Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as
to be purchased at the price of
chains and slavery?

IDS writes for the Telegraph:

This Government is currently striving to build a new welfare system, one based on a fairer deal between claimants and the British taxpayer. But a decision emerging from Europe this week has the potential to completely undermine these reforms.

The UK has no problem playing its part in supporting the free movement of labour in the EU. However, what the EU is now trying to do is get us to provide benefits for those who come to this country with no intention to work and no other means of supporting themselves, with the sole purpose of accessing a more generous benefit system.

More: Brussels poses serious threat to our welfare reforms – Telegraph.

Via The Blue Blog » Our welfare reforms will make work pay:

At the election, the Conservatives made a promise to you to get Britain working. Now we are delivering on that promise.

This Government is on the side of people who want to get ahead. The plans we have announced in the last few days will get people into work and will reform the welfare system to ensure that work always pays and no one can say they are better off on benefits.

At the election, we promised to work to reduce the very high marginal tax rates faced by many people on low incomes who want to return to work or increase their earnings. The Welfare Bill I introduced yesterday delivers on that promise. We will start to reduce these rates and simplify the system by introducing the Universal Credit, ensuring it will always pay to work.

Just last Friday, I met a young mum stuck in the benefits trap in Wycombe. She can’t take any more work, even though it is there for her, and she is fed up of seeing people better off on benefits. She just wants to get on but the system is stopping her. Where is the social justice in that?

I have her permission to use her story in Parliament and I look forward to doing so. The present nightmare is just plain wrong.

Via 21st Century Welfare, the Coalition seeks views on proposals for welfare reform. Since I gave time to work for the Centre for Social Justice, these reforms are close to my heart: we must take people out of the present intergenerational cycles of broad spectrum poverty.

Iain Duncan Smith’s statement in the main paper is encouraging, particularly the central section:

Too often governments have tried to tackle poverty but ended up managing its symptoms. The changes outlined here are based on a recognition that poverty cannot be tackled through treating the symptoms alone.

The benefits system has shaped the decisions of the poorest in a way that has trapped generation after generation in a spiral of dependency and poverty. This has cost the country billions of pounds every year in cash payments and billions more in meeting the social costs of this failure.

The only way to make a sustainable difference is by tackling the root causes of poverty: family breakdown; educational failure; drug and alcohol addiction; severe personal indebtedness; and economic dependency.

Through the Centre for Social Justice, Iain Duncan Smith has set the trajectory of this government’s poverty-fighting programme, a programme which aims to build a healthy society.

The paper sets out “a fair system that protects those in greatest need”, with proposals which:

• establish a fairer relationship between the people who receive benefits and the people who pay for them and, as crucially, between the people on out-of-work benefits and the people who work in low-paid jobs;

• target support more efficiently, supporting and protecting those in vulnerable circumstances;

• help to divert people away from the pathways that lead to poverty and give people living in poverty a route out; and

• support our wider goal of strengthening families, supporting carers and enabling disabled people to have an equal role in society.

The other aims of reform are affordability, rewarding work and personal responsibility, reduced worklessness, simplification and a reduction in delays, error and fraud. The paper sets out several ways in which these aims could be realised before inviting comment.

You can provide feedback by following the instructions in the annex to the main paper, which may be found here.

See also

• 21st Century Welfare, DWP
• Breakthrough Britain and other publications by the Centre for Social Justice
• Benefit Simplification by David Martin for the Centre for Policy Studies

I am an Associate Member of the Centre for Policy Studies and I always enjoy reading their pamphlets: they remind me I am not alone. I caught up with the following four yesterday on the train. The theme? Putting humanity back into our society.

Click the images to download the pamphlets as PDFs.

The Reality Gap – an analysis of the failure of big government demonstrates that more government means worse. Jill Kirby writes of voter disenchantment and indicates that, in the EU elections, “Only one voter in 11 voted for the runaway winners, the Conservative Party”.

Jill provides and explores:

five techniques which have been deployed by the Government to create the appearance of success, while presiding over failure:

• Moving the goalposts
• Declaratory legislation
• Government as public relations
• Data collection
• Complex structures, procedures and language.

In particular, from the chapter Declaratory Legislation:

A 2008 survey by Sweet and Maxwell found that Margaret Thatcher’s Government introduced an average of 1,724 new laws every year. That rose to 2,663 under Tony Blair and in the first year of Gordon Brown’s regime the annual total reached 3,071.

This frenzied legislative activism can only be ignored by ordinary people. It puts me in mind of Jamie Whyte’s article Am I a Criminal? I haven’t a clue:

This Government has relentlessly undermined the rule of law by its vague legislation and constant meddling

Jill concludes that “The only answer is a significant reduction in state control” — I could not agree more.
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As David Cameron throws open the list to more candidates from outside the political mainstream, I personally recommend these five books from my reading list plus some first-class think tanks.

Five books

See the links in the sidebar for more book recommendations.

Tansey and Jackson, “Politics: The Basics”, because you have to start somewhere. Via Amazon:

This highly successful introduction to the world of politics has been fully revised and updated in collaboration with a new co-author, Nigel Jackson of the University of Plymouth. The new edition builds on the reputation for clarity and comprehensive coverage of the previous editions. It explores the varieties of political systems, the main political movements and key issues at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Bartholomew, “The Welfare State We’re In”, because in our essentially rich society, a human tragedy is in progress: we need to know why, and what we can do about it.

See also the reports of The Centre for Social Justice, Breakdown Britain and Breakthrough Britain, where Iain Duncan Smith writes:

For the last six years, I have been visiting many of Britain’s most difficult and fractured communities. I have seen levels of social breakdown which have appalled and angered me. In the fourth largest economy in the world, too many people live in dysfunctional homes, trapped on benefits. Too many children leave school with no qualifications or skills to enable them to work and prosper. Too many communities are blighted by alcohol and drug addiction, debt and criminality and have low levels of life expectancy.

Our interim report Breakdown Britain charted the extent of the problem in extensive detail. Britain tops the ‘league tables’ when it comes to spiraling levels of drug addiction, single parenting, poor education and debt. Many people told us that the quality of their communities had deteriorated, maintaining that the crime levels were much higher than those reported to the police. The recent rise in gang warfare, which resulted in a spate of teenage stabbings and shootings in our cities, is a savage illustration ofthe deep fractures in so many of our inner city communities. A recent UNICEF Report concluded that we have the lowest levels of child well being in Europe. A further report has shown how young people in Britain are more likely to be unemployed and out of education than in almost any other country in Europe.

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