The Welfare State We're In

A letter of condolence written in 1939

I have recently inherited a dauntingly large archive of letters and papers relating to my mother's family. They include letters and diaries written by my grandfather as long ago as 1901. Looking at just a few of these - the tip of the iceberg - I came across a little packet of letters of condolence sent to him in 1939 on the death of his wife, my grandmother. As I never met my grandmother, I was interested to know more of what she was like. This is one of the letters:

"Dear Sir,

Yesterday I called at 57 Pont Street to learn with deep regret the sudden passing of Mrs Beresford.

Of the many hundreds of people who graced the staircase during the two and a half years I was parlourmaid to her Ladyship, Mrs Beresford with her sweet naturalness was always outstanding in my memory.

I left her Ladyship to take over a small business on the 4th Sept. Unfortunately war broke out as everything was settled and so many people from whom I could buy are out of town. But faith is a conquering power which stands us in good stead even in the darkest hours.

Please forgive me Sir, for writing to you but I feel so inwardly urged to do so, and to accept my profound sympathy during these dark days through which you are passing.

With my best respects
I remain,

Yours truly
Ruth Craven"

The letter is evocative of that time in all sorts of ways. But what struck me most of all was the richness of the writer's expression. As a former parlourmaid, she was obviously from the poorer half of British society. I wondered, if she were alive today and came from the same relative social class, would she be able to write such a letter? I doubt it. The letter is not perfect but the second sentence contains 31 words (the number two and a half was written with figures) and starts with a long sub-clause which has a terrific image of many people on a staircase that she had seen in her work. That complexity and elegance of expression would be as much or more than you might hope these days from an Oxbridge graduate. I doubt that you would expect it from someone in her relative position. And remember, most adults now left school aged 16 or 18. Ruth Craven probably left school at 11 or 14.

I don't offer this letter as proof or even strong evidence that educational standards have dropped. It is only one letter and there could be all sorts of reasons why it was written as it was. But for those of us who already believe, due to a wide variety of accumulated evidence, that educational standards have dropped, the letter is a possible illustration of just what has been lost.

Again the trustworthiness of government statistics in question

Violent attacks are estimated to be 44 per cent higher than they were in 1998 after research on the way police record them allowed comparisons for the first time.
The study, by the independent House of Commons Library, shows violence against the person increased from 618,417 to 887,942 last year.

The devastating review comes despite repeated claims by the Government that violent crime has come down substantially since it took power.

It is the first time such a trend in police recorded crime can be made because a change was made in counting rules in 2002 which ministers have always insisted meant figures before that date were not, therefore, comparable.

Instead, they have always used a separate the separate British Crime Survey which suggests violence has dropped by more than 40 per cent since 1998.

The Tories, who requested the new research, said the findings make a mockery of such claims and reinforce the public's fear that violence is in fact rising.

The full story is here.

Two out of three disabled are fit for work

It is extraordinary how trivial news can dominate the headlines while genuinely significant news barely gets mentioned, even in so-called quality newspapers.

One story that came out about nine or ten days ago was mentioned in only a minority of newspapers (including the People, the Daily Telegraph and, from memory, the Daily Express). It was the news that two out of three people claiming Incapacity Benefit (now renamed Employment and Support Allowance) have been deemed fit for work under new, tougher tests.

This is extremely significant news. For the first time since Labour came to power here is concrete evidence that, finally, it is tackling the vast army of people who are wrongly being given Employment and Support Allowance. I have not seen the latest figures but the numbers who were on the old Incapacity Benefit were over two million. That is a vast number. This news suggests that over a million people will be taken off this benefit and required to seek work. Those deemed incapable of work, of course, are not required to seek work.

The consequences could be:

- a dramatic rise in the numbers 'unemployed' as defined by those getting Jobseekers Allowance. This rise may be considered by casual observers to be a rise in unemployment. In fact, to the extent it is due to people being moved off Employment and Support Allowance, it will be a revealing of unemployment that was previously hidden because so many were wrongly on incapacity benefit.

- a great increase in the numbers genuinely seeking work, since the money given to those on Jobseekers Allowance is significantly less than the money people used to get on Incapacity Benefit. Also they have a legal requirement to seek work.

- most important of all - a long term increase in the proportion of people genuinely seeking and doing work. This could make a great - though hard to measure - difference in the morale and culture of Britain.

