the brilliantly leaping gazelle

If, as Keyser Soze observered in ‘The Usual Suspects’, “the greatest trick devil he ever pulled was convincing the world that he didn’t exist.”, then what was true for the devil is true for welfare.

We have been so successfully conditioned to think of welfare spending as some kind of state sponsored paternalism, and thus the people who receive it as needing this kind of paternalism, existing as they do at the lower ends of the social spectrum, we think that’s all it is. All of the political debate and thus all of the the discussions concerning it are fixated exclusively upon this conception of welfare as existing only in this way.

Therefore those claiming those benefits are much easier to demonise in the media, and because of this, this makes it much easier for politicians to promote the idea of them being ‘scroungers’ and ‘cheats’ when cutting or withdrawing those benefits. This of course is nothing more than one big elaborate distraction – the scantily clad young female assistant to the old balding magician, whom you look at while he does the trick.

Corporate welfare (CW) can best be described as  governments financial assistance for business. Sounds innocuous?

Until, that is, one reads ‘The British Corporate Welfare State: Public Provision for Private Businesses.’, a by turns both excellent and shocking piece of academic literature by Professor Kevin Farnsworth, which lays bare the sheer scale and cost of the whole scam.

And this scam isn’t new. As early as 1776, Adam Smith, he who has an institute named after him so as to promote the ideologies he was expounding in his book  ‘The Wealth of Nations’. These can summed up as the notion that it was a governments duty to create the necessary conditions under which business could flourish.

So when Beveridge created the blueprint for the modern British welfare state in 1942, most of the focus was directed on his plans for combating the ‘five great evils’ that blighted the lives of the working classes – want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness. But less commented on was his conviction that in order to have the money needed to do this, the needs of business would have to supported by government.

In 2015, when Farnsworth’s report was published, he estimated CW to cost upward of£93 billions and includes a great many expenditures which we think of as properly the duty of a government to pay for.

And an article in yesterday’s Guardian underlined both how blind we are to see CW for what it is, but also how it can be easily be mistaken as a public good.

‘Low wages under Tories have pushed 900,000 UK children into poverty, report finds’

Essentially implying that somehow because this had happened under 14 years of Conservative rule, that this was somehow all their fault, . And that only a change of government might improve things, it quoted Paul Nowak, the general secretary of the TUC, saying as much

“No child in Britain should be growing up below the breadline. But under the Conservatives we have seen a huge rise in working households being pushed into poverty. We urgently need an economic reset and a government that will make work pay.”

Earlier this month, the TUC published a report showing the number of people in insecure, low-paid work had increased by nearly 1 million during the Conservatives’ time in office, to a record 4.1 million.’

It also cited various statistical comparisons with other countries workers and their wage increases to bolster the claim that child poverty in is largely due to low wages. 

It doesn’t, curiously enough, apportion any blame whatsoever upon the employers that pay those low wages in the first place. They know that they can get away with paying low wages because they know government will step in to help boost workers incomes with additional financial support.

Working Tax Credits (WTC) are a device by which the government effectively subsidises employers who pay low wages and so rather than being cast as the villain in this false narrative that the Guardian endlessly promotes, they are at best accomplices. 

The WTC replaced the Working Families Tax Credit (WFTC), which operated from April 1999 until March 2003. The WFTC was itself a transitional system from the earlier benefit for working families known as Family Credit (FC), which had been in operation since 1986. In addition, people may also be entitled to Child Tax Credit (CTC) if they are responsible for any children.

So since 1986 we’ve been subsiding low wages and this is but one example of the state channelling funds to support the private sector, making a mockery of the notion of a free market. 

Consider housing benefit (HB). This is a benefit that helps defray the housing costs of those who live in private rented accommodation. Had the market been truly free – and HB wasn’t a thing – then those rents charged by those landlords would soon fall, as no-one could afford to rent them. But it is a thing and has been one since 1982. The cost of HB is staggering, £23.4 billions in 2022 -23, the fourth highest single expenditure by government.

Then consider that HB is but one component of Universal Credit, a benefit designed to combine six benefits to people on low or no income and which this year the government expects to cost £78 billions.

And then consider the ‘gig’ economy, workers on zero-hour contracts, part-time workers, those employed in either casual or seasonal work and ask yourself for whose benefit is that £78 billions ultimately benefiting?  

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I really thought that we’d be done with it by now, but the media is still promoting the idea that the whole betting irrelevance is somehow something about something, and that because of this, it matters.

To my mind, the sums involved are so trivial as to be laughable. Had there been a concerted effort by a gang who’d all placed bets at various locations all over the South East, with each bet in the region of £10,000 or so, then fair enough. But bets totalling £2,700 in one day.? 

But I must confess to being somewhat amused by this development, ‘Labour suspends candidate who bet on Tories to win his seat.’

After all, at the last election, the Tories did win his seat with of majority of over 23,000!  So if any bet can be considered a safe one…

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