Talking honestly and intelligently about such matters has been obstructed — in slightly different ways — on both sides of the Atlantic by a combination of prejudice and vested interest.
Most senior politicians and professionals in the areas of penology and social work rightly feel some measure of responsibility for the liberal policies pursued since the 1960s, and are understandably reluctant to confess their failure. Or if they do make such an admission it is generally qualified by the suggestion that although present approaches may not work, nothing else will work better. This is, of course, a strange justification for a hugely costly and vastly complex system operated at the taxpayer’s expense. Secondly, there is an understandable human reluctance on the part of comfortably-placed politicians to adopt a social analysis that places some of the responsibility for their condition upon the poor themselves — in the jargon, ‘blaming the victim’. This reluctance is especially marked, again understandably, when the poor in question are drawn disproportionately from racial minorities. Paradoxically, however, policies which shrink from placing the responsibility where it belongs help to create more victims.
If this is not always recognized, it is because the forces of ‘political correctness’ also muddy the waters, particularly in America, but covertly and increasingly in Europe. If, for instance, a disproportionately large number of black people are in prison, that is automatically taken as proof of racism in the criminal justice system, and policies that require more incarceration become suspect. If the traditional nuclear family is seen as an institution which enslaves women, policies discouraging single parenthood are unlikely to find favour. Only two conditions can allow such powerful obstructions to be overcome. The first, which is increasingly evident, is the refusal of the general public to tolerate the personal, social and financial cost of continuing as we are. The second is to gain wider understanding of what has been happening and why.
CRIME HAS RISEN
The starting-point for all such discussion must be the rise in crime. For many years Home Office orthodoxy was to deny or at least to minimize it. Attention was, instead, focused on the ‘fear of crime’ which, on the basis of the incidence of recorded offences, was shown to be exaggerated, particularly among such victim groups as the elderly. The unspoken implication was that if commentators talked less about crime, unnecessary fears would subside and the public would feel safer on the streets and in their homes. Within the constraints on government applied by a free society, systematic propaganda of this sort is largely impossible and so rather less is now heard of this patronizing argument. Rightly so, for the only way to diminish fear of crime is to diminish the threat of crime. Where the threat is real — and where the potential victim is frail — fear is a rational and prudent response.
A second and more substantial point which has been made is that the figures for recorded crime suggest a larger increase than has in fact occurred. At first glance, the Home Office British Crime Surveys (BCS) carried out in 1982, 1984, 1988 and most recently 1992, lend some substance to this. The BCS asks 10,000 people directly about their experience as victims of crime, whereas the official crime figures depend upon the number of crimes reported to the police. The recorded crime figures nearly doubled between 1981 and 1991; but the BCS suggests a lower rise of about 50 per cent. The inference is that the willingness to report crime to the police has increased. Particularly in the case of crimes like sexual assault, where police treatment of victims has become much more sympathetic, this is easily explainable. It also suggests a degree of confidence in the police to which the latter’s critics rarely draw attention.
What must also be borne in mind, on the other side of the argument, is that victim surveys undercount the real number of violent offences, particularly when violence occurs within the family. On violent crime, therefore, we cannot be certain which of the two sets of figures is more accurate (though both point to a large increase, differing only in the matter of degree). As for other crimes, the sharp increase in recorded burglaries since 1987 is supported by the Survey. All in all, therefore, the BCS does not cast serious doubt on the fact of a large increase in real crime in recent years. But, it is not only the level — or more precisely the rate — of crime from year to year which bothers the general public; it is the long-term trend. That has been dramatically upwards. The figures for recorded crime — which are of course subject to some changes in recording practice over such a long period but which form the only continuous series — paint a very clear picture. And the fact that such a picture conforms closely to popular received wisdom makes it all the more convincing.
During the last half of the nineteenth century there was a marked fall in the crime rate, both as regards property and violent crime. The crime rate — that is the number of criminal offences per 100,000 of the population — did not increase substantially until the late 1950s. It then rose ever faster. The crime rate is now ten times that of 1955 and sixty times that of 1900.