- a reduction in the cost of the welfare state, as people are moved to a less expensive benefit and more of them seek work.

We are talking about over a million people whose lives are being changed. This is truly important. Yet it is barely written about at all.

Some of the best coverage was by the Taxpayers' Alliance, using the story in the People. Here is the Telegraph coverage. The Guardian, I find, has mentioned it. Naturally it is worried that the test is unfair and appears uninterested in the idea that people have been claiming billions of pounds for being incapable of work when, in fact, they are not. It is, of course, important that a test is fair. But why cannot the Guardian have any sense of injustice to those who pay tax or the importance of work to the creation of decent lives?

Benefits undermining energy - what would Beveridge say

One of the five giants which Beveridge wanted to slay was idleness. What would he say about this particular outcome of benefit dependancy? He would be appalled.

http://winstonsmith33.blogspot.com/2010/01/failing-to-scrounge-from-state.html

'Of 12 incidents that ended with the victim attending hospital, only seven were reported to police'

Sometimes it is truly worrying how much is claimed by this government that is repeated, unchallenged, by the BBC and other media. One of the government's repeated claims of late has been that crime is falling. In reality, we don't appear to have the information to know either way - or so it would appear from the fascinating comments of Roger Graef, quoted in the Mail on Sunday. Roger Graef, according to the website of the London School of Economics, is a visiting fellow at the Mannheim Centre for Criminology. He is basically asserting that the official statistics are thoroughly inadequate.

In an interview, Mr Graef, voiced his 'worries' that official crime figures did not reveal the true scale of violence affecting women and children.
He warned that attacks on children by other children not reported to police were absent from the official British Crime Survey (BCS) - other areas of unreported crime are included to get a wider picture of trends.

Mr Graef said: 'We did our own survey of 1,800 schoolchildren aged 14 and 15. One in three had been kicked or hurt. One in four admitted to kicking or hurting somebody else in a month and that's not recorded anywhere.'

He also pointed out the Home Office-compiled BCS did not include unreported assaults at hospitals and prisons.

And Mr Graef highlighted the limitations of official police crime records - based on his own research.

He said: 'We spent two weeks in Oxford and watched how much crime, how much violence, how much harm was happening.'

Out of 12 incidents that ended with the victim attending hospital, only seven were reported to police.

Mr Graef also disclosed how domestic violence goes unreported. 'Women's groups say that 35 assaults are made on the victim before they call the police. That means there's a dark figure of violent crime which we simply cannot know for sure.'

Sir Hugh Orde, president of the Association of Chief Police Officers, said Mr Graef was 'absolutely right' to say the BCS was incomplete, and that 'some crimes will not end up on a police computer'.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1249094/Expert-backs-Conservatives-violent-crime-figures.html#ixzz0f2B2rKTX

This is yet another example of government statistics being unreliable or actually misleading. Please use the search facility on this website citing 'statistics' for more entries on the subject.

State education and the decline of language learning

At an Intelligence Squared debate last week, Professor Mary Beard gave some indications of how the teaching of languages has suffered in state education.

- Fewer than 500 state schools now offer any classical languages and much of this teaching is offered in the 'twilight' hours after most classes have finished.

- The government is not providing enough training of classics teachers to replace the ones who will retire.

- The numbers taking French GCSE have fallen by 100,000 since 2004.

- There is some difficulty in finding sufficient translators for the London Olympics.

- Generally speaking she was Left-wing and disliked private schools but she wished them to survive because they were the place in which language and classics teaching were continuing.

Video: welfare benefits are like stale cheese

Here is part of talk I gave at the Cato Institute in Washington last year.

What were the mechanics of the corruption of science teaching?

Why do the people who frame the curriculum and GCSEs want to take out the tough, scientific content (see entry below)?

It certainly suits politicians to make exams easier to pass. Higher grades give the impression of successful education. Also if they make science exams easier, they calculate that more children will chose them than otherwise. This is politically useful because it slows down any flight in state schools from hard subjects to soft ones. Politicians wish to slow down this flight because it reveals the way that state schools are underachieving and this reflects badly on them.

However, teachers would not - one hopes - want to be associated with such political calculations.

