The middle class are about to discover the cruelty of Britain's benefits system

A decade of cuts has ripped apart the safety net. People on decent salaries hit by the Covid-19 fallout are in for a shock writes Polly Toynbee 

 

‘People confronting universal credit’s obstacles may join the half who find themselves propelled to local food banks.’ Photograph: Oli Scarff/AFP/Getty Images


Millions of people are about to discover something they didn’t know about British life. There is no longer a safety net. People who have paid tax and national insurance for years and never been near the social security system will be turning to it in their hour of need; yet far too late, like trapeze artists falling through the air, they will find that the net beneath them has been lowered dangerously close to the ground and is badly torn.

If these people once believed relentlessly misleading tabloid tales of benefit scroungers, they will have a rude awakening. They will find that when Iain Duncan Smith turned the screw on social security in 2012, he was right to warn claimants: “This is not an easy life any more, chum.” As if it ever was. 

The chancellor, Rishi Sunak, has done well to honour 80% of wages for those “furloughed” from shut-down businesses – up to £2,500 a month. No one knows how many that covers and at what cost, but it was a macroeconomic necessity. One worry is the incapacity of the HMRC workforce, with 15,600 staff cut and 157 local offices with local knowledge closed: can they pay the wage subsidy to companies in time to save them? Many firms could still close, sending millions into unemployment.

The 15% self-employed are urgently seeking a matching plan, with the Treasury under intense pressure for a rapid response. Most of the self-employed are low-paid: their median income is just £10,000, according to Paul Johnson of the Institute for Fiscal Studies. Some won’t qualify, if they have earning partners. But many will have been forced into sham “self-employment” by tax-cheating companies. They will be desperate – and angry. The Resolution Foundation wants them paid 80% of average earnings over the past three years – or they will work through illness, rather than starve on £94 a week sickness benefit, says the RSA Populus poll.

Let’s hope that injustice is fixed. But even then, watch the shock as millions fall on the untender mercies of the Department for Work and Pensions, to discover what happened to benefits in the past decade. While never over-generous, by 2010 Labour had greatly lifted living standards for low earners, especially for children: Gordon Brown’s tax credits raised a million children and a million pensioners out of poverty. Since 2010, according to new research by Kerris Cooper and John Hills, a professor at the London School of Economics, children have lost a quarter of the support they had; chancellor George Osborne and his successors took out a staggering nearly £40bn from benefits. Never “all in this together”, Osborne justified it by raining down abuse on low-paid families. The hypocrisy: as the current editor of the London Evening Standard, he ran Christmas collections for poor families! The Resolution Foundation predicts a third of children falling into poverty by 2023.

Some cuts were secretive, uprating benefits by a meaner CPI not RPI inflation rate, a four-year freeze, and axing council tax support. Some made a noise – such as the bedroom tax, costing some families £14 week for a spare room. An early case was a Hartlepool family whose empty room belonged to their recently deceased 10-year-old. Housing benefit for renters was cut brutally. Introducing the two-child limit was exceptionally unjust.

New claimants confronting universal credit’s obstacles may join the half who find themselves propelled to food banks. Many new arrivals will join the 60% of claimants falling into debt and rent arrears while waiting at least five weeks for first payments. As with HMRC, a stripped-down DWP workforce is at risk of being overwhelmed. Some talking to the Treasury are shocked to find its staff clueless about the meanness of a benefits system they have cut and cut again. That explains Sunak’s sudden extra £20 a week and slight easing of housing benefit: they had no idea.

Torsten Bell, head of the Resolution Foundation, says people on £50,000 salaries have been anxiously asking him about benefits rates. They’re in for a shock, he says. Unlike the previous tax credit system, universal credit only allows savings of £6,000 (it takes steep deductions from savings up to £16,000). People hoping this is only temporary will be distraught at having to use up their rainy-day funds, often saved for years for a deposit on a home. The foundation is lobbying urgently to have this savings means-test dropped.

Hills says a couple with two children will get £266 a week. And take from that £115 – the average amount that housing benefit falls short of rental payments. Many new claimants will run up rent arrears. Expect them to plunge immediately into poverty, miles below the £384 minimum income standard for a family of four, says Hills.

Some singles will get a shock too. Under-35s will be living on £73, and only funded for a room in a shared flat, in the cheapest third of rentals in the area.

