Another voice

Joining the Welfare conger

Auberon Waugh The day before the Post Office closed for its long winter recess, I went to buy my weekly supply of postage stamps in Taunton. This is one of my few outings nowadays. Others claim to divine what the lower orders are thinking by conversations with London cab drivers, but t have never been able to understand a word they say. The Taunton Post Office queue is my only contact with these engaging people, most of whom, I notice, are very, very old.

There are two topics of conversation. One is the level of prices, and the inadequacy of their various pensions, benefits, rebates and bonuses to grapple with the problem. The lady standing in front of me this time had just paid 95p for a hamster, which did indeed seem a lot of money when you think of what hamsters used to cost, although I could not help wondering what she wanted a hamster for at her age, or why she should expect me, the only tax-payer present, to pay for it if she did want one.

The other topic of conversation is medicine, but I shall not worry Spectator readers with any of the horrifying things I learn every week about the nation's health. For my own part, I am convinced that if medicine were not free, we should have none of this morbid preoccupation with the intestines. But nobody ever asks for my opinion, and after various attempts to interest them in my own ailments and in my brutally inadequate War Office pension I have come to accept that they will never take me to their hearts as one of themselves, at any rate until I am sixty-five and have lost all my teeth.

Only two counters are now open in the Taunton Post Office, and there are seldom fewer than fifteen or twenty old age pensioners in each queue. Notices on the wall exhort 'Please take a child benefit claim form;' Rent rebates—Are You Getting Yours?' After some thought, I chose three pamphlets for my morning's reading. They are: Leaflet W11 Free Milk and Vitamins; Leaflet F151 Family Income Supplement; Leaflet P111 Free Prescriptions. I ignore Child Interim Benefit for One Parent Families (a CHI B Leaflet) and Equal Opportunities: A Short Guide to the Sex Discrimination Act on the grounds that I could see no obvious advantage in them. Leaflets Wi 1, F151 and P111 similarly let me down, as I already have free prescriptions and can find no way of entitling myself to free milk, vitamins or a Family Income Supplement. Disgraceful. But I feel sure I could do something with Rent Rebates, if only I paid a rent. Over 37,000 GLC tenants already get a rent rebate, as the pamphlet proudly announced, and 'RENT

REBATES ARE NOT A CHARITY--If you are a tenant (or about to become one) you have a legal right to apply for a rent rebate.' Soon, no doubt, we will be liable to prosecution if we don't apply. This is how a typical entitlement is calculated :

'Married couple with two dependant

[sic] children earning £60 a week and paying

a net rent of £7 a week : Weekly income Needs Allowance Difference £60.00 £43.45 --+ £16.55 Take two fifths of the net rent of £7 Add 17 per cent of difference between income and needs allowance £ 2.80 TOTAL £ 2.81 Total subtracts from net rent of £7 leaving a balance of Add 10 per cent £ 5.61 Final Rebate £ 1.39 £ .13 --£ 1.52'

Who says our welfare state has lost its heart to bureaucracy ? What a wonderful way to work out one's entitlement! I spent the remaining twenty-five minutes of the queue, as we shuffled our way to the counter in a great, grumbling conger, working out the algebraic formula for Final Rent Rebate. Here it is. Where 'x' represents the net rent, 'y' represents gross weekly income and 'z' represents the needs allowance (I can't be bothered to describe how that is arrived at, but it is great fun, too), then FRR = .66x — -187y + •187z.

My formula works so well that anyone with a calculator can see at a glance that the Department is trying to swindle the customer in the example given. His final rebate is £1.53 and the swindle occurs in the last entry-10 per cent of £1.39 is 14p, not 13p. But before I could warn the others of the danger—I should surely have been the hero of the hour—the queue came to an end, or rather I had come to the end of it, and it was my turn to buy some postage stamps.

The lady in front of me—the one with hamster problems—had grabbed her handful of blue five pound notes, counted them suspiciously and retreated with groans and snarls to her lair, or possibly to the Senior

Citizens' Rest Room behind the car park. As I approached the counter, it occurred to me that t was the only customer whose business had anything to do with the post, and also the only one that morning who actually paid anything in. All the rest were collecting—most of them between eighteen and twenty-three pounds, so far as I could count, but one or two much more. A swarthy, dishevelled young man (not black —just swarthy, and almost certainly of English stock) collected £70, an obviously mad young woman about £55. And the queue behind me was much longer than it had been when 1 joined it at 9.30.

Now I do not resent that thirty or forty people should be maintained in the style to which they are accustomed on the proceeds of my earnings. In point of fact, the taxes I pay in a year would scarcely keep the Taunton Post Office going for a day at its present rate, but that is the Government's problem, not mine. But it does occur to me that anyone who talks of poverty as a widespread or important phenomenon at the present time is talking through his hat. And there is a whole generation of creeps and bore, many of them earning almost as much as I do, who can talk of little else.

The basic welfare sustenance level, so far as I can quote—and if poverty has any meaning, it must refer to people at this level—is now appreciably higher than the level of skilled workmen in full-time employment twenty years ago. There is still some bad housing, although I would dispute the extent to which it is the fault of bricks and mortar rather than the neglect of the people who live in it; and there is undoubtedly a surviving body of those people who are too simple-minded or too proud to claim their various entitlements. It is also true that more old people die in cold weather than at other times of the year, as they always have done and always will. But to pretend that real poverty, real deprivation or discomfort exists in any substantial way is to indulge in the sort of masochistic fantasy which can only be explained in terms of emotional deprivation.

No doubt a hundred hysterical women will write to inquire how I would like to live in a damp rat-infested slum on a diet of baked beans and Kit-e-Kat, but I can only ask them to take their hats away from their faces. Small pockets of poverty undoubtedly remain—but they are not a large part of the social scene, and certainly not large enough to justify any major social readjustment. The rhetoric of the poverty corps may be explained in terms of deliberate lies for political ends, or it may be explained in terms of hysteria and emotional insecurity, as I prefer to believe, but it cannot be explained in terms of social analysis. And if anybody disagrees, or asks me to walk round the Gorbals on a Friday night, I can only reply by asking her to stand with me in the Taunton Post Office queue on Monday morning. A great problem of our time is not poverty but guilt, and I can think of no better cure for it.