From the London evening Standard:
I can see why people might want to make Iain Duncan Smith live on a £53-a-week salary — but I can’t help wondering what it would achieve. The petition calling for the Work and Pensions Secretary to honour his infamous boast now has more than a quarter of a million signatures. That would be enough to have it debated in Parliament if the Government’s e-petitions site hadn’t rejected the proposal as “offensive, joke or nonsense content”. If only such high standards applied to Government policy.
Perhaps the best we can hope for is a fly-on-the-wall documentary in which the callous minister swaps his £134,565 salary and four spare bedrooms for the harsh economies of a life on benefits. Still, only if he were to live that way month after month, unheralded and unheard, would the experiment have any merit. Reality does not work like reality TV — and the welfare debate has been distorted enough by the idea that everyone on benefits is living some sort of My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding high life.
There are noble arguments for ending welfare dependency but the Conservatives have been happy to fall back on “mistrust thy neighbour” arguments instead. Yesterday, adopting an absurd Mockney accent, George Osborne alluded to the shocking cases of the “£100,000 benefit claimants” — when he should really know that there are only five such families in Britain.
Such are the terms of the debate, it’s hardly a surprise that the Daily Mail would try to expose the impoverished market trader who challenged IDS in the first place. His crime? He claimed that terrible weather conditions had meant he could only open his stall for 21 days this year, “despite selling cold weather gear”.
It’s no wonder the public has such distorted ideas about welfare. According to a recent survey we estimate that 41 per cent of the welfare budget goes to unemployed people — when actually it’s three per cent. We also assume that 27 per cent of the welfare bill is claimed fraudulently. In reality it is less than one per cent.
The largest part of the welfare budget actually goes to pensioners — around 47 per cent. The next largest portion goes on in-work benefits for low-paid workers, the £29.91 billion spent on tax credits dwarfing the £4.91 billion spent on Jobseeker’s Allowance. In effect this means taxpayers are subsidising companies to pay their workers less than is required for them to live — which in turn limits demand in the economy.
These are the structural imbalances our ministers should be addressing. However, just as Osborne was giving his speech on making work pay, it was announced that the Government is considering lowering the minimum wage. Then again, it is far easier to blame poor people than it is to help them.