Many who see themselves as middle class will confront the reality of Britain’s nonexistent safety net. It is, says the IFS’s Paul Johnson, “extraordinarily low”. One piece of advice from all these experts I’ve talked to: apply immediately, to limit these delays and debts. “Too many will wait, borrow from family, deny it’s happening to them, feeling the stigma. Apply at once,” says Torsten Bell.
These millions discovering DWP brutality at first hand will no longer be deceived by the old poison shaming those on benefits as loafers, frauds and “not people like us”. Benefits offer penury, not a life of Riley. Rishi Sunak has been lavishly praised, not least for his empathic language: “We will be judged by our capacity for compassion”. But his compassion will be judged by how far he keeps benefit rates below the most basic poverty line.

Bluff, blackmail and brinkwomanship: the ‘madman theory’ of no-deal Brexit

Andrew Rawnsley in The Guardian


Don’t panic! Don’t panic! You need not spoil your Christmas by worrying that Britain is walking the Brexit tightrope without a safety net because the defence secretary, Gavin Williamson, has announced that the armed forces are on standby.

Standing by to do what exactly? That is not clear. Penny Mordaunt, the international development secretary, is redeploying civil servants with expertise in disaster management to no-deal emergency planning. And Matt Hancock, the health secretary, has declared himself the world’s biggest purchaser of fridges so that the NHS has somewhere to keep stockpiles of critical medicines. He recently told colleagues that, in the event of a bad Brexit, he could not guarantee that people would not lose their lives. Choose Brexit – and you may die. They certainly didn’t put that on the side of their campaign bus.


Those who willed this nightmare on our country did not reveal that it would require such costly and alarming measures

The obvious thing to say, but worth emphasising nevertheless, is that those who willed this Brexit nightmare on our country did not reveal that it would require such costly and alarming measures. They sold it as liberation day, not doomsday. Do you recall Boris Johnson and his gang telling us that leaving the EU could mean putting troops on the street, establishing a “war room” in the NHS, emergency airlifts of medicines, leafleting every household with advice on how to cope with food shortages and deploying those with experience of dealing with the aftermath of tornadoes, epidemics and tsunamis? No, me neither. It was supposed to be a piece of cherry-topped cake, not a humiliating national calamity.

A few of the Brexiters are still trying to claim that it might somehow turn out all right on the night, so it is important to be clear about the consequences of a no-deal outcome. It will mean a stark rupture to our relationship not just with the EU but with much of the rest of the world. The overnight termination of almost every legal and trading agreement between Europe and Britain would cause disruption without precedent in peacetime. There will be no transition arrangements. There will be no mutually recognised rights for EU citizens living in the UK and Brits living in the rest of the EU. There will be a hard border in Ireland. Instead of a glide path into a new relationship with our continent, Britain will be in free fall.

Large businesses have taken some precautions against a botched Brexit. That was only sensible after the abject combination of tragedy and farce that has played out over the past 30 months. But hardly anyone is ready for the crash version. Neither is the government. It can’t even tell companies what tariffs they might be expected to pay on imports from the EU. Britain’s five most important business organisations – the CBI, the Institute of Directors, the British Chambers of Commerce, the Federation of Small Businesses and the manufacturers’ body, EEF – all agree. An unprepared Britain would be plunged into severe turbulence.


There is no such thing as a pain-free no deal

Earlier this year, the British Chambers of Commerce outlined 24 critical risk questions that businesses needed answering in order to cope with any Brexit scenario. The BCC reports today that, with under 100 days left, the government has produced a satisfactory response to just two of the 24, while 15 “are still flashing red”.

A few of the Brexiters in the cabinet are touting the idea of a “managed no deal”. This is oxymoronic. There is no such thing as a pain-free no deal. It is notable that this latest iteration of fantasy Brexit is most often promulgated by ministers, such as Andrea Leadsom, who have no responsibility for delivering essential services. Even these Brexiters don’t deny that a no-deal outcome would present a big challenge to government on multiple fronts. In the light of their recent performance, how confident are you that our masters of disaster could cope? A couple of drones have just incapacitated Gatwick airport, an example of the degree to which the complex systems of advanced societies can be acutely vulnerable to disruption.

In a no-deal Brexit, a key role will be played by Chris Grayling, the rogue drone who goes by the title of transport secretary. This is the one-man disrupter who proved incapable of introducing new rail timetables without throwing the network into chaos. I don’t know about you, but I am not sleeping better at night for knowing that Failing Grayling will be in charge of trying to manage ports gridlocked by a crash-out Brexit.

