Tackling the giant evil of idleness

Verity

The solution to the vast, expensive and destructive welfare system is simple: disenfranchise welfare recipients.

The result will be, once politicians lose the ability to bribe these people with ever more lavish "benefits", they will stop bribing them.

There is no sane reason that people who produce no wealth should have a say in how wealth created by others should be spent.

mac

"it will quite literally be the most dramatic overhaul to the welfare state since its inception."

Mmmm. Let's see the small print first, Fraser.

According to your analysis, this should produce paroxysms from Polly and the Harman "wimmin 'n' equality" regiment. Let's see how far they're prepared to fight this.

mitch

Its quite amusing that a government made up of people who have never had real jobs feels it can hound people who chose the same but without expenses.
How many single parents could ed and Mrs balls expenses keep eh? and which is the bigger waste.

strapworld

Mr Nelson. It will be very interesting to see how this well researched and radical welfare reform programme develops!

Perhaps, the cynic in me is used to this Labour Government promising much but never delivering.

Perhaps this is just padding ready for an early 2009 general election.

Perhaps you are right and I am wrong. If so I will apologise.

But, for now, I am saddened that a journalist of your ilk has, yet again, been taken in by labour propaganda!!

ChrisD

"This is the real deal. A real solution to a real problem, being tackled with as much urgency as anyone could expect. Purnell is about to undergo the toughest task in politics, one that neither Blair nor Thatcher tackled. And I, for one, wish him luck"

Sorry, but I remember Frank Field being brought in Tony Blair and thwarted at every turn by Gordon Brown.
Not gonna happen, and especially when that core vote is so desperately needed, its where Labour has been recovering in the polls in recent months.....

Brown will hang Purnell out to dry on this one, another young Turk bites the dust....

It doesn't matter how good these proposals are, or even if Grayling is on board. The chances of Labour implementing this at all, never mind in full and competently, is zero.

KMcC

can you provide a source for the £1400 figure please?

Baldwin

You are spot on Fraser.

Whilst I am a Tory, I have a sneaking regard for James Purnell.

He seems to understand the human condition more than most of the left.

He has a lot of heavy lifting to do and will go down in history if he succeeds.

David

Whether it's good or not isn't the point. What is the point is that so much of this is core to Conservative thinking, and has been for many, many decades. Labour are now trying to pinch it as their own because now, more than ever, there are human faces attached to the problems. The issue should be why now, after so many years of slating the Tories and saying everything was peachy - not well done.

John

How are people expected to find jobs where none exist?

Susan Hill

Jobs do exist. There are plenty of jobs. Not as many as there were but there are still jobs believe me. Mind you, whether any employer in their rights minds would want some of the 3-generations deep workshy lot on their payroll is another matter.

Ken

Pity Poor Purnell, about to be decimated by the same man who made UK synonymous with catastrophe. Why expect Liebour to undo the dependency state, its their core vote, (turkeys etc...) But if you're right I'll certainly apologise.

Olaf Rye

It may perhaps dissuade some of these people if they were issued food stamps and given very little cash from the state. It is not perfect, but it certainly is a policy that would not reward these people for having more children. Although I had misgivings about Clinton's policies, his welfare reform was quite successful--money for only two children. If you have more, this is your own problem.

Carol-Ann

I also hope Purnell has the guts to face, not just the Labour left but the left in general, down. I am not holding my breath and only when this is implemented and there is evidence of people losing benefit will I believe it. After all even Thatcher didn't tackle this issue and look how she was demonised. There is also another angle to this which is business and employers. For this kind of welfare reform to really work business has to be forced to employ such people and invest time, energy and money in them and stop opting for the easy immigrant labour. If there is not joined up thinking at all levels on this issue the consequences will be catastrophic for the people involved and ultimately for this country.

Fraser Nelson

KMcC, apologies it was monthly. And that came out of the court reporting - if you google £350 a week, and her name, you should get it

Strapworld, perhaps you're right and this is a big decoy for the likes of me. But it changes the parameters of debate. Plus I think Purnell is sincere.

RODEST

This will turn out to be another scam by Brown; Nulabour encouraged unemployed people to claim incapacity benefits to fiddle the employment figures.

The injustice of this reform will be to require those people who have genuine disability will have to suffer further indignity by having to prove they are unable to take up employment. All of these people would gladly give up benefits if they could rid themselves of their disability and take up employment.

The system is not robust enough to weed out the scroungers or ensure proper use of its resources.

Mike. Brighton

Hmmm...we'll see. Let's see if it more eye-catching initiatives that real action? Surely the lesson is the Labour is institutionally and culturally incapable of confronting the welfare state and the evil is causes. The key reason is that the clients of the welfare state are also clients of Labour. Well those that vote...

