by Citizens' Income Trust | Jun 3, 2012 | Opinion
Paul Spicker, How Social Security Works: An introduction to benefits in Britain, Policy Press, 2011, xii + 284 pp, hbk 1847428110, £65, pbk, 1847428103, £23.99
This well-organised book is what it says it is: an ‘introduction’ to the ‘design, management, operation and delivery of benefits’ (p.ix). Its careful structure enables Spicker to bring a sense of order to a system which he recognises to be ‘baffling’ (p.x), though he himself admits that ‘there is a limit to how clear it is possible to make things clear – the structure of benefits does not make sense’ (p.x). A further problem identified is the constant and rapid change from which the system suffers, and this reviewer can empathise with Spicker’s statement that his ‘head is cluttered with old rules and regulations dating back through the last thirty-five years’ (p.xi).
The first part of the book asks ‘What is social security?’ and suggests that ‘there is much more to social security than the relief of poverty’ (p.10). The second part details the development of the system from the Poor Law to the present day, and asks whether the new Universal Credit will in practice be a unified benefit. The third part discusses different categories of benefits (National Insurance, means-tested, non-contributory, discretionary, and universal), how claims are processed, and take-up levels. Part IV debates life’s contingencies (retirement, illness, disability, children, parenthood, lone parenthood, unemployment, and poverty); and the fifth covers such issues as cost, targeting, fraud, the meaning and measurement of poverty, and redistribution. A final chapter compares Britain’s system with those of other countries. A particularly interesting chapter is that on complexity in which Spicker concludes that complexity matters when it leads to the system ‘failing to respond to the changing conditions of people in complex circumstances … We cannot ask claimants to live simpler, more orderly lives’. Part of the answer is to address the issues of ‘conditionality, administrative rules and administrative procedures’ (p.145).
Chapter 12 on ‘Universal benefits’ starts with an argument as simple as the benefits themselves:
The general arguments for universality … include basic rights, simplicity and effectiveness. The central criticism of universal benefits is that they spread resources too widely: if benefits are going to everyone, then either they will be very costly, or they will have to be set at very low levels. This dilemma can be avoided. One option is that universal benefits can be reclaimed through the tax system – a process referred to as ‘clawback’. This has an effect similar to means testing, with two important differences: first, that everyone receives the benefit, and second, that the examination of means is also done for everyone. (p.117)
Then follow a history and discussion of Child Benefit, a description of New Zealand’s universal pension, and a discussion of the Coalition Government’s current consideration of a citizen’s pension for the UK. The chapter concludes with an intelligent and nuanced debate of a Citizen’s Income and with another encomium to Child Benefit:
What Child Benefit offers is a modest but secure element of a family’s general income, something that is fairly predictable and secure. It is the only element of income that seems to continue to function reliably in situations where people are moving in and out of work or where their income is unstable and unpredictable. That seems to me something which is valuable and important, and the principle could be more generally extended. (p.124).
In his concluding ‘Postscript: Social Security: a programme for reform’, Spicker’s first recommendation is: ‘extending the scope and value of less conditional benefits, like Child Benefit, which also helps to stabilise the income during transitions’ (p.274); and the first suggestion in a list of ideas for ‘reducing complexity, error and administrative confusion’ is ‘replacing some claims with automatic payments’ (p.274).
Spicker doesn’t put it like this, but it would be perfectly fair to describe his book as a sustained argument for a partial Citizen’s Income.
by Yannick Vanderborght | Oct 10, 2011 | Opinion
I graduated in Social Work in 1964 and back then, in Australia, we were three quarters of the way through the 23 years of unbroken conservative rule. The prevailing welfare ideology of the time was heavily influenced by the combination of providing assistance to those ‘in need’ whilst sifting out ‘malingers’ and others who could but wouldn’t work. There was a sense of noblesse oblige [nobility obliges one to assist others less fortunate than oneself]. Yet such ‘generosity’ was hedged around by a prevailing view that some people were ‘bludging’ on the system and this meant that social security officials were wary of being taken for a mug. Fortunately, the Labor Party had consolidated the social security legislation in 1947 in one Act and set out eligibility entitlements in clearly defined categories. The ideological biases of social security administrators only came into play at the edges. In church run and other not-for-profit organisations, which supplied many of the ancillary welfare services, such conservative ideologies were very much to the fore.
