Welfare

Iain Duncan Smith Swings And Misses

Samuel Hooper3 Comments

Iain Duncan Smith 2

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Four years of painstaking research have finally revealed the gaping black hole in Britain’s finances, the reason why the British state has grown so large and expensive yet manages to achieve such mediocre outcomes in so many areas.

No, it wasn’t throwing ever larger sums of money at the same inefficient education and healthcare delivery models. Nothing to do with a rigid retirement age at a time of ever increasing life expectancy. It turns out that the problem was providing multilingual access to benefit claim forms, and translating services to immigrants who lack fluent English. Armed with this knowledge, Iain Duncan Smith, the Work and Pensions secretary, has drafted a clever scheme to fix everything.

The Daily Mail, for whose readers this policy was so transparently and cravenly crafted, summarises it thus:

In a radical bid to slash Britain’s benefits bill, the Prime Minister intends to stop printing welfare paperwork in foreign languages and prevent claimants using taxpayer-funded translators at benefits offices.

The move – which would also hit British residents who cannot speak English – was due to be announced tomorrow, but has been delayed following a row with Nick Clegg.

Tories hope that axeing foreign-language versions of documents explaining how to claim benefits would make it harder for immigrants such as newly arrived Romanians and Bulgarians to cash in on the UK’s benefits system, encourage others already here to learn English – and save money spent on translators.

Anyone who thinks that taking this action will slash Britain’s annual welfare bill needs to go away, look at the figures and then maintain a long period of dignified silence. Social security spending (pensions and benefits) will cost Britain £256 billion in 2014. How much of that vast sum do people really think goes toward printing forms in multiple language and hiring translators? Who, exactly, is the Work and Pensions secretary trying to fool?

Just use Google Translator
Just use Google Translator, that will save some cash.

 

If you want to do the things that IDS proposes to save some money around the edges then that’s one thing, but to enact them and claim that it will “slash the welfare bill” is misleading and disingenuous. Iain Duncan Smith is a talented minister with otherwise good ideas, and it is discouraging to see him wasting his efforts proposing ideas such as this when he knows full well that they will go nowhere towards solving our fiscal problems.

Of course, there are doubtless some lazy immigrants who are perfectly capable of learning English sufficiently well to be able to function independently, and yet who choose not to do so for one reason or another. Where this refusal is rooted in a stubborn unwillingness to integrate into British society and desire to remain part of an insular and closed community, this is a particular cause for concern, because integrating new immigrants effectively into our country is vital for social, law and order and national security reasons. But threatening to cut benefits from immigrant claimants is highly unlikely to either solve the problem of people persistently failing to learn English or dramatically cut the welfare bill.

If the Tories’ concern about new immigrants struggling to integrate into British society is genuine, then they should propose some positive ideas to help promote inclusion and cohesion, and suggest ways to make it easier for new arrivals to learn their new native language. There should be some carrot (even if the incentive is of the cheapest kind, such as pointing people in the direction of existing English courses at local colleges and institutions) as well as the stick of cutting off access to benefits. If they are not seen to tackle the problem from both ends, many people (myself included) will suspect them of cynical motives.

And cynical they are. This is a proposal designed entirely to grab headlines, but more worryingly than that, it is a proposal designed to win the approval of the Daily Mail. If the Conservative party is really gearing up for 2015 general election mode by pandering to the prejudices of their base rather than reaching out to those whose instincts are to vote Labour or Liberal Democrat (who are likely to roll their eyes at policy announcements such as this) then there is grave cause for concern at their electoral prospects.

All is not yet lost – the Conservative Party has recently shown some signs of attempting to reach out beyond their core supporters. But, as so often, we see these small steps forward immediately neutralised by the two steps back of the let’s-bash-the-immigrants rhetoric. Shedding the label of the “nasty party” is not helped by policy proposals such as this.

The sardonic response from the Liberal Democrats puts it best:

“These are proposals from the Tories which haven’t been agreed in Government,” [the LibDem source] said.

“We’ve already taken significant steps to make sure we all enjoy the right to move and to work, but not a freedom to claim.

“We will look at these proposals, but would prefer the Tories to agree policies in Government rather than chase Ukip’s tail via the Sunday papers.”

The Conservatives would do well to heed this particular pearl of wisdom from their inexperienced junior coalition partners.

Over-Entitled Graduate Gets Smacked Down

Samuel Hooper1 Comment

If you were out of work for a length of time and were told that you had to participate in a mandatory work experience placement as a requirement for receiving your unemployment benefits, would you:

1. Be grateful for the safety net that exists to support you, and comply with the programme, or

2. Take the government to court for enslaving you, citing the European Convention on Human Rights?

Cait Reilly and Jamieson Wilson both decided to opt for choice 2. According to The Telegraph:

Ms Reilly’s barrister told the High Court that the geology graduate’s stint at the Poundland near her home in Kings Heath, Birmingham, involved her carrying out “unpaid menial work”.

This consisted of very basic tasks such as sweeping and shelf-stacking “without training, supervision or remuneration”.

