Day 3564: Is this the End for Baby Elephant Benefit?

Monday:


I'm afraid that my CYNICAL response to the news that Master Gideon is cutting Universal Child Benefit from Higher Rate taxpayers was to anticipate that Hard Labour would issue a press release about half an hour later decrying it as "an attack on the very poorest in society".

I was WRONG.

It took them a bit more than half an hour.

Yes, apparently it's "an attack on already hard pressed families" and yes apparently it's "an attack on women".

Sigh.

What happened to the OPTIMISM, Mr Potato Ed?

Is there ANY measure that you wouldn't attack as "an attack"?

How can we HOPE to balance the Budget without cutting anything for anyone ever?





Look, this is BAD. Really it is. I can think of HALF-A-DOZEN good reasons off the top of my fluffy head for having Universal Benefits.

1. Incentive. If people think that the reward for working hard and being thrifty is to LOSE out, then you don't give 'em any reason to work hard. It's the problem Mr Iain Drunken Swerve is wrestling with in the Benefit Reforms.

2. Involvement. The FLIP-SIDE of that is that the people who DO work hard are the ones you are asking to pay out for other people. We're a RICH country, and we all like to feel we do our bit to help each other. But the less that the people doing the paying feel that there is anything that they get back, the more they're going to think "what's in it for me?" You need an incentive for people to pay in too, or you get resentment, and eventually they won't pay, and then you have a problem.

3. Reach. We all know that means tested benefits do not reach all the people who need them, whether it's because people are too proud to ask, or intimidated by a system that they are not equipped (or educated) to cope with, or through simple ignorance or through error by the state. Universal benefits are easy to operate and much more likely to bypass all these hurdles and actually HELP the people who need help.

4. Protection. Lastly there is the TERRIBLE TRUTH that even in the better off families (oooh, paging Downton Abbey!) sometimes mummies can find themselves in POVERTY because their partner keeps tight control of the purse strings. Child Benefit bypasses THAT too by going straight to mummies, and can often be a LIFELINE. The way this works (the benefit is ONLY withdrawn from mummies who THEMSELVES earn more than forty-four "k") ought to mitigate against that being affected here.

5. Simplicity. Anything other than giving a simple payment to everyone is COMPLICATED and needs a BUREAUCRACY to operate it. THAT is clearly why Master Gideon has opted for this cack-handed method of picking only Higher Rate earners to lose the benefit which results in the seemingly PERVERSE outcome that better off HOUSEHOLDS might keep the benefit if two earners separately earn less than the Higher Rate threshold but together earn more.

6. Divisiveness. Treating RICH and POOR differently is only going to EXACERBATE the friction in our society. It helps LABOUR of course, in their DEEP DENIAL that THEY did anything wrong, to keep adding fuel to the fires of mutual resentment, pouring more blame on "the bankers" or "the top 10%".

(I am, incidentally, getting really BORED by the mendacious argument increasingly coming from left-of-centre commentators: "such-and-such an article/minister/newspaper spoke of something affecting the middle class; well, median income is actually twenty thousand pounds and they're talking about people earning forty or fifty grand – that's the top ten percentile". The MIDDLE CLASS is NOT measured by MEDIAN INCOME. These are two COMPLETELY DIFFERENT things. Traditionally, there have been VASTLY more working class people than either middle OR upper class. So OBVIOUSLY the median income would be bound to lie somewhere in the middle of the WORKING CLASS. Even today, with a LOT more people doing "white collar" work it would be REALLY SURPRISING it the ENTIRE upper half of the income distribution were "middle class", don't you think? "Class" is not a simple measure of how much you earn; it is INCREDIBLY complicated to define, depending on heritage, family, ownership and the relationship to land and income generating activates. You are NOT "upper class" if you earn in the top ten percent. You're not EVEN upper class if you earn in the top ONE percent. It just doesn't work that way, and it's simply WRONG to have a go at people for addressing "middle-class concerns" by saying they are focusing on "the rich".