Competing welfare ideological circles
In tropical Australia on full and new moons [which create huge tidal flows] currents flow very strongly. Whenever such flows are constricted, for example, by the narrowing of passages between islands, ocean eddies are formed that are so powerful they can force boats off course. Such eddies form patterns which are as unpredictable as the turbulence created in a jug of boiling water. Whenever I listen to neo-conservative economic fundamentalists pontificating about the propensity of social security recipients to sink into the “mire of welfare dependency” I have a sense of deja vu. As I try to untangle the twisted amalgams of ideological thought, I am reminded of the turbulence of these ocean eddies. At the same time in my mind’s eye, I see a gatekeeper of an 18th century Poorhouse berating those who enter with warnings about impending ‘sloth and licentiousness’.
Some of the competing descriptions exhibiting such ideological constructions are:
socially approved/ deserving/ good moral character- including previously adequately supporting ‘his’ family. Married/ widowed/ unmarried mother/ separated/ divorced/ living in sin. Citizen/ permanent resident/ migrant/ refugee/ over stayers / asylum seekers/ boat people/ illegal arrivals. Worthy/ entitled/unworthy. Universalism/ individual/ targeted/ categorical. Able bodied/ disability /sick/ malingerer/ blind/ old/ worker/ unemployed/ skilled/ unskilled/ contributing/ productive/ unproductive/ dependent/ self-reliant/ adequate/ inadequate/ helpless / hopeless/ taxpayer/ dole bludger.
Many of these ideological conundrums and often several other arcane protestations pop up when neo-conservatives discuss welfare issues and they have been doing much the same for many centuries. Joel Handler (2002 p. 56, footnote No. 217) pointed to 1348 Statute of Labourers admonishing the provision of assistance to ‘sturdy beggars’. Guy Standing (2002, pp. 173-174) makes the point that: “the principles of workfare were enshrined in the English Poor Law of 1536 dealing with ‘sturdy vagabonds’, and in the French Ordonnance de Moulins of 1556. The 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act in Great Britain, was designed to reach only the ‘deserving’ and desperate poor (italics in original)”. Jennifer Mays (forthcoming) notes that similar ideological constructions prevailed in Australia throughout the 20th century and into the 21st. There is little doubt that those who wish to limit the scope or generosity of income support provisions find the frequent repetition of dependency rhetoric useful. However, it should be noted that the veracity of an idea is not established by its longevity nor by how frequently it is asserted.
The distinctions which neo-conservatives attempt to make in these dependency/ self reliance debates are based on distortions of reality. They are, as Joshua Holland (2006) notes, “a ‘zombie lie’ – no matter how many times you shoot it in the face, it keeps coming back to haunt you.”
Currently, in Australia, the favourite prevailing welfare myths are:
- Australians pay high levels of taxation compared with the rest of the world,
- asylum seekers without visas arriving by boat are entering Australia illegally,
- Aborigines get exceedingly generous welfare payments compared with other citizens, and
- there is such a thing as a ‘self-funded retiree’.
The reality is that:
- “Australia has a low tax burden, both currently and historically. In 2003, Australia had the eighth lowest tax burden of the OECD-30 countries and has typically ranked in the bottom third of countries for the period since 1965” (Treasury 2003).
- Because Australia has signed and ratified the 1951 Convention on Refugees asylum seekers have every right to enter this country to seek protection.
- As a group, Aboriginal citizens are the least wealthy section of the society, who face the greatest health difficulties and they get less generous assistance than other Australians. This is sometimes because of the rural and remote regions in which they live. But mainly it is often due to Indigenous people’s lack of bureaucratic sophistication coupled with non-Aboriginal racism and governments’ determination to foist their ‘best intentions’ upon Indigenous citizens rather than to listen to Aboriginal peoples’ suggestions.