If indeed this is all that the work involved, this is disappointing as it breaches the terms by which the companies participate in the back-to-work schemes. In exchange for receiving free labour, the participating firms should ensure that they fulfil their obligations by providing a suitable induction, training and supervision. However, this is a reason to update and modify the scheme, not to abolish it altogether. The secondary benefits (keeping people in the habit of work during a period of unemployment, and providing additional labour to British companies so that they can generate further profits and employ more people) remain intact, even if the primary benefit was not realised in this case.

And it is hardly slavery.

Fortunately, the presiding judge agreed. The Telegraph gors on to report:

Mr Justice Foskett criticised the DWP for the lack of clarity over the potential loss of benefits to claimants who fail to take part in the schemes without good reason.

But addressing the issue of article four of the European Convention on Human Rights, which bans forced labour and slavery, he said the schemes were “are a very long way removed from the kind of colonial exploitation of labour that led to the formulation of Article 4. “

“The Convention is, of course, a living instrument, capable of development to meet modern conditions, and views may reasonably differ about the merits of a scheme that requires individuals to ‘work for their benefits’ as a means of assisting them back into the workplace,” he added.

If the Department for Work and Pensions has not been crystal clear on the conditions for receiving benefits and the potential ways in which they could be forfeited, this needs to be remedied immediately.

However, the broader ruling, upholding the government’s back-to-work schemes, is very satisfactory indeed. Crying “slavery” and running to the European Convention on Human Rights because you dislike the “menial” work you are asked to do is overdramatic in the extreme, and does a disservice to the many people around the world who are in actual bondage, the victims of sex trafficking or any other kind of real slavery.

Not being able to watch Jeremy Kyle on television every morning while you balance a work placement with job searching ≠ modern day slavery.

It just doesn’t.

Labour Party Balderdash On Jobs

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

Ed Miliband Jobs Guarantee

 

Good news, everyone. Ed Miliband has solved the youth unemployment crisis in Britain. I guess he was lying in bed last night and the ghost of Michael Foot visited him and told him what had to be done to make everything better again.

Once he and his merry band of super-competent cabinet colleagues are sworn in as the next government in 2015, everything will be fine. Rainbows will appear in the sky and bunny rabbits will hop across the land. We know this because, at the one-day Labour Party conference in Coventry today, Mr. Miliband unveiled his “real jobs guarantee”.

The nasty Conservative Party, of course, likes young people to be unemployed. It gives us right-wingers a kick to pay taxes so that people can receive Jobseekers Allowance indefinitely.

His plan – to give every young person who has been unemployed for 12 months or more a guaranteed internship with a company, paid at the minimum wage – would be paid for by another £600m arbitrary raid on bankers bonuses.

Miliband says:

“To business we say, we’ll pay the wages, if you provide the training … To young people: if you’re out of work for a year we’ll guarantee you the opportunity to work.”

The BBC article goes on to mention:

“Those taking part will be expected to turn up for work, as well as looking for a full-time job and complete training, or face “tough consequences” – including possible benefit sanctions.”

What other tough consequence could there possibly be for failing to turn up for work or complete the other requirements for receiving government benefits, other than to lose those benefits? Being scolded by someone at the Job Centre? Being sent a letter of disapproval? Anyway.

I almost don’t feel as though it is worth delving into the flaws in this dystopian policy, especially given the fact that Labour’s deputy leader, Harriet Harman, was apparently clueless when it came to how much the scheme would cost, and whether this cost would be fully met by their proposed one-time (but seemingly all-the-time) tax on bankers’ bonuses.

Nonetheless, a couple of points of rebuttal, just to go through the motions:

1.Guess what, not all “bankers” had a hand in bringing about the global economic downturn. In fact, a lot of people in quite a lot of industries, and government positions also had a hand in it. So when will the Labour Party get over trying to use banks as a piggy bank to raid at will to fund their latest scheme? Gordon Brown was either Chancellor of the Exchequer or Prime Minister for the decade leading up to the collapse, so how about we also arbitrarily add a 10% tax surcharge on all of his future income to help him atone for the consequences of his calamitous incompetence?

The time to extract penance from the banks was at the time of the bailouts, but it didn’t happen. The Labour government missed the opportunity. Businesses cannot plan for the future and grow and prosper if they don’t know if they will be hit by a new punitive tax at any moment to fund the latest socialist pipe dream. Should the country have extracted more of a toll from the financial sector at the time? Almost certainly. But we didn’t, and now it is too late, and we have Gordon Brown and his heirs and successors in today’s Labour Party to thank for it.

2. This policy is so vague as to be worthless. Mr. Miliband says that “saying ‘no’ is not an option”, but doesn’t outline the consequences of saying no. After never once having gotten tough before in their history, does anyone really expect that this Labour policy, if implemented, would actually have any real teeth?

3. Youth unemployment currently stands at around 22.5%, or 1.042 million people. How, exactly, is a future Labour government going to coerce enough firms to take people on in order to reduce this to 0%? The answer is, of course, that they won’t. And if they even come close, it will only be because they bully firms into taking on people to do non-jobs that are of no training value, just to help the government meet its target.

4. Go away, and come back when you have a real jobs policy or any kind of plan that will actually solve the problem of youth unemployment. And in the meantime, perhaps stop demonising the current government’s “Welfare to Work” plans, which are much more cost-neutral and much more likely to succeed.