And while I'm ON the subject of idiotic comparisons… saying the Mr Potato Ed won "more votes than either Captain Clegg or Mr Balloon" is as STUPID as saying "well Mr Jensen Button won his World Championship race by travelling a LOT further than Mr Sir Chris Hoy did in the Olympics."

Sorry, where was I. Oh yes…)


The ADMITTED PROBLEM with all Universal Benefits is that they are, by any measure, a bit WASTEFUL. If you hose money over the country to make sure that you cover all eventualities, you're bound to wash quite a lot of it over people who don't technically NEED it.

Not EVERY pensioner needs a winter fuel allowance to avoid fuel poverty, nor a bus pass to get out and about.

Targeted benefits are technically better because they can FOCUS the money onto the people who need it more. If the system works. If they apply for it.

So you have to work it out: does the COST of the bit that you are wasting by making a benefit Universal OUTWEIGH the BENEFIT of reaching people who really need it?

This is where I come down on the side of KEEPING the Universal Child Care. I think it's worth the money.

But then, I'D restore the personal tax allowance to people earning over a hundred thousand pounds too because taking that away is saying that rich people should be treated as different.

Well, actually, I'd go further than that and have a Citizen's Income and do away with benefits altogether, if only the numbers could be made to add up, because that way EVERYONE would get something and I can trust them to get on with their lives their own way without having to make them jump through hoops to satisfy ME that they are DESERVING.

You see, that's because LIBERALS are the REAL OPTIMISTS; not Hard Labour or Mr Potato Ed. Hard Labour are PESSIMISTIC about PEOPLE – they believe that people are BAD at making decisions, that people will get things WRONG if they are not TOLD what to do. I am an OPTIMIST. I trust people to get it RIGHT.


But here's the KICKER.

The numbers DON'T add up. Hard Labour – yes we have to keep saying it – spent all the money. In fact, they spent all THEIR money and rather a lot of OURS too, what with the hundred and twenty MILLION pounds a day we're spending on THEIR interest payments.

So it would cost a BILLION pounds (each year) to keep the Universal Child Benefit UNIVERSAL. And that would mean cutting a BILLION pounds from somewhere else. Housing benefit? Unemployment benefit? Invalidity benefit? The pension? Do YOU want to choose?

This is the real WICKEDNESS of Hard Labour's "attack" attacks.

Every cut that they say we mustn't do, they're ACTUALLY saying: "do it to someone else".


So it's not right. But everything else is worse. And if when we put this right we CAN do better.

PS:

My Daddies do not get Child Benefit because for some reason the Government does not pay out for boys with soft toys. I'm sure Hard Labour could spin this as an attack on something too.
.

Day 2874: Throwing the Baby Out With the Bathwater

Thursday:


I think I have to say I'm appalled about Baby P; apparently it's now COMPULSORY.

So yes, I'm appalled. And, obviously, I'm appalled by the people who did it.

But I'm ALSO appalled by the people who are BAYING for BLOOD. "Put them to the torture!" seems to be the common consensus.

No, no, a thousand times no.

COMPASSION is what is supposed to separate human beans from animals. And on that ground, Baby P's mother and her partner and their lodger have FAILED. But that is NO REASON for US to fail the same test.

Torturing people is WRONG even when they themselves are torturers.

Killing people is WRONG even when they themselves are killers.


So why do people say otherwise? Sometimes I have to think that you people are not MONKEYS at all, but some kind of no-horned species of BERSERK RHINOCEROS: angrily charging in with no second thoughts, or even first thoughts.

I have asked Daddy to try to EXPLAIN, and he calls it a very HUMAN reaction:

Nobody demands horrible nasty punishments from a position of TOWERING MORAL RECTITUDE; we call for horrible nasty punishments because of our SHAME, because these people remind us of all of our own little failings, all the little times we look away or fail to help, they remind us how LITTLE a gap compassion makes betweens human beans and animals and then we try to say "Noooooooooooo, we're not like that! These cannot be people like US; they must be MONSTERS! And there's only ONE way to deal with MONSTERS!"

