Frank Field is a good man. He also knows more about welfare benefits than anyone else in Westminster. Nevertheless, for the 13 million men, women and children who live in poverty in Britain, his forced departure from the cabinet last week was good news.
Field has been claiming with increasing bitterness that he failed to reform the welfare system because Gordon Brown at the Treasury and Harriet Harman, his boss at the DSS, obstructed him. The truth, however, is that if, in some imagined world, Field had been given supreme power over both the Treasury and the DSS, if he had realised every one of his reforming dreams, he would not have altered the course of poverty in this country. Simply, Frank Field got it wrong.
He was certainly right, in a narrow sense, to complain about the Treasury. There is probably no more absurd sight in contemporary British politics than a Labour government attempting to attack poverty without redistributing wealth. As long as the Cabinet continues to confuse a war against poverty, which is an extremely expensive project, with their ambition to cut the welfare budget, they will fail – and the DSS will swallow Alastair Darling and anyone else who dares to tread there.
But Field was fundamentally wrong in two ways. He was wrong in principle. The philosophical engine that drove his thinking was his belief that he had to destroy the culture of welfare dependency. This pushed him a very long way off course, because there is no such culture. It is a fiction, created by the same muddle of American conservatives and middle-market Fleet Street pundits who brought us most of the discredited right-wing ideas of the 1980s, monetarism, trickle-down, poll tax et al.
Out in the bleak estates of our inner cities, in the damp and delapidated housing, in the shelled-out schools and battered community halls, in the hidden landscape of crack houses and shebeens and illegal gambling dens, in the red-light areas and on the pavements where the children play, there is no such culture. Instead, there are roughly ten million people who rely on benefit which is just about the lowest in Europe and which consistently fails to provide the reasonable necessities of life (as the University of York, for example, has explained several times in unerring detail) and which has been cut and cut again with ruthless indifference to the welfare of those who rely on it. There are also roughly three million others who rely on earned incomes which are equally inadequate and which would have been illegal if the Tories had not scrapped the wages councils. Why would anyone – how could anyone – possibly cling to a life like that? They live this way because they have no option.
This is not some theoretical point. We have clear and immediate evidence to judge Field’s theory. In April 1986, Mrs Thatcher removed the general right to welfare benefit from all 16 to 18-year-olds. If the theory of welfare dependency were correct, those young people – finally freed from the chains of state handouts – would have found themselves work or set up small businesses or enrolled in colleges and taken out mortgages and generally signed up as stake-holders. Of course, it didn’t happen. Notoriously, those young people were shovelled out into the streets, into crime and prostitution and drugs and the most bitter alienation.
When Frank Field cantered over the horizon last summer, boldly announcing that benefits would now be paid for those who worked and not for those who stayed at home, that the poor would be roped into compulsory saving schemes and pensions, that they would pay a new health insurance tax to fund the NHS, he was launching a possibly lethal attack on this culture of dependency. To put it another way, he was charging at windmills, challenging an enemy that did not exist with a set of weapons that were utterly irrelevant and even dangerous to the lives of the people he wanted to help.
This philosophical failure in turn reflected a failure of information. Field knows a lot about benefit regulations but he is terribly out of touch with the facts of life of the poor. The poverty which he wants to tackle cannot be cured simply by the creation of jobs. Poverty in the 1990s is entirely different in character from poverty in, say, the 1930s. Material hardship now is combined with a lethal cocktail of other social problems: the huge black market in drugs which provides high-paid employment, status and excitement far beyond anything that is offered by welfare-to-work; the collapse of the old working class communities, precipitated by the sale of council houses; the exclusion of delinquent children from their only avenue of escape, school, encouraged by the use of league tables on which schools ultimately rely for funds; the institutionalised negligence of care-in-the-community which injects extra friction into the community; the epidemic of child abuse, physical and sexual, against which the reduced forces of social services departments are fighting a hopeless battle.
And the really alarming point about this cocktail is that each of its elements is provided by policies that lie at the heart of the most powerful departments in Whitehall. They were inherited from the Tories but without exception, they have been left in place by the Blair government to generate yet more damage. Together with the Treasury’s inheritance of Tory spending limits, they are the cause of Britain’s poverty and they are the real enemy that Frank Field should have been fighting.
Nick Davies’ book, Dark Heart – The Shocking Truth About Hidden Britain is published in paperback this week by Vintage, price £7.99