Hereford

"welfare ghettoes, those oases of deprivation in every British city"

Try telling a person living in almost any third world country that the satellite tv watching, boozing, smoking, bling wearing denizens of these, so called, ghettos are deprived.

Karen Matthews is not deprived. She is lazy feckless and stupid.

Wily Trout

The left are always happy to condemn the idle rich who get into the depravity spiral - and they have inflicted the same lack of direction and challenge on the poor.

Tim Carpenter LPUK

I am not sure if it is a good idea to replace the vast welfare system with a vast workfare system farmed out to various "local monopolies". Such tendering risks corruption and almost certainly will not give value for money.

One of the key planks of the Libertarian Party's position on Welfare is that once a household or person is directly or indirectly getting benefits, they will not be able to gain an increase in benefits or housing due to family expansion (babies, boyfriends, relatives). Thus welfare is a net to catch those falling, but will not become a hammock for those within.

Anthony

I agree with the sentiments put forward by Purnell but it is only happening now because Labour has been rumbled. People are finally waking up to what you have spelt out in your post, Fraser, but it just wouldn't happen after an election. It would all be watered down by the Labour benches. Labour is just making noise on this because they know how furious the public are.

I love your story about Shaun Bailey. I worked in the benefits sector briefly a few years back and you would have no idea what goes on - I mean the mindset of many people who milk the system - unless you've seen it first hand. I completely changed my mind about the welfare culture once I saw first hand how utterly destructive it is.

For those who haven't read it yet, here's Melanie Phillips today on the same subject:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1092740/Shannons-mother-culture-greed-abolish-child-benefit.html

David Short

"Born in the right place, and that trail leads to university and a job. If you’re born in the wrong place, that trail leads to welfare dependency and poverty. Sure, you can deviate from this trail, but it’s a broad rule of thumb. This is the social apartheid in Britain today, the product not of unbridled market forces but of the perverse incentives of a mutated welfare state that is now breeding the poverty it was designed to abolish."

Far,far too simplistic, and it shows that Fraser Nelson has little or no understanding of the changes in British politics and society over the past forty years.

I was born in a Tyneside slum in the Fifties. My father was frequently unemployed because he was a labourer; his mother could not afford to get him and his brothers a trade.

That meant poverty, of a sort. My parents and my four siblings and I lived in a small upstairs terraced flat with no running hot water and an outside toilet shared with the family downstairs.

Nevetheless, I went to the London School of Economics and Manchester Business School, and prospered up to a point.

There are many reasons for the change in the chances society gives or does not give to its less well-off children. Both the Tory and Labour parties have some blame attached here, but changes in society are far more complex to ascertain and governments have little power to affect society in fundamental ways, and nor should they.

Conservatives believe in the lack of power of government here, never mind the legitimacy of doing so.

But The Spectator, which is supposed to be Conservative, believes in power of the state and the possible success of using that power.

Very odd.

David Short

Susan Hill, sorry, but you are an idiot. There are up to 3m unemployed, depending on your definition, and approximately 650,000 vacancies.

Square that circle if you can.

Susan Hill

There`s one way. Just stop their benefits. Full stop. Give the children free school dinners and uniform but not a penny of other benefit in cash or kind to any adult under 60.
But as you say, nobody will do it. Even Thatcher bottled it.
So far as incapacity benefit goes, there are not very many who cannot do some form of work from home. I know a paraplegic who has no voice and who got an MA by using a specially adapted computer. I also know someone who claims to have had M.E.for 20 years and can`t lift a finger, couldn`t even manage a home-based IT job inputting data. She manages to e-mail her friends non-stop and spend hours on internet forums of course.

TrevorsDen

We used to think that 'Wayne and Waynettas' were a farcical joke. Welcome to the real world.

As for Purnells reforms... ChrisD is right to point out Field being skewered by Brown. Whats changed? Brown is still the same man ... the difference his he is £150 billion poorer.

He needs the money to save his skin so the Waynes and Waynettas loose their perks. I think not ...

1 - this will be watered down, and
2 - only the normal and the decent and the really needy will be caught in the fly trap.

Just tell me this - all the Mathews bint's children? Who's paying for their upkeep whilst she costs us a damn sight more than £1400/month in jail?

Ah, you might call me an old cynic ... but that because I am.

strapworld

Mr Nelson. I believe that the parameters of the debate were changed by Iain Duncan Smith and his brilliant and truthful reports on broken britain. He identified the problem and it is he who should be applauded for actually moulding government thinking.

BUT it will cause massive unrest in those area's -almost no go area's- which are inhabited by the many thousands on benefits!

Would any government send in the troops to deal with them??

It may well come to that.

Verity

Take away their vote and the politicians will not pander to them any more. The welfare sector is, as someone said above, Labour's core vote. If their vote were removed, Labour would see no point in catering to them any longer. Benefits wouldn't rise along with the standard of living, thus saving the taxpayer the affront of paying for other people's cigarettes, alcohol and plasma screens and the millions ploughed into the Karen Matthews of the estates ploughed back into the productive segment of society.

