I have just been to a talk given by Charles Murray, the American intellectual who has been so influential in the matter of state welfare and the damage it has done. He spoke about his idea for reform - an idea described fully in his book In Our Hands.

His idea, briefly, is this: that the government should give every person US$10,000 a year in place of all welfare benefits, retirement payments and healthcare. Of this, US$3,000 would have to be used to buy health insurance.

I hope he will forgive me if I misreport some of his remarks. I do not have shorthand.

He said he was not primarily concerned that the welfare state costs too much "though it does", nor that it tends to make things worse "though it does" but that it "drains" the life out of people - particularly the spiritual life and sense of meaning.

He believed that people derive a sense of meaning in their lives in one or more of the following four ways: vocation, community, family and faith. For these things to retain their meaning, it was vital that government should leave them alone.

He offered his sense of how Europeans defined the purpose of life these days. He felt they think that the idea is to have a pleasant time until you die. He felt that they no longer believe that life has a special or transcendental meaning. Their priorities seem to be holidays and shorter working hours. The idea that work can have meaning in their lives has faded. Their belief in marriage, too, has dwindled. They even are no longer so ready to put their children's interests above their own. There has been a secularisation of society. People now think they are a combination of chemicals which, after a while, would "de-activate".

This may be a caricature of how Europeans think but it is not so very far from how a lot of Britons think. His view is influenced, I think by the fact that he is a believer - and believers in God are probably more widespread and fervent in America than in Britain. It is his religion that perhaps makes him more shocked by some of the behaviour in Britain than non-religious people are.

In fact, I would suggest that America's continuing belief in God helped to get through the welfare reform of 1997. Many simply thought that it was wrong, for instance, that there should be special government payments for those having children outside marriage. It was against God's law. (American religion is, perhaps, different from what remains of British religion in that, here in Britain, the church has given up on morality and tends to take a socialist approach, calling for more big government).

He said that if his plan were introduced, behaviour would be affected. There would be 'feedback loops'. I think he implied that a girl would be less inclined to get pregnant out of wedlock if she knew she would get no extra money from the government. She would also be able to get money from the father because his regular money from the government would be paid to a known bank account and money could be taken from it. This would, Murray suggested, affect his behaviour, too. He would be more cautious about making women pregnant.

The idea of 'feedback loops', such as described above, is crucial to understanding how the welfare state has undermined behaviour. The welfare state has, in many ways, taken away the feedbacks which a society without state welfare used to supply.

Among these, Murray emphasised, is stigma. He said "stigma is wonderful" and "it is extremely powerful" and he suggested it was rarely a bad thing except in novels.

My take on Charles Murray's proposal is this:

I am struck first of all by how he admitted that this was a compromise. He said he was making an offer to the Left. They would be allowed to keep big spending - since his plan would continue big state spending. But it would be in a different form that would curtail many of the bad effects of state welfare.

Many times I have been asked, when giving talks about my book, "so what is the answer?" I have always felt it is impossible to give a satisfactory answer. The ideal solution - minimal state welfare - would probably not be politically acceptable in a democracy. But reforms that would be politically acceptable would probably not be radical enough to make a 'good society'.

What Murray has done is come up with an admitted compromise. But I wonder whether even this compromise would hold. I can imagine some hard luck stories that would be played out at length on TV and radio and would cry out for action by the government. Gradually, the whole thing might fall apart. I fear that in a democracy there is a tendency for people to look to government to sort out every problem. I fear that even in America, the will to say: "let the chips fall where they may - the net good to society will still overwhelmingly come from a low welfare state society" is not likely to be strong enough in the face of such stories.

I have come to fear that all advanced societies are becoming more and more welfare state dependent and that people in these countries are gradually being changed more and more by these welfare states. The welfare state gives you money if you have children out of wedlock, it gives you money if you don't work, if gives you money if you are well but you pretend to be ill and it declines money it would have given you if you have saved. I agree with Charles Murray that the worst effect of the welfare state is on the character of the people it affects (mostly the less well off). I would love to see major reform but I fear that over the long term, reform will not last and that the damage done to society will continue.

If this happens around the advanced world, we are really talking about a whole civilisation in decline. Is this too gloomy? I hope so.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Behaviour & Crime • Parenting • Reform

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Rather belatedly I want to mention last week's speech by John Hutton, the Secretary for Work and Pensions. He flagged up the idea of requiring more lone parents to seek work in order to be entitled to welfare benefits. At present, they are not required to seek work until their youngest child reaches the age of 16. He suggested this age might be reduced to 12.