I can’t forecast exactly would happen. No one can. One of the alarming things about this scenario is its very unpredictability. I observe that civil servants, those who lead government agencies and the majority of the cabinet, the people who would be expected to handle the consequences, are very scared of no deal. They differ only in thinking that it will be absolutely catastrophic or merely disastrous. Ministers fear that the disruption to normal life will be deeply serious and there will be an extremely nasty hit to the economy, a combination that would inflict once-in-a-generation damage on the Tory party’s reputation.

A calamity Brexit would do to the Conservatives what the Winter of Discontent did to Labour. The mass strikes that overwhelmed the Callaghan government in 1978-79 seared into the national collective consciousness images of picket lines, paralysed services, rubbish piling up in the streets, the sick going untreated and the dead left unburied. That haunted Labour, and cost it public trust, for years after the event. Empty supermarket shelves, shortages of critical medicines, stranded travellers, motorways to ports turned into giant lorry parks and all the other consequences of a bad Brexit would not be quickly forgotten nor forgiven. This spectre chills the blood of some of the most hardcore Brexiters in the cabinet. The case of Michael Gove is instructive. Ardent Brexiter that he is, his departmental responsibilities for farmers and the food supply have opened his eyes to how bad no deal could be for both the country and his party. In a piquant twist, he is now one of those ministers who believe that any deal is better than no deal.


This is a highly perilous game of chicken in which people’s livelihoods, and quite possibly people’s lives, are at stake

David Gauke, the justice secretary, is not a man given to the hyperbolic statement. His usual role in government is to be deployed as a fire blanket for the smothering of any controversy that is getting fiery. So it is noteworthy when such an unflamboyant figure publicly declares that a no-deal Brexit would be so grotesquely irresponsible that he would quit the government rather than sit in a cabinet that allowed it to happen.

If all the sentient members of the cabinet think a no-deal Brexit will be a calamity, and as good as admit this in public, why is the government nevertheless acting as if it might allow that to come to pass? Bluff, blackmail and brinkwomanship feature in the explanation. Though Theresa May will say that this is not a scenario she wants or expects to happen, some of her strategists think that amping up the prospect of a disaster Brexit suits her. The prime minister is still hoping that she can extract some last-gasp concessions from the EU that will help her get her unloved deal through parliament. European leaders are sounding unwilling to do very much to assist her. The EU has worked on the assumption that Britain is not so crazy as to crash out in a way that would hurt it, but us much more. So part of Number 10’s calculation is that the EU needs to start worrying that it really is possible that this could transpire.

To make sense of this, it is useful to have some familiarity with “madman theory”. This was an idea about how to conduct international relations that was formulated during the Cold War, when Richard Nixon was in the White House. It was thought to be useful for America to have a leader who seemed to be a bit unhinged, because this would throw the other side off balance and force the Soviet Union to make concessions for fear that the US president might be crazy enough to start a nuclear war. The Brexit variant is to induce the EU to believe that Britain might be unbalanced enough to crash out. The EU will then, so goes the theory, give Mrs May what she needs. She is also gambling that fear of a disaster Brexit will drive many Conservative MPs who don’t like her agreement into supporting it.

This is a highly perilous game of chicken in which many people’s livelihoods, and quite possibly people’s lives, are at stake. The risk is that it could accidentally lead to the very catastrophe that it is supposed to prevent. It was called “madman theory” for a reason.
A merry Christmas, everyone. I will not tempt fate by wishing you a peaceful and prosperous new year.

Welfare fraud is a drop in the ocean compared to tax avoidance

As Joanne Gibbons' case shows, benefit underpayments save us more than 'cheats' cost us. We need to target the real villains

• 
• • James Ball
  • guardian.co.uk, Sunday 3 February 2013 12.06 GMT

Had Gibbons claimed the benefits to which she was entitled she could have collected double her 'fraudulent' claims. Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

 

Joanne Gibbons was sentenced to community service for claiming income support while holding down two paid jobs. Through accumulated payments of £66-a-week, the court heard, she collected £3,140 to which she wasn't entitled.

Predictably, the Daily Mail is outraged. But here's the strange twist: had Gibbons claimed the benefits to which she was actually entitled, she could have collected £130 a week through family tax credits and child benefit. In total, Gibbons' fraudulent claims cost the taxpayer around £3,100 less than claiming what she was actually entitled to.

