We could have done with Norman Tebbit in the Commons this week, if only for dramatic variety. MPs were discussing welfare cuts that turned out to be soggier than trailed.
Even so, hands were wrung and damp hankies were flourished. Frowns on the Labour and Lib Dem benches were worthy of the hired grief at a municipal crematorium.
The atmosphere became claggy with pious angst. ‘Look at us,’ these MPs’ expressions seemed to say. ‘We care about welfare claimants. We are good people.’
Liz Kendall, Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, moped her way through an emotive speech.
Her cuts may, at most, bring £5billion savings from an annual benefits bill that is heading for £100billion. That is almost twice what we spend on defence.
Ms Kendall thrashed her head from side to side in anguish. Other MPs wailed that the cuts to incapacity payments were causing ‘terror’. People would ‘die’.
The background music was all swooping violins. Behold Dickensian 21st-century Britain where the ragged ‘unemployable’ receive a few meagre groats to offset calamity.
At PMQs the next day Sir Keir Starmer was confronted by the Labour MP Diane Abbott. She demanded ‘less of this rhetoric about the so-called reforms being moral’ and averred: ‘There is nothing moral about cutting benefits for what may be up to a million people. This is not about morality; this is about the Treasury’s wish to balance the country’s books on the backs of the most vulnerable.’
Liz Kendall’s cuts may, at most, bring £5billion savings from an annual benefits bill that is heading for £100billion
Ms Abbott, 71, was heard in quasi-ecclesiastical silence. In part that was because she is ‘Mother of the House’ – the longest-serving female MP.
But there was another reason for that reverential hush.
Diane Abbott was putting the establishment’s view. She was saying what ‘top people’, from parliament to Whitehall, the BBC and the House of Bishops to most think-tanks, universities and trade unions, fervently promote: that higher benefits represent progress.
For years they have cleaved to a one-sided view of welfare politics. This sees state handouts as fairness. Seldom is there discussion of the impact they have on the workers whose taxes fund them.
There we all sat, listening to the blessed Diane, the chamber so quiet you could have heard a mouse shutting its briefcase; and that was the moment, I am afraid, that I disgraced myself.
We scribes are supposed to sit in the press gallery in silence but Ms Abbott’s question annoyed me and I started harrumphing like a rhinoceros.
From deep in my orlop decks there arose a gaseous indignation. How the blazes dare Diane Abbott claim the high ground?
My stabbing Biro punctured my notepad and I may well have shouted something like ‘*£$%!*&!!!!’.
Diane Abbott promoted the idea that higher benefits represent progress
I am grateful to a young Labour MP sitting in the adjacent spillover gallery for very decently not reporting my disorderly conduct to Mr Speaker.
Sir Keir Starmer is hardly my ideal PM but I willed the nasal knight to give Ms Abbott short shrift.
He went only halfway and was far too courteous.
Sir Keir argued that it was not moral for a million young people to be in neither education nor training. ‘Opportunity and aspiration are the root of my values,’ he said quietly.
Well, that was good. But why so calm? Why not join the dots to a sharper part of the argument?
He should have vented, loudly and pungently, the truth that paying millions of citizens not to work only encourages more to try it on. And that undermines the work ethic of the rest of us.
State-subsidised idleness wrecks our economy and rots society.
There are 9.3million people aged between 18 and 64 who do not a stroke of work and show little inclination to change that. In a decade those claiming to be disabled have risen from just under six million to almost nine million. Referrals to mental health services are up by a third since 2019.
Disability rights activists protest at the Department for Work and Pensions against proposed changes to benefit regulations which, they say, will result in further hardship for the disabled
Lockdown undoubtedly did damage some people’s minds, yet these numbers defy credibility. Welfare payments are dished out without onerous checks. One does not wish to be glib – the genuinely disabled, both physical and mental, clearly need to be supported. But when claimants pocket fat sums in worklessness payments simply because they are fat or have acne, eczema, a food intolerance or a tendency to wet their beds, the social covenant frays.
If taxpayers see their money being frittered on frauds and if the political class equivocates about that abuse, many will conclude it is no longer worth bothering to go to work.
Why drag yourself out of bed to toil at a call centre or on a production line when you can tell the doctor (probably via a telephone examination) that you have some unquantifiable illness? Hey presto, suddenly you can be paid just as much money to stay at home all day.
The parallels are not precise but we have been here before. In 1981 Britain was skint. There were inner-city riots. Manufacturing was in trouble and interest rates were bankrupting businesses and mortgage-holders. Almost 10 per cent of adults were out of work. Inflation, which had hit 18 per cent the previous year, was still on a jampot’s rolling boil of more than 10 per cent. It was not clear Margaret Thatcher would last.
Streets were littered with anti-Tory graffiti. Northern Irish republican prisoners went on hunger strike. Punk rock lurched into something darker with bands such as The Exploited and GBH, whose songs included City Baby Attacked By Rats. It was an edgy time.