If this sounds radical, it is nothing compared to the situation in other countries. He mentioned that in Sweden, widely regarded in Britain as the place where welfare benefits are enormous and handed out without question, lone parents are expected to seek work. In America, I believe, lone parents are expected to seek when their youngest children reach the age of three months.

Britain has been amazingly lax about this with the result that we have an enormous lone parent population with millions of children disadvantaged as a result.

The fact that John Hutton is prepared to suggest this reform is a sign that common sense can break through from time to time. He must have been encouraged by the modest objections from the Left. The Guardian clearly did not like it much but did not make a great deal of it.

But the Telegraph points out that David Blunkett suggested something similar two years ago.

Let's see if Hutton goes ahead and puts this through. It would be one of the more significant welfare reforms of this government. It might also pave the way to reducing the age requirement much further.

This is part of the Guardian's coverage:

The work and pensions secretary, John Hutton, signalled his willingness to consider more stringent requirements for lone parents to look for work as part of a package of measures to encourage them back into employment and alleviate child poverty.

"Very little" is currently asked of lone parents on benefit with a requirement to look for work that begins only when the youngest child reaches the age of 16, Mr Hutton said in a speech in central London today.

Mr Hutton cited evidence which showed that when the youngest child reached 16, as many as a third of lone parents moved almost "seamlessly" on to incapacity benefit or made a further claim for income support within the following 12 months, he said.
The UK was at the bottom of the league of major European countries for lone parent employment rates, he said.

Countries such as Sweden and Denmark make "little distinction" between lone parents and other benefit recipients in terms of their obligation to look for work.

Here is some of the text of Hutton's speech with a few useful statistics:

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Parenting • Reform

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Ten years ago, President Bill Clinton was faced with a difficult decision. For the third time, Congress, dominated by the Republican Party, had sent him a welfare reform bill to approve. He had vetoed the previous two.

The Democrats - his own party - were overwhelmingly against this reform. Left-wing commentators warned that the poor would become destitute. But Clinton, for all his faults, knew a lot about the welfare system and the damage it was doing to America. After some indecision, he signed the bill. It was probably the best act of his presidency.

A decade later, the terrific success of America's welfare reform is there for all to see. The number of people receiving welfare benefits has fallen by 60 per cent. That is a staggering figure - a major change in the nature of the lives of millions of people. There has been a 70 per cent rise in the employment of single mothers. Welfare grants from the central government to the states have been cut by 30 per cent in real terms.

As for the poor, far from becoming penniless, as some said they would, their condition has considerably improved. The rate of officially-defined poverty among blacks has fallen from 31% to 24%. Among Hispanics, it has has fallen from 31% to 23%. The toughening up of welfare has made poor people better off. It is a paradox which many on the Left struggle to understand or accept. But it is not hard to explain: work is the best route out of poverty.

The benefits of the major changes have reverberated through the country. Since the amount of benefits paid by government have been reduced, taxes are lower than they would otherwise have been. As a result of lower taxes and more employment, economic growth has been faster.

Most Americans recognise the success of the reforms and are glad of them. Last week I was riding in America. A retired man who had administered food stamps - one of the major welfare benefits - remarked that the rules had been tightened up considerably and it was better. He used to do home visits to people on welfare and had seen how those who claimed they were not working often had a job on the side. Men who supposedly were not part of a single mother's household turned up when the welfare cheque arrived. There was a ripple of agreement.

Why can't we have the same sort of reform here? Why can't we have a similar transformation? The answer is that we could.

True, at present it seems impossible that a politician of any political party could manage it. Tony Blair talked a lot about welfare reform on coming to office, but funked it. Gordon Brown was effectively in charge of welfare but did not understand it. He bodged the entire thing, creating tax credits and numerous employment plans which have added greatly to the bureaucracy and left the underlying problems little changed. The discouragement to saving is actually worse. And we still have, by the government's own admission, over a million people on incapacity benefit who could be working.

Meanwhile the new Tory leadership, in awe of the way Tony Blair achieved power by being a centrist, has adopted a similar stance. It does not appear to have the guts to reform welfare.

Yet in the 1970s, it seemed equally impossible that overwheening trade union power would ever been contained. No one predicted the events which then took place. As with the trade unions, a powerful force is pushing for reform: the problem itself is causing major damage to our country. More than that, an increasing proportion of the population is aware of the fact.

We all know that there are millions of people 'working the system'. We know that single parenting is unpleasant for the mother, fails to socialise the father and often damages the children. It contributes, in the long term, to crime. We all know that incapacity benefit is often a cover for unemployment. We know, too, that lives spent in dependency are miserable. As Lord Beveridge, the man who wrote the report that led to the modern welfare state, said, "Complete idleness even on an income demoralises".

