Daily Mail Blaming Welfare State for Philpott Fire is Symptom of Real Problem

Today the Daily Mail has outraged people on the left by linking the tragic case of a fire that killed six children with the ills of the welfare state. The court found that the fire had been started by the children's father so that he could be the hero who saved them. Except he didn't. Was this a situation created indirectly by government policy, and if so which government policy.

It is certainly true that across the UK there are to be found thousands of households where mothers have large numbers of children by numerous fathers who don't take much responsibility and for which the state meets the costs. Households like these have always existed and are the product of poverty and powerlessness as much as wilful irresponsibility. The main difference that the welfare state has made is that the children can be reasonably dressed, reasonably fed and have access to the education that offers them some chance of living differently from their parents. In another time many of the children in such families would have died as infants and those that survived would have had no choice but to start earning a living at an early age by being exploited as child labour, criminals or prostitutes. The failure of the welfare state lies not in the support it has provided, but rather in the failure of other policies to ensure that there has been the quality of education and opportunity needed to encourage and enable people to avoid poverty in the first place.

As the country that pioneered industrialisation and global empire, the UK suffered in the longer term from out dated infrastructure and an economy that was designed to serve an empire that no longer existed. The country's history since the second world war has been about the adjustments it has had to make. It has also been a time when it has tried to progress from the brutality that characterised the previous two hundred years, during which people endured horrendous exploitation and hardship while the country developed from a primarily agrarian base to become a diverse industrial and knowledge based economy. Through this period of development people could see the progress and change and even those experiencing extreme poverty believed that in due course that people like themselves would benefit. Much of this was an act of faith and Christian faith played a large part in helping people to retain hope and dignity in the face of horrendous hardship. Some of this faith was transferred to unions and the political process and there was a steady improvement in work conditions, education and opportunities that reached into the poorest communities.

The depression in the 1930's came as a massive blow to undermine all faith. In particular though it reminded working people that, when faced with a threat to their own prosperity that the elite and the secure middle class would turn on the poor and deny them the basics needed to hold their households together with dignity. Faced with government officials snooping around their homes for saleable items before qualifying for a form of welfare that involved queuing up with pillow case for food handouts, many men lost faith and hope to charity. Brought up to believe that their role was to provide for their families, the depression and its welfare system made them failures as humans. Many who had been solid church goers became drinkers and gamblers with the little they had, adding to their families hardship. The war allowed a fresh start, building not only on a more powerful state committed to improving the lives of working people, but on a pride for having fought and won a terrible war.

There was though the very real problem of an economy that was in poor shape. Much of the productive capacity of the economy was in need of massive investment to reach competitive productivity levels and many of its products were designed for an empire that no longer existed. Similarly, the systems of management and finance were designed for a passing world and the state did not know what to do with its powers to intervene. Faced with change and uncertainty vested interests dug their heels in, making change all the more difficult. The result was the opportunity, exploited by the neo-liberals, to allow short term profit seeking in a weakly regulated economy with a global reach. Again the working poor were sacrificed, but not without a gentler welfare system that was never the less abusive in its effects. As money flowed in from overseas investments, finance, arms sales and the sales of pharmaceuticals, the working poor moved into service industries, including a bloated retail sector as consumption of anything and everything was encouraged to churn profits. Investment from pensions and other savings was used to finance asset value bubbles to enable a massive expansion of asset backed debt, with commercial banks being given the freedom to expand the money supply as debt so long as inflation was contained.

When the bubble burst and banks went bust, again it was the