In a system with winners and losers, you can't have 'equality of opportunity' | Deborah Orr | Comment is free | The Guardian

In a system with winners and losers, you can't have 'equality of opportunity'

Those who are stronger need to look after those who are weaker, but the right thinks the market would look after everybody if only the welfare state didn't stop it from evolving

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• • Deborah Orr
  • guardian.co.uk, Friday 6 January 2012 21.30 GMT
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Attempts are being made to make welfare ultra-punitive, as a means of getting people reluctantly into work (that often doesn't exist anyway). Photograph: Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP

Liam Byrne, the shadow work and pensions secretary, says he wants "a radical rethink" on welfare. I suggest this chap wouldn't know a "radical rethink" if it turned up on his doorstep claiming to be his long-lost love-child. Welfare dependency is not a cause of society's problems, but a consequence of them. Sadly, it is in the febrile interest of all mainstream politicians to continue pretending that it's the other way round. The belief that you can transform society by prodding at welfare is similar to the belief that you can untangle knots by pushing at the ends of string.

Byrne claims – rightly – that William Beveridge would be appalled by the way his welfare state has developed. Byrne also admits, however, that Beveridge thought his system would be operating in a society that provided full employment, at fair and decent wages (Beveridge would probably have surmised that this applied mainly to male citizens too). Beveridge assumed a progression towards greater economic equality (and also a lack of progression towards sexual equality) that simply is not credible without the plentiful employment he envisaged. As unemployment started to rise in the 1970s, so did welfare dependency. Byrne argues that welfare dependency has "skewed social behaviour". In truth, mass unemployment, and the consequent downward pressure on unskilled wages has "skewed social behaviour" (Changes in employment patterns also fostered postwar rejection of the nuclear family as a single-salaried economic unit every bit as much as feminism, probably a great deal more).

People become welfare-dependent when they find themselves unable to find work they perceive as suitable. The conventional argument is that in many cases they are perfectly able to earn a living, but choose not to. If a person has truly "chosen" welfare dependency, then that person has made a very poor and stupid choice. People who make such very poor and stupid choices are in this day and age not very employable, especially in a highly competitive environment where work is scarce. So, QED.

It is the disabled who are frightened and horrified most by attempts to make welfare ultra-punitive, as a means of getting people reluctantly into work (that often does not exist anyway). The policy challenge, supposedly, is to differentiate between "real" incapability and "mere" inability. Labour, when in power, was committed to this no less than the Conservatives are now. In trying to make a sharp distinction here, politicians cause great suffering and worry to truly vulnerable people. In truth, inability is in itself a serious problem, worthy of much greater consideration in policymaking – especially by Labour.

By this I don't mean offering endless support, training and advice to the jobless. I mean accepting with some grace that it's tough at the bottom, that many people can't cope with the conditions that they find themselves in, and then honestly recognising why it is that so many people are so predictably set up to fail. Thinking up ever more intrusive and punitive ways of getting the welfare dependent to have some Damascene conversion, and suddenly decide that they know what they want from life, know how to get it, and have the ability to start working on it, is just a waste of energy, as decades of new-deal type initiatives have illustrated.

Labour stopped calling itself socialist long ago. The last vestige of its former ideological underpinning is expressed by its continued commitment to achieving "equality". With a sigh, the proponents of "equality" will explain that they don't mean "equality of outcome", they mean "equality of opportunity". Basically, this is just some watered-down, technocratic cover-version of the US trope that "anyone can be president".

The idea is that as long as there is "equality of opportunity", then a highly competitive economic system that naturally sorts people into "winners and losers" – let's call it a meritocracy – is perfectly reasonable. But the rhetoric is laughably fallacious. In a system that divides people into winners and losers, you can't have "equality of opportunity". The children of the winners will, broadly, always have the advantage. The children of the losers will, broadly, always have the disadvantage, the inability, if you will.

It is vast, fast economic and social change that has created welfare dependency; damaging, disorientating change that has been engineered, exacerbated and lauded by both parties in recent decades. In the 1980s, the Conservatives congratulated themselves as they dismantled industries that provided an income to entire households, while at the same time clutching their pearls in horror, with grotesque hypocrisy, at "the breakdown of the family".

Likewise, the accelerating entry of women into the workforce during this time as low-paid, part-time workers suited the Tories well, in the short-term. These hapless footsoldiers helped to weaken unions, depress wages and make casual employment the new normal. Once they were in power, Labour declined adequately to reform employment law to give such workers some stability and protection, outside the public sector. They brought in the minimum wage, which was great, but beyond that they chose to subsidise low-pay culture, rather than challenge it, for the sake of illusory "growth".

Both parties encouraged the idea that to get on in life, you had to have a degree – the Conservatives by turning polytechnics into universities (worth remembering when they sneer at "Mickey Mouse university courses"), and Labour by adopting a policy that aimed to furnish 50% of the population with a university education, as long as they were willing to pay for it. Now, you need a good degree to manage a supermarket. Perhaps more young people would take jobs stacking shelves, if they could see a clear path to advancement ahead of them. Instead, supermarkets are told by governments that they are doing young people a favour by offering unpaid "experience" tidying the aisles.

But, hey, that's "the market", which has to be appeased. The right's political idea is that the unfettered market would look after everybody, if only the welfare state did not exist to stop it from evolving to provide suitable work for people of all abilities or inabilities, and suitable goods and services commensurate with what people are willing to pay. Like magic emanating from the beautiful wands of benign capitalist fairies. How can adults believe in this nonsense?

Humans are not born equal, and individual vulnerabilities are not always easy to identify or to repair. Those who are stronger need to look after those who are weaker. It is precisely because humans are not good at doing this – it's not in our aggressive, predatory natures – that so many people shrug at their inability to clothe, feed and house themselves. At the very least, this failure of the able should be recognised, rather than dressed up as a failure of the unable. Until it is, it's hard to see how a better future can be imagined, let alone planned for.

via guardian.co.uk