A couple of thoughts on entitlement
The British sociologist TH Marshall famously argued that the three centuries since the enlightenment had seen the respective advance of three levels of rights: civil, political and social. These levels roughly equate to the spread of the rule of law, the widening of suffrage and the creation of the welfare state. Until very recently it was the general assumption that growing entitlements were a good thing and that national progress is measured by a combination of rising disposable incomes, growing social entitlements and enhanced public goods (infrastructure, public spaces, environment).
From the beginning, and particularly since the 1970s, the free market right has opposed this view on grounds of affordability, economic efficiency and moral hazard. The cost of growing state entitlements is seen to be a drag on enterprise, to penalise wealth creation and to foster dependency among welfare recipients. The current crisis gives this critique an extra twist. As the cuts get deeper, the economy languishes and we look with envy at the growth rates and apparent entrepreneurial drive of many developing countries (with much more limited social entitlements), the sense grows that the problem is not that there are too few entitlements but that there are too many.
One difficulty here is distinguishing arguments of expediency and principle. For example, is the reduction in public sector pension entitlements simply an unfortunate necessity to balance the books, or is it also objectionable that workers funded by tax payers should enjoy retirement benefits not available to most of those tax payers? Are cuts in benefits justified merely by austerity or also by the need to tackle dependency? Does pulling the state out of the provision of services like libraries represent a sad loss or a great opportunity for community self–help? The lazy answer in each case is ‘both’, but as I have argued before, different arguments for the same course of action must be independently valid or else the whole case gets damaged.
It is easy to avoid all hard questions if one simply reverts to attacking the privileges of the rich and implying that if only we taxed them more we could pay for everything. But even as someone who personally supports the fifty pence tax rate and abhors the way some bankers and business leaders have exploited their position to create obscene wealth, I don’t think it is realistic or honest to argue that squeezing the rich will, any time soon, enable us to return to a path of rising entitlements.
I have no easy answers or startling new perspectives (which is a bit of a problem given that I am discussing these issues on Moral Maze in a couple of hours), but two half formed lines of thought have occurred to me.
The first might be called ‘the entitlement paradox’. Rising entitlements are a sign of social progress but their maintenance and growth depends on us not treating them merely as entitlements. In other words the sustainability and social value of welfare benefits depends on the existence of a strong work ethic and the sustainability and social value of public services depends on them being seen as collaborations which involve responsibilities for citizens and communities as well as the state.
The second is the need for public debate to acknowledge the contested framing of notions of fairness. Take today’s strike: many critics on the right argue that it is both unfair and corrosive to national solidarity that many public sector workers get a better deal than most private sector workers. Fine; but once the issue of fairness is opened such critics have to answer the question: isn’t it equally unfair and socially corrosive for useless bankers to get paid a hundred times more than hard working care assistants? To which an economic liberal may reply that we should distinguish between things that happen because the state interferes (public sector pensions) and things which are the result of free choices in a free market (income differentials).
However, at the same time as the case for state entitlement has been eroded by changes in the world around us, so has the credibility of this kind of free market fundamentalism. To take one line of criticism: it might very reasonably be argued that every child – born free of sin and error – should have broadly the same life chances (indeed some measures of public opinion suggest this view is widely endorsed), yet the state uses the power of law to defend the right of the privileged to pass on their advantages to their offspring and thereby – in the context of limited absolute social mobility – generate a reduction in the comparative life chances of the offspring of the less privileged. Those who talk about fairness to try to win a specific argument are likely to find themselves embroiled in a much bigger debate.
Crises can easily become times of fear, anger and resentment but they can also act as an imperative for reflection and new ways of thinking. Yesterday’s Autumn Statement did point to a few rather random principles behind the Government’s management of these difficult times, but missing from the Coalition narrative (not to mention that of the Opposition) are deeper reflections on what austerity means for our idea of ourselves of a nation and our collective norms and aspirations. However hard, it is a debate we should choose to enter rather than avoid.
The longest journey starts with a single step
Regular listeners to the Moral Maze(hi Mum) will spot the connection between Michael Buerk and David Aaronovitch. The former has been the long-time presenter and chair of the programme, the latter was a very accomplished stand-in earlier this year. But this week there is another connection – immigration and jobs.