Although of scant comfort, the explosion of crime since the 1960s is not just a British phenomenon. In the United States between the mid-1960s and 1990 the crime rate trebled and the rate of violent crimes quadrupled. The United States — more specifically life in America’s big cities — is still more violent than in Britain and Europe. Partly this reflects the number of guns on the streets (as opposed to in American homes, where the evidence is that they probably deter burglary); partly it reflects the number of murders and attacks associated with drug dealing. With these important exceptions, however, the picture is similar on both sides of the Atlantic. Property crime rates are now at comparable levels throughout the West. And we in Britain have to rid ourselves of the complacent assumption that we are immune from the trends we deplore in the United States because of our allegedly gentler, more communitarian culture. For example, in 1981 the rate of burglary in Britain was half that of the United States; in 1987 it equalled it; it is now higher.[92]
It is possible to quibble about the legitimacy of comparing statistics, both between periods and between countries. But the fact of what has happened in Western society over the last thirty years cannot be denied. Nor should its significance.[93]
Theorists and practical men alike have generally agreed that the primary purpose of the state is to maintain order. It is highly desirable that order should be upheld under law and that law should respect rights. But unless the state has the will and capacity to ensure order, not only bad but eventually good people will flout its authority. The law-abiding are demoralized when they see criminals getting away with it. Citizens and local communities tend to turn inwards, away from national institutions, losing confidence in the law-enforcement authorities and relying on degrees of vigilantism to protect themselves, their families and their neighbourhoods. And once that process of disintegration goes beyond a certain point it is all but impossible to reverse. This is the deeper reason why governments in Western countries should be concerned about the trends of rising crime and violence.
THE GROWTH OF WELFARE DEPENDENCY
If the sharp rise in crime over the last three decades is one startingpoint for social policy, the barely less dramatic onset of welfare dependency is another. (I shall suggest some connections later.) Since 1949, when the British Welfare State was effectively established, public spending on social security has risen seven times (in real terms), up from under 5 per cent of GDP to about 12 per cent now; it constitutes almost a third of total public expenditure. This real increase continued when I was Prime Minister, and since. Of course, to lump together contributory and non-contributory, universal and means-tested benefits — retirement pensions, housing benefit and Income Support for single parents — is somewhat misleading.
But these crude figures show two important points.
First, insofar as the share of public expenditure and GDP taken by a particular programme reflects the importance collectively attributed to it, British society (or at least British government) is asserting that Social Security is not only more impo
rtant than other programmes — its relative importance is actually increasing. The Social Security budget is twice as large as the next largest, that is spending on health. More significantly, perhaps, it is six times as large as the budget for law and order.
Secondly, in spite of the large general increase in prosperity over the last forty years, there are more people making larger demands on the taxpayer to sustain their or their families’ living standards than ever before. Against this, it has been argued that in spite of the economic advance since 1979 ‘the poor have got poorer’. The latest official Households Below Average Income (HBAI) statistics suggested that after housing costs were taken into account the income of the bottom decile of the population between 1979 and 1991-92 fell by 17 per cent. But before housing costs it remained constant. And even without that gloss the figures are so misleading as to be materially false. ‘Incomes’ in this series of statistics do not reflect the real resources available to this group; in particular, they are not the same as living standards. Only about half of the group (excluding pensioners) were on income-related Social Security benefits. Many of this group who said they were earning nothing actually spent above the average for the population as a whole. And 70 per cent of those with ‘zero incomes’ before housing costs (according to the HBAI statistics) were in the top half of the nation’s spenders.
It is anyway probably wrong even to think of these people as a ‘group’. Its composition is constantly changing, as people’s circumstances change. So the figures provide no evidence that particular people’s incomes have dropped; and there is a great deal of evidence to suggest that their standard of living has risen. Most significantly, ownership of consumer durables — fridges, washing machines, central heating, telephones, videos and so on — in this group has increased dramatically. Given these facts, the crude picture painted of ‘the poor getting poorer’ is just not credible. By contrast, it is reasonable to conclude that the Social Security budget encourages anti-social behaviour, including dependency, and needs serious reform.
As in the field of crime, so in that of welfare dependency it is largely American scholars who have asked the boldest and most important questions. Charles Murray’s pioneering study, Losing Ground — American Social Policy 1950–1980, has demonstrated how benignly-intended Federal Government policies in the United States aimed at reducing poverty have actually had the perverse effect of increasing it in recent years. In making it less worthwhile to work, and less troublesome and more financially advantageous to have children outside marriage, while reducing the penalties for crime and weakening the sanctions against school misbehaviour and truanting, government has changed the rules of the game. Those with the shortest time-horizons and the least self-discipline or support from their families have responded all too readily to this new framework and have begun to form what Mr Murray and others have described as an ‘underclass’. In subsequent surveys of the British scene he has detected a similar development here, with its attendant signs of increased illegitimacy and crime rates.
In the ‘dependency’ debate most attention has focused on the impact of the tax and Social Security systems on families and the hidden encouragement to single parenthood. But ensuring that young men have the motivation, skills and opportunity for work is equally important. Here in Britain since 1979 we sought to ensure this in several ways. We felt that a period of subsidized idleness would be the worse start in life for these young people and a bad example for their fellows. So a two-year training scheme is guaranteed for every sixteen-and seventeen-year-old school-leaver who is without a job and not in full-time education; and simply going on to benefit is not generally a permitted option. The Restart programme, introduced in 1986, focuses on those who have been unemployed for more than two years and is mandatory for benefit recipients who do not take up the other employment and training options. Those undertaking the courses who do not seriously look for work, moreover, may have their benefits reduced. Incentives to work will be further strengthened by the new Jobseeker’s Allowance which further tightens the rules on the conditions for receiving benefit.
