The evil that the welfare system encourages

Fraser Nelson 10:42am

One of the benefits of doing Question Time is being taken to task on the blogosphere for days afterwards, and my comments on welfare and immigration have been reproduced and critiqued. Here’s my offending quote:

“Right now we don’t really notice that we have 14% of the population on benefits, a huge figure.  But if immigrants weren’t here then my God we’d notice.  There’d be huge labour shortages everywhere, we would be forced to actually confront this huge joblessness.”

Alex Hilton over at LabourHome, had this to say.

"The Tory position seems to be that working class people should go and work in factories or call centres or bring in crops rather than living on benefits because that way we won't need immigrants to fill the gap. In short, they're saying that working class kids should know their place and aspire to working class jobs. This is at the heart of why I believe that Toryism is founded on an evil ideology - that some people are by birth of greater value than others.”

Alex’s site is a great resource, and reflects much of Labour grassroots thinking and he may be on to something. Does Labour believe that welfare has mutated, that its function is to protect people from jobs that we now expect foreigners to do? That attitude would explain not just immigration but why after decade of Labour – and an economy so strong that 1,500 settle here each day to find work - 23% of Manchester is on benefits as is 26% of Liverpool and Glasgow (full list here).
 
I made a similar point at a Fabian Society seminar recently, one respondent told me he saw no problem with people using the welfare state, any more than using pavements or other public services.
 
And as for ideology, I draw mine from a basic idea that everyone should do something. Whether that’s Tory or not, I don’t know. I believe in social insurance but also that

“the insured persons should not feel that income for idleness, however caused, can come from a bottomless purse. The Government should not feel that by paying doles it can avoid the major responsibility of seeing that unemployment and disease are reduced to the minimum.”

This quote, Alex, is from that evil document the Beveridge Report. In 1942 he identified idleness as one of his “five giant evils”. This evil is back, being incubated and sustained by the welfare state designed to eradicate it. But Labour doesn’t seem to care anymore. Idleness has been downgraded, from an evil to something we can, and should, ignore.