(You'll be UNSURPRISED to learn that this means FRANKENSTEIN and not BEAUTY AND THE BEAST.)

People may talk about "letting the punishment fit the crime" or "an eye for an eye", but what they mean is that they feel that EVIL deserves EVIL.

But how can it EVER be FAIR to do EVIL?

Perhaps I am being a SIMPLE elephant, but it seems that nothing can undo the harm that has been done; all we can do is try to do NO MORE harm.

People who do horrid things should go to prison (which I have heard is a very horrid place) and we should try to help them to become better. And maybe, to make sure THEY do no more harm, we can never, ever let them out again, but that does not mean that we should not try to help them.



There is also the UNDIGNIFIED spectacle of a search for a SCAPEGOAT. Great are the cries of: "who is to blame for this tragedy?!"

Well, we KNOW who is to blame; they are the people going to PRISON.

Has anyone asked: "How many children have the Social Services SAVED? "


But could THIS poor toddler have been saved, if someone in "authority" had acted? Possibly, yes. The signs were there (but missed); the warnings were given (but unheard); action was called for (but no one took it).

That is a terrible, horrible failing. But it is fair to pick SOMEONE to blame for all this?

The world is TOO BIG and TOO COMPLICATED for each of us, individually, to look after everyone else individually. So we dump the responsibility on someone else. We give people an IMPOSSIBLE job to do, UNDERFUND them, and THEN blame them when – surprise, surprise – something horrible happens.

Doesn't that make it ALL of our faults?


I have listened to a LOT of points of view on this, but the one that to ME seemed to be KEY was, believe it or not, on Mr Jonathan Dimbledonkey's radio show, "Nanny Answers", from a person who TRAINS social workers. This person said that in the last ten years the guidance has changed from "Paramount Importance of Protection of the Child" to "Best to Keep the Family Together".

The additional assertion was that this was CHEAPER for the Government, but that might just have been the contributor's allegation and may NOT have been their motivation.

Think of the calculation: the harm that is done to the (many more) children just by being taken into care, sometimes (maybe rarely) needlessly versus the harm that is done to the (very, very tiny number of) children not taken into care who end up DEAD. Who can POSSIBLY do the maths to work it out?

What sort of a SYSTEM would it take to make sure that no child was ever, ever killed by an abusive parent or guardian? Accepting that you can never account for accident or madness, surely deliberate ongoing malice like this could be spotted and stopped? But how far would the system have to lean towards ALWAYS taking children into care? How INTRUSIVE would we need to make the powers of the social services? Should there be TESTING of parents, or indeed testing before people are ALLOWED to be parents?

We want – and quite rightly too – freedom to have our children and to raise our children; we don't want the Big Nanny State intervening in our lives to tell us how they should be run. But how can Big Nanny State tell the difference between US (nice people) and THEM (monsters)?

It can't. So we compromise. Sometimes the State CAN intervene, sometimes it CAN'T. And we'll have a COMMITTEE to decide which is which. And sometimes committees cannot bring themselves to take action, which usually means that we err on the side of benevolent non-intervention and everyone is generally happy,

And occasionally it means we fail to act when desperately needed.

Doesn't THAT make it ALL of our faults?


And yet, the Government DOES treat the social provision (social workers, unemployment benefits, preventative health care, basic relationship education and so on and so on) in this country VERY BADLY. They try to get it all on the cheap, all the while happy to splash out on "big ticket" items like Olympic Games, or I.D.iot cards or Middle Eastern Wars… For that, we get dedicated people who try their hardest, (as well as some mediocre people who muddle on through). And once in a while, we get a massive cock-up.

But we get the sort of Government that we vote for (and to be fair it wouldn't make much difference whether it was Conservatory or the Labour).

So doesn't THAT make it ALL our fault too?


For more on this, read:

Auntie Alix

Darrell G

Or Mr Costigan