The DWP, the third accomplice in the Philpott case
The writer AN Wilson has a piece in the Daily Mail that has hit the nail right on the head when it comes to the background to the Philpott child killing case. Here is a ‘man’ (in the broadest sense of the word) who created children he had no intention of paying for, and worse saw his offspring only as a meal ticket for more benefits and a bigger house.
Sadly Philpott, although unusual in killing his children in a vile attempt to smear others and gain material advantage, is not the only person who feels no shame about poncing. There are ‘Philpott types’ up and down the country in every town and city who game a welfare system that has defrauded those honest taxpayers who paid in to the National Insurance system for decades, in order to support those who are undeserving, in a style that many working people cannot afford to have.
The existence of a welfare aristocracy has been exposed not just by this tragic case but also by the fact that there have been 878,000 Britons who have dropped their benefit claims rather than having their fake so-called ‘mental illness’ or ‘bad back’ conditions exposed by medical examination. That figure alone should alert people of the appalling extent that fraudulent claims were accepted by the Welfare State.
No sensible or reasonable person would want to see a society without a safety net, but far too often what was intended by people like Beveridge as a safety net has instead become a hammock for the terminally idle.
There are two questions that must be asked about this case. Firstly, would Philpott have had so many children and been such a vile and violent ponce if the state had not fleeced so many taxpayers to pay for him and those like him? Secondly, where were the social services, who are often so eager to remove children from those parents and foster parents who have political views which social workers disagree with, in this case?
The average British worker has via this appalling case, seen the extent of welfare funded idleness, cruelty and depravity that exists and hopefully it will be a spur to proper reform of the welfare system. This should mean benefit being dependent on community work, limits on the number of children for whom benefit can be claimed for and a policy of favouring those who have paid in to the system or who contribute to it in other ways.
It is long past time that the Welfare Kings and Welfare Queens whom the Philpott’s are but one awful example, were tipped unceremoniously from their amply padded thrones.
AN Wilson said:
“What the Philpott trial showed was the pervasiveness of evil caused by benefit dependency. The welfare state, which was designed to provide a safety net for those in genuine need, worked only in those vanished times, more than half a century ago, when there remained a culture of honesty, respect for the police and the law.
Those of us who grew up in ‘Austerity Britain’ thought of William Beveridge with his compassionate report, which invented the welfare state, and Clement Attlee, the prime minister who put it into account, as heroes, and we thought of ourselves as their children.
They were heroes with the most honourable of intentions, determined that the conditions they had witnessed during the 1930s and the war — hungry children suffering from rickets and tuberculosis, appalling housing conditions, the persecution of the unemployed — would never come to Britain again.
In post-war Britain, where there was high employment and everyone had to accept a low standard of living, it really looked as if a just and decent society was being formed. A society in which benefits helped those who genuinely could not help themselves.
But in time, the welfare state became an exercise in Whitehall empire-building.
Ever more people were entitled to welfare and, understandably, ever more people grabbed it. When Attlee left office in 1951, we spent just £700 million a year on welfare (not including health and pensions), which accounted for 4.7 per cent of Britain’s gross domestic product.
By 2011/12, the benefits system had become an uncontrollable leviathan and we were spending more than £200 billion a year — even allowing for inflation, that’s 13 per cent of GDP.
With such sums being disbursed so readily, little wonder there is so much waste and fraud. Until recently, more than two million people of working age claimed disability benefit.”
There are 2.8m people on the dole, and at any one time less than half a million vacancies. People like Philpott, and there are a LOT of people like him, are ‘vile’, ‘worthless’, (insert your epithet of choice here). But they are products, symptoms. The result of a policy that accepts an imbalance of jobs to jobless. The result of a policy that can see no more worth in a class of people than to consign them to a pointless and nihilistic existance. There are families which have not had a member in fulltime employment for three generations now. But there are 2.2m more people than jobs. Whose fault is that? Mick Philpott’s?
Bobo, Mick Phillpot is a symptom of a system that when gamed, as it far too often is, rewards idleness, irresponsible fecundity and family breakdown. Yes there a lot of people who are jobless but we, or rather tha Labour Party, rather than getting these people to take responisibility for themselves and their families, imported hundreds of thousands of people to do the work that our jobless were not willing to do or were not educated to do. It is indeed a scandal that we have families where three generations are not in employment and you can see the historical reasons why a late life or middle aged miner or a steelworker not working ever again in a changed economy, but there should have been no excuse for their children and grandchildren also being workless. The reason for these problems lies not only in an acceptance of an imbalance in jobs to jobless but in the design of a welfare system that only warehouses people on benefit and an educational system that has singularily proved itself unable to educate Britains young people. Too many employers have looked at the products of the British welfare and education systems and gone ‘sod that’ and chosen a Pole instead.
