What has become of the Welfare State
David Willetts
LOSING OUT by Frank Field
Basil Blackwell, £22.50, pp. 196
There are two main genres of socialist criticism of the Government's social poli- cies. Some thinkers attempt to claim the ideas of citizen and community for social- ism. Citizenship is no longer seen as simply comprising political rights but economic rights too. We are told that this Govern- ment's economic policies 'disenfranchise' members of the community. This is the tradition of political philosophy associated with late 19th-century liberals such as Hobhouse and T.H. Green. It rests on a Whig interpretation of history with a simple-minded idea of progress. Whilst this view of the world is rapidly disappearing from political history, it lives on in most social history. The other genre is apparently more empirical. The argument is simply that life is ghastly for lots of people because of Mrs Thatcher's policies. It rests on tendentious interpretations by left-wing social scientists of unreliable and patchy data.
Frank Field's book combines these two genres. We are told that Mrs Thatcher has single-handedly put 300 years of political and social progress in reverse by restricting the opportunities open to poorer people. He argues that this has been achieved by increasing unemployment, widening class differences in respect of health and educa- tion, changing the social security system so that the poorest people do not enjoy rising living standards, and changing public atti- tudes so that wealth creation matters more than compassion.
Frank Field develops this argument re- morselessly without any interest in alterna- tive view points from either left or right. Although he aims at being synoptic, the book is actually rather blinkered. He hard- ly considers the view that it is naive W imagine that the institutions of the Welfare State could change society rather than merely reflect it. In the event, middle-class people get longer consultations from NHS GPs than less articulate poorer people. Higher education is supposedly an impor- tant part of a free education system extend- ing opportunities to all, yet it largely benefits the children of better off parents. Some institutions of the Welfare State have clearly been captured by their middle-class employees. This line of argument was very fashionable amongst socialists during the 1970s but has been dropped in the past few years because they feared they were giving ammunition to the Government. It is a pity Frank Field does not address that argu- ment but displays an engagingly old- fashioned belief that the Welfare State can achieve his social purposes. Then there is the argument that too much welfare creates dependency. The book's title is clearly a response to Charles Murray's Losing Ground, so it is surprising that there is no discussion at all of him or his arguments. We are rediscovering a problem which the Victorians well under- stood — pauperism, being dependent upon public relief. Frank Field clearly does not want to create more paupers. He wants more people earning high wages in good jobs. But this approach leads him into the error of taking high unemployment as the big problem. As a result, he does not confront the real question, which is how we can enjoy an economic boom with unem- ployment falling further and faster than at any other time since the war yet still have large groups of people incapable of getting or holding down jobs.
Frank Field uses the fashionable term `underclass' to show that he recognises this problem, but he does not properly grapple with it. He gaily refers to greater opportu- nities as the way to get people out of this mess but does not consider the depressing possibility that it may be a meritocratic society rich in opportunities which contri- butes to the problem. If a group such as blacks in America faces systematic discri- mination, then everyone is trapped in the ghetto together and a stable community evolves. Tear down the barriers and ex- pand opportunities and the ambitious, the competent, and the lucky will get out into the prosperous suburbs, leaving behind a much more enfeebled community that may become an underclass.
For a new model Democratic party or Labour party serious about gaining power the right electoral strategy must be to follow the majority out into the suburbs and affluence. It would be interesting to see Frank Field's reflections on the painful possibility that the spreading of opportun- ity over the past few decades and the rise of the underclass may actually go together.
He also fails to assess very rigorously the particular policy proposals which he advo- cates on the grounds that they enhance people's opportunities. At various points, higher benefits, more public expenditure on welfare services, higher wages enforced by government, more jobs, easing the means-testing of benefits, and higher uni- versal benefits are all advocated on the grounds that they increase opportunities. But these may well represent very different sorts of opportunity. MOreover, even some elementary economics — and Frank Field is quite open about his ignorance of econo- mics — would have shown him that these different approaches were really rather difficult to combine. His discussion of new policy initiatives is by far the most interest- ing part of the book, but it is rushed and skimpy because it does not consider priori- ties or costs. It is one of those menus without prices which modern socialists are supposed to avoid.
Frank Field is many Conservatives' favourite Labour MP because of his back- ground in Christian socialism rather than in Marxism. He has a reputation for being open-minded and fair. It is surprising, therefore, that much of the argument rests on his belief that Mrs Thatcher and her advisers have deliberately set about trying to make the lives of a significant part of the British population more miserable. That is not just untrue, it is also implausible. It is not how democratic politicians think.
There is a much more boring account of this Government's approach to poverty, not really satisfactory for politicians of either left or right, and it goes as follows. The British Welfare State has over the past ten years been under great strain because of increases in the number of pensioners, single parents and unemployed people. These changes are not by and large the Government's fault — even a Healey administration might have had to face them. These groups tend to depend on the state for their income and also to use other welfare services more heavily than the average. The Welfare State safety net, as conceived by Beveridge, has met these greater demands and remains largely in- tact. It has cost a lot of extra money but not much of the extra money has gone into increasing the real value of benefits for individual claimants; most of it has gone to finance the same benefits for more claimants. So the Welfare State has spread even more widely under Mrs Thatcher, but is not deeper than it was before. It is a pity Frank Field's rhetoric will not allow him to consider such low-key concluSions.
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