Some, though certainly not all, have come to think that teaching children to think about science - or other subjects - is more important than teaching them a body of specific knowledge. On the surface, the idea has its appeal. I remember when I was compelled to learn Latin that the justification most frequently given for the task was that it would help me to think logically. It is also true that knowledge that is considered useful, important or up-to-date keeps on changing. But in most subjects, there is plenty of knowledge that does not change and more still that will not change for a few decades, at least.

But how did many teachers come genuinely to think that rigorously learning a body of knowledge, particularly in science, is of secondary importance?

Did it start with some theorist of teaching who then got taken up by politicians because they could see the ideas would help them? What were the mechanics of the dismantling of educational standards?

How important was the idea that tough science (and other subjects) are elitist because they are too difficult for less bright students? For those who feel like that, the appeal of the idea of teaching more accessible stuff about evaluation and problem-solving would be strong. But what they did not consider properly was how the clever state school students would be disadvantaged. With the debased science GCSEs, those bright state school students have their career prospects severely damaged.

This is a re-edited version of an entry posted earlier today. My apologies for re-writing it:

Origin of the idea: "teach skills, the knowledge will be irrelevant".
Unfortunately the dominant mode of thinking is that, if the argument makes sense, it is probably true. There is far too little "critical thinking" and use of evidence.

After hearing this line from the ATL union official a few years ago, I went through the GCSE science curriculum to see what could be "out of date" in 20 yrs.

Atoms? Elements? Cells? Expansion? Metals? Energy transfer? You get the picture: none of the basics will change. It's science!!! Its the way we explain the natural world.

On top of this there is clear and irrefutable evidence that trying to teach context-free "skills" does not work. They need to be learned in one context before they can be transferred somewhere else.

I detect an increase in "helplessness" from pupils who claim that the reason for their low marks is "the teacher was rubbish" rather than "I did no work".

I did not expect the dependence culture to get all the way down to the learning process - but I now meet so many "learning disabled" (backed up by "my rights" parents) I despair for them.

Mike

The classic Dan Hannan attack on Gordon Brown

Now I have belatedly learned how to upload some videos, and for anyone who missed it, here is the classic speech from Dan Hannan that was an internet phenomenon:

A prime example of how state schools now reduce social mobility instead of increasing it

The excellent letter below illustrates how state schools now reduce social mobility. The state schools are not allowed to take IGCSEs. But only the IGCSEs offer a rigorous training in science. So only those who have studied the sciences at private schools are in a good position to go on to do well in science A levels, get a good science degree and a science career. And it is not only careers in science per se that are affected but also science-based careers such as medicine. Whole swathes of bright, potential scientists at state schools are handicapped in their chances of getting good science-based careers. It is shocking. And these lives are hampered to suit the views of Left wing politicians.

Fact-free science lessons

SIR – The Government has spent huge sums on a laudable campaign to increase state-school students’ interest in becoming scientists and engineers, while simultaneously distorting the curriculum to make it more “relevant” in ways that make it more difficult to learn enough science to follow it as a career.

Content has been steadily removed in the name of accessibility. That which remains is largely chosen to illustrate wider “societal” themes, without sufficient regard to the theoretical coherence of the science being taught. I am head of science at a comprehensive school and was told at a training day: “It’s all about skills now. They [the students] can look up facts on Google.” Would you want to be treated by a doctor who has spent five years honing evaluation skills instead of mastering tedious old anatomy facts?

The International General Certificate of Secondary Education (IGCSE), which does retain a coherent structure, isn’t offered in state schools as it doesn’t conform to the “Science Subject Criteria” (the very cause of the problem). Calls to offer the IGCSE are denounced as “elitist”.

A two-tier system is returning to British education. Are we happy with private-school students learning about electromagnetism, while their peers at comprehensives have to grapple with identifying “the use of evidence and creative thinking by scientists in the development of scientific ideas”?

Andrew Urwin
Umberleigh, Devon

The letter was in today's Telegraph.
(You have to scroll down to find it.)
See also this previous article on science GCSEs.

Ask your child not to be ill out of hours

The disclosure that just two GPs are available for out-of-hours duty in the county of Suffolk is the inevitable consequence of the contract with family doctors negotiated by the Health Department in 2004. Such sparse coverage is now commonplace throughout rural England

From an editorial in the Telegraph on GP out-of-hours services.

