The Deserving Poor

This concept has suddenly come back into favour over the last couple of days since, at the Conservative conference, it was suggested that there should be a limit on the amount of benefit anyone should receive from the welfare state and a cabinet minister suggested that people on benefit should consider carefully about having children. I thought that the concept of the deserving and undeserving poor had died with the Victorian world and the birth of the welfare state. In Victorian times it was a seriously important view for determining how and what one should give to charity. It was okay to give your hard-earned money to those who showed a capacity to help themselves out of misery. And it was also tied very much to religion. If the poor were religious and showed the necessary humility then it was fine to help them but if they went to the pub when they should be at church that was a sure sign that they didn’t deserve any help. Local charities, details of which you can sometimes find inscribed on large boards in your local church, often specified who might get the help – widows and orphans being the most popular. Then with the coming of the welfare state these distinctions were eliminated. Even the concept of the means test – so important in the cash-strapped 1930s- was derided as basically undignified and unfair. Universality became the order of the day. Now we find that such an idea leads to seemingly ever-increasing deamnds on the state and people want to retreat from it. There are, obviously, easy targets – the man and woman with a large family who have never worked or the young single parent getting pregnant and needing help. While these are not urban myths they are beside the point. What matters is creating jobs. Only when there are enough jobs for all can we start getting on our high horses about deserving and undeserving poor. We must start from the assumption that everybody will want to work if there are jobs and it is to their financial benefit to work. Then you create the jobs. I know that we are in financial crisis but I wonder what anyone thinks of the idea of scrapping as many high paid managerial jobs as possible and replacing them with lower paid jobs that will make a better environment in which to live. In a way this was Roosevelt’s response in 1930s USA. After all if you are giving a person £100 a week not to work, why not invest an extra hundred and get him working and raising his self-esteem and contribtion to society ? One senior manager in local governement at £125000 a year could thus pay for the extra money needed to employ 25 people. Once you have people in work you can talk all you like about the deserving poor and their opposite. Bye for now.