Whatever the causes of the current problems it cannot be denied that our current welfare system is unsustainable. There are too many undeserving getting help whilst the deserving who have paid in are denied help and worse treated like shit. We have a welfare system without any internal moral guide to help those who need and deserve it and tell those who don’t to bugger off.
Bobo, I understand your anger, but think it through.
Why is it so hard to create jobs or even make a living as self-employed? Because of the never-ending ‘Red Tape’ and costs – all to fund the leviathan.
How much tax (not just income tax but all those other ‘incidental’ taxes on taxes) does it take for you to admit it would negatively impact on your ability to run, start or ‘make a living’ from a business or job? And why does the government ‘need’ all that tax income?
How much paperwork (necessary only to justify the existence of the army of bureaucrats ‘needed’ to administer the behemoth, all of whom you get to pay for too) before it becomes ‘too much trouble and effort’? (Parts of this country have 60%+ of those ‘in employment’ working for council or the government – funded by whom?)
Consider the problems cause by ‘helping’ (with tax payers money) eg. the ladies on benefits to do a part-time job (my own area of ‘health’ has no full time posts for those seeking to make a living since all the posts are now 0.5 fte or 0.25 fte, and ‘only’ those on benefits can afford to live on that measly income). The issues of immigration, jobs taken are in the whole so badly paid as to only be seen as a possibility by those living temporarily in communal shared rooms whilst sending money home, or supplied (yet again at tax payers expense) with housing.
There are jobs, low paying, boring, hard and often dirty, but they are there. To claim otherwise is false. (Amazing how all those immigrant workers can find them, no? And yes, if cheap ‘subsidised’ labour wasn’t available employers would have to increase wages to a reasonable level – an increase in the cost of your arugala offset by less tax to support the unemployed?)
The issue remains that too many ‘choose’ to live on the income taken from others at the point of a gun (your multi-generational unemployed). Many, if not most, of the ‘difficulties’ surrounding finding employment can, and are, traceable back to ‘the welfare state’ and it’s all pervasive influence.
And Philpott et al are merely ‘the extreme’, but visit a sizeable proportion of the (long term) unemployed and you’ll have trouble getting past the benefit funded big-screen TVs, X-boxs, etc. assuming they aren’t on a benefit funded foreign holiday at the time (yes there are those who legitimately find themselves in such straits, but not unsurprisingly they are usually the very ones least supported by the institution supposedly set up purely for those in their situations).
The ‘welfare state’ is broken beyond repair – not enough workers to support all the ‘nanny will provide whatever I think I deserve’ types.
@ F211 and Able:-
To be fair, I don’t think we contradict each other on any major point, although I will hammer home ad nauseam the fact that there are 2 and a half million more people than there are jobs available. This is really a key point, as the ‘war on welfare scroungers’ or however it is currently being trumpeted in the media is a smokescreen for succesive governments’ pursual of the policy of screwing the working class. Without recognition of this fact, any discussion of the consequences of welfarism rapidly descends to straightforward prole-bashing: exactly how our masters like it. Anyway, thanks for spirited and interesting responses, all the best to you both.
Bobo, where I definitely concur with you is that there has been a political war against the working classes but this war has not, at least during the last 15 years or so been carried out by the right, but by the Left. It was the Left who decimated this country with unnecessary and damaging levels of immigration which mopped up those jobs that did become available during the time when the economy was in bubble mode. What cannot be denied is that the current welfare system favours those who are canny enough to game it but punishes those who have contributed and who have not made a career of claiming. Maybe freeing up the economy and reducing petty regulation (which grew immensely under the Labour govt) may help to create jobs for those who need them?
Yep: the destruction of the nation state by the atomisation of the working class. The death of big industry and unionised workforces, mass immigration and minority rights. All part of the Big Project: European federalisation and the creation of a permanent supra-national ruling class of technocrats. A post-Democratic future with the Middle Classes cementing their grip on the levers of power, and the lower orders relegated to one of a happy rainbow nation of untermensch tribes, each vying to carve out a little niche for themselves, and favoured status for their self-appointed spokesmen. Funny how supra-national government never means the abolishing existing government jobs sinecures though, merely the proliferation thereof.