In the ‘dependency’ debate most attention has focused on the impact of the tax and Social Security systems on families and the hidden encouragement to single parenthood. But ensuring that young men have the motivation, skills and opportunity for work is equally important. Here in Britain since 1979 we sought to ensure this in several ways. We felt that a period of subsidized idleness would be the worse start in life for these young people and a bad example for their fellows. So a two-year training scheme is guaranteed for every sixteen-and seventeen-year-old school-leaver who is without a job and not in full-time education; and simply going on to benefit is not generally a permitted option. The Restart programme, introduced in 1986, focuses on those who have been unemployed for more than two years and is mandatory for benefit recipients who do not take up the other employment and training options. Those undertaking the courses who do not seriously look for work, moreover, may have their benefits reduced. Incentives to work will be further strengthened by the new Jobseeker’s Allowance which further tightens the rules on the conditions for receiving benefit.
It is generally necessary to reinforce offers of assistance with the threat of sanctions in cases of non-compliance in order to prevent people opting out of work while drawing benefit. They may do this for several reasons — because of low morale, or because they consider it is not sufficiently worthwhile to work, or because casual employment in the black economy pays better. Furthermore, if we want to make real jobs available to people starting out, we must forswear minimum wage laws or any other regulations which destroy low-paid and less skilled employment.
We shall, however, never devise or implement the right policy programmes to keep people out of welfare dependency if we entertain wrong assumptions about ‘the poor’. It is again an American scholar, Gertrude Himmelfarb, who has done most to investigate the historical background to our current ideas about poverty.[94] From at least Elizabethan times, a distinction had been drawn, both in popular understanding and in administrative action to relieve poverty, between the ‘deserving’ and the ‘undeserving’ poor. And although softened and attenuated, not least because people understood the disruptive stresses of urbanization, such a distinction continued to be made, even though the safety net of benefits widened and deepened. Indeed, for anyone who remembers the pre-war period in Britain the notion that ‘the poor’ constituted one identifiable, homogeneous group would have seemed quite unrealistic.
In Grantham and in similar towns up and down the country, we understood that there were some families where the breadwinner had fallen on hard times and who were going through great difficulties but who would never accept charity — even what they saw as charity from the state — being determined at all costs to keep up their respectability. ‘I keep myself to myself and I’ve never taken a penny piece from anyone’ would be the way many a dignified pensioner would express it. Taken to the extreme, this sense of independence could certainly lead to suffering. Neighbours would tactfully do what they could. Unfortunately, however, some individual cases of proud hardship are the counterpart of avoiding welfare dependency.
By contrast, there were others — and I came across this far more once I moved to London — for whom independence and respectability were of little consequence, who willingly accepted dependence on the state and who were unwilling to make the extra effort to improve their own lot or give their children a better start.
The fact that status in society accrued to the first of these groups and stigma to the second meant that social pressures were generally benign in the sense that people who fell, as most of us do, somewhere between the two were more likely to find a job and provide for themselves and their families. Set down like this, such an approach may seem harsh. But a society that encourages such virtues as effort, thrift, independence and family obligation will tend to produce people who have greater self-esteem, and are thus happier (as well as not being a burden to others), than the people living in a society which has encouraged them to feel useless, demoralized and frustrated. Even if that were not the case, the state and society must be just as well as compassionate. To treat those who make an effort in the same way as those who do not is unjust; and not only does such injustice demoralize those who are benefiting from it, it also foments resentment among those who are not.
At some point in this century, which it is difficult now to distinguish precisely, too many Western policy-makers began to talk and act as if it were ‘the system’ rather than individuals — or even luck — which was the cause of poverty. We fell into the trap of considering poverty — and there is no need here to enter onto the minefield of distinctions between relative and absolute poverty — as a ‘problem’ created by economic policy which the redistribution of wealth and income could ‘solve’ by various ingenious methods. We kept on returning to the idea that poverty was a cause rather than a result of various kinds of irresponsible or deviant behaviour.
Most of those who spoke in these terms did so for the highest of motives. No one’s motives were higher than Keith Joseph’s, whose speech of june 1972 to the Pre-school Playgroups Association when he was Social Services Secretary constituted the most sophisticated version of this approach. Drawing on recent research, Keith suggested that a ‘cycle of deprivation’ was at work in which ‘the problems of one generation appear to reproduce themselves in the next’. In this Keith was breaking important new ground in drawing attention to the way in which ‘bad parenting’ has an impact not just on the children of those parents, but on their children. But Keith did not question whether the state by its welfare policies was acting as a third bad parent by sapping personal responsibility and self-help. Indeed, he advocated, alongside initiatives to promote better parenting and more family planning, that the government should intervene by way of different benefits and a possible tax credit scheme. When a clear analytical thinker like Keith gets the analysis right and the prescription wrong (as he later accepted), it is indeed a good illustration of the way in which on both sides of the Atlantic both right- and left-wing governments created the conditions for our present problems. Right wingers concentrated on ‘targeted’ benefits, which went to those whose behaviour was most likely to be adversely affected by them; left wingers increased the global burden of Social Security benefits, which hard-pressed and even ‘poor’ taxpayers then had to meet.
Much less research on welfare dependency has been done in Britain. But knowing what we do of the size and rate of increase in our Social Security spending, and seeing what has occurred in the United States, we should expect to see some similarly unintended consequences of government social policy here. And indeed we do — which leads on to the third development, the weakening of the traditional family.
FAMILY MISFORTUNES
The family is clearly in some sort of crisis: the question is what. There are those who claim that the family is changing rather than weakening. At one extreme some of these people view any household unit, such as cohabiting homosexuals, as a ‘family’ deserving the same degree of social recognition and respect as a married couple with children. Rather more would argue that an unmarried couple living together in a ‘stable’ relationship, who may or may not have children and may or may not in due course get married, should be so treated. Still more, doubtless, would regard serial monogamy, couples who marry and divorce lightly, as simply an ‘alternative lifestyle’ (divorce rates have risen rapidly in Britain as elsewhere in the West since divorce laws were reformed in the 1960s). And happily there is still the traditional family of dad, mum, youngsters and relatives.
94
See Gertrude Himmelfarb,