I am a little baffled by the bishops leading the charge with Lord Ashdown to block, modify or ameliorate the benefit cap proposed by the Coalition (and IDS in particular). I agree with David Keen their attempts are far short of the outright war the media are trying to portray, but I still puzzle over their appropriateness.
First, I find I easily get suspicious when people approach the morality of specific policy proposals with emotive rhetoric about “the children”. It’s a bit like following a car with a “Baby on Board” sticker. What’s the opposite? There are no babies in this car, so you can drive as carelessly as you want? Waving child poverty around indiscriminately is not an argument.
It seems to me, quite frankly, that £26,000 after tax – which is the effective limit of the cap, is quite a high income. Certainly it’s considerably higher than mine, although my taxes will have to help cover it. That in itself is not a good argument, but we need to remember that it’s not just higher than mine, but that £500 a week is more than the gross average weekly earnings. That does, I think, raise questions which are both ethical and practical about the relationship between those in work and those out of work, and how the state plays a part in building social co-operation rather than antagonism.
Behind some of the opposition to the benefit cap is an expressed anxiety about the children’s needs. It is probably fair to say that there is a certain congruence between many verses in scripture (though others point in a different direction) and the Marxist slogan “From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs”. Something like that appears to lie behind what some bishops are saying.
There are problems, however, in applying that in a society that has long since confused “want” and “need”. Even before the cap, there would seem to be a significant number of households where the children’s disadvantage has more to do with what the money is spent on than with the amount of money that is made available. It is highly doubtful there can be a moral redistribution of wealth in a society that sees no moral problems with spending money it does not have, whether at the governmental, corporate, family or individual level. In that sense, many families are caught as much in a morality trap as a poverty one, where everyone thinks they should have a right to what they desire.
That concern about morality should, however, be taken further. On the whole, the Christian tradition has seen work as a significant part of human existence, ideally directed to good stewardship of the material world, and towards creativity, but also recognised as sometimes just hard labour. Certainly it has encouraged a sense of taking responsibility not only for one’s own actions, but for the care of the neighbour.
Under either of those broad themes, the current situation which actively encourages people not to work by making them worse off, or to see themselves only as recipients of an impersonal state care that somehow becomes a default right, is itself an immoral one.
That may well be matched by the immorality of the unfettered market making job cuts in pursuit of higher profits, rather than sustaining more in work at the cost of reduced but still adequate profits. There are Christian critiques of the market to be made, not least for creating the concept of “human resources”, which is a dehumanising a concept as any invented and profoundly destructive of the dignity of the human person as steward of God’s resources. People are not merely material from which product and profit may be made.
Unfortunately, the benefit trap is at least as dehumanising as the unbridled market, and the welfare state in its totalising current shape, shares the same debased image of the person, shelving them in an warehouse of the unemployable, with a bribe sufficient to stop them resisting their own marginalization from society as an unproductive resource. That, I think, is a far worse moral ill to inflict on children than any benefit cap aimed at bringing such collusion between family and state to an end.