It's the reaction to Gibbons' claims which are particularly noteworthy. Matthew Sinclair, chief executive of the Taxpayers' Alliance – an organisation rarely troubled by wealthy people's tax avoidance – tells the Mail:

"It beggars belief that somebody going to the lengths of making fraudulent claims would have actually received more in benefits had they been honest.

"It just goes to show that the current system is broken and doesn't provide the right incentives for claimants to go back to work."

This quote suggests Sinclair is perhaps even less numerate than the "benefits cheat" he's deriding. Gibbons was entitled to £130 a week in legitimate benefits, while working on two low-income jobs. This total was higher than the £66 a week out-of-work benefit she was improperly claiming (though some of the £130 a week could be claimed in or out of work).

In what sense is a system which tops up low wages a disincentive to work? Sinclair appears lost in lazy rhetoric – an all-too-common failing when it comes to chastising the millions of families, most of whom with at least one adult in work, who rely on the benefit system.

The British public believe benefit fraud is a big problem. A recent poll by the TUC showed people believe 27% of the welfare budget is fraudulently claimed.

The reality is very different. Last year, 0.7% of total benefit expenditure was overpaid due to fraud, according to the DWP's official estimates. This totalled £1.2bn over the year. Nor is fraud getting worse – even against a background of benefit cuts and long-term unemployment fraud made up a smaller share of the welfare bill last year than it did in 2010/11 or 2009/10.

Indeed, welfare fraud is smaller than accidental overpayments due to error, which totalled £2.2bn (£1.4bn of which due to official error). It's also smaller than the amount of money underpaid to those entitled to it: £1.3bn.

In other words, if we wiped out benefit fraud tomorrow – but also eliminated the errors that deprive people of money to which they are entitled – the welfare bill would grow, not shrink.

In the context of the UK's £700bn public spending, and £150bn+ welfare bill (of which pensions and in-work benefits make up the substantial majority), benefit fraud is a relatively small revenue loss. But how does it compare to another textbook villain: tax avoidance?

Put simply, it is comparatively tiny. HMRC consistently estimates the UK's tax gap – the gap between what HMRC thinks it should receive versus what it actually gets – at more than £30bn per year. Others estimate this is far, far higher.

Of this, even conservative estimates suggest around a sixth – £5bn a year – is lost through tax avoidance, tricks to reduce tax bills which fall within the letter (if not spirit) of the law, but often fall outside what's regarded as acceptable by the public. A further sixth, at least, is estimated to be due to wholesale tax evasion: simply illegally not paying the tax that's owed.

These conservative estimates alone outweigh benefit fraud by a factor of eight, but this time not done in tens (or at most hundreds) of pounds per week by people struggling to get by; but rather by people who could afford to pay more, but prefer not to.

Benefit underpayments save us more money than benefit fraud costs us. By the most conservative estimates, tax avoidance and tax evasion outweighs benefit fraud eightfold. But the constant target of argument – "scroungers", "benefit cheats", and more, isn't the well-heeled middle classes who knock a little off their tax return, or the high-rollers with elaborate offshore schemes.

Instead, it's those at the bottom of society – for the government, perhaps, it makes it easier to sell the public swingeing cuts to the safety net that millions of families, both in and out of work, rely on to get by. For the Mail, it's easier to sell papers by buying into the easy preconceptions of their readers than bothering to challenge them.

Unfortunately, all too often, that's a view the Labour party – and others on the left – seem all too happy to go along with. If we must have national villains, surely we can do better than these?

There is a problem with welfare, but it's not 'shirkers'

This economic model isn't delivering jobs or decent wages. The real scroungers are greedy landlords and employers

• 
• • Seumas Milne
  • The Guardian, Tuesday 8 January 2013 22.20 GMT

‘The costs of systemic failure have ­ballooned: long-term ­unemployment has ­increased by 146% since 2010.' Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

The glee and class contempt with which Britain's Tory leaders have set about this week's onslaught on welfare has been an object lesson in the cynical venom at the heart of David Cameron's coalition. To force through cuts in the living standards of the poorest people in the country, demonisation and division have been the order of the day.

The Conservatives back workers not shirkers, the prime minister declared, as George Osborne pictured an honest shift worker passing the closed blinds of a skiver "sleeping off a life on benefits". Tory MP John Redwood insisted betting firms target deprived areas because the poor have too much "time on their hands".

