How Labour is turning Britain into a land of paupers

If there was one reason above any other for the British electorate’s flight to socialism in 1945, it was surely the means test. In some ways the national government’s grudging state charity of the Depression years was worse than nothing. For his ha’p’orth of black pudding, the 1930s welfare claimant had first to surrender his dignity, his privacy and in some cases his home. A claimant for the dole or the old age pension had to submit to inspection by the means test man, who had the power to enter his home and order him to dispose of every last luxury before money would be paid. Tales circulated about pensioners ordered to sell dining chairs or pictures from their walls. In The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), George Orwell wrote of unemployed miners forced to evict their elderly bedridden parents from their homes because the means test man had ruled that they could not qualify for the dole so long as they had a lodger. A man who had been spotted helping in his neighbour’s garden while the neighbour was away was refused help on the grounds that he ‘had a job feeding chickens’. To Nye Bevan the means test was ‘a principle that eats like an acid into the homes of the poor. In the small rooms and around the meagre tables of the poor, hells of personal acrimony and wounded vanity arise.’

The means test is an unlikely model, then, for the Blair government’s reforms of the welfare system. Yet it is back with a vengeance, and with remarkably feeble resistance from Labour back-benchers. Be it pension credit, child tax credit or working tax credit, the state is dispensing largesse via an ever-burgeoning army of ever nosier inspectors. Those who have lobbied the government to abandon the much hated pension credit in favour of higher state pensions are likely to be disappointed: in anticipation of last week’s report by the Pensions Commission, which warned of a £57 billion hole in the nation’s pension provision, the Prime Minister has spoken of wanting to create a new system ‘with the state pension at its core’: code for yet more — and more elaborate — means-tested add-ons to the existing miserly state pension of £79.40