Brown’s premiership will be short

Irwin Stelzer

11 April 2007

Clinging to this position puts the Brown premiership in peril of being short-lived. Middle-class support for the welfare state is not what it once was. That support rested on two pillars. The first was a (mistaken) belief on the part of the middle class that the value of the direct benefits they received exceeded the taxes extracted from them. These benefits were always recognised explicitly by the Left as a necessity — an unfortunate one, but a necessity nevertheless — to buy voter support for the redistribution that is at the heart of the welfare state. Unfortunately for Brown, he has used up his bribe money: he can’t afford any more goodies for the middle class, on which he has loaded a succession of tax increases. And he has presided over the pouring of huge sums down the rat hole of an unreformed health service. So Middle England and hard-pressed blue-collar workers are not as willing as they once were to sanction expansion of the welfare state.

The second pillar on which middle- and working-class support for the welfare state rested was a belief that aiding the less fortunate is the decent thing to do. Although the phrase ‘deserving poor’ went out with the Victorians, the idea behind it is as current today as it was some 150 years ago. Unfortunately for Brown, he will be moving into No. 10 when rumblings grow louder about welfare cheats, the increasing number of healthy malingerers drawing disability benefits, and recipients of benefits refusing to accept responsibility for the behaviour of their offspring.

Unless Prime Minister Brown can find some way of reducing the burden of the state on the middle class, of cleaning up the benefits system so that the undeserving are less well treated, and of getting value for money spent, he might be the Prime Minister who presides over the beginning of the unravelling of the welfare state. It is just that fear that drove Tony Blair to attempt to turn the welfare state from a producer- into a consumer-driven apparatus.