Having softened up their audience with a press campaign of tales of "scroungers" and fraudsters, the Tories couldn't have been clearer about their purpose: to turn the low paid against the unemployed, just as they've tried to set private sector against public sector workers – and the Victorians separated the deserving from the undeserving poor.

Having drawn their toxic dividing line, the game has then been to put Labour on the wrong side, in the scroungers' camp. Hence the Conservative poster campaign in advance of yesterday's Commons vote on the coalition plan to make the first general real terms benefit cuts since the 1930s, declaring: "Today Labour are voting to increase benefits by more than workers' wages."

But the signs are that the skivers versus strivers talk has been backfiring. Even Cameron's dog-whistle spinman, Lynton Crosby, has been getting worried about the tone. So no wonder Nick Clegg, who claims to be on a journey to "the centre ground", wants to dissociate his Lib Dems from the nakedly nasty party.

As the impact of this year's benefit squeeze hits home, the backlash is likely to grow. Far from targeting "shirkers", the three-year benefit and tax credit cap doesn't even mainly target the unemployed. More than 60% of those who will lose out are in work.

Among the "scroungers" Cameron will be clamping down on are 300,000 nurses, 150,000 teachers and 40,000 soldiers. The real terms cut will hit the poorest, lone parents, the disabled and women hardest, according to the government's own assessment. It will increase inequality and help tip hundreds of thousands of children into poverty.

Just as 8,000 millionaires are about to get an average tax cut of over £107,000 and food banks are booming, the coalition is driving through a benefit squeeze that swamps the rise in tax allowances and targets the most vulnerable – already subject to a string of other cuts and new charges, from disability allowances to council tax.

Ministers claim the end of child benefit for the better-off in some way balances the attack on means-tested benefits. But not only is child benefit set apart in being paid overwhelmingly to women: like all universal benefits it helps to create a common social interest, can be offset with progressive taxation and becomes far easier to hack away at once restricted to the lower paid.

Of course, these cuts are being made in the name of deficit reduction. In reality, even if the logic of the coalition's austerity programme is accepted, there are plenty of other ways to find the savings made from capping benefit and tax credits (even the Blairite prince over the water, David Miliband, today denounced the cap and floated lower rate pension tax relief instead).

But austerity is failing and the underlying deficit growing. Even the IMF has now admitted it underestimated the disastrous impact of austerity programmes on growth and jobs. And cuts in the incomes of the poorest in any economy will only depress demand when the opposite is urgently needed – including to shrink the deficit.

The Tories feel safe attacking social security because a long-running media campaign has fostered a wildly inaccurate welfare mythology. On average, people think 27% of the welfare budget is claimed fraudulently, when the government's own estimate is 0.7% – or around £1bn, compared to an estimated £70bn worth of tax evasion. Most payments go to pensioners, and, far from soaring ahead of wages, unemployment benefit has fallen to 11% of average earnings, compared with 22% in 1979.

That's not to say there isn't a problem with welfare. It just isn't the one the political class and media mostly claim it is. Central to the sharp increase in social security costs over the past generation have been rising joblessness and stagnating wages. Since 1980, unemployment has averaged more than three times the postwar rate, while the proportion of those in low-paid jobs has doubled to over 20%.

In other words, welfare has become a prop for the failure of neoliberal capitalism to deliver jobs or decent wages. In Britain, the prop has partly taken the form of subsidising poverty pay through New Labour's tax credits, and exorbitant private rents through a massively expanded housing benefit bill.

That model has now crashed and the costs of systemic failure have ballooned: long-term unemployment has increased by 146% since 2010. What Cameron and Osborne are doing is to kick away props, not from bad employers and greedy landlords – the real welfare scroungers – but from the most deprived when they're needed most.

Labour is right to oppose real benefit cuts and support publicly backed work programmes, but wrong to endorse real terms cuts in public sector pay and private minimum wage schemes. If politicians are serious about cutting the welfare bill – instead of driving claimants deeper into poverty – there are obvious alternatives.

A crash council housebuilding programme, backed with northern European-style rent control, would slash the £21bn a year from the housing benefit bill. A living wage across the economy, combined with strengthened workplace rights, would cut the tax credit and other benefit bills. And both, combined with a public bank-driven national investment programme, would boost growth and shrink the dole bill.

