Today, on my way home from yet another interview in London, I popped into a newsagent in central Birmingham and I had to wait to buy my chocolate milk because some woman was buying a pack of cigarettes. Fine, I normally have nothing against smokers – I hate the way they are demonized by health conscious puritans – except that not only did this woman have a child, sat screaming outside in a pushchair, she was also heavily pregnant. Not the slightly pregnant level where you might not give up your seat on a bus in case she’s just fat. Not even just kind of pregnant. This woman was so pregnant that the shopkeeper was probably eying up the mop in case her waters broke. And she was smoking!
I was, of course, outraged, as all middle class people are when confronted with working class people being grossly irresponsible. It’s what the Daily Mail thrives on. But then I thought about it, and I couldn’t actually work out why I had any right to be outraged. It wasn’t my kid she was carrying around in her nicotine stained womb. It was hers. And whilst it seems a little harsh for children to be disadvantaged like that before they’re even born, we let middle class parents put their children through all sorts of terribly risky experiences, like learning to ski or to ride horses. Though we may live in a child obsessed age, where the Prime Minister invites parents to denounce companies that ‘sexualize’ children, and where an unfortunately ‘Lolita’ branded bed can become a national outrage, most people would probably still accept that parents have the right, within reason, to endanger the lives of their children. It shouldn’t matter whether they do it on a mountain top or by smoking a cigarette or two during pregnancy.
But of course it does. It matters because we (the liberal minded middle class) have allowed ourselves to be seduced by this radical leftist idea that somehow only middle class people need to be responsible, and not only are we responsible for ourselves, we are for everyone else too, and especially the poor. As a result, we have constructed a welfare system that is intensely hypocritical, because it treats the people who depend on it like children, shutting them into poverty traps, whilst depriving them of any real opportunity for advancement. The British welfare state was meant to be liberating. It began as an attempt to provide the poorest with opportunity, and to alleviate them from the savagery of a world they couldn’t control. Under New Labour, it has been transformed into a prison, one in which the inmates are watched and kept in line by a perpetual, snooping nanny state. Living on benefits has become the equivalent to going into the workhouse – recipients hand over their liberty and take their bread in return.
The young mother I saw buying cigarettes is a case in point. I initially felt justified in judging her because I come from the taxpaying class, and the taxes that my parents and friends pay, and that I (hopefully) will be paying soon most likely keep that woman in cigarettes. They also probably pay for a roof, for baby food, for a TV and so on. Her job is quite literally to raise children – that is what the state is paying her for - and so superficially it is outrageous if she is doing it badly. But what is really outrageous is that that is all she can realistically aspire to. If she wanted to get a job, for every pound she earned, she would effectively be taxed something like 90p through the loss of benefits. Moreover, she would need to pay for transport, childcare and so on. Faced with such rates of taxation, would anyone work? Probably not. The benefit system creates a situation where people are forced to become ‘scroungers’, and because they are scroungers, they apparently surrender their rights to choose how to live their lives. The right is allowed to hate them for abusing the ‘taxpayer’, but of late the left has been joining in, because with their fecklessness and stupidity, they undermine the project of building a utopia, where everyone is middle class and responsible, despite the obvious fact that middle class people can be quite irresponsible in their own ways.
As I see it, the best solution is to make benefits universal. Pay out enough to live on to every single citizen, regardless of whether they are in work, or have children, or not. Fund it by increasing income tax and by scrapping the entire patchwork of housing benefit, tax credits, income support and so on. What anyone does after that is their own affair. If they choose to spend it on tobacco or booze or gambling, it is none of anyone else's business. If, as a result, they end up being unable to pay their rent, then they suffer the consequences, instead of the state picking up the tab. In an instant, it would restore personal responsibility to the welfare system. It would make it genuinely liberating, quite literally providing a bank balance below which no-one can fall, whilst allowing anyone to rise above it. The concept is called the ‘Citizen’s Income’, and it is enormously popular amongst certain academics, economists, Think Tanks and so on.
It will of course never happen. The right would hate how progressive it would be. More importantly however, the left would hate it too; because it would be genuine liberalism, and letting working class people do what they want has never been the concern of the puritans who claim to represent them. If they did, when young mothers went out and spent it all on tobacco, they would have no right to care, and what is middle class socialism if not ‘improving’ the proletariat whilst hating everything they do?
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