Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Making work pay | 16 July 2010

What is the purpose of the welfare state? To protect British people from unemployment, or to protect them from jobs like fruit-picking and working in Pret A Manger? I listened to Farming Today* earlier, in which they interviewed the Eastern Europeans that we import en masse to do jobs that Brits used to do.

Having done the job myself in my younger days (I come from a part of the world where the October break is called the ‘tattie holidays’ so kids can dig potatoes), I can attest that it’s bloody hard work for a paltry reward. But it pays no less than the minimum wage. Without immigration, we’d be forced to find a proper solution to this problem: that welfare has priced a lot of British people out of this particular market.

But my main complain about immigration (which, to the chagrin of some CoffeeHousers, I’m in favour of) is that it has allowed us to cover up, rather than deal with, such problems. We have not noticed that at least 1 million working-age people have been on benefits since John Major was in power. We’d notice that if there were labour shortages. Immigration makes it easy not only to ignore the British poor, but to ignore huge dysfunctions in the British labour market.

Why, as Ken Livingstone once asked, has he never been served coffee by a Londoner if there are 782,000 working-age Londoners on benefits? The answer lies in the perverted incentives of our welfare state, and our deplorable system of taxing the low-paid to further deter them. Why break your back picking berries, if a fifth of what you earn from it has to pass to the government.

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