There is so much that concerns me about the Zoe Williams article in today’s Guardian that the only way I can make sense of it is to gloss the piece paragraph by paragraph. This is intended as a gloss commentary, not as a textual unpicking (and still less a satirical devaluing). The Zoe Williams paragraphs are in black and my gloss is in blue.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/mar/28/tories-benefits-money-vouchers-underclass
Back in January, a report came out arguing for benefits to be loaded on to a prepaid card rather than paid in cash. "It opens up the potential," the thinktank Demos concluded, "to exercise some control over how benefits are spent." Indeed it does: the MP Alec Shelbrooke, who might be the least pleasant Tory you've never heard of, had already put forward this idea, of finding some way to ensure that benefits couldn't be spent on "non-essential, desirable or damaging (Nedd) items".
Originally all working people paid compulsory National Insurance which gave them entitled benefits when they were in need. For various reasons, mostly to do with short-termism and the cowardice of governments, National Insurance as an insurance system was allowed to lapse and benefits were funded by general taxation. Labour were instrumental in this, but Conservative governments of the post-war pre-Thatcher period also acquiesced. However as soon as you move from National Insurance to state handouts you are changing the nature of the relationship between the state and the individual. State handouts became based on an ever-shifting idea of “need” which introduced the process of state value judgments about who is in need and who is not. Benefits were given to people in need who had not paid National Insurance – which allowed the theoretical possibility that more money could be paid out by the state than was paid in by taxation.
Not sure why Zoe Williams feels the need to abuse Alec Shelbrooke, but in my opinion people who become abusive are conceding that they cannot base their argument on rationality (perhaps Zoe Williams is just expressing her anger, but she should be reminded of Margaret Thatcher’s maxim: coolness is strength).
Demos's report, sponsored by Mastercard, came out strongly in favour of benefits-by-preloaded-card. "Whatever the future of prepaid cards, it's clear that they enable more creative and innovative thinking regarding how people relate to local and national government and public services," it said. Creative, they say. When you can no longer pay for a pint or buy your kid some crayons, this is meant to make you more innovative in how you relate.
Here Zoe Williams needs to take ownership of her lefty political culture and heritage - Demos is a left-wing think tank associated with many Labour luminaries such as former minister James Purnell. They are of course interested (as all lefties are) in social engineering. What might be reprehensible is that Conservatives have also adopted this social engineering model, but what else can the Tories do given the current family unfriendly state of society?
Nuclear families in difficulties do indeed need to be “reformed” (in a neo-Victorian values sense) but the best way to do this is to strengthen the wider family context and (Zoe Williams will hate this) strengthen the institution of marriage (especially in the tax system). Make divorce more difficult where couples have children. Whenever a child is born out of wedlock create an automatic legal relationship (not a marriage, not even a civil partnership, but some form of legal acknowledgement of responsibility). Give rights to the extended family - grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins will have much more effect on bad parents than state social workers or Demos-inspired initiatives. Give grandparents statutory rights to see their grandchildren. Give divorced fathers more rights to see their children.
At the time, it seemed like such obvious nonsense, such blatant, corporate-sponsored poor-bashing that I didn't wonder how near it would get to an actual policy. Shelbrooke was a bit-player in that classic Tory stunt of sending out the village idiot to punch some room on the right, so that the mainstream could shuffle closer to Ukip.
Does she really think UKIP are important here? UKIP are an anti-intellectual reaction (to all parties), not a long-term solution. No true Conservative is going to find UKIP satisfying – the philosophical basis is too slight and the policies too close to old-fashioned Labour.
Less than two months later, the idea resurfaces as real life; the social fund, which gives out crisis loans, normally of around £50, is to be scrapped. The money's going to councils, but not ringfenced. Most local authorities are going to deliver it by voucher, on a prepaid card – you can only spend it on food, and in some areas, only in certain shops. One council's voucher is only redeemable in Asda, which is handy if you live near an Asda. There are councils that are cutting out the middleman – commerce – and giving the money straight to a foodbank charity.
In a sense we are returning to the idea of parish relief – a regression from the Victorian idea of state provision for the poor (the whole of Bevan’s welfare state is arguably just an ultra-sophisticated version of the Workhouse with social workers as the modern-day Beadles). Under the new system local people will be able to choose, through the councils they elect, what help they want to give to their less well-off neighbours - which is admittedly an unknown quantity. Who knows how generous they will be? On balance I think people will be very generous, especially when they will know (broadly) the people they are helping. At the moment the state just takes the money and says “trust us, we are politicians, we will spend it wisely on your behalf” (and then they spend it on pet communities who are most likely to vote for them). If Labour had not been so greedy and corrupt in politicising welfare spending this devolution down to local councils would not have been necessary.
For the sake of this pitiful amount of money – on average, councils had around 7,000 claims a year – a fundamental principle has been upturned. Your government still upholds your right, as a citizen, not to starve (well, generally speaking – there is one council planning to peg even the crisis loan to "behaviour"); it no longer upholds your right to public money. Indeed, the figures at stake here are so small, and the principle so fundamental, that I won't be surprised at all when we discover that, due to outsourcing and administrative error, it winds up costing more than it did before. Money isn't the point; cruelty is the point.