- The statement that, unlike age pensioners, ‘self-funded retirees’ don’t draw on the public purse’ is a nonsense – they get exceedingly generous tax waivers on their superannuation and, provided their income is below $50,000 annually, get government subsidised medicines. Some of the recently beatified ‘self-funded retirees’ get more assistance from the government (by way of tax concessions) than age pensioners get from the pension.
The left is left behind
The absence of logic, in many of the arguments propounded by rightwing ideologues about the need to force recipients of social security to meet onerous obligations in return for payment of benefits, should make it easy to destroy their arguments. But in Australia, as elsewhere, this is not the case. As George Monbiot points out:
rightwing movements thrive on their contradictions, the leftwing movements drown in them. Tea Party members who proclaim their rugged individualism will follow a bucket on a broomstick if it has the right label … Instead of coming together to fight common causes, leftwing meetings today consist of dozens of people promoting their own ideas, and proposing that everyone else should adopt them.
Australia in the 21st century
After the economic fundamentalist and thirdwayism of the Hawke and Keating Labor governments in the 1980s and 90s. John Howard came to power, in 1996, promising even more economic fundamentalism coupled with conservative social policies. He set out, with alacrity, to fight the ‘Culture Wars’ it didn’t matter whether it was winding back the Native Title legislation ‘to give pastoralists more certainty’, removing industrial award protection, enforcing individual work contracts, setting up Star Chambers which compelled building workers to give evidence, tightening disability support pension eligibility, enforcing ‘work for the dole’ provisions on ‘job snobs’ (by which he meant people who were unemployed), expanding mandatory detention of asylum seekers, introducing temporary protection visas for refugees (which did not allow family reunion), excising offshore islands from our migration zone, sending those who did not reach the Mainland to be processed on Nauru or Manus Island and launching the Northern Territory Intervention in 73 Aboriginal communities. This Intervention involved suspending the Racial Discrimination Act, compulsorily acquiring leases of town areas, quarantining half of people’s social security pensions and benefits on a Basics Card that could only be used for government approved purchases (Altman and Hinkson 2007).
Monbiot (2010, p.59) quotes with approval Thomas Franks 2004 book What’s the matter with Kansas? whose thesis is that the new conservatism systematically erases economic explanations by blaming the trouble of the poor not on corporate or class power, wage cuts and so forth but on cultural factors. In 2001, Brendon O’Connor argued that George Gilder and Charles Murray’s “central claim (was) that welfare causes dependency and thus unemployment and poverty – and that welfare reform therefore needs to focus on changing the behaviour of welfare recipients rather than providing employment opportunities (p.221).
In 2007, Kevin Rudd led Labor to victory – promising to wind-back the worst excesses of Howard’s Work Choices legislation and ending offshore processing of asylum seekers but maintaining the Intervention and other conservative social policies such as continuing the suspension of the racial discrimination legislation whilst leaving in place the prohibition of same sex marriage and euthanasia. In 2008-9, almost all developed countries experienced recession. Largely through counter-cyclical spending, Labor managed to avoid it. Rudd tried to introduce substantially increased mining taxes. The billionaire miners launched a massive anti-mining tax campaign that somehow convinced average Australians that the increased mining taxes, which Rudd was proposing, were not in their best interests. Just prior to the 2010 election, his Deputy, Julia Gillard, rolled Rudd. She immediately decreased the amount the mining taxes would add to Federal revenue and limited the types of mining that would attract a tax.
The subsequent election resulted in a hung parliament. Gillard’s minority government rules with the assistance of the Greens and three independents. Opinion polls put support for Labor in the high 20s. Gillard promised 2011 would be the ‘year of delivery’ when what we needed was a year of deliverance. Gone are the days when it could truly be said “Hope springs eternal in the human breast” (such as in the run up to Gough Whitlam’s 1972 electoral victory) when it seemed that grand improvements in social welfare were imminent: or in early 1975, when it appeared that the government was about to introduce a guaranteed minimum income. But, that was before the Dismissal of the Whitlam government by the Governor General on the 11th of November 1975; when progressive Australians realised that “Man always is but never To be blessed” (Pope 1733).