Since this government will be doing nothing of the kind, expect instead the social unrest predicted by northern council leaders in response to plans for 30% cuts in local authority budgets. Polling suggests public opposition to the benefit squeeze will also spread as people find out more about who will bear the brunt. Even the Tories may come to regret their war on the poor.

An Obituary to The Welfare State, 1942-2013.

After decades of public illness, Beveridge's most famous offspring has died

• 
• • Aditya Chakrabortty
  • The Guardian, Tuesday 8 January 2013

For much of its short but celebrated life, the Welfare State was cherished by Britons. Instant public affection greeted its birth and even as it passed away peacefully yesterday morning, government ministers swore they would do all they could to keep it alive.

The Welfare State's huge appeal lay in its combination of simplicity and assurance. A safety net to catch those fallen on hard times, come rain or shine, boom or bust, it would be there for all those who had paid in.

Such universality allowed people to project on to it whatever they wished. Welfare State's father, the Liberal William Beveridge, described his offspring as "an attack on Want", one of the five evil giants that had to be slain in postwar Britain. But for future Labour prime minister Clement Attlee, "Social security to us can only mean socialism".

Yet there were critics. Indeed, it is thought that as late as yesterday, an unnamed twentysomething PPE graduate at Policy Exchange was revising a document entitled "What's Wrong with Welfare?" In the end, however, it was not a rightwing think tank that killed Welfare. The proximate cause of death was a change in child benefit from being available to all to a means-tested entitlement. That marked the end of one of the last remaining universal benefits, in turn causing a fatal injury to Welfare.
It is a testimony to Welfare's powerful charm that few immediately accepted its passing. Hours after its official death, bloggers continued to talk as if it were still alive, albeit under grave threat from the perfidious Tories.

But analysts later confirmed that the change to child benefit did indeed mark the death of the Welfare State as originally envisaged by Beveridge: a "contributory" system, where those who paid in during their working lives could count on financial help from the government when in need.

It expired peacefully on Monday, 7 January, just weeks after marking its 70th birthday.
The system had suffered many attacks over the years, from politicians talking of a "welfare trap", government means-testing, and frothy-mouthed journalists reporting isolated cases of benefit fraud.
For many would-be claimants, Welfare had become a ragged system where, however deserving or needy, they weren't poor enough to qualify for benefits, or the cash involved was too small to bother claiming.

Though David Cameron spoke of a "something for nothing" culture, the opposite was closer to the truth: Welfare had become a "nothing for something" system where taxpayers chipped in but got very little back.

This was very different from the scenes that greeted Welfare's birth in 1942. Then, the BBC broadcast in 22 different languages the details of Beveridge's social insurance scheme and the Manchester Guardian repeatedly acclaimed it as a "great plan" and a "big and fine thing". The public was enthusiastic, buying more than 635,000 copies of what was formally titled the "Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee on Social Insurance and Allied Services".

Yet the golden period of Welfare really came in the 60s and 70s as, thanks to the work of Barbara Castle, Jeff Rooker, Audrey Wise and others, pensions and allowances were made more generous and tied to typical earnings.

"If you were poor, you were far less behind than at any other time in contemporary British history," according to Richard Exell, a senior policy officer at the TUC and a campaigner on welfare issues for more than 30 years. "It produced a Britain that was one of the most equal societies in western Europe."

Just before Margaret Thatcher came to power, a single person out of work would get unemployment benefit worth almost 21% of average earnings; last year, jobseeker's allowance was nearly half that, amounting to just over 11%.

Welfare's big decline came in the 1980s, as the Conservatives moved more benefits from available to all to on offer only to the poor. This was justified as making public spending more efficient.

But, according to a famous and much quoted study by Walter Korpi and Joakim Palme, such means-testing is far less effective and more expensive than universal benefits. In a study of 18 rich countries, the academics found that targetting benefits at the poorest usually generated resentment among those just above – and led to smaller entitlements.

This "paradox of redistribution" was certainly observable in Britain, where Welfare retained its status as one of the 20th century's most exalted creations, even while those claiming benefits were treated with ever greater contempt.

"If you look at unemployment and sickness benefit as a proportion of average earnings, then Britain has one of the meanest welfare systems in Europe," says Palme. "Worse than Greece, Bulgaria or Romania."

