How to spring the benefits trap

16 September 2009

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Fraser Nelson reports on how a revamp of the benefits system could finally end the scourge of Britain’s mass and hidden unemployment

In the reception of The Spectator’s office stands a statuette of a Welsh miner, pick and shovel over his shoulder, above an inscription ‘from the townsfolk of Aberdare’. The town had been savagely hit during the collapse in demand for British coal in the 1920s, with almost half of its residents out of work. The magazine launched an appeal and our readers responded with £12,000 — equivalent to £580,000 today. It gave a taste of a mood of national solidarity that was to go on to create a welfare state, to cure what William Beveridge called the ‘giant evil’ of idleness. Few could imagine, then, how this welfare state would incubate the very evil it was designed to eradicate.

The 2009 recession has been cruel to Aberdare, with some 25 per cent of its working-age population on benefits. But the real problem was what happened during the boom. At no point in the last ten years have fewer than a quarter of the population of the Welsh valleys been on out-of-work benefits. The same is true for Glasgow. And Liverpool. And Hartlepool. And Middlesbrough. And this, even more than the job losses of the last year, is the true scandal of British unemployment. That, for vast tracts of Britain, worklessness is not a curse introduced by the recession but a way of life.

For decades, it has been too easy for politicians to disregard this problem. The poor, in Britain, have proved horribly easy to ignore. Most do not vote. Most do not show up in claimant unemployment figures, which tend to feature less than a quarter of all Britain’s jobless. Covering up four million souls is an awesome task, but for the purposes of political debate in Britain it is one that has been successfully accomplished. Gordon Brown has boasted about new jobs — yet, staggeringly, all of the net job creation in the private sector since Labour came to power is accounted for by immigration.