What is on the Gillard government’s agenda is revealed when she speaks about: wanting everyone to have a job ‘for the simple dignity that work brings’, or wanting to process asylum seekers, arriving in Australian waters, in Malaysia, or increasing the hurdles which those with disabilities have to jump-over before they will be considered eligible for a disability support pension, or maintaining many aspects of the Northern Territory Intervention, or moving to be able to reinstate the Racial Discrimination Act by extending the quarantining of half people’s social security from just Northern Territory Aborigines to other disadvantaged groups in other parts of Australia (Tomlinson 2011) and at the same time increasing the compulsory superannuation levy from 9 to 12 per cent.
John Howard won the ‘Culture Wars’ and there is no-one in a leadership position within the Australian Labor Party with the ticker to take on the continuing conservative dominance of the of the ideological debate. The Parliament has literally become a coward’s castle. The words: equity, justice, equality, freedom, least restrictive, honour, decency, solidarity and ensuring everyone has an above the poverty line Basic Income have disappeared from the Australian lexicon.
Bibliography
Altman, Jon & Hinkson, Melinda (eds.) [2007] Coercive reconciliation, Arena, North Carlton.
Handler, J. (2002) “Social Citizenship and Workfare in the United States and Western Europe.” BIEN 9th International Conference, Geneva, Sept.12-14.
Holland, Joshua (2006) “Myth of the Liberal Nanny State.” AlterNet, June 8.
https://www.alternet.org/story/36895/myth_of_the_liberal_nanny_state/
Mays, Jennifer (forthcoming) Australia’s disabling income support system: Tracing the history of the Australian disability income support system 1908 to 2007 – disablism, citizenship and the Basic Income proposal. PhD thesis Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane.
Monbiot, George (2010) “Bogus, Misdirected and Effective.” The Guardian, June 14.
O’Connor, Brendon (2001) “The Intellectual Origins of ‘Welfare Dependency’”. Australian Journal of Social Issues. Vol.36, No. 3, August pp.221-235.
Pope, Alexander (1733) “An Essay on Man, Epistle I”, Princeton.
https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~rywang/berkeley/magic3/paris/singles/eternal_spring.html
Standing, Guy (2002) Beyond the New Paternalism: Basic Security as Equality. Verso, London.
Tomlinson, John (2011) “Needs must when the devil drives.” On Line Opinion
https://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=11494
Treasury (2003) “International Comparisons of Australia’s Taxes.” Australian Government
https://comparativetaxation.treasury.gov.au/content/report/html/05_Chapter_3.asp
by Yannick Vanderborght | May 18, 2011 | Research
SCHULTE-BASTA, Dorothee (2010), Ökonomische Nützlichkeit oder leistungsloser Selbstwert? Zur Kompatibilität von Bedingungslosem Grundeinkommen und Katholischer Soziallehre, Freiberg: Zas, 2010.
Catholic social teaching is a body of doctrine developed by the Catholic Church on matters of poverty, wealth, economics, labor, social organization and the role of the state. Its foundation has been laid by Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum, and ever since than it is distinctive in its consistent critique of modern social and political ideologies both of the left and of the right. In her now published Master’s thesis, Schulte-Basta, who studied Theology, Philosophy and Communications in Muenster and Berlin, analyzes this critique in terms of Basic Income, as one of the most popular alternative to a marked-based form of organization. Analyzing the compatibility of Basic Income and Catholic Social Teaching, she gives a detailed overview in the history of Catholic Social Teaching in general and especially on the genesis of the key principles such as human dignity, solidarity and subsidiarity. In a second step she aligns their essence to the fundamental values of Basic Income. Her study finds that Basic Income does not contradict those key principles but instead helps to implement them by realizing human dignity, implementing solidarity in society and enabling people to help themselves. The book, first German-speaking overview on this topic, comes with a preface by Birgit Zenker, head of KAB, Germany’s Catholic Workers Movement.
For futher information:
https://zas-freiberg.de/index.php/buecher/55-oekonomischenuetzlichkeit
by Yannick Vanderborght | May 18, 2011 | Research
BLASCHKE, Ronald, OTTO, Adeline & SCHEPERS, Norbert (Eds.) (2010), Grundeinkommen : Geschichte – Modelle – Debatten, Berlin: Dietz, 2010.