Today in The Times, Aaronovitch is fighting a brave rear guard action against the widespread but erroneous view that immigration creates unemployment and drives down wages. Given how many people – the latest being Ed Miliband – seem to have bought the ‘immigration is bad for the poor’ line, David’s determination to base his opinions on the actual statistics is an example – to misquote TH Huxley – of slaying a seductive hypothesis with an ugly fact.
Last night after our Moral Maze conversation about the morality of bailing out the Greeks (or should that be bailing out the banks), Michael Buerk was telling me about a recent visit to Herefordshire. Knowing me to be a bleeding heart liberal, the great man was as circumspect as possible in asking why it is still the case that Eastern Europeans migrants are willing to take jobs which indigenous youth refuse (I imagine he might have posed the question in somewhat more forthright terms if his interlocutor had been my fellow Maze panellist, Michael Portillo).
From their different perspectives both David A and Michael B agree that the problem about unemployment in areas where there are jobs is more to do with the readiness and willingness of local people to work than the impact of migration.
Why is this? The political right’s argument will tend to focus on the failings of the unemployed and will prescribe a more authoritarian regime in terms of benefit conditionality. The left may point to low wages and the poverty traps created by reductions in the value of in-work benefits. There may be validity in both arguments.
But I think other things are at play too. One might be what could be called the narrative of work. My suggestion to Michael Buerk was that Eastern Europeans may be willing to do tough work for low wages because they see this as part of a bigger life story. Perhaps their ambition is to settle in the UK or maybe to return to their mother country with enough money to set up their own business. In contrast, young people with limited skills and expectations of career progression may see the choice as simply between being free to hang around on limited benefits (perhaps occasionally topped up occasionally by cash in hand odd jobs) versus the constraints and indignities of a menial job which only gives them a few pounds a week more spending money, by the time things like transport, uniform etc have been paid for. This is not to condone those who choose not to take opportunities but to suggest that motivation is not just a matter of proximate choice but also wider life narrative.
I don’t know if there is any authoritative research on this but anecdotally it seems that employers who have a good reputation for looking after and progressing staff (M&S, McDonalds) will attract plenty of applicants for jobs even though starting wages are modest. Also relevant is research undertaken a few years ago which showed that many working class young people had a pretty sketchy understanding of the labour market and the range of careers that existed in any sector, such as health care.
I guess all I am saying is that part of encouraging young people to take on opportunities which offer limited short term benefits is to provide information and encouragement so that they see this as being the first step on a bigger project of personal growth, financial independence and career development. Ministers are currently mulling over whether to abandon independent face to face careers advice so perhaps this is another reason to suggest they shouldn’t. It’s also why I hope we at the RSA can take forward the promising work we have been doing around providing mentoring for students in FE.
Getting young people to take up modest opportunities (and we shouldn’t forget that in some areas there are no opportunities at all) is about sticks and carrots but also about advice, encouragement and support, and in that we can all play a role.
Losing it on the Maze
In a rather self-satisfied way, from time to time I ask the readers of this blog to listen to me on the radio.So it is only fair that I now alert you to the chance to hear me getting things badly wrong. You can do this by tuning into the repeat of yesterday’s Moral Maze (you can also use BBC ‘listen again’).
Taking its cue from Kenneth Clarke’s article about the feral underclass and the failings of criminal justice, the subject was supposed to be prisons but soon drifted into the general question of whether to understand, or simply to punish, criminality. I suspect I wasn’t in the best frame of mind from the outset but then I found myself up against three other panellists who were totally disinclined to blame criminality on anything other than simple badness, exacerbated only by a welfare dependency. When Michael Portillo suggested that people steal things primarily because – through the malign beneficence of the welfare state – they have been inculcated into an assumption that they get everything for free, he spoke also for fellow panellists Melanie Phillips and Claire Fox
In the law and order debate the ‘condemn and punish’ position is always easier and quicker to articulate than ‘understand and rehabilitate’. So it was that in the very constrained time allowed to make a case on ‘Maze’ I found it impossible to get beyond sounding like a soft headed bleeding heart liberal. The particular low point involved me cross examining David Green from Civitas.
