How to spring the benefits trap

Fraser Nelson reports on how a revamp of the benefits system could finally end the scourge of Britain’s mass and hidden unemployment

In the reception of The Spectator’s office stands a statuette of a Welsh miner, pick and shovel over his shoulder, above an inscription ‘from the townsfolk of Aberdare’. The town had been savagely hit during the collapse in demand for British coal in the 1920s, with almost half of its residents out of work. The magazine launched an appeal and our readers responded with £12,000 — equivalent to £580,000 today. It gave a taste of a mood of national solidarity that was to go on to create a welfare state, to cure what William Beveridge called the ‘giant evil’ of idleness. Few could imagine, then, how this welfare state would incubate the very evil it was designed to eradicate.

The 2009 recession has been cruel to Aberdare, with some 25 per cent of its working-age population on benefits.