The book, written by Germanys leading left-wing basic income supporters Ronald Blaschke, Adeline Otto and Katja Kipping, includes a detailed history of the idea of basic income as well as an overview about minimum income and basic income models, which are discussed in Germany right now. Blaschke draws a line from Thomas Paine and Thomas Spence about Charles Fourier and his student, Victor Considérant, to Erich Fromm, proving that fundamental questions related to basic income (means testing, basic income and public infrastructure, basic income and emancipation of female, basic income and attractive labour) have already been discussed by these protagonists. He also discusses some possibilities to determine a fourth criterion of basic income, which is required by the German Network of Basic Income (secure the individual’s livelihood and enable them to participate in society), while Kipping discusses the relation of basic income and democracy and describes the basic income as a fixed rate for democracy. The last part contains articles of various international authors (José Iglesias Fernandéz , Spain/ Ruurik Holm, Finland/ Melina Klaus, Austria/ Sepp Kusstatscher, Italy) dealing with different approaches to a basic income from a left-emancipatory perspective.
The book can be downloaded as a PDF at: https://www.rosalux.de/fileadmin/rls_uploads/pdfs/Publ-Texte/Texte_67.pdf
by Citizens' Income Trust | Apr 30, 2011 | Opinion
Vladimir Rys, Reinventing Social Security Worldwide, Policy Press, 2010, x + 126 pp, hbk 1 847 42643, £60, pbk 1 847 426406, £19.99
This book is the fruit of a lifetime of academic research and administrative experience in international social security policy. Rys worked for thirty years for the International Social Security Association (ISSA) and for half of that time as its General Secretary, and there can be few people with such a broad geographical and historical overview of the evolution of social security (here understood as financial benefits and also state insurance-funded health provision) and of the challenges facing it.
The first part of the book offers an international history of social security, a discussion of the economic and ideological context of the current debate, and some current trends:
‘… a series of shifts in emphasis on different elements in the existing structures and different roles assigned to specific actors. Thus, the state, while reducing its direct involvement in running social security schemes and providing social welfare benefits, is at the same time greatly increasing its powers when it comes to regulating occupational or private arrangements. Simultaneously, … there is an obvious shift of responsibility back to employers and different forms of occupational welfare, back to families and their supporting role, and also back to the individual and their personal capacity to save for rainy days’ (p.55)
The second part of the book builds on Rys’s previous publications on the sociological study of social security policy, and in particular discusses the ISSA’s contribution to the development of a method which goes ‘beyond the descriptive accounts of the institution as contained in legislative texts and [explains] why it is organised the way it is and why it functions the way it does’ (p.77). Such a method contributes to policy debate by suggesting which proposals might be feasible and which not. The different components of the method are discussed: the demographic, the economic, the sociological, and the political, the study of ideas, ideologies, laws, institutions and administrative techniques, and the study of the ways in which ideas are disseminated. The method is then applied to a variety of contexts, and particularly to eastern Europe ( – Rys is Czech).
The third section of the book is entitled ‘Reinventing social security in time of economic crisis: foundations of a new political consensus’ and argues for transparency about expenditures and present and future benefit levels and that only a renewed emphasis on social insurance can halt the privatisation of social security:
‘The principle of social insurance appeals partly to the rational self-interest of the individual, assuring them of access to benefits not normally attainable through private means, but also partly to their natural sentiment of solidarity and respect for other human beings’ (p.116)
As Rys suggests in his introduction, ‘it would be irresponsible, in the light of recent experience, to entrust [social insurance] to private arrangements’ (p.2).
Whilst rather too much of this book is of the ‘We did this at the ISSA’ variety, there is plenty of useful material here, and, above all, a sustained and rational argument for the importance of social insurance. However, Rys’s own career investment in the development of today’s systems leads him to neglect developments in which he has been rather less involved. It simply isn’t true that ‘no new social protection mechanism has been invented to deal with new risks and socially precarious situations’ (p.1). ‘Basic income’, ‘citizen’s income’ and ‘Child Benefit’ don’t appear in the index, and neither do ‘universal’ or ‘universalism’. Recent experience in Namibia suggests that universal provision might be precisely the new mechanism which the current crisis needs.