My plan was to start by asking him whether he would make a moral distinction between someone who stole soup to feed their starving family and a millionaire who did so because he liked the smell. The plan was to move from this to make the case – given the much greater likelihood that certain acts of criminality are performed by people from disadvantaged backgrounds – that we should, at the level of the individual, qualify our instinct to condemn with a responsibility to understand and help, and, at the social level, (as the political cliche has it) commit to tackle the causes of crime as well as crime itself.
But when David seemed unwilling even to accept the implications of my thought experiment and then went on to use the example of a heroic victim of the Holocaust to argue that whatever deprivation an individual has suffered they should be condemned if they err, I lost it. As Barbara said to me this morning, ‘you are usually so reasonable on the Maze. What happened to you?’
I am sure some of it was down to my mood and knowing I was losing the argument, but it was also disorientation at where the centre of gravity of this debate seems now to have moved. Maybe it was just the circles I moved in but, say, twenty years ago it seem to be taken for granted that poverty and unemployment created the circumstances which fostered criminality, drug abuse and other forms of anti-social and self-harming behaviour. There were starting to be concerns about the role that welfare dependency played in undermining responsibility – and in time these led to a growing consensus about the need for conditionality (something for something) in benefits – but the social explanation was still widely accepted.
But now it seems any suggestion that we might look beyond individual culpability to social circumstances is – and this was another reason I lost it with David – immediately described as social determinism. Any attempt to bring in social context is disingenuously caricatured as excusing badness on the grounds that the only reason people do bad things is that they are poor or, worse, that all poor people are incapable of moral judgment. But this is like saying that because someone thinks smoking cigarettes increases the likelihood of lung cancer they think everyone who smokes will die this way. One of the characteristics of those who reject social explanations is to treat any attempt to use statistics as mere sophistry.
The final straw in my abject performance was when the general issue of crime and society segued into discussion of the recent riots. In fact, I think much of the explanation for the riots is sui generis, not just individual weakness nor economic circumstance but also the specific social epidemic nature of mass acts of disobedience.
The balance between condemning and understanding is difficult to get right and so is that between punishment and rehabilitation. I certainly failed to find that balance last night but as I read today of yet more ways of punishing poor offenders and, in the same news cycle more evidence that many parts of the UK are close to being economically dead, I can’t help wondering how we can try to develop an account of wrongdoing which integrates both the need for individual responsibility and for tackling social deprivation.
Do clever people care about the X Factor?
I hope I may have persuaded Radio 4′s Moral Maze to make X Factor, and celebrity culture more generally, its focus this week. I have told the producer that I am happy to open by declaring: ‘I am an X Factor addict but I am ashamed of myself’ and then go on to attack the pernicious impact of the programme and its ilk on our moral fibre.
I want to argue that the series is only a little bit to do with music and much, much more a form of voyeuristic exploitation. Every single contestant, from the opening public auditions to the grand final, is required to say that winning and becoming famous is the most important thing in their life. The thrill we get is not from great performances but from seeing people’s hopes get shattered.
I intend to connect this to the wider celebrity culture, one which, for example, sees the best seller lists dominated by terrible autobiographies (John Harris is very good on this today in the Guardian). And because so many celebrities are famous for being famous, the worshipping of celebrity comes at the cost of valuing other attributes like effort, skill and virtue.
Finally, I hope to argue, celebrity culture is also responsible for the way the media (and the public) reduces everything - from sport to politics – to soap opera.
The problem is that, in order to try to convince the programme, I tried developing arguments against my attack and quickly came up with three:
It is elitist - middle class people have their own celebrities – e.g. Melvyn Bragg, Damien Hirst, Simon Schama - it’s just we call them public intellectuals
It is patronising – assuming less educated people don’t know this is all just a bit of frothy escapism
It fails to see the value - in our diverse, atomised society – of a programme like X factor which gives tens of millions of people something about which they can talk to workmates and strangers
I would love to know what my readers think. Having said which, I won’t be holding my breath.
Today, I have asked two audiences – one at a Parenting Institute conference and the other the Great Room audience for an event awarding the RSA Albert Medal to Jeremy Deller - to tell me whether they were ‘Rebecca’, ‘Matt’, or – option three – they didn’t care about X Factor. In both cases option three won hands down.
So, knowing the intellectual calibre of my readers I fear this topic may leave you cold.
