Brendan O’Neill on the vast gulf between the bien pensant supporters of Britain’s current welfare system and those who actually depend on that system:
Comfortably off liberal campaigners are always bemused to discover that the working classes and poor do not share their love of the welfare state. Where radical middle-class students bravely spend bitterly cold evenings on pro‑NHS demos, and Left-leaning newspaper columnists write heartfelt articles about the importance of maintaining welfare payments, the less well-off seem totally unmoved by cuts to welfare.
[. . .]
Agreement that “unemployment benefits are too high and discourage work” has risen steadily among the less well-off. Only 40 per cent of benefits recipients agreed with it in 2003, while in 2011 59 per cent did. Thirty-eight per cent of working-class respondents agreed in 2003 that welfarism discouraged work; 58 per cent agreed in 2011.
The lack of love for the welfare state among its supposed beneficiaries drives liberal campaigners nuts. Why, they wail, are those on the breadline so down about the glorious postwar system of welfarism, even though it has saved their ungrateful rumps from destitution?
In Monday’s Guardian, columnist John Harris, who regularly travels around Britain to find out what the little people think, bemoaned the fact that anti-welfare “noise” always gets louder “as you head into the most disadvantaged parts of society”. This echoes a recent Guardian editorial which complained that ordinary Brits have become “more Scrooge-like” towards welfare claimants.
Or behold the bamboozled Joseph Rowntree researcher Fern Brady, who was horrified to discover that the less well-off are not remotely “pro-welfare”. Earlier this year, Ms Brady interviewed 150 families who will be affected by benefits cuts and was alarmed to find that “the majority held the kind of attitudes that make the Daily Mail‘s headlines look positively Left‑wing” — that is, they were anti-welfarism, and stingingly critical of those who claim welfare, even though they themselves claim it.
