The benefits bill is the fault of politicians, not the poor

A row has broken out between the Scottish Government and the Scottish Tories. It is over the Scottish benefits system and it is not only depressingly predictable, divorced from evidence and riddled with hypocricy, it demonstrates a complete failure of politics to understand what is wrong with society.

This story begins with the Scottish Tory Leader Russell Findlay rolling out boilerplate Conservative anti-poor people propaganda. It's all here – 'benefit cheats', disincentive to work, feckless single mothers, two-child caps.

But a flailing, collapsing Scottish Tory Party retreating into its happy place isn't enough to understand this story. Because First Minister John Swinney responded that he would not “get in the gutter” with the Tory leader over this.

As a piece of moral politics, this would carry more weight if Mr Swinney hadn't only recently vacated that same gutter. Less than a year ago it was the SNP claiming that it couldn't increase the Scottish Child Payment because it would create a 'disincentive to work'.

Common Weal is particularly conscious of this because we challenged the Government over whether it had any evidence to support this claim. It did not. Swinney had simply made up this claim for political purposes and it bore no relationship with effective policy-making.

The primary problem with this 'debate' is that yet again it demonstrates a political process divorced from any serious understanding of what they are talking about, no coherent comprehension of the problem over which they are offering invented prognoses.

Because after decades of impoverishing a significant proportion of Britain's population we actually have reasonably good data on what results from this. The outcome is that if you cut benefits to below any form of subsistence, poorer people do go back to work – and that is the problem.

Each extended round of benefit cuts has resulted in a slightly larger number of people in work, but it is this which has entrenched poverty in Britain, because the work they have secured doesn't enable them to achieve subsistence either. Britain has been forcing people to accept any work by starving them, and then the only work they can find is low-pay, part-time and insecure.

It is why most people in poverty now have jobs. In fact, about two in three people in Britain now classed as in poverty are also in employment. This is significantly worse than most comparator countries. The reality of this is set out by the Living Wage Foundation:

“The polling shows that 3 in 5 low-paid workers (59%) were forced to skip meals regularly, were unable to heat their homes, fell behind on bills or took out a pay-day loan to cover their essentials in the past year because of their level of pay. Two in five (42%) have been forced to use foodbanks, rising to over half (56%) of low-paid workers with dependent children.”

The politicians are simply wrong; the disincentive to work in Britain comes from the fact that work doesn't pay enough to live on. People used to talk about the 'benefit trap', but this is really a poverty wages trap. And while some small steps have been taking on raising the minimum wage, this isn't really at the heart of the problem either.

Even after slight rises, surviving in a minimum wage job is only possible if it is full time and reliable and even then it requires very careful budgeting and significant sacrifice. The very best version of the employment the regulatory framework has created at the bottom of the employment spectrum isn't nearly good enough. The rest of it results in starving children.

Why? Because both Swinney and Russell take a very different approach to moral hazard at the other end of the wealth spectrum. For Tories there is no moral hazard in an under-regulated 'VIP Lane' during Covid and for the SNP a ropey half-a-billion guarantee to a questionable business proposition backed by a flakey investment firm can be sketched on the back of a napkin after discussion at an un-minuted dinner.

They have created a system in which business leaders are freed from the need to provide a living existence for staff in pursuit of ever-greater wealth for themselves, promising to make up the gap with welfare payments – which they then relentlessly blame on the poor rather than on the employers who impose the need for them in the first place.

There is no way out of this without a revolution in the regulation of work and workplace democracy. The armies of notional people that the politicians and business leaders keep assuring us 'actually really want flexible employment' (which is their euphemism for low pay and insecure) are going to have to be disappointed.

Unless politicians make work pay so people can live, the fault for benefits lies entirely with the politicians and the employers. Blaming single mothers or hungry children is grotesque.