Contributory welfare – politically prudent, morally misguided

Rachel Reeves’s announcement last week that Labour are considering increasing JSA payments for those with four years’ worth of National Insurance contributions won’t come as a surprise to anyone who has followed the development of Labour’s social security policies. Floating the idea, which is being reviewed by the IPPR think tank, Reeves invoked the saintly spirit of Beveridge in an attempt to give left-wing credence to ‘something for something’ social security policies.

So, as the political philosopher Raymond Geuss asks, ‘who does what to whom and for whose benefit?’. Firstly, the what and the whom. The value of this scheme to the unemployed is at best limited. Reeves’s vague proposal is aimed at ‘someone who has contributed for four or five years…perhaps in the first six weeks’ to get ‘perhaps in the order of £20’. Issues of indeterminacy aside, as Jim Pickard at the FT has pointed out, contributory welfare already exists in the form of contributory JSA, which goes to those with two years of National Insurance contributions. This is paid for six months and is designed to soften the blow of unemployment. Those made unemployed with between two and four years’ worth of work would miss out on the four-year limit, despite their additional contributions.

This policy would also exclude a large number of the 900,000 claimants under-25 who already receive less per week, simply because few of them have had the opportunity to consistently find work for four years or more. The long-term unemployed, those on zero-hours contracts and people who struggle to find stable work would all be indirectly punished for the form their unemployment takes, unemployment which, it must be stressed, is not their fault.

So if it’s not the unemployed who benefit, who does? Rachel Reeves hopes the answer is Labour. Contributory welfare aims to dispel the perception that Labour sponsors a ‘something for nothing’ culture that rewards indolence. The ambition to be tougher than the Tories on welfare (an ambition that surely tests the loyalty of most Labour supporters) is a key part of altering Labour’s image for 2015. Whilst this might be politically prudent, which the hateful reaction to Channel 4’s Benefits Street suggests it could be, it is certainly not moral, nor is it in keeping with Labour’s ethical commitments.

Implicit in the idea of contributory welfare is the moral idea of desert: those who have worked for a number of years deserve more money than those who have not. The problem, however, is that desert cuts both ways. In order to say that those who have worked deserve a bonus, we have to say that those who have not do not deserve it. But the reason that 900,000 under-25s are unemployed is not the failure of their volition, rather it is the failure of the society in which they live. The unemployed cannot be held responsible for their unemployment. There are simply not enough jobs, whatever this neo-Tebbitite Coalition might say, and the unemployed can neither find nor create jobs from thin air. All are victims of iniquitous circumstance, visited upon them by the incompetent political and financial agents of a broken economic system.

It is the concept of need, not of desert, that provides the motivation for the welfare state. The state provides support to people because they require support, not because they deserve support. Only in the sense that all people (through virtue of their personhood) ‘deserve’ support can the notion of desert be, emptily but fairly, invoked. That the moral worth of One Nation Labour’s policies is to be found in the seventy year old report of a Liberal Party candidate born in the 1870s is in itself worrying, but if Reeves needs a historical precedent, why not go all the way back to one of the founders of the party? In Keir Hardie’s 1907 booklet From Serfdom to Socialism, he endorsed Marx’s principle of ‘from each according to his ability to each according to his needs’. It is this principle, not a confused idea of desert, which should continue to provide the moral justification for the welfare state in 2015 and beyond.