There’s no defence for raiding the social security pot

A few weeks ago a cartoon appeared in The Daily Telegraph that caught the predicament of the Treasury when faced with current events. A large poster on the wall of the Treasury showed a general pointing at the public saying ‘Get off benefits and fight for your country.’ It was based on the famous First World War poster of Lord Kitchener supposedly pointing at men to join up. 

It summed up graphically the problem that faces the government: how can it reduce its vast social security bill and get people behind the increasing need to build a military response to a new world disorder.

With Trump bringing into question the nearly 80-year US involvement in protecting Europe from Russian ambition, it seems Europe needs its own protection. Hence Starmer’s conundrum: he can’t leave the flow of governmental money going the way it’s been going for much of those eight decades. His government is obliged by world events, it would seem, to get military spending way above its apparently paltry level, to reverse the decline in defence spending from its post-World War II high.

Every government has nibbled away at military spending because of the US’s enormous defence budget as it played policeman of the world. And now the ‘New Broom’ Trump is not from the old establishment school of thinking. In imitation of his TV Apprentice days, he’s firing people and firing the starting pistol for a new world order.

‘Cough up if you want security’ runs the argument. Hence the unpalatable raid on the largest amount of money the government’s budget has to spend each day to make poverty almost bearable. Hence the years when virtually nothing was spent on preventing poverty or curing poverty, but solely on maintaining poverty, now seem like wasted decades. Decades that were shared between different ideologies that took a turn at holding the strings of the public purse. 

• The hidden impact of Labour’s disability benefit cuts – from carer’s allowance to railcards
• Keir Starmer’s government is bringing power to local communities. We need that in social security
• UK will be at war by next election, says ex-Army Lib Dem MP – and will need conscription

Pusillanimous government, a lack of bravery, might have been the best way of viewing the increasing poverty maintenance bill. ‘Let’s do what has always been done’ is probably the approach of the civil service and various governments. Universal credit, an attempt at reducing the cost of administering poverty costing circa £5 to deliver £1 of support, was always mired in rigidity. It took forever to get it, and the idea of mentoring people into work was held back by staff training and other issues. 

An acceptance in all but name overtook an increasing use of social security to warehouse people who, due to Thatcher’s destruction of traditional British industry, left millions afloat in an inadequate benefit system. A lack of thinking on a large-scale deserted government and civil service at a time when there were large problems needing large solutions.

Planning a reconstruction of education, social support for children inheriting poverty, government investing in new technologies: these would have skilled a new workforce away from poverty; all of this was cosmetically tried by every government since Thatcher’s demise. But in a lacklustre, half-hearted manner which never imagined the puncturing of that ever-growing balloon of social security and its replacement with social opportunity. 

Now, because of Putin and Trump, government is having to raid the poverty pot that sees a thousand new applicants seeking solace every day of the working week. One in five people receive some form of state support, according to the Treasury. An unbearable burden on a government that since it came into office has had to take into account the reality of a world security in decline. And unfortunately a prime minister who has to assume an obligatory Churchill-like pose when the money and the armaments and the rockets are not there to do the job.

A vulnerable UK is the result: vulnerable militarily and vulnerable socially because, instead of curing poverty with an enormous alliance of talents and skills and businesses and universities and schools, we have been concentrating on holding the poor’s hand, not on getting people out of poverty.  Not creating a churn out of poverty but laying on more resources to increase the warehousing of the people who fall into need. 

The raiding of the social security pot will make victims of people who do not deserve such treatment while ‘encouraging’ those that seek an exit from dependence. Our job in this climate must be to protect those that could suffer, because such an exercise by a government driven on by an urgent need to cut costs will be clumsy. Careful thought may well be sacrificed to expediency. Our defenders, who are often volunteers, need to be aided in their work to protect the vulnerable. A sledgehammer to crack a nut will create more suffering. 

We have to be alert to world events but at the same time we cannot see the destruction of people’s lives simply because they have been caught in a state-sponsored warehouse. Ending the two-child embargo would lift 700,000 children out of immediate poverty. 

But overall we need to take a cold hard look at what can be done about those stuck in poverty and how we can get them out of it. As of yet no government department is doing any more than using a feather duster to tickle the surface of this dire situation. 

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