Eventually welfare reform will have to take place. The only question is when and how. The way things are going, welfare reform is happening so slowly that our society will continue to deteriorate. Crime will continue to rise. Our economy will lag further behind that of America and the rising countries of the Far East. More people will be so poor they are means-tested in their old age.

But if we took radical steps, like the Americans, we could change our nation's future. True, It would take political bravery and skill. Some of the measures would be angrily criticised as harsh. In America, for example, a single parent on benefits is required to seek work once her child is three months old. In Britain, she can continue on benefits until the child is 16.

In America, the bill that Clinton signed introduced a requirement that no one should live on welfare benefits for more than five years. That would be strong medicine by British standards.

But anyone who cares about this country must support radical reform such as America has had. Welfare is probably more influential on the nature of Britain than the church or the media. We must get our poor off benefits and into work. In doing so, we can make the poor richer. We could then reduce taxes. And in all this we would be doing major work to arrest the decline of civility and decency that has been the bane of our country in recent decades.

We need to fight for welfare reform not in order to be mean or hard but to give people back their dignity and to make Britain a better society.

(The above is the unedited draft for an article which appears in today's Daily Express.)

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Here is an article on the success of America's welfare reform in the Daily Mail today.

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In France, children are taught that the Battle of Trafalgar was inconclusive and that the British admiral was killed. In Britain, of course, we are told something rather different, that it was one of our greatest naval triumphs.

History is not just a series of facts but an interpretation of them. Quite often there is considerable disagreement. [A new book called ] Margaret Thatcher's Revolution is a cavalry charge by loyalists in the battle over how her time in office should be seen. It is a bold assertion that the Iron Lady made Britain a better place than it was before.

Yes, she had her flops.

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I attended a talk by Professor Larry Mead at the Institute of Economic Affairs the night before last. He gave his talk in a scholarly, methodical way - quite different from the more openly partisan talk given by Ron Haskins last week. But the message was mostly the same. The big fact is that welfare rolls fell by 60 per cent in America following the 1996 reform package. It was an awesome result. Of course, people like Professor Mead knew very well that such a thing would be attacked as cruel and bad. But one of the impressive things about the American Right is that it arms itself with plenty of facts to counter such assertions:

He gave Federal Poverty Rates for whites, blacks and Hispanics in 1994, 2000 and 2003 respectively:

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Parenting • Recommended reading • Reform • Welfare benefits

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Gordon Brown's poor record as chancellor is gradually becoming more obvious.

This week, more light fell on his bad policy of tax credits. But first a quick summary of the bad policies he has pursued:

1. He has raised tax heavily to pay for investment in a monopolistic healthcare system (adding to the problem by fighting any attempt to make it less monopolistic). The result: the country will be poorer than it would have been and people less well cared for when ill.

2. He took a pension system which was amongst the most successful and well provided for in Europe and has put it in crisis. Result: more people will be poor in old age.

3. He has increased the prevalence of means testing - with all its disadvantages (see The Welfare State We're In and previous postings. One of the results: reduced savings (which will, again, cause more people to be poor in old age).

4. He has dramatically increased red tape, waste and errors through complicated systems - such as tax credits - instead of using much simpler methods (such as higher thresholds for tax-free income). By wasting public money, he has made us poorer. Through red tape he has cost us money again and wasted our time.

Here is some of the coverage of the problems Mr Brown created through tax credits:

Hundreds of thousands of families have suffered because of flaws in Gordon Brown's £13 billion system of tax credits, a watchdog says today.

Ann Abraham, the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman, says poor families are particularly vulnerable because of the way they have been forced to pay back money given to them in error.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Reform • Tax and growth • Waste in public services • Welfare benefits

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Ron Haskins, a senior adviser to President Bush on welfare reform, addressed the Centre for Policy Studies yesterday. It was an exceptionally good presentation - powerful about the way in which the 1996 welfare reform programme has succeeded and honest about admitting ways in which it has disappointed.

He brought home that the welfare reform was not, as it is usually described in Britain, a genuinely bi-partisan affair. It was, above all, a Republican reform that was fought bitterly by most Democrats (with one particularly notable exception). Based on the American experience, we should not get hung up on the idea that only the Left can reform welfare on the same basis that 'only Nixon could make peace with Commmunist China'. In America, passionate Republicans aimed to save their country though welfare reform and they have, to a remarkable degree, succeeded.

The notable exception on the Democrat side was,

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Behaviour & Crime • Parenting • Politics • Reform • Welfare benefits

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The blog Once More Unto the Breach has an interesting posting and comments on the options and difficulties in welfare reform.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in NHS • Politics • Reform • Welfare benefits

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