Say Anything Blog

When the subject of welfare comes up, my liberal-Democrat wife often says, “It was a good idea at the time.” But even Mrs. Geologist now has to admit that welfare has been a big disaster. Both of us are teachers who’ve spent most of our careers in low-income schools. What brought my wife to the conclusion that welfare hasn’t worked is seeing case after case where unmarried teenage girl gets pregnant on purpose to start collecting free money.

Unlike me, Mrs. Geologist grew up middle class. He original attitude, as she describes it was: “In a country as rich as the United States, nobody should go to bed hungry.” But after seeing first hand the unintended consequences of “free money, she’s come around.

I didn’t grow up middle class. I grew up poor and living around the fringes of people who had exiled themselves to the underclass. Drugs were common, indolence was a source of pride, and welfare was a way of life. One relative of mine stayed on welfare from the Nixon Administration to the Clinton Administration. She raised three children on welfare, none of whom seem to be able to hold jobs as adults. Even though I myself grew up poor (or maybe because I did), I could never remember a time when I thought it was a good idea to give my lazy relatives money.

I’ll admit to carrying a bit of emotional baggage on this issue. Even so, I recently read a short interview that confirmed a lot of what I internalized as a child.

Martin Durkin is a documentary film maker who’s been researching the British Welfare system, and has documented the institutional nature of what I observed.

To most people, I imagine, welfare seems an obviously good thing. But in fact the corrosive and iniquitous side of welfare has been evident for many decades. It’s only now that people are poking their heads out of the trench and daring to say so. You can see the devastating effects of welfare in Britain, for example, in the exponential rise in single motherhood. The figures are astonishing. In the 1950s almost all children in Britain were brought up by their natural parents. Today, only around half the children in Britain are brought up by their natural parents. Half!

How did this come to be?

Durkin: To see why that happened, let me paint you a picture. In the 1950s, the typical working man and his wife In Britain lived in an income-tax free existence. They kept every penny they earned. For an unmarried teenager, there was no council flat (the ‘projects’ I think you call them), no rent rebate, no rate rebate, no housing benefit or anything else. The burden of looking after her and the child fell on her family, friends or charity. Parents who discovered their daughters were pregnant were understandably furious – because they had to pick up the tab. That’s why Dad stomped round to the family of the boy responsible, to call him to account. They boy’s family understood the full economic implications of making babies and came down on him like a ton of bricks. From the real economic relationships there arose a real moral code – the value and the cost of things were clear.

The growth of welfare benefits has been huge since that time. And within that system a pregnant girl gets special treatment (top of the state housing list etc). The fear has gone. The old idea, “Don’t, for heaven’s sake, get pregnant. It would be a disaster” has gone. For many girls, getting pregnant is a ticket to get out of the parental home. This has been the subject of detailed studies. A ten percent increase in benefits, one of them finds, tends to increase the prevalence of single mothers by 17 percent.

Durkin on the effects of the Welfare system on British society in general.

The Welfare State, pioneered in Britain of course, has corrupted this country to its core. It has transformed the country caricatured by Noel Coward and others – essentially pretty decent, self-reliant, and plucky – into a country which is thuggish, selfish, mindless, dispirited and lost. Gone is the British stiff upper lip. Modern Britons are moaning, self-pitying inadequates. The welfare state has bred a generation of obnoxious, drug-addled criminals and ne’er-do-wells. It has also, incidentally, burdened what was once the world’s biggest, most dynamic economy with the dead weight of an obstructive and vastly expensive state machine.

I’m sorry to sound cross about this, but I don’t think people fully realise what’s happened. Britain has, I think, the highest crime rate of any industrialised country in the world. It is twice as high as the US. The violent crime rate is higher in London than New York. Britain has the highest rate of drug abuse, the highest teenage pregnancy rate and the highest rate of sexually transmitted disease in the modern industrial world. What the hell happened?

I urge you all to read the entire interview.

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