Generosity or Fairness?

Recently, on radio 4, Simon Hughes (LIB) expressed concern about the welfare cuts the coalition were planning to make.  He expressed a view consistent with wanting to increase the state help to a number of groups of people who will otherwise receive less state financial help after the cuts.  Whom should receive what state help and why is an open ended question that will keep politicians debating for years and is arguably something over which there is no easy answer.  The difficulty that comes here is that Mr Hughes was advocating an increased financial help for these groups on the basis of what was “fair”.  This seems an odd use of words as it neither ties in with what the traditional conservative position on welfare provision is, i.e. government (viz. the state) should be distant and small, with individuals in charge of their own destiny, with the ups and down that that brings, nor with the compromise between conservative and liberal principles that the coalition appears to be.  A more socialist view point is more based purely upon perceived need – viz. of course these people need help you remtard, give them money.  Neither of these ideas is based upon an apparent fairness.  In which case it seems difficult to work out what Mr Hughes wishes to achieve in this way.  We might assume that he wanted to inject radical liberal principles in, but this is perhaps best left to Eddie Izzard (“I’m a radical liberal.  I want to break down the doors of parliament and say ‘Look, we’ll pay for the damage’ ”).  Perhaps it was just meant to sound good, or perhaps he is attempting to use a subtlety of language? 

          We are attempting to recover from a financial crisis in which the common perception is that those ‘paying for the deficit are not those that caused it’.  Aside from the cultural comment this makes, it does invoke a pervading feeling that less should be spent in general.  If the man on the street is being asked to pay more tax or be paid less salary, it seems reasonable to make sacrifices elsewhere – not least to ensure that his sacrifice is not a futile one.  The re-organisation of Quangoes was an obvious example.  What perhaps it gestures only slightly towards is the zeitgeist of political acceptability of language and attitude.  Can we be seen to be generous?  We have no money, it is hard to justify spending money when you have none readily available, even with monetarist thinking.  An even, one might say, with mechanisms such as mortgages.  To quote Jeremy Hardy in a recent edition of Radio 4’s The News Quiz, “having a £200k mortgage is not going to stop me buying lavatory paper and mean I wipe my arse on the walls”.  But surely generosity is what giving more money to groups in our population is, whether or not one agrees with the perceived need they may or may not have?  And why would it be wrong to do so?  The coalition’s response would probably effectively be ‘we can’t afford it’, which is clearly not a view unique to them. 

           The trouble is, this use of language regarding how money is apportioned does belie a school of thought common on the continent, that even in a financial crisis investment should be maintained.  Lumpy timing of financial investment in projects makes achieving the aims they are investing in rather difficult.  The trouble is, how can we decide what we might be able to spend in 15 years’ time?  Perhaps this is how welfare provision should be looked at in order to get the best out of it.  Perhaps that way the stakeholder view rather than the customer one.  I do not know Mr Hughes’ views on this but it may just be what he means by ‘fairer’ – something that does not appear to be part of the ‘customer’ model of either the conservative or more socialist ideas. 

           The cultural difference I alluded to earlier, in case you were wondering, was an example of how pupils at schools in China are assessed.  Under that system, only if all of the pupils achieve the pass level do all of them pass, otherwise the whole class fails.