I'm Entitled

Mick should have been picking litter outside Mr Mundair's shop

Yes, we know: we can't judge our entire welfare system on the basis of Mick Philpott. But what we can say is that if it hadn't been for our welfare system, he wouldn't have been able to live like that. He wouldn't have been able to get a living from fathering 17 children. There wouldn't have been any benefit in cramming two entire broods into his 3 bed Council semi to boost his income and his case for a bigger house. The incentive simply wouldn't have been there.

We've blogged the issue of children as meal ticket many times (eg following the Shannon Matthews case). And to some degree it is an inevitable consequence of any welfare system that seeks to protect poor children from the fecklessness of their parents: we pick up the tab because we don't want the children to starve. But we don't have to sit back and accept that such parents can just carry on being as feckless as they like.  

Yet according to the welfare administrators in Derby, there was nothing to flag up Philpott and his domestic arrangements as being a concern. In other words, it was deemed perfectly acceptable for him to carry on taking the money and fathering even more kids. All that mattered was that the kids were not obviously being abused.

Why? Why when Philpott was clearly able-bodied, was he allowed to spend his entire life sponging off the rest of us? Because he wasn't some unfortunate casualty of the recession: come rain or shine, boom or bust, he'd always expected us to support him, and our welfare system did absolutely nothing to stop him. Instead of making the dosh conditional on him, say, clearing the rubbish strewn around outside Mr Mundair's Derby shop (and all those other neighbourhood jobs that never get done) he was just given the money. 

This appalling case highlights once again how the culture of entitlement has ramped up our welfare bills. And lest we forget, welfare spending doubled in real terms between 1990 and 2010. Doubled to over £200bn.

In the case of Housing Benefit, that's grown even faster, nearly trebling over the same period. And once again, entitlement has been driving up costs - the entitlement of recipients not just to a roof over their heads, but to remain in the same subsidised accommodation irrespective of how many spare bedrooms they have. And judging from the outcry over the government's attempt to tighten the rules, that sense of entitlement is deeply felt and shared across large sections of the media. 

Yet the government's rule changes are pretty modest, with prospective savings amounting to less than 5% of the total £24bn bill. They will certainly not result in widows and orphans being cast out into the snow.* As for forcing children of the same sex to share bedrooms, I personally shared a bedroom with my two brothers right up until I finally left home in my early twenties - it was no hardship whatsoever. 

Of course, much of the reporting we get on these welfare changes is filtered and spun by the BBC. The R4 Today programme did a great job of stitching up poor old IDS on Monday, getting him to claim he could live on £53 per week. It later turned out that their case study - a market trader who claimed he only gets £53 per week to live on - was being somewhat economical with the actualité, but by then the damage had been done.  And that stunt was only part of the BBC's big campaign against welfare reform, and indeed all Coalition attempts to curb public spending.

Which is hardly surprising, given that the BBC is Britain's biggest tax-funded business. Accountable to nobody except themselves, they are as steeped in entitlement as any Mick Philpott. And they can see that if the rest of us start asking the right questions, it won't be long before their £3.5bn subsidy will be seen as a luxury we can no longer afford. Best to stop such questions being asked in the first place, and hope their guys get back in 2015.

*Denham Senior recalls witnessing the eviction of an elderly widow from her home in the early 1930s. She was carted off to what had once been the workhouse, and her possessions were piled up on the pavement for passers-by to help themselves to. Nobody is suggesting a return to that, or anything even close.

PS How long has the BBC been using our taxes to advertise themselves on YouTube? Personally I find much more to interest me on YT than on the BBC's six (six!) channels put together. Yes, there are ads - ever more ads - but I'd much rather put up with them than the BBC's telly tax... especially when it's being used to advertise on YT.