At the Conservative conference in Blackpool, where shouting protestors ringed the Winter Gardens venue, former party leader Edward Heath demanded ‘a return to consensus politics’. He possibly meant ‘a return to me being in charge’.
While Heath’s criticisms could be attributed to sour ambition, similar arguments from the Conservative Blue Chip group were not so easily dismissed.
Saatchi advert for The Conservative party which put them into government in 1979
Chris Patten, William Waldegrave, Tristan Garel-Jones and a certain John Major – how naive the Thatcherites later were to consider him ‘one of us’ – supported a pamphlet entitled Changing Gear.
This, too, endorsed ‘the old tradition of consensus’.
Far from wishing to change gear these consensualists wished little to alter. Their policies would have seen Britain continue rolling downhill to disaster.
Thirty-five years later many of those same anti-Thatcherites campaigned for us to stay in the European Union. On both occasions, thankfully, their demands for managed decline failed. But it was a damn close thing.
Mrs Thatcher was defended in 1981 by the lean, plain-talking new employment minister Norman Tebbit. In a speech that had bien pensants yelping with disgust, he said his father had been unemployed in the depression of the 1930s. ‘He didn’t riot. He got on his bike and he looked for work.’
Mr Tebbit became every Leftie’s exemplar of Thatcherite heartlessness. But he had a point, surely. Work was, and remains, a necessity for life.
That same month I entered the labour market as a 18-year-old would-be journalist. I shared digs with three Oxford undergraduates, although unlike them I needed a job to pay for my rent and food. The local Jobcentre was a depressing place. Middle-aged men queued at its booths, desperate to be hired.
There was nothing going in newspapers so I resorted to temporary stints as a warehouseman, factory hand, dustman, barman and Father Christmas.
At the start of that autumn my politics were on the Left, very much of the view that Mrs Thatcher was a threat to civilisation. Working life changed that. While my student housemates continued to read The Guardian and spout fashionable views about ‘On Yer Bike Norman’, the men and women I worked alongside were glad that someone was finally stating the obvious.
The newspaper in the cab of our dustcart was The Sun, and not just because of its Page 3 girl. During a stint as a forklift truckdriver’s mate in a Brut 33 warehouse I heard the socialist MP Tony Benn ridiculed as a deluded idiot. My student friends thought he was wonderful but my workmates could see the country was bust and union leaders were an obstacle to recovery.
I don’t remember complaints then about unemployment scroungers – everyone was too desperate to work, and the dole did not pay much – but there was certainly a lively appreciation for the facts of economic life.
Nearly half a century on, maybe the country has changed. What can I know today from my ivory tower of the Westminster press gallery? Are Labour MPs, elected politicians with constituency surgeries, not closer to the real world? It’s a fair question. Let me try to answer it with a couple of real-life stories.
A Herefordshire friend is a plumber who also keeps livestock. He works six or seven days a week, as does his wife. They have had one holiday in the past three years, a week’s package to Spain.
My friend has a cousin who is a heroin drug addict who is classed as depressed. During the pandemic this cousin received so many food parcels from the authorities that he could not possibly eat all the stuff. He sold much of it on the black market. The cousin receives at least £700 a week in benefits and more is spent on pottery, carpentry and archery courses to lift his spirits.
My friend watches this pampering, this waste, and wonders why he bothers to work so hard. He has another drug-addict neighbour who was given a free television by social services. He sold it to raise money for drugs and then demanded a replacement. They gave him a second TV because ‘we don’t judge’.
Meanwhile, I have another acquaintance who calls himself a ‘resting’ arts administrator. He has worked six months in the past 25 years. He is on pension credits, pays no council tax, has various other perks – a free TV licence, preferential treatment at the dentist, etc – and has just come back from a chi-chi holiday in Italy. How does he vote? Labour, of course. And Labour MPs know there are plenty more like him.
One of the wicked things about benefits abuse is that it weakens the truly moral case for a social safety net. Gordon Brown often invoked the parable of the Good Samaritan, saying we ‘should not walk by on the other side’ when we saw suffering. Any decent person will agree.
However, the man rescued by the Samaritan is not a welfare claimant. He is the victim of a mugging. The Samaritan uses his own money and does not look for personal glory or electoral advantage. And please note that the Bible encourages toil and scorns sloth.
St Paul tells the Thessalonians: ‘If any would not work, neither should he eat.’ The Book of Proverbs urges us to heed the most industrious member of the insect kingdom: ‘Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise.’
This week’s welfare cuts will not be enough to save our economy but they have achieved one thing of merit. Wittingly or not, the Starmerites have opened ‘the Overton window’.
That is the term for the limits of what is acceptable in polite political debate. Now that ‘their guy’ has started cuts, the BBC and the Guardian can no longer denounce welfare reform as being beyond the pale.
Even the great Lord Tebbit could chip in now and not be attacked.
We might still be able to save this country. But, as in 1981, it could be a damn close thing.