Some of that same meanness can be seen in the way Welfare was discussed as it moved into its sixth and seventh decades. It was no longer about social security but benefits. Those who received them were no longer unfortunate but "slackers", as Iain Duncan Smith referred to them. A recent study by Declan Gaffney, Ben Baumberg and Kate Bell of 6,600 national newspaper articles on Welfare published between 1995 and 2011 found 29% referred to benefit fraud. The government's own estimate of fraud is that it is less than 1% across all benefit cases.

The death of Welfare does not mean an end to all benefit spending. Instead, it is outlived by its predecessor, Poor Relief, in which only the very poorest will receive government cash. Analysts are unsure about the repercussions.

"I'm not aware of any country that's ever had a combination of Victorian-style poor laws and parliamentary democracy," says Gaffney.

Instead of a book of condolences, there will be a special edition of the Guardian's letters page. In separate tributes, BBC4 will air some respectful but little-watched documentaries; there will also be a truly unbearable edition of The Moral Maze.

Family isn't dead – it's getting better

If people abandon the traditional model and forgo children or marriage it does not destroy societies, it can liberate them

• 
• • Jill Filipovic
  • guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 11 December 2012 13.30 GMT

'It is actually exceedingly difficult in much of the world for women to achieve highly in a career while also having a thriving family and personal life.' Photograph: Aping Vision/STS/Getty Images

 

Are we living in a post-familial age? According to a new report, The Rise of Post-Familialism: Humanity's Future?, the answer is yes: the traditional family unit is slowly dying out as more people choose to forgo children and even marriage. As a result, society is economically imperilled, lacking the necessary workforce to support older generations. We're also "values-challenged", entering a brave new world of materialistic indulgence, selfishness and protracted adolescence.

Sounds awful, doesn't it? Luckily, almost none of it is true.

People around the world are indeed delaying childbearing and marriage, and larger numbers of people never marry or reproduce at all. But that is not synonymous with a moral decline, or selfish decadence. It represents an uptick in women's rights, a commitment to creating the family one wants, and wider choices for everyone.

It's no shock that the drop in the number of children a woman has came along with the advent of the birth control pill. The countries with the highest birth rates aren't just highly religious; they're poor, have abominable human rights records and lack access to reliable birth control. Contrary to New York Times columnist Ross Douthat's position, it is not in fact the country with the most babies that wins: if that was the case, Nigeria would be running the show.

Despite the clear correlation between reproductive rights and prosperity, the report's author, joined by conservative commentators, laments the decline in childbearing because, as David Brooks says, it represents a rise of individualism and personal freedom – and that's a bad thing. Brooks writes:

"People are not better off when they are given maximum personal freedom to do what they want. They're better off when they are enshrouded in commitments that transcend personal choice – commitments to family, God, craft and country."

But the moral case against individualism and choice doesn't have legs. It's a moral good when people have a wide array of choices and increased personal freedom – not just for the individual, but also for children, family and society. And the evidence backs that up.

Valuing tradition, family and God doesn't automatically translate into healthy families or economic prosperity. Just look at the United States: the states that most idealise the conservative model do have higher birth rates, earlier marriage, higher levels of religiosity and more consistent church attendance. They make up consistent conservative voting blocks. They also have the highest levels of divorce in the country, the highest poverty rates, the highest teen pregnancy rates, the lowest child health ratings and the lowest education levels. On the other hand, the states that champion "liberal values" do have later marriage rates and lower birth rates. They're also richer and better educated, the children that reside in them are healthier and families split up less often.

And contrary to the assertions in both the report and the commentary surrounding it, a lower birth rate does not actually mean that individuals end up voting to support only the interests of affluent childless singles. Quite the opposite: the social safety net is much stronger in liberal, supposedly individualistic, lower-birthrate blue states. An array of choices seems to mean that people respect and support a variety of paths.

The rest of the world tells a similar story. There are obviously myriad complex factors that play into a nation's success, but the places where people are the healthiest and the most economically stable are the relatively liberal nations that provide for social welfare while allowing many different models of family to flourish.

Meanwhile, the arguments in favour of a return to the traditional family remain unconvincing, and even insulting. For example, NYT columnist Ross Douthat accuses single people of being "decadent" in their selfish singledom (an argument neatly taken down by Ann Friedman). In the report itself, the authors project a nobility on to staying at home and "sacrificing" for one's family, as opposed to young people who show "an almost defiant individualism" and "indulge themselves in hobbies, fashion or restaurants". Singapore pastor Andrew Ong says that the child-free media culture is "about not growing up".