Social care innovation points the way
Usually when I get asked to speak, it is on a specialist subject. Yesterday, for example I had a great time delivering the Edward Boyle Memorial Lecture, on twenty first century enlightenment, to Fellows and some non Fellows in Leeds. It is still more challenging when I am asked to speak on a topic which goes beyond my current (limited) expertise. As the date of the event approaches I get into a spin and rely heavily on the ‘idiot’s guides’ churned out by Ben Dellot from our Projects team, who doubles up as my occasional research assistant. But it also means I have to become reasonably informed about a new topic and, sometimes, it spurs me into thinking about whether there is any scope for a wider RSA intervention.
Tonight I am speaking at the National Care Forum annual review and this has got me doing some thinking about the future of care. I won’t bore readers with my whole argument but I thought there might be some interest in one key point.
I am going to argue that we need many kinds of innovation if we are to close the care gap (between what individuals and the state can afford and what is needed). The gap is already widening as local authorities withdraw all but essential care and the Centre for Social Justice said this week it will grow by an additional £6 billion over the next two decades.
The areas of invention which most interests me tend to be at the intersection of three trends. First, the growth in personal and community based commissioning (Turning Point are doing some great work on the latter). Second, the search for ways of bridging and smoothing the divide between paid and unpaid care. Third, new ways of thinking about the economics of care, utilising not just money but other commodities such as time and housing.
There is a danger the audience will have heard of all of these but I am going to describe three ideas which I think are particularly powerful pointers to the direction we need to take if we are better to tap into the ‘hidden wealth’ of people’s willingness to share, care and connect.
Caring Relationship Tickets is a Japanese community currency created in 1995 by the Sawayaka Welfare Foundation so that people could earn credits helping seniors in their community.
The basic unit of account is an hour of service to an elderly person. Sometimes seniors help each other and earn the credits, other times family members in other communities earn credits and transfer them to their parents who live elsewhere. For example, an elderly woman who no longer has a driver’s license; if you shop for her, you get credit for that, based on the kind of service and the number of hours. These credits accumulate- users may keep them for when they become sick or elderly themselves, then use the credits in exchange for services. Alternatively, the users may transfer credits to someone else.
An interesting lesson from the project has been that the elderly tend to prefer the services provided by people paid in the tickets over those paid in yen.To convert this community service to yen would seem to dilute the community ethic.
Closer to home there is Southwark Circles of Care, the flagship in a network of ‘Circles’ that extends to Hammersmith & Fulham in West London and just last month to Suffolk County Council. The concept and business model has been co-designed and developed over three years with over 1,000 older people and their families, in conjunction with the cutting edge service design consultancy, Participle.
The service is delivered by a distributed network of people called Neighbourhood Helpers. These are people of all ages who share their talents and skills; many are also members and some are paid the London Living wage for their time. Each Circle is designed to be self-sustaining within a three-year launch period, and is supported by the Local Authority as it grows towards this milestone.
Third, Shared Lives and Homeshare which are both initiatives developed and supported by NAAPS. Shared Lives is where an individual or a family chooses to include an isolated or under-supported older or disabled person in their family and community life. In many cases that person becomes a permanent part of a supportive family.
There are around 10,000 SL carers in the UK, of which 3,800 are NAAPS members. Shared Lives is unique in adult support, in that Shared Lives carers are paid a flat rate (like a foster carer) rather than by the hour, are expected to form two-way relationships including mutual links to family and social networks (as opposed to the highly boundaried, one-way “professional” support relationship), and because Shared Lives is based on matching individuals who need support with compatible Shared Lives carers and families.
Homeshare involves someone who needs some help to live independently in their own home being matched with someone who has a housing need and can provide a little support. “Householders” are often older people who own or are tenants in their own home but have developed some support needs or have become isolated or anxious about living alone. “Homesharers” are often younger people, students, or key public service workers who cannot afford housing where they work.
Sometimes ideas like the Big Society, hidden wealth and socially productive public services seem abstract but in these examples we can see a clear outline of the services of the future.
PS Because the splendid Clifford Longley is trapped in the snow I have just had an emergency call to join the panel for Moral Maze. The topic – should we be trying to live forever? Having prepared for my speech tonight the prospect of a long old age seems just a bit less daunting.
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