“Right to public money”? Did she really write this phrase? Here in a few words you see all the economic illiteracy of the left.
Replacing cash with vouchers has a number of damaging effects. First, it's infantilising. Crisis loans delivered this way take on the shape of pocket money or charity. Second, it's stigmatising, as asylum seekers on the Azure card often point out – people don't want strangers to be able to make judgements about what they're buying, and whether they should be buying it. People want privacy in their financial transactions. Call them crazy. Third, it erodes the idea that the public purse is something we all created together and, in a crisis, are entitled to draw on it. Yes, I'm talking about a culture of entitlement – culture is a culture of entitlement. Modern civilisation is built upon pooling resources and being entitled to a share in them.
Zoe Williams is right to point to the issue of infantilisation, as this is exactly the insidious effect welfare has on the institution of the family. And state handouts, without the principle of National Insurance ARE charity – what else can they be? The public purse is not “something we all created together” – it was created by taxpayers and only by taxpayers, and all the real wealth in those taxes was created by taxpayers in the private sector (taxation of public sector workers is just an accounting manoeuvre).
“Modern civilisation is built upon pooling resources” is a completely flawed analysis – modern civilisation in western Europe is built upon the legally-protected concept of private property in all its forms (insurance is built upon pooling resources, but National Insurance is what Labour eroded in the 1950s and 1960s and 1970s when they called themselves “the natural party of government”).
Fourth, and to my mind most important – though all of these effects are vitally important – something very significant happens when you expel people from the sphere of money. In the moment of exchange, everyone is equal; you don't have to prove that you're worthy of that purchase, your status is bestowed by the fact that you can pay for it, and you are worth as much in that moment as anybody else who can pay for it. There's a fillip of power in the process; it's why people who like shopping like shopping, and it is especially important when – for some reason that is probably financial – you spend a lot of the time feeling powerless. Give people a voucher instead, and they are not equal. Asda may be getting the same amount of money for the same amount of food, but charity and condescension have crept into the transaction – or maybe pity. But nobody wants their groceries served with pity.
Here Zoe Williams is (unwittingly perhaps) pointing to a fundamental problem of the human condition. Under Maslow’s hierarchy of needs people crave self-actualisation. Without it their lives become meaningless. In our materialist culture the mechanism we are offered to achieve self-actualisation is primarily through shopping (“one more pair of Blahnik shoes, one more holiday in Barbados, one more ticket for the Rolling Stones at Glastonbury and my life will be complete, I can finally be the person I want to be!”). The trick is that you can never achieve self-actualisation through shopping and so for people on benefits the mirage of self-actualisation through shopping is a cruel hoax (it is a cruel hoax for everyone, but for low-income people it is especially cruel). Therefore it is sensible to guide low-income families to spend their money on security, food, housing etc rather than the unattainable state of self-actualisation.
Note: the government that works out how to deliver self-actualisation to the people is going to be onto a winner. David Cameron’s Big Society, delivered properly, might do this; and the universalism of the post-war full-employment welfare state came close (until the politicians mucked it up). Personally I think High Anglicanism has a lot to recommend it (the sensory rituals, the selfless universal love, the sense of living for others) but obviously this is a minority view.
The right wing is obsessed with the poor being able to afford to smoke and drink, and nowhere is their hostility clearer than when you get them on the subject of the Sky+ package. But I've wasted enough of my life arguing about this fanciful portrait, the family on jobseeker's allowance who can afford a satellite package, which then rivets them to the telly, leaving them unable to apply for any of the plentiful jobs available.
Smoking, drinking, Sky Sports etc are all means of escapism. Should we allow low-income families the means of escaping, for a short while, from the psychological chains of poverty? Or is it better that they live continuously in the “real world”? It’s a moral decision and one that the state should not be making. However now that benefits are paid as state handouts it is impossible for the state to avoid making moral judgements (the electorate insists on it). That is why we need to return to a system of benefits funded by contributions, not general taxation.
It's straightforward – with benefits as low as they are and food and fuel prices as high, anyone who could afford to smoke and drink would be starving. You just have to look at Sky's audience share to see that almost nobody is watching it, underclass or otherwise.
Is nobody watching Sky Sports?
I see those pragmatic arguments now as a Maginot line, and food stamps marched in over the undefended territory of human dignity. When you relegate people to a world outside money, you create a true underclass: a group of people whose privacy and autonomy are worth less than everyone else's, who are stateless in a world made of shops.
Perhaps Zoe Williams was on a deadline and had to rush this final paragraph as it seems very weak. The Second World War reference is irrelevant and (if I may say so) self-indulgent. The idea of a stateless underclass is also irrelevant unless the reference is to asylum seekers. Reading between the lines I think what Zoe Williams is arguing for in her article is full-blooded socialism - nationalisation of the means of production, distribution and exchange and the ushering in of a society where each according to their means helps each according to their needs (via the medium of the state and presumably with a gulag to take care of the anti-social elements who will inevitably try to sabotage the common good). If this is the case why does she not come out and say so? Why all this mealy-mouthed discussion of a system she so obviously disapproves of?
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