Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ budget, despite subterranean expectations, somehow managed to beat even the gloomiest predictions in its sheer depths. So bad was the budget that it actually managed to put some fuel back in the tank of the spluttering Tory machine, with bruiser Badenoch battering Rachel from accounts as “spineless, shameless and completely aimless”. You didn’t have to be a free marketeer to agree with the judgement that this was “a Budget for Benefits Street, paid for by working people”. Shockingly, the proposed changes in taxes and welfare will see a three-child family in work needing £71,000 a year in pre-tax income to match an equivalent family on benefits according to the Centre for Social Justice.
Welfare systems rely on trust, and few more so than the British one, which involves easy to access benefits funded out of central taxation. As old forms of trust and cooperation break down, we are being forced to return to the fundamentals of what binds us together as a people.
The reciprocal relationship between paying taxes and receiving benefits has been lost by both sides of the equation. Those who pay higher levels of tax see worsening public services in transport, health and education in return. Moreover, they often find themselves paying double as higher incomes disqualify them for benefits and tax rebates, and as they end up paying extra to opt out of public education and health, whilst continuing to fund it from their taxes.
At the other end, those who get benefits may feel that their identity as a woman, ethnic minority, single parent or disabled person entitles them, in some not always articulated or clear way, to social compensation for perceived disadvantages, or that they are unable to work, even when they can. Many net recipients of course are in work, and in a context of high living costs may not experience even very generous benefits as especially lavish. Many, especially pensioners, believe that their benefits are funded from their own contributions, even though that is almost never the case in the British system. More broadly, the highly centralised, complex and abstract nature of the British state makes public spending hard to understand or relate to questions of personal virtue and duty.
As the budget has exposed, this system is failing on both a financial and moral level. Recipients feel no sense of gratitude or obligation, whilst contributors have no sense of trust that their contributions will be spent well, or that they will ultimately benefit, either directly through better services, or indirectly through a more just and prosperous society. This is reflected in increasingly politicised, unfair and unsustainable forms of spending. State and public pensions are unfunded liabilities, representing direct transfers of income from the young to the old, set against a context in which over 60s control a majority of the nation’s housing wealth. The government has been in deficit for decades, and public debt is not just growing, but becoming more expensive.
Who can fix the system? Labour has shown itself unable and unwilling, and despite Badenoch’s powerful words in parliament, it was her party who failed to take action during its 14 years in power. That leaves Reform, whose policy agenda is still in flux, and whose voter base is on average old and more likely to be in receipt of benefits. Rethinking a system that dates to the 1940s, whilst delivering for their voters is no easy trick. A possible indication of travel may come by way of Danny Kruger MP, who recently contributed to an essay collection by Bright Blue, entitled “Mending the Net: A new centre-right approach to social security”.
Kruger, a recent member of Reform’s top team, articulated the central problem of welfare in a low trust society:
Conservatism begins in gratitude for what we have received. Each of us is born into relationships of obligation – family, neighbourhood, nation – and our responsibility is to honour these ties, to nurture them and to hand them on to those who come after us. This is the essence of the creed: not the cult of the solitary individual but the politics of belonging, of mutual duty and care.
Social security belongs within this moral vision. Properly understood, it is not a cold transaction but a declaration of solidarity: the assurance that when hardship comes — through disability or sickness, job loss or the trials of old age — society will not turn its back on you. It is a practical expression of the truth that we are our brother’s keeper.
Our present age tests this settlement. Global markets, cultural change and the erosion of traditional institutions all press against the bonds that hold us together.
The collection itself was not short on solutions, with one of the most incisive and pertinent being Henry Hill’s proposal of a return to a local rather than a national welfare system. Yet if building reciprocity and relationality back into social security can be best done at a grassroots level, there remains a vital contribution for national policy.
The question of building social trust goes deeper than just reforming the system. Britain has ended up with the system it has because ancient ideas of liberty, citizenship and virtue have been crowded out by a utilitarian model built on central planning, managerialism and social contract theory. Rather than acting as free members of a social body, British people have drifted into thinking of themselves as individual consumers endowed with unilateral rights unconnected to reciprocal duties.
At a time when religious faith has eroded, social norms fragmented and national identity collapsed, the old forces of shame and self-reliance that prevented abuse of the benefits system have fallen away. In the era of human rights, benefits, especially if they can be tied to disability, are seen as an entitlement, not a gift made by the community.
What Britain needs, if it is to renew the broken bonds of social fellowship, is an ad fontes moment — a renaissance and a revival of our British, classical and Christian heritage.
In ancient Rome, the res publica or commonwealth, was bound together by two civic virtues: pietas and fides. Pietas involved a sense of reverence and gratitude to parents, elders, the state and the gods. Just as important was fides, which concerned the horizontal bonds of trust between citizens. Whilst respect for laws and political authority derived from pietas, questions of mutual care, commerce and day to day relationships rested on this less elevated and more interpersonal notion of fides. Indeed, we still use the Latin word itself in the phrase bona fides and its direct translation, “good faith”, both in ways closely related to their original usage.
Rome, unlike the ancient Greek city states, was a vast republic of millions of citizens with a dense international trade network that anticipated modern globalisation. In this complex, multicultural society, the powerful Roman sense of civic trust, and attendant social penalties for breach of that trust, was a necessary precondition to political order and economic exchange. This trust was built not just on a sense of honour and patriotism, but on a shared sense of the sacred. Indeed, the very words sacred and sacrament relate to the Roman sacramentum, a terrible oath of loyalty witnessed by the gods.
The welfare state in its current form has metastasised from merely wasteful and unsustainable to part of something far more dangerous
No government regulation or well meaning charitable intervention can substitute for this inwards regulation of behaviour that derives from virtuous habits and beliefs. This strength of character is built from the individual’s profound awareness of themselves as a social being, connected by ties of duty and affection to those around them. This sense of good faith, of fides, is intimately bound up with his sense of reverence for law, authority and tradition, his sense of pietas.
Far from being ancient and dusty ideas ill fitted to modern democratic life, these qualities were once widespread and well understood as essential by English-speaking democratic cultures. This integrated vision of virtue and liberty can be found as early as the 12th century:
And so what is more attractive than liberty? What is more favourable to him who has some reverence for the virtues? We read that it has spurred on all outstanding princes; and none has ever trampled on liberty except for the manifest enemies of virtue.
The question of reforming welfare and rebuilding social security goes far beyond policy debates and earnest discussions of social trust and cohesion. As with so many areas of British life it is downstream of an existential question of who we are, and what sort of common life we seek to lead.
The welfare state in its current form has metastasised from merely wasteful and unsustainable to part of something far more dangerous: a disabling and alienating structure that is destroying the basis for democratic life and popular liberty. There are many possible policy answers to this problem, but they will come to nothing unless we also return to a robust account of the common good, rooted in the cultivation of public virtue.
