For almost 40 years I worked, paid my taxes and never expected to need state support. Then chronic illness changed my ability to work and I found myself relying on Universal Credit and Personal Independence Payment (PIP). It taught me something we seem increasingly to forget: any of us can move from taxpayer to claimant when life takes an unexpected turn.
A dangerous echo chamber
I am becoming increasingly tired of hearing people talk about “taxpayers paying for this, that and the other”, well, perhaps not the other! Seriously though, I think we need to be very careful about where this kind of language takes us. There is a tendency in political debate to talk about people who receive support from the state as though they are somehow a completely different group from the rest of us: ‘taxpayers’ over here and ‘benefit claimants’ over there. One group contributes, the other supposedly takes.
But that simply isn’t how real life works.
For almost 40 years I worked, paid my taxes and earned a good salary. I never imagined that one day I would develop a chronic illness that would fundamentally change my life. In the three-plus years before I retired last year, my illness meant I lost around £20,000 a year, and perhaps considerably more in potential earnings, because I simply couldn’t work as I once had.
I didn’t suddenly stop wanting to work.
I didn’t stop contributing.
My circumstances changed.
There was no sudden transformation in which I became a fundamentally different kind of person. I was still me.
I survived during that period with the help of Universal Credit, PIP and the limited amount of work I was still capable of doing. The illness is still here, and without that support, goodness knows where I would have ended up.
Social security as a societal necessity
That experience changed the way I think about social security. I no longer see it simply as an item of government expenditure. I see it as something much more fundamental: a collective safety net against the things in life that none of us can reliably predict or protect ourselves against: illness, disability, redundancy, caring responsibilities, losing a job, a relationship breaking down, being unable to find enough hours of work. And growing older. Any one of us can be knocked off course. That is what social security is supposed to be about. We all contribute to it, and any one of us can find ourselves needing it.
We should remember something else that is too often lost in this debate: many people receiving social security are working people. The idea that there is a neat dividing line between people who work and people who receive benefits is simply wrong. People can work part-time because of disability or caring responsibilities. They can be in low-paid or insecure employment. They can work full-time and still struggle to pay the bills. They can move between work and social security as their circumstances change.
Compassion over hostility
The millions of people who receive some form of social security today are no less diverse than the population as a whole. Some are working, some are looking for work, some are too ill to work. Some care for other people, some are children and some are pensioners.
What the majority have in common is not laziness or a lack of ambition. It is simply that, at a particular point in their lives, they need some help. The evidence should make us cautious about the increasingly familiar rhetoric about welfare dependency and people supposedly choosing benefits over work.
The Joseph Rowntree Foundation estimates that around one in five people in the UK are living in poverty. Millions of them are children, working-age adults and pensioners. Poverty is not a marginal problem affecting a tiny minority of people who have somehow opted out of society. It is a substantial part of the reality of modern Britain.
Importantly, poverty does not disappear simply because somebody has a job. Two things can be true: work should pay, and people who are unable to support themselves adequately through work should not be abandoned. Those aren’t contradictory principles. They are part of the same argument for a decent society.
When I read recently about someone wealthy complaining about children receiving free breakfasts, I honestly wondered: have we completely lost the plot? Children don’t choose the circumstances into which they are born. They don’t choose whether their parents have secure employment, whether the rent has increased, whether someone in the family has become ill, or whether there is enough money left at the end of the week to buy food. If providing breakfast means that a child starts the school day fed, able to concentrate and ready to learn, then frankly I am more than happy for my taxes to help pay for it. Why wouldn’t I be?
The Institute for Fiscal Studies has estimated that the expansion of free school meals in England will eventually benefit around 1.7 million additional children and could lift around 100,000 children out of poverty. That isn’t an indulgence. It is an investment in children.
Perhaps we need to step back from the language of ‘who is paying for it?’ and ask a different question: What kind of society do we want to build? One where we look at a hungry child and first ask whether their parents have contributed enough? Or one where we simply say: feed the child? I know which society I want.
A tempting rhetoric
My concern is that we are entering a period in which the growing financial and political resources behind populist movements may increasingly be used to convince people of a very simple story about why people are struggling. The story goes something like this: ordinary people are having a hard time because somebody else is getting something they don’t deserve. It is attractive because it is simple. But simple does not mean true.
If people are angry about the cost of living, insecure employment, housing costs or the state of public services, it is much easier to point blame towards somebody receiving benefits than to explain the complicated economic and social forces behind those problems. This can make vulnerable people convenient targets for frustrations that have much deeper causes. Disabled people can be portrayed as a burden. People on low incomes can be portrayed as irresponsible. People who need social security can be portrayed as somehow less deserving than those who do not. And those of us who argue that society has a responsibility to support those people can be portrayed as naïve and unconcerned about taxpayers’ money.
I don’t believe we should accept this framing nor do I think we need to respond with anger. We can respond with something much more powerful: evidence, experience and a different understanding of what citizenship means.
A fairer future
Of course, governments need to spend public money responsibly. Of course, fraud should be tackled. Of course, the tax system should be fair, and work should provide a decent standard of living. But none of those things requires us to turn poverty into a moral failing. Indeed, if we really want to reduce the number of people needing social security, then surely we should be interested in reducing the causes of poverty and insecurity in the first place. That means looking seriously at wages, housing, disability, ill health, insecure employment, childcare and the costs faced by families. It means recognising that the social security system isn’t simply about ‘them’, it is about all of us.
I am paying tax again now, and I don’t begrudge one penny of it because I know something that we all need to remember. None of us knows what is around the corner. I never expected to need the state, but when my circumstances changed, I was incredibly grateful for it and it is probably fair to say that without that support, I might not be here now. So yes, my taxes help pay for other people and I am proud of that. Because those ‘other people’ aren’t really other people at all.
They are our neighbours.
They are our colleagues.
They are working people whose circumstances don’t quite add up.
They are children who had no say in the circumstances into which they were born.
They are disabled people trying to live with conditions they never chose.
They are parents trying to keep their families afloat.
They are older people who have spent a lifetime contributing.
And sometimes they are people like me: someone who worked, paid taxes, made plans and assumed that life would continue more or less as expected – until it didn’t.
One day, it could be me again.
It could be you.
It could be someone you love.
That, surely, is why we have a social security system. Not because people have failed but because sometimes life happens and, when it does, I would rather live in a society that reaches out a hand than one that points a finger.
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