They don't pay taxes. Take away their vote. No representation without taxation.

Andy

It makes a good soundbite, but I'll believe it when I see it. Incidentally, you don't have to follow a trail if you can have access to a map and compass; I went to grammar school and ended up the only member of my working class family ever to make it to university and a respected profession.

IB Claimant

I wonder how many on this blog are prepared to consider the possibility that a much less divisive, and more successful, way of encouraging the opters-out to opt back in would be to make the "game" that most people play less unconscionable to those who choose basic survival in preference to participating in it.

It suits the majority to pretend that the work-remuneration deal that is on offer is such that to refuse to take part is disreputable. Maybe they would do well to understand that some don't accept this view, and that for a number of the opters-out it is the ethic of what the majority does that is disreputable.

Most twelve pound a day IB claimants don't feel very comfortable about doing it, but they feel far less social lepers than, for example, the IT consultants drawing a thousand a day from a known-to-be pointless computer project commissioned by some arm of the government.

Sue Denim

IB claimant, is your choice to not participate in work, for conscientious or moral reasons? Well, don't take my money even second-hand, as before it is taxed I earn it in the same evil way.

Ruairi

This is possibly the best piece of journalism I have read in the past 5 years.

I write from Ireland, where we have a similar welfare system which gives the greatest rewards to those who deliberately contribute the least to society....

Unfortunately, such is the level of political correctness in our country, that an article like this would provoke a backlash of such magnitude that the writer would probably be fired.

As a result a smug left wing consensus now masquerades as the Irish natonal media....

Congratulations Mr Nelson - well said sir....

Peter Reddington

Rubbish, ive heard this more times than i care to remember, and from this lot. Come on, there's an election coming up, if you believe this then believe in fairies.

hadrian

If we honestly believe all the laugh-out-loud, hot air rhetoric about governments 'abolishing child poverty' by such and such a date we are naive indeed. There is much that is accurate and right in your discetion of our society, Fraser, but like all political solutions it abysmally fails to address the deepest problem which is spiritual. If our national leaders and opinion makers are essentially and ultimately nihilistic, hedonistic cynical materialists ( be that of 'left' or 'right' persuasion, it makes no difference) then 'the led' are going to be massively influenced by that as is the nature of the case in being by definition largely 'the led'!
Sure, many of these sad atrocities happen in our poorest neighbourhoods but the affluent have their own problems. Will we ever be rid of poverty? Not if Christ is to be believed and His authority far outweighs and overwhelms piddling politicians of the hour and their pathetic humanistic utopian delusions and 'solutions'. When rich and poor alike treat life as dirt and ultimately pointless and existence as truly 'impersonal' the resultant chaos is what has started to envelop us as a people. To use an old and much derided, much despised word, repentence in the richest, most profound meaning of the word is needed nationally. There was a time when the Tory party did more faithfully reflect our Christian heritage from which springs all the beneficial aspirations and endeavours society needs. Now I am less inclined to agree the Tories still distinctively reflect this outlook. Hard greed, P.C. 'morality' and fads and a fear of tackling the statist 'gods' as they radically require but in ways that remain genuinely humane...well, are there any such high minded M.P.s left? Alistair Campbell isn't alone in 'not doing God'. Hence you have the lawless hell-holes and deprived dependency we all, as tories, should rightly bemoan and weep over.
Getting 'tough' is indeed a part of the answer, but a small part and not a universal panacea. Verity's right- persistent malingering should lead to disenfranchisment. Persistent delinquency and thuggery should lead to the thugs being PUNISHED, not the victims being intimidated by the authorities that any retaliation or even self defencecould lead absurdly to charges of assault!! I know of at least two outrageous cases where the victims have been the ones where the police in their twisted P.C. values warn them off or even threaten to turn the tables on them. No wonder society is so fractured. However much of the weekend town centre hooliganism and binge drinking is the privilege of the moneyed, not the penniless. The Conservatives can contribute greatly to the mending of things but ONLY if firmly underpinned by what are ultimately Protestant Christian values and leavened with an intelligent, charitable, tolerant christianity. Continue to reject that and Toryism is finished and our national slide into disintegration unstoppable.

Verity

No representation without taxation.

If you don't pay tax, you don't get a say, through a vote, on how other people's taxes are spent.

The main benefit of this idea is, once they couldn't bribe the hundreds of thousands of malingerers in Britain to vote for them, as those malingerers no longer had a vote, politicians would stop catering to this segment.

rob

agree with Susan Hill posting at
December 8th, 2008 10:30am re ME? How do the people who cannot work from home spend hours on the net posting and arguing medicine with medics. When I was ill I could not do this