calm down. I experienced the UK’s Welfare State system during the Thatcher years, and I’m ready to admit that once, at Shepherd’s Bush Dole office, they made me cry. The Irish attitude is thankfully more respectful of the poor, but when you hear on the news those stats about the numbers claiming benefits, never ever assume the people are actually receiving the money.

This practice of using welfare as a weapon comes, of course, from the USA, and just as when Washington sneezes, London catches a cold, we here in the West of Ireland run the risk of droplet infection.

Let’s hang on to our precious values and never use the most wonderful creation of the almost civilised world as a weapon to beat the least guilty.

If you have a heartbeat you are worth a Basic Income!

There have been short periods of my life when I’ve had more money than I knew what to do with, as well as, of course, long periods when I’ve had just enough. Certainly the happiest years of my life have coincided with times when I had little dosh and a lot of time, but equally, the darkest times came when there were debts: court summons’ piling up on the chair in the corner of my squalid 1980s London flat, covered by a pile of bills in red ink, final demands, credit card bills, letters from banks and overdue rates bills.
I knew I’d made it the top of Penury Mountain when I received one day from a certain charge card company a letter in a black envelope on bright red notepaper. Their message was printed in black ink on a scarlet sheet, and even though I was spending my days squatting on my knees, in the corner of my living room farthest from the bill-piled chair, gently rocking back and forth, humming a little tune to myself, it’s all going to be fine, ha ha doo bee doo, I did feel a thrill of perverse pride at having reached such a high echelon of corporate annoyance.
Everyone I knew back in those poverty-stricken days occasionally got bills in red ink, but I never heard of anyone else getting a bill on red paper.
And oh, that black envelope was an intimidating beauty.
So having found out that being hugely in credit doesn’t really make me happy, I also have first-hand experience of how terrible a thing is debt. Back then, in my 20’s, my financial crisis was pretty much self-inflicted, through a combination of youthful ignorance and a splash or two of hedonism and indulgence.
But it was no fun. Believe me. You never want to live in London on the dole. One of the things I love about this country, and particularly the West, is that in Ireland you are rarely punished for being poor. Of course you suffer the same lifestyle barriers and human right infringements that poor people suffer all over the world, but in your dealings with the dole and others, you are not confronted by the intimidating and often terrifying attitude prevalent in Thatcher’s England.
Back in the early 90s I was briefly on the dole in Galway, and could not believe how compassionate and cheerful the interviewers were. Ten year’s earlier I had been reduced to tears by a small English woman in the Shepherd’s Bush dole office, after she saw fit to tell me how pathetic I was and no, she had no idea when my benefit money might come through.
Some of those tears were of self-pity and dejection, but mostly they were furious and full of indignation. How dare she? What gave her the right?
Of course at the moment the Irish Welfare State is overwhelmed, the queues are stretching out forever, and doubtless tempers are fraying on both sides of the glass, but if you have never tried to draw dole in England, you do not know how lucky you are.
I’ve no idea whether this disparity in how the two nations deal with poverty is down to historical, cultural and religious grounds. It’s too easy to say the Irish are more compassionate because they have suffered so much in the past. All populations have suffered.
Whatever the causes, the difference is stark. With the Euro and Sterling close to parity, a week on the dole in England right now will earn you a measly £60.50, while over the water here in Ireland, the same week will give you €204.30.
However, right now welfare systems all over Ireland are backed up with a glut of applications, and traumatised people who have recently lost their jobs are having to make the weekly trawl up to their CWO (Community Welfare Officer) to get emergency payments, so that they can feed their children and survive until the dole payments come through.
I’m hearing stories of 2-3 month waits for official payments, and it breaks my heart. Why should these people, who have suffered so much, many for the greed and sins of others, be subjected to this exhausting and demeaning Poverty Trail?
Have we not finally arrived at a time when Basic Income might be the perfect answer?
Simply put, a Basic Income is a singular amount paid to every permanent resident of a country. It is not applied for; not means tested; not predicated on age, sex, gender or anything. If you have a heartbeat you are entitled to receive a Basic Income.
There are many highly-respected organisations the world over who have explored the fine economic details of Basic Income, and in his final book ‘Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?’ Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote:
“I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective - the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.”
This colyoomist is no economist, so let’s say for the sake of argument that the Irish Basic Income was set at €200 a week. There are those who would choose not to earn more than that, but equally there are many millions who prefer a better lifestyle, and would rather work than live on that subsistence level.
But oh, think of the benefits. Think of the economic savings. There would be no need for the massive bureaucracy that is the present Welfare State. Instead of processing hundreds of thousands of forms, welfare workers could concentrate on the needs of those most vulnerable in society, those very people whose schemes and day centres and projects are now the first to be slashed in the name of ‘savings’.
Instead of chasing scammers and fraudsters and dole cheats, agency workers could apply their funds and time to improving the dignity of those on the fringes of society.
There would be no need for the costly, pointless and dreaded Emergency payments; no shamed faces in the dole queue; no need for terror at the thought of being made redundant.
Right now Gordon Brown and Barack Obama are spending billions in a bid to stimulate the world economy. What could possibly do more to encourage people to spend, to invest, to share their funds, time, ideas and ingenuity, than a cash injection of human dignity?