Polishing a turd

Bob E brings us an update on how the Blue & Red Wings of The Daily Mail party are competing to see who can be 'tougher on welfare scroungers'. From The Guardian:

The government's welfare reform minister has suggested lone parents, sickness claimants and other people on benefits are too comfortable not having to work for their income, saying they are able to "have a lifestyle" on the state...

"The incapacity benefits[sic], the lone parents, the people who are self-employed for year after year and only earn hundreds of pounds or a few thousand pounds, the people waiting for their work ability assessment then not going to it – all kinds of areas where people are able to have a lifestyle off benefits and actually off conditionality," the Conservative peer said...

But what is this - could it be a turd attacking a turd? It is!

Liam Byrne, the shadow work and pensions secretary, said: "The nasty party is well and truly back. This government has comprehensively failed to get Britain back to work and frankly it's a disgrace that ministers now choose to kick people when they are down rather than even pretend to offer a helping hand."

Suffering from Short Memory Syndrome again, is our Liam, it seems ... someone ask him who first gave this person, sorry nasty person, a platform to have his nasty views translated into government policy? I wonder if that Beeb hagiography from 2009 gives us any clues..?

Sir David was hired by ex-Prime Minister Tony Blair to draw up a review of the welfare system, and in 2007 proposed opening up the system to the private sector as well as requiring lone parents to seek work earlier.

His suggestions were initially shelved amid reports of opposition from Gordon Brown, but he was hired again by Work and Pensions Secretary James Purnell in 2008 to work on a welfare green paper. That paper called for measures to get more disabled people and lone parents into work, and was backed by the Conservatives while outraging many on the Labour left.

In response, the Tories promised a "full-blooded version" of Sir David's proposals, and criticised the government's implementation of them as "half-hearted". Should the party form the next government, Sir David will now be in an even stronger position to make sure they are true to their word.
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It's also worth noting at this stage how these myths create themselves. The Tories originally proposed - quite sensibly to my mind - to cap Housing Benefit at a very generous £400 per household per week, this then turned into a general cap of £500 on all benefits.

Clearly, short of outright fraud, no workless household receives anywhere near £500 a week in cash benefits*, so they then declared that Housing Benefit would be capped at £500 minus cash benefits received, which also seems more than fair. The landowners squealed at this loss of lovely subsidies. The Guardianistas were waving shrouds at the tops of their voices. My view was if a simple policy proposal like that can simultaneously piss off two groups of rent seekers, it's got to be a good thing.

So far so good, but there now appears to be a general assumption that all welfare claimants receive more than £500 a week in benefits, see e.g. Metro Reader's letters (21 November 2012, pages 14-15), which is quite simply not true. I quote:

I find it immoral that someone who chooses to drop out of school at the age of 16 and spend the rest of their days being looked after by the state can have £500 a week handed to them, while another young person who decides to stay on in education and go to college or university while holding down a part-time job, is lucky if they can make more than £400 a week.

While I have every sympathy with people who do the right thing (scrapping taxes on income and having universal benefits would help them enormously), the proverbial 16-year old school leaver is "entitled to" Employment and Support Allowance of £56.25 a week, a nice cosy place on a housing waiting list and all manner of grief and hassle.

* Entitledto tells us that e.g. an unemployed couple with three kids gets £111 Income Support, £165 Child Tax Credits and £47 Child Benefit per week = £323 per week. That leaves £177 a week for rent, £770 a month, which happens to be slightly more than the overall average rent paid for private housing in the UK.