The frightening reality of the welfare state we’re in
IF TV’S Benefits Street raised a fuss, James Bartholomew’s The Welfare State We’re In should cause an earthquake. Never mind a few scrounging scallywags, Bartholomew’s book (just republished) gives us the total historical horror of the welfare state in living Technicolor.
Bartholomew is a Redbull double-espresso to Iain Duncan Smith’s limp chamomile tea. Forget reforming the welfare state. We must blow it to smithereens! Bartholomew is clearly a monster. Why else would he attack the welfare state with such ferocity? It is, after all, a modest attempt to help the vulnerable in difficult times. If it has grown enormously, it merely reflects the increasing cruelty of capitalism.
Ha! Bartholomew grabs the welfare state by the throat, and exposes something ugly, frightening and dehumanising. This isn’t a dry book about public policy. It’s an explosive blockbuster, guaranteed to boil your blood, beautifully written, sweeping in its scope.
It is about the transformation of a once independent, prosperous people into a demoralised, dispirited, lumpen mass. It explains why we marry less and divorce more (and the terrible human cost). It tells us why we are so stupid and unhealthy, why our state health system is so inadequate and cruel. It tells us why we don’t save any more, why we are no longer so charitable or polite. It tells us why popular entertainment has descended into pornographic imbecility, why human progress in the past century has fallen so far short of expectations.
The cost is huge in money terms. “Benefits” alone account for about £200bn a year – more than the combined GDP of 30 African countries. But the result of this Niagara of handouts is not contentment. As Bartholomew shows with heartbreaking clarity, the real victims are those whom welfare is supposed to help. It has created legions of single mothers, fatherless children, and jobless boys and men. For them, the welfare state hasn’t given, it has taken. It has taken their savings, dignity, independence, initiative, pride, it has denied them full lives as productive economic agents. Walk through a council estate, as Bartholomew has many times, and witness what he calls the tragic “concentration of despair”.
And don’t mistake the leftist apologists for big-hearted fools. Behind the welfare state is the cancerous growth of a self-interested bureaucracy – the vast, tax-eating, paternalist, public sector “New Class”. These people must justify their existence, to us and to themselves. And they know that the recipients of state largesse, if they vote at all, will vote Labour. This grateful tie to Labour is like that of a nervous drug addict to the estate crack dealer.
Bartholomew describes the destructive wave of state control which, over decades, swept away classical liberal Britain. In its place we have the welfare state. And boy, what a disaster. We have learned to our cost that classical liberalism was about much more than low taxes and free trade. It was about rapid increases in the prosperity of everyone, social mobility and a determination among ordinary people to improve themselves. It was about self-reliance, parsimony, neighbourliness, decency, a love of family, a desire for culture and learning. It was human. The welfare state has proved to be the opposite.
There are many bad things about modern Britain. Until I read this book, they seemed disconnected, hard to explain, impossible to put right. That’s why it is such an exciting read. Bartholomew’s message, that the welfare state has done much to destroy liberal society in the West, is scary, but it’s also thrilling. For in articulating the problem so clearly, he shows us how to solve it.
Martin Durkin is a television director and producer. The Welfare State We’re In, by James Bartholomew, is published by Biteback.