Should we deal with the undeserving rich in the same way as the undeserving poor?

The early signs are that George Osborne’s political manoeuvre on welfare cuts may have backfired already. The Chancellor of the Exchequer decided to usher in the New Year with an announcement designed to wrong-foot the Labour Party and effectively declare open the 2015 general election campaign. But his move revealed, intentionally or not, something about the morality of this government’s attitude to the poor.

Another round of spending cuts is to be at the heart of the Conservative election strategy it seems. Of the £25bn proposed cuts, half will come from taking the axe once more to benefits. Old age pensions are to be exempted, apparently because older people vote more than do the under 25s whose housing benefit is the only specific target announced in the new welfare cuts.

The subtext, apparently, is that this will paint Labour as “the scrounger’s friend” ever-ready to squander the taxes of “hard-working people”, to use another Tory catchphrase. Many in Conservative party ranks, however, are unimpressed with the idea of balancing the budget on the backs of the working poor and those without jobs. There is also talk of intergenerational unfairness in sharing the burden of austerity unequally between young and old.

But there is a deeper subtext too. For it revives the old distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor of which our Victorian forebears were so fond with their Poor Law to incarcerate paupers in the Workhouse.

Earlier in the life of this government Dr Rowan Williams, then the Archbishop of Canterbury, warned against “a quiet resurgence of the seductive language of deserving and undeserving poor”. Not all churchmen agree. His predecessor, Lord Carey, opined in response, in the Daily Mail, that “hand-outs given to the long-term unemployed” exacerbated the problem of a “bloated” system of “welfare dependency” that “rewards fecklessness and irresponsibility”.

The general public tends increasingly to the latter view. The 2012 British Social Attitudes survey suggested that 37 per cent of the population thinks that most people on the dole are “fiddling”.  Some 62 per cent think unemployment benefit is too high and discourages work.

This is almost a threefold increase on what people said during the last recession in 1993. The public now sees the occupants of the 340,000 household in which no adult has ever worked as idle and undeserving caricatures from Shameless rather than people who, in Dr Williams words, are not “wicked or stupid or lazy” but who need help “because circumstances have been against them”. But the majority are not always right.

Clearly there is a balance to be struck between the duty of solidarity with those in need and the requirement to creative incentives for individuals to take responsibility for themselves and their families.  The Work and Pensions Secretary, Iain Duncan Smith, has for years been grappling bravely with that issue. His success has been only limited, not least because such a move is, ironically, best conducted in a time of plenty rather than one of austerity. But any attempt to achieve that balance will be further undermined by Mr Osborne’s crude politicking.

The Office for Budget Responsibility and the Institute for Fiscal Studies have both said that Mr Osborne’s new cuts will disproportionately hit the sick and disabled. That cannot be right. And both say that tax increases will be very difficult to avoid if the public deficit is to be reduced. Paying taxes is also a moral issue.  Odd then that we hear nothing from Mr Osborne, who previously cut taxes for millionaires, about the undeserving rich.

from The Church Times

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