Listening to these guys, you would think that kids are an awful drag, that raising a family requires (almost entirely female) sacrifice, and that such hardship simply must be endured for … something they don't quite specify. By contrast, they seem to think that single people are in a perpetual adolescence, out partying, eating and drinking until, I suppose, we get ours by dying alone with our cats.

That's not making much of a case for marriage and babies, is it?

In reality, most of these selfish singles are in fact eventually getting married and having babies. They're just doing it later. The result is that these selfish late procreators are wealthier, their marriages last longer and their kids are healthier. How awful.

Investing in future generations is crucial, but conservatives seem to value not so much investment as major personal sacrifice in the here-and-now that results in poorer outcomes for everyone involved. And for what? So that future generations can grow up to sacrifice themselves too? Feminists and other liberals aren't against supporting children and making the world a better place. We just realise that the best way to do that isn't by making ourselves collectively miserable, but by actually taking steps to improve society for everyone, now and later.

One of the ways we're doing that is by making it easier for women to choose to have children. Demanding that women sacrifice everything for child-rearing isn't exactly getting the young ladies to line up, but that's what our current employment model is based upon. It is actually exceedingly difficult in much of the world for women to achieve highly in a career while also having a thriving family and personal life. Our current employment model is based on a family economy with a male partner who is able to work full time, and a female partner who stays at home and tends to the children. Women are now in the workforce in unprecedented numbers – but the workforce hasn't adjusted to give people much time for anything other than work. And conservatives have championed this model, praising folks who do multiple jobs just to make ends meet or work 80 hours a week. High-achieving men still often have wives who stay home. What happens, then, is high-achieving women either "opt out" and let their husbands do the bread-winning, don't get married or decide that they want to have kids later or not at all. And the economy suffers for it.

But young single people don't just want to slave away at work all day, and we don't have someone at home taking care of the rest of our lives. We also want a work-life balance. We may not be going home to children, but we want to pursue our hobbies, spend time with the families we've created and engage with our communities. We realise there is much more to life than just work – but we also think there's much more to life than a traditional family.

That kind of push-back could be the key in making work-life balance a reality. Historically, women's work has been undervalued and disrespected. One reason "work-life balance" is discussed but not actually executed is because, I suspect, it's women – and the most disrespected and undervalued group of women, mothers – who that balance is perceived to benefit. So what if this new group of highly effective, highly motivated, hard-working young single people are now demanding more balance and reasonable work hours and leave policies? Everyone benefits.

Women today also want relationships that are mutually supportive and egalitarian, something they might struggle to find – but not for the reasons conservatives seem to think. Lots of men haven't caught up, and still want wives who will be subservient and financially dependent. For men, getting married and having kids comes with increased social status and emotional benefits, not to mention actual salary increases and workplace opportunities. For women it's the opposite: motherhood brings with it lost income and opportunity. There simply aren't enough subservient women who are willing to put themselves in financial, social and sometimes even physical peril to have a "traditional family".

Despite its reliance on rightwing values, there is much to be gleaned from this report. It identifies a place where liberal feminists worried about gender equality and conservatives worried about fertility rates can come together to promote both of our goals. Make reproductive freedom a priority, including the right to have healthy babies. We do this by promoting healthcare that covers the family planning tools that lead to healthy, wanted pregnancies. Federally mandated parental leave and other family-friendly policies like state-sponsored childcare would also make it easier for women and men to work and raise families. More affordable housing programmes would make it more plausible for parents to stay in the places where they choose to live, and where they have put down their social roots and earned their stripes at work. Real investment in public education would relieve much of the financial burden for parents who want their children to have the same opportunities they did.

Finally, support a variety of lifestyles and choices. When the traditional family model isn't something that everyone is expected to personally sacrifice to create, we can construct and implement policies that benefit actual families, in all of their incarnations. When they are not a crass economic contract where financial support is traded for housekeeping and child-rearing but instead a unit based on love, respect and mutual support, marriages last longer. The conservative and religious promise that there is only one best way to live, one that requires temporal sacrifice and is justified solely by obligation but will be rewarded by happiness in the afterlife, but it doesn't actually lead to good outcomes here on Earth.

Family isn't dead. It's just getting better. Expanding its definition and allowing people to choose their own happiness model is just making it more highly valued than ever.