The Spectator's Notes | 2 May 2013

It is fascinating watching the great welfare debate as the universal credit starts its life. The ruling elites have very, very slowly caught up with public understanding. The simplest way to think about the question is this. At every level of society people tend to be acutely aware of what their approximate equals are paid, and usually unaware of what those richer or poorer receive. Therefore the people who best understand how welfare works are either its recipients or those who work on low wages and are scarcely better off for doing so. These people recognise that being on welfare is — in effect, though not morally — like having a job. There is a wage for it, plus various equivalents of overtime and fringe benefits, and the task is to get as much of these as you can. One effect of this has been to destroy the working class. Its more enterprising members have become middle class and the rest have discovered that they can live by not working. The Labour party, as its name suggests, was historically the party of work. It does not seem to realise (though the Blairites half did) that the benefits it defends will therefore be the death of it.

Not that the Conservatives are much further advanced. The essential point about welfare benefits, if they are not to have perverse effects, is that they should be lower. The only benefits which should be higher are those, most notably old-age pensions, which are contributory. This still cannot quite be said directly by politicians. Give it another five years.