Following up on the Tories' campaign promise to "cut benefits for those who won't work", the government has unveiled a raft of measures to target "benefit cheats", alongside swingeing cuts to welfare. If we're to believe ministers and most of the press, increasing numbers of scroungers who won't work and expect to live on benefits are one of the reasons for the black hole in the nation's finances.
Anglo-Irish aristocrat and current chancellor George Gideon Oliver Osborne didn't waste much time before putting the boot into the poor. In early September he outlined his intent to take on those claiming benefits as a "lifestyle choice", claiming that "the welfare bill is now completely out of control".
Leaving aside important related issues (such as what is admirable about working in a dead-end job for the minimum wage, and what someone with vast inherited wealth would know about the value of hard work), let's look at the claim that spending on welfare is "out of control".
Handily, the TUC's Touchstone blog have put together a set of charts illustrating the scale of claims for various kinds of benefits over the past decade.
Out of Work Benefits
The first chart illustrates claims for out of work benefits generally - so Jobseeker's Allowance, Carer's Allowance, Incapacity Benefit, Disability Living Allowance, etc. Unsurprisingly, the number of claimants leaped from 2008 onwards. We can sensibly assume that this was due to the economic crisis, not the "lifestyle choice" of claiming benefits becoming on-trend that year. The years prior to that show a steady decline:
Incapacity Benefits
If you look at the figures for Incapacity benefit claims alone, you see a slightly different picture, but hardly one which shows an "out of control" level of applications for IB. As we can see, the increase in claims slowed down, before levelling off and decreasing before the economic crisis:
Lone Parent Benefits
Here, the decline is even more marked, with a consistent decline throughout the period in question.
Of course, none of this is meant to overlook the means New Labour used to bring about such reductions - attacks on the welfare state such as the welfare reform act and the introduction of workfare, which the current government are are taking to their logical conclusion. We can, however, use them to refute the arguments currently being made by the government which are being widely and uncritically repeated. The last decade did not see "out of control" spending on welfare as the government subsidised people's laziness. The cuts are completely ideological in character, there is nothing "inevitable" about them.
Comments
Good stuff Django - that
Good stuff Django - that touchstone blog is good.
One thing though, if you are using images embedded in an article, would you be able to add the images as "file attachments" then embed them? That way when they get removed or moved from their original website they will still be here.
I often think that people
I often think that people having to live on Benefits, regardless of ethnicity or background, are amongst the most oppressed in the Western world. They are oppressed by the very government agencies that help them.