It is generally necessary to reinforce offers of assistance with the threat of sanctions in cases of non-compliance in order to prevent people opting out of work while drawing benefit. They may do this for several reasons — because of low morale, or because they consider it is not sufficiently worthwhile to work, or because casual employment in the black economy pays better. Furthermore, if we want to make real jobs available to people starting out, we must forswear minimum wage laws or any other regulations which destroy low-paid and less skilled employment.
We shall, however, never devise or implement the right policy programmes to keep people out of welfare dependency if we entertain wrong assumptions about ‘the poor’. It is again an American scholar, Gertrude Himmelfarb, who has done most to investigate the historical background to our current ideas about poverty.[94] From at least Elizabethan times, a distinction had been drawn, both in popular understanding and in administrative action to relieve poverty, between the ‘deserving’ and the ‘undeserving’ poor. And although softened and attenuated, not least because people understood the disruptive stresses of urbanization, such a distinction continued to be made, even though the safety net of benefits widened and deepened. Indeed, for anyone who remembers the pre-war period in Britain the notion that ‘the poor’ constituted one identifiable, homogeneous group would have seemed quite unrealistic.
In Grantham and in similar towns up and down the country, we understood that there were some families where the breadwinner had fallen on hard times and who were going through great difficulties but who would never accept charity — even what they saw as charity from the state — being determined at all costs to keep up their respectability. ‘I keep myself to myself and I’ve never taken a penny piece from anyone’ would be the way many a dignified pensioner would express it. Taken to the extreme, this sense of independence could certainly lead to suffering. Neighbours would tactfully do what they could. Unfortunately, however, some individual cases of proud hardship are the counterpart of avoiding welfare dependency.
By contrast, there were others — and I came across this far more once I moved to London — for whom independence and respectability were of little consequence, who willingly accepted dependence on the state and who were unwilling to make the extra effort to improve their own lot or give their children a better start.
The fact that status in society accrued to the first of these groups and stigma to the second meant that social pressures were generally benign in the sense that people who fell, as most of us do, somewhere between the two were more likely to find a job and provide for themselves and their families. Set down like this, such an approach may seem harsh. But a society that encourages such virtues as effort, thrift, independence and family obligation will tend to produce people who have greater self-esteem, and are thus happier (as well as not being a burden to others), than the people living in a society which has encouraged them to feel useless, demoralized and frustrated. Even if that were not the case, the state and society must be just as well as compassionate. To treat those who make an effort in the same way as those who do not is unjust; and not only does such injustice demoralize those who are benefiting from it, it also foments resentment among those who are not.
At some point in this century, which it is difficult now to distinguish precisely, too many Western policy-makers began to talk and act as if it were ‘the system’ rather than individuals — or even luck — which was the cause of poverty. We fell into the trap of considering poverty — and there is no need here to enter onto the minefield of distinctions between relative and absolute poverty — as a ‘problem’ created by economic policy which the redistribution of wealth and income could ‘solve’ by various ingenious methods. We kept on returning to the idea that poverty was a cause rather than a result of various kinds of irresponsible or deviant behaviour.
Most of those who spoke in these terms did so for the
highest of motives. No one’s motives were higher than Keith Joseph’s, whose speech of june 1972 to the Pre-school Playgroups Association when he was Social Services Secretary constituted the most sophisticated version of this approach. Drawing on recent research, Keith suggested that a ‘cycle of deprivation’ was at work in which ‘the problems of one generation appear to reproduce themselves in the next’. In this Keith was breaking important new ground in drawing attention to the way in which ‘bad parenting’ has an impact not just on the children of those parents, but on their children. But Keith did not question whether the state by its welfare policies was acting as a third bad parent by sapping personal responsibility and self-help. Indeed, he advocated, alongside initiatives to promote better parenting and more family planning, that the government should intervene by way of different benefits and a possible tax credit scheme. When a clear analytical thinker like Keith gets the analysis right and the prescription wrong (as he later accepted), it is indeed a good illustration of the way in which on both sides of the Atlantic both right- and left-wing governments created the conditions for our present problems. Right wingers concentrated on ‘targeted’ benefits, which went to those whose behaviour was most likely to be adversely affected by them; left wingers increased the global burden of Social Security benefits, which hard-pressed and even ‘poor’ taxpayers then had to meet.
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