The fear of losing benefits ”” of not being able to scramble back on to the lifeboat if you fall off ”” is a huge disincentive to change your circumstances, let alone report them. One in seven working-age households is dependent on benefits for more than half its income. More than half of all lone parents depend on the State for at least half their income. William Beveridge would be horrified to discover that the safety net he designed has become a trap, creating generations of worklessness and dwindling self-esteem. It is also creating a glut of unemployed, unwanted, unmarriageable men.
These men were overlooked during a decade of prosperity that did nothing to change their lives. At the beginning of that decade, 5.4 million working-age adults were claiming out-of-work benefits. The same number were still claiming just before the recession struck. Almost a fifth of 16 to 24-year-olds were not in education, employment or training in 1997. The number was identical in 2006. These people stayed put in the Welsh valleys, in Liverpool, in Glasgow, while Eastern Europeans travelled a thousand miles to pick up work on construction sites in London. Immigration reduced the opportunities available to white British men whose poor education made them less attractive candidates, while the benefits system undermined their motivation.
The problem affects the whole of society because of the striking correlation between male joblessness and single motherhood, particularly in the old industrial cities.
food for thought and well written
An interesting and well-argued piece, but to my mind fatally flawed at the end. I am afraid that the author suffers from a British disease: the belief that The Government Must Do Something. Surely part of the problem of our society is that the government increasingly takes decisions to run people’s lives. Indeed, this is one of the themes of this article. Do we have to turn to government to solve every problem? What resources are there in civic society that could be used to take the initiative here?