Suella Braverman’s welfare tirade exemplifies the current Tory pandering to baby boomer myths about social spending and moral decay. Interviewed by ITV News on Monday, the leadership candidate said:
I think we spend too much on welfare. There are too many people in this country who are of working age, who are of good health, and who are choosing to rely on benefits, on taxpayers’ money, on your money, my money, to get by. I don’t think there’s enough rigour. Universal Credit’s been a brilliant thing in stamping out the culture of dependency but there’s further we can go, there’s more we can do.
Since I’m about to be very critical, let’s begin in a spirit of charity. There are roughly 3.5 million people on out-of-work benefits during a labour shortage, or 5.3 million if incapacity-related benefit is included. Are there people ‘choosing to rely on benefits’ instead of working? Yes. One way we know this is because there is a problem of benefit fraud. Braverman doesn’t mention fraud and her word choice (‘culture of dependency’) suggests she is talking instead about a lack of willingness to work but let’s give her the benefit of the doubt. Fraud overpayments, which in 2019/20 stood at 1.4 per cent (£2.8 billion) of overall welfare expenditure, doubled to 2.9 per cent in the first year of the pandemic and held steady at three per cent (£6.5 billion) last year. So, benefit fraud is a contextually small but real problem.
They worked hard all their lives, remember. They deserve their pensions. Unlike benefit claimants, who are undeserving
Beyond that, Braverman’s thesis is hopelessly wrong. ‘We spend too much on welfare.’ The UK dedicates roughly one-fifth of its GDP to social spending. That places us 17th – roughly in the middle – of OECD countries. However, ‘social spending’ covers all social protection expenditure, not just working-age benefits, which is what people tend to think of when they talk about welfare. The single largest item in social protection outlay is the state pension.
In 2019/20, the government spent £1,598 per head in England on the state pension. In the same year, it spent just £17 per head on unemployment benefits. (Incapacity, disability and injury benefits in total came in at £644 per capita.) In fact, the UK spends more every year on the state pension (£113 billion) than it does on education (£96 billion) and more than it does on defence (£45 billion), law and order (£39 billion), housing (£14 billion) and environmental protection (£13 billion) combined.
Pensioners, not those on incapacity or unemployment benefits, are the primary beneficiaries of welfare spending. They are the sole and exclusive beneficiaries of 10 per cent of total managed expenditure across government. They are, you might say, choosing to rely on benefits, on taxpayers’ money, on your money, on Suella Braverman’s money, to get by.
Baby boomers don’t think of their state pensions as benefits. Benefits are something lazy, feckless, workshy people receive and they are none of those things. They worked hard all their lives, remember. They deserve their pensions. Unlike benefit claimants, who are undeserving. Why undeserving? Because they claim benefits, of course.
This is the same circular boomer logic that sees people who voted to cut their parents’ pensions demand that their own be triple-locked. The same mindset in which avocado toast is the reason millennials are doomed to a life of renting, not the fact that boomers bought their houses on the cheap then used their votes and their planning objections to make home ownership prohibitively expensive for their children. (When you factor in foisting Joni Mitchell, tie-dye and post-structuralism on the world, these people have a lot to answer for.)
I appreciate it’s a Tory leadership election and Braverman knows her electorate. I appreciate, too, that there are no rewards in politics for telling unpopular truths. But boomer mythology is socially destructive and so is the political cowardice that confirms boomers in their self-interest rather than asking the most pampered generation in all Creation to put something back into the society they have taken so much from.
That way, no one would have to pretend that we spend too much on working-age welfare. We could admit that, at just 21 per cent of previous in-work income, UK unemployment benefits are the lowest in the entire OECD. That our system is the fourth-strictest in the OECD. That over-65s experience the same poverty rate as working-age adults without children (18 per cent) while almost a third of children in Britain live in poverty. We could start to talk about how we make this a fair country for everyone, not just the most powerful voting bloc.
Speaking of voting, I’ll close with a few purely electoral points. First, voter attitudes on welfare have been softening since before the pandemic. Britons are twice as likely to reject the suggestion that benefit claimants don’t deserve help as they are to agree with it. The same is true of the assertion that welfare recipients are ‘fiddling’ the system. The Tories are addressing a changing country with talking points a decade out of date.
Second, and of more immediate concern: this leadership contest is a rare opportunity for the Tories to get media coverage by talking about policy. Even if you want to put clear blue water between yourself and the bloke on his way out the door, there are smart and not-so-smart ways to do it. Making yet another welfare crackdown a centrepiece of your campaign falls under the category of not-so-smart. It may go down well with an electorate of Tory MPs but the voters get to hear you, too. The government of which you are a member has presided over a 35 per cent drop in the out-of-work benefit claimant count in the space of a year and boasts an unemployment rate to rival Ted Heath’s. Why would you go on TV and say benefit claims are spiralling out of control and not enough people are in jobs?
Suella Boomerman might appeal to certain Tory demographics but she has neither the insight nor the savvy of a prime minister.
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