One of the worst things done in the Labour years

Below is an attack on Alastair Campbeel by Michael Howard which is of lasting importance. I suspect that Alastair Campbell was a key player in the undermining of the independence of the civil service and laid siege to the independence of newspaper comment, too, during the time when he had some power. It is one of the worst things done during the Labour administration. Previous Labour administrations may have been misguided but they were run by decent men and women who generally upheld standards of public life. As Howard says, Campbell attacked these standards and Blair knew what was going on and so also bears responsibility for it.

'Slums' that make for better people than council estates

Kevin McCloud's experience of staying with a family in an Indian slum made fascinating television when I caught up with it last Saturday night. One of the most interesting aspects of it was that it challenged whether 'slum clearance' and new public housing leads to improvements in the lives of those concerned.

He found much to be appalled by in the slums but also much to admire and even envy.

Plague, cholera and TB abound, but its citizens are among the happiest and most beautiful I’ve seen.

This entirely echoes the discoveries of researchers in Britain when they got close to the removal of so-called slums here and their replacement by planned, architect-designed council housing. Michael Young, who had written the 1945 Labour Party election manifesto, joined by Peter Wilmott studied a slum in great detail and then also a council estate. They found that contact with extended families fell by as much as 75 per cent after the move to the estate.

George Orwell, another Left-winger, when he lived among the poor also found that much was lost when people moved to council estates. What are the most important things? I suspect that two are among them: a strong sense of community and family and a sense of being responsible for one's own actions. The idea of community and the benefit it gives is well known. What is less commented on is the impact of independent action. I struggle even to find a language to write about it.

It is illustrated at its best by the daughter of the family in the overcrowded, rat-infested slum building where McCloud stayed. She emerged looking immaculate each morning in her school uniform. She was evidently bright and one believed she would succeed when she said she aimed to be a lawyer. How did she come to be ambitious and work hard? Because she knew very clearly that if she did not work, she would never emerge from the slum and grim. long hours of manual labour. Compare her with the offspring of a household in Britain where no adult works but the flat or house is paid for by the state and they get income support. The children learn that you can get a tolerable life style without really bothering and if anything is wrong, in the house or the education or healthcare they get, it is all down to someone else. Life it not what they make it. It is what the state makes it. That takes away from them a self-respect and a sense of being able to make a difference to their own lives.

"Slumdog Millionaire" was a superbly made film and one can understand the power of the story of the TV quiz changing everything in the hero's life. But the more important story is of the thousands of girls like the one in Kevin McCloud's film who was going to change her life through a decision in her own mind to work. The state changes the condition of people's minds. That is the way it tends to do the greatest damage.

ps The name that was not mentioned, as far as I know, in the programme was Hernando de Soto who is a leader in this field and who has argued that the key thing for economic growth is to give property rights to slum dwellers.

pps Much more about the damaging effects of council housing - and their possible causes - is in the housing chapter in The Welfare State We're In.

The government claims that IGCSEs 'don't count'

The refusal of the government to recognise IGCSEs is surely because the Labour Party wants to obscure the fact that the private schools generally vastly outperform government-run schools. It is nothing to do with good government. It is everything to do with propaganda. It is not the first time that the league tables have been fixed to make the private schools appear to be doing less well than they are.

However there is a hope that this time the measure is so obvious that it might backfire. The sight of St Paul's and Winchester and Westminster at the bottom of exam tables will strike all but the most prejudiced observer as being as ridiculous as placing Manchester United and Chelsea at the bottom of the Coca-Cola League Two.

Footnote: We have here another example of how civil servants have been turned into spokesmen for the Labour Party. When questioned about it, the spokesman does not confine himself to explaining government policy. He talks like a party fighter. He calls the argument for counting IGCSEs 'fatuous'. Note also the tone of scorn towards private schools. This is not the language of someone who wants the best for all children in Britain. It is the language of someone who has a political agenda that government schools are a good thing, government frameworks must be of prime importance and private schools deserve no consideration. Here is the final para of the article in the Telegraph:

But a spokesman for the Department for Children, Schools and Families said: "This is a fatuous argument. The IGCSE does not meet the requirements of the National Curriculum and so it is not approved for use in curriculum in state schools - it would make absolutely no sense for it to be included in the end-of-year tables just because some independent schools choose to offer them."

