Sunday, April 24, 2011

What is the social contract?

Welfare handouts aren't fair – and the public knows it

A new survey shows that despite years of propaganda from the Left, Britons retain a deep-seated sense of fairness and individual responsibility, says Janet Daley.


Like a mythical traveller seeking truth, a think tank has asked a profound question: what is fairness? And lo, the people have answered with (almost) one voice: what "fair" means is that those who are deserving shall receive, and those who are not shall be – well, not exactly cast out, but certainly not entitled to everything that's going.

As we report today, Policy Exchange – supposedly the Prime Minister's favourite ideas outlet – has done a brave and unusual thing. Rather than polling the public just on policy and voting intention, it has put a far more abstract moral issue before them. It instructed the pollsters at YouGov to find out precisely what the public thought the most powerful term of approbation in the political lexicon – "fair" – actually amounted to.

The quite unequivocal reply that was received (with breathtakingly enormous majorities in some forms) came as no surprise to this column. To most voters, fairness does not mean an equal distribution of resources and wealth, or even a redistribution of these things according to need. It means, as the report's title – "Just Deserts" – implies, that people get what they deserve. And what is deserved, the respondents made clear, refers to that which is achieved by effort, talent or dedication to duty: in other words, earned on merit.

As I have written so often on this page, when ordinary people use the word "fair", they mean that you should get out of life pretty much what you put in. Or, as the report's authors put it, "Voters' idea of fairness is strongly reciprocal – something for something." By obvious inference, a "something for nothing" society is the opposite of fair. And this view, interestingly, is expressed by Labour voters in pretty much the same proportion as all others.

Imagine that. After all these years of being morally blackmailed by the poverty lobby, harried by socialist ideologues and shouted at by self-serving public sector axe-grinders, the people are not cowed. Even after being bludgeoned by the BBC thought monitors and browbeaten by Left-liberal media academics with the soft Marxist view of a "fair" society – from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs – they have not bought it. They do not believe that if people are poor, it is necessarily society's fault, and therefore society's duty to deal with the consequences.

No, they say, as often as not, poverty is a consequence of lack of effort or self-control – and, therefore, the individual must accept the consequences. And they do not believe that such character failings and their consequences should be disregarded in the apportioning of welfare or help from the state – help which they know is made possible by the efforts of those who do "the right thing". They still have a firm and undaunted conception of the "undeserving poor" – a term so unfashionable that no politician would be capable of uttering it – and would like such people to be made to accept their reciprocal obligation to society in return for any assistance from public funds.

So the idea of "workfare" schemes, in which the long-term unemployed must undertake services to the community such as litter collection or graffiti removal if they are to continue receiving benefits, is hugely popular. Indeed, the public believes that one of the causes of unemployment is that out-of-work benefits are too generous.

This is a striking example of how voters can come to a common-sense understanding of an economic situation – that if you pay people not to work (or to be poor) then they are likely to stay out of work (or remain poor) – even though almost no one in public life has ever enunciated it. More surprising, perhaps, is the robust demand that those who could work, but won't, should have their benefits cut or stopped altogether – even if they have children. There seems to be little sympathy for the argument that the children of the workshy should not be penalised for their parents' fecklessness.

Now, this matter of children, and how they affect matters, is an interesting one. Those who responded to this poll seemed to take a quite startlingly hard line on the question of how much the presence of children should be taken into account by the welfare state. A majority said, for example, that there should be no additional child benefit paid after the third child, and they were only lukewarm on the subject of tax breaks for families with children (although they certainly prefer tax reliefs to cash benefits). And although they believe that lone parenthood should be discouraged, they are not particularly keen on the idea of encouraging marriage by incentivising it through the tax system.

On the face of it, this might appear odd, given what seem to be the traditional (some would say almost Victorian) attitudes that are expressed about work and life's vicissitudes in the survey as a whole. I think the result might have been different if the wording of the question had been more clearly linked to fairness: ie, is it fair that a married person supporting a family should pay the same amount of tax as a single one with no dependants?

But that notwithstanding, there is a comprehensible pattern here. I suspect that people now see marriage and the having of children as a matter of personal choice – a private decision one makes for oneself – rather than as a virtually inevitable part of adult life. Raising a family in today's world is not viewed so much as a function of accepting your grown-up role in the community, but a lifestyle option which you or may not adopt according to your personal tastes. What follows from that assumption is that you must accept responsibility for that decision.

That is the common thread throughout this survey: overwhelmingly, and with remarkable consistency, people reiterate their belief in individual responsibility. Their insistence that those who are able should be prepared to support themselves – and any children they produce – is not mean-mindedness or lack of compassion. (There was a clear message that those genuinely unable to make their own way should be helped.) Rather, it is an acknowledgement of the value of self-respect and self-determination: an understanding that taking responsibility for yourself is a proper part of fully fledged grown-up life, and that not having such expectations of people demeans them.

That part of the argument has been won. Now the case must be made more clearly that those who are carrying out the most important business of the society, by raising its children in a responsible way, are genuinely deserving of special consideration – even if it was their own self-sacrificing decision to do so.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Which is why Gay "Marriage" by any name doesn't make a difference - it's just our way of doing personal responsibility. Currently denied. And if there's one thing gay guys don't create -- it's the social burden of extra kids like people who have them that are unable to care for them. But we gays don't get any benefits, here or in England. Indeed, we're so busy making entrepreneurial efforts after being fired from jobs that we embody the "responsibility" ethic -- we get up off our duffs and do something, and with astoundingly little whining about how society "owes" us a living. The only thing we ask of society, or the only thing we think society owes us -- is a little respect for being extraordinarily responsible for ourselves.