Benefits

The BBC is not the Daily Mail. So if the BBC publishes a story about people on benefits, it will be sympathetic and supportive, and ever-so-slightly designed to make those of us in work feel a little bit harsh and guilty for our knee-jerk 'get a job' attitude, right?

Well, wrong. Either the BBC has had a sudden change of heart, or someone in their research department hasn't had the memo yet. They have published an article entitled "Family Life on Benefits", and in it they have sneaked some very pro-Coalition propaganda.

The article concerns Raymond (not his real name) who lives with his wife and seven children. No-one in the family works, and they receive benefits totalling £30,284.80 per annum. Now this is the money they actually receive in their hands, so it will be the equivalent of a pre-tax income of around £40k. Now this interests me. I don't have seven kids (I took the 1970s mantra of 'Stop At Two' seriously), but that income is way, way more than I have ever seen. I have been Head of Department and Faculty in a large comprehensive school, I have worked as a commercial trainer, and I have been Health and Safety Manager for a medium-sized company - all good, solid jobs requiring qualifications, skills and experience. I have worked hard all my life, paid all my taxes and been a loyal and conscientous employee. And the most I have ever earned in one year has been £25k. So when I read that the average income in the UK is £26k I start to wonder where I have been going wrong. And when I hear of someone receiving substantially more than that for doing nothing (and when the taxes from my earnings help to pay for it), my ears prick up.

The BBC article could be calculated to raise the hackles of any working taxpayer. Here are some of the reasons:

Why isn't Raymond working?

Ray says: "The market for my skills dried up 10 years ago - there's a total lack of work in my area of expertise."

He was a writer of educational software, but he hasn't worked since 2001. Was there no work he could have taken on to tide him over until he got himself retrained?

Why isn't his wife working?

His wife Katherine suffers from bipolar disorder with an anxiety disorder and is unable to work.

If she's genuinely bipolar, than of course I am very sympathetic and I wish her well. But why do I see the words "anxiety disorder" and see someone who has managed to talk an overworked GP into signing her off for a vague condition which can't be disproved?

The impression is that of two people who have decided long ago that they don't want to work, and have managed to convince the system that they would be better left alone and fed, clothed and housed by the rest of us. I could be wrong there, but I doubt it.

Where this gets really Daily Mailish is when the family give a breakdown of their spending, and claim that the proposed benefits cap will force them to choose between "heating and eating". The breakdown includes the following items every week:

• 200 cigarettes
• Large pouch of tobacco
• 24 cans of lager.

Let me see. 200 Sterling King Size cigarettes, £56. 50g Samson rolling tobacco, £13. 24 cans of Carlsberg, £18. Total £87.

Add the Sky TV that they say is essential

because we're stuck in the house all week - otherwise we wouldn't have any entertainment.

and costs another £15 a week. (I used to have Sky, the minimum package just to get the 'free' box and dish. I stopped it years ago because I never watched it, but I couldn't afford to start having it again even if I wanted to.) So the work-free family feel that the rest of us ought to stump up out of our own earned income to buy them booze, fags and 'entertainment'. (Entertainment is no longer something you make for yourself; it's something you buy. Says it all.) And an expensive £60 per month subscription to Sky is not necessary, even if you are a telly addict. You can get a Freeview box for under £20 these days - a one-off payment - and have between 50 and 100 channels for nothing.

So that's a total of £102 per week of what even the most bleeding-heart lefty would not describe as essential expenditure.

And, for comparison, there's a total of £82.40 per week which they claim would be snatched away from them if the benefit cap were introduced. Less than they spend on booze, fags and telly. So when they say they are going to be forced to choose between heating and eating, what they mean is that both heating and eating are less important to them than their ciggies and beer. Good priorities to be teaching those seven kids, don't you think?

As an additonal bit of what-the-fuckery, listen to Mrs Raymond's reason for continuing to smoke:

On the cigarettes, my wife tried to give up, but she missed one appointment on the course and they threw her off it.'