Housing benefit provides the biggest discouragement to work

In the great roll call of this government’s failures and blunders, its record on housing benefit deserves to have a prominent place. This was the government that was going to “think the unthinkable” on welfare benefits. Instead it “did the predictable”. Instead of embarking on radical reform like the administration of President Clinton in America, it opted to muddle along. It talked big and acted small.

Housing benefit is arguably the worst of all the benefit failures. Why? For two important reasons. One, it costs an amazing amount of money after nearly doubling since Labour came to power to £20 billion. That – for those who can bear the idea – amounts to £692 for every working person in Britain. Most people imagine that Jobseekers’ Allowance is the big, key welfare benefit. Not at all. Housing benefit costs more than three times as much.

The second and even more important reason why this failure matters is that housing benefit is probably the biggest single discouragement to the low-skilled unemployed to getting a job. Get a job and you lose housing benefit at a rapid rate. So housing benefit is one of the most important reason why more one in four people of working age are not working.

The official cost of £20 billion is just the beginning. Nearly all the people who are discouraged from working are also getting other benefits including Jobseekers’ Allowance and – in many cases - Incapacity Benefit or Income Support. But worse even than that is the effect on the morale and culture of those at the lower end of society who get accustomed to welfare dependency. It causes depression and alienation and contributes to uncivil and even criminal behaviour.

There is a simple rule for creating sound welfare benefits. It was described 175 years ago in the report of a Royal Commission into the operation of the poor laws. The commissioners decided that benefits should not be more advantageous than the income that would be obtained by the individual taking on low-paid work. It is as simple as that. Work must always pay. .

On radio phone-ins I have often heard people exclaim: “Do you realise how little you get on Jobseekers’ Allowance? You can’t live on that!” Unfortunately interviewers – being part of the upper middle class - rarely understand that the Jobseekers’ Allowance and other benefits are normally accompanied by other benefits such as a free school meals and, very likely, the big one: housing benefit. Only when they are all added together do they amount to a meaty discouragement to work for the low-paid.

It will come as a surprise to many people to know that not all countries pay housing benefit – or at least not to as many classes of people as Britain does. In Italy, for example, an unmarried teenage mother does not climb up the council housing queue, get income support and housing benefit. She is expected to live with her parents or other relatives or perhaps the father of the child. The result is that there is far less unmarried parenting in Italy than here. They make their decisions and live with them. That means they make better decisions.

If there were prizes for tinkering with the welfare benefit system, this government would certainly win the gold trophy. I used to get press releases from the old Department of Social Security as it was called. If I had had a strange notion of interior decoration, I could have wall-papered my bedroom with them within a few weeks.

To be fair, some reforms have gone in the right direction. James Purnell, when he was in charge, decided that people should only get benefit to pay for a maximum of five bedrooms. Yet you can see from this example just how cautious the reform has been. For people who struggling to afford accommodation with two bedrooms, it will seem outrageous that others can going on having babies and getting more and more bedrooms at the expense of taxpayers. And people sometimes get benefit at a level based on expensive housing. Hence the scandalous case recently of one family getting £2,875 a week.

America was far more radical in its reforms. President Clinton agreed to a limit to the total number of years in a lifetime during which people could claim unemployment benefit. America was determined to do something about the benefits culture. Britain under Labour has merely strutted on the stage – posing, pontificating and making precious little difference.

What could be done? One idea – from the Centre for Social Justice - is to subsume housing benefit with many benefits into just a couple of major benefits. The benefits could be withdrawn at a slower rate than now when someone gets work, thus reducing the discouragement to getting a job. The trouble is that, other things being equal, this would cost a lot more.

The truly radical idea would be do something like that but significantly reduce the amount paid and leave it to the recipient entirely what accommodation is rented – if any. That would provide a powerful incentive to lodge with relatives or to go to a different area with lower rents.

But has Britain got the guts to do this sort of thing? I would like to think so but there is every reason to doubt it. The upper middle class elite does not get the seriousness of the problem. The BBC, the readers of Guardian and the Independent believe that their support for generous benefits makes them into generous, good people. Unfortunately it does not. It results instead in the continuance of a welfare dependant lower class with tremendously damaging social effects both to the poor themselves and everyone else.

(This is the unedited version of an article that appeared in the Daily Express today.)