In the depths of the Second World War, economist William Beveridge drew up radical plans to tackle poverty. Among his recommendations, set out in the historic Beveridge Report, were a universal system of social insurance and the creation of a national health service.
To the best of my knowledge, however, he did not add: “Oh, and one other thing. To banish Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness once and for all, the unemployed must be entitled to spend all day watching Homes Under the Hammer free of charge.”
That, however, is the proposal apparently being considered by our current Government, as it weighs up potential reforms of the BBC licence fee. Obviously no Labour administration would abolish the licence fee altogether – that would be like Stalin abolishing Pravda. But ministers are at least thinking about changes to the funding system. And one idea is to exempt benefits claimants from paying the licence fee at all.
Well, allow me to save the Government some time. Because I can already tell it exactly how this exciting little brainwave would go down.
First, there would be the entirely justified backlash from the dwindling proportion of people in this country who still work for a living. Quite reasonably, they’d ask: “How is it fair that I should have to keep paying the licence fee, if the unemployed don’t? If anything, it should be the other way round. After all, the unemployed watch far more TV than I do. Mainly because they’ve got quite a lot more time to do so.”
Their backlash would grow even more furious, however, once they realised the following. As so many millions of people nowadays are on benefits, the people who aren’t would presumably be forced to make up the resultant shortfall in the BBC’s funding – by paying far more for the TV licence than they do at present.
Good luck dreaming up a slogan to sell that policy. “Pay more, so that others can pay nothing. Work harder, so that others don’t have to work at all.”
Obviously the whole suggestion is ridiculous. Which is why, I suspect, the Government will end up going for it. After all, it’s Starmer’s Labour in microcosm. Yet another way to make the productive fund freebies for the unproductive. Just like raising taxes on businesses while abolishing the two-child benefits cap.
Labour politicians endlessly tell us that their approach is motivated by “compassion”. But in reality it’s cynical self-interest. The party is deliberately cultivating an ever-growing culture of dependency, because it’s confident that, come election time, it can count on the dependents’ votes.
Naturally people who are dependent on the state won’t vote to have their freebies cut or removed. They’ll vote for the party that will maintain their freebies and, in all probability, grant them new ones. In effect, then, the Labour strategy for the next election is as follows. Take money off people who were never going to vote for us, and give it to people who might vote for us, in order to guarantee that they do vote for us.
Of course, you can see why such a concept might appeal to party strategists, given the perpetually soaring number of claimants. Just this week, it was revealed that more than 300,000 young people – twice as many as five years ago – are now claiming out-of-work benefits with no requirement to look for a job. And so a new generation of loyal Labour voters is born.