You see, we really want to be good, but NHS bullies keep stopping us.

If this story had been in the Daily Mail, I would be discounting it as an extreme example, polished and honed to cause the maximum apoplexy in the slightly-dim middle-aged. But not when it's presented by the BBC. Not because I trust the BBC to be unbiased and factual - I don't - but because the BBC's agenda is usually exactly the reverse of the Mail's.

The benefits cap is proving massively popular with the general public, and this article is the reason why. Last word to Raymond:

But, says Raymond, "If these proposals go through we will take a massive hit to our finances - and it's not as if we could move into a smaller or cheaper premises. I see eight people here having to choose between eating or heating."

I'm going to borrow Julia's 'World's Tiniest Violin', if she'll let me.

Flight Decked?

Oh dear. It seems that Tory peer-to-be Howard Flight has put his foot in it. Cameron has told him to apologise, and apologise he has, and furthermore the apology was "unreserved".

What has he been saying? That the Jews were to blame for the Holocaust? That Global Warming Climate Change Chaos is a criminal conspiracy? That immigrants should be rounded up and sent home?

None of the above. His crime was to say:

We're going to have a system where the middle classes are discouraged from breeding because it's jolly expensive. But for those on benefits, there is every incentive. Well, that's not very sensible.

Labour have called the comments "shameful" and said they showed how "out of touch" the Tories are, and Plaid Cymru have called them "disgraceful". Brendan Barber, of the in-touch-with-the-people's-mood TUC, said that Flight was "an insensitive throwback to the worst of 1980s politics". Man-of-the-people Eric Pickles has said that he found the comments "personally repugnant". David Cameron was clear that he didn't agree with the remarks, and was sure that Mr Flight would want to apologise. Which, after a brief interlude, he has. Shame.

The Tories are planning to remove child benefit from families where someone earns more than £43,000 a year. This will prove a slight disincentive for those familes (who may be accurately called middle-class) to have more children. At the same time, families on less than £43,000 (which will include those on benefits, or should) will continue to get the full child benefit that they do at present. I would be grateful if anyone could explain how anything Mr Flight said was wrong. The first two sentences are pretty much uncontested fact, or at least reasonable assumptions. It can only be his comment that encouraging those on benefits to "breed" is "not very sensible" that is causing controversy.

Paying people to have more and more children (i.e. breeding) when they can't even afford to support the ones they have is indeed not very sensible. I can see the argument for helping anyone who finds him or herself on low or no wages to support children they already have, and that is reasonable and humane. But the current system pays the feckless to be even more feckless. In an age of reliable contraception, there is no reason why anyone should have children they can't afford. Why I should keep on paying for Che'lsee to pop out her fourth and fifth sprogs while sitting at home watching Jeremy Kyle is a mystery. The noises from the Left are as expected. But for Cameron and Pickles to join in an attack on a man who is only saying what many ordinary people are thinking shows a lack of balls.

I happen to think that Flight is wrong on the issue of the higher earners. If you are earning over £43k, you can afford a couple of children, and these are the kind of people who are the least likely to have children they can't afford in any case. His remarks on the incentive that those on benefits have to produce even more children are spot on.

The Coalition - gradually revealing themselves as New Labour with a new coat of paint.

While we're on the subject ...

... of everything being everybody else's responsibility and nothing to do with me and my choices, I was reminded in one of the Guardian's comments of this classic from The Onion:

I Wish Someone Would Do Something About How Fat I Am

Spot on.

The Client State

From The Last Ditch (h/t whollyRUDE for the link), a superbly written piece about the way that those least able to bring up children are incentivised to do so by the benefits system. Read it and weep:

The single most sickening aspect of modern British society is the fate of children bred to maximise state benefits. The most extreme recent example is the "British Fritzl," who kept his daughters in captivity and raped them over a period of 25 years in order to produce more child benefit. Fritzl is a sick, sadistic pervert. His British equivalent is a lazy, greedy, sick sadistic pervert motivated by the desire to live free on the work of his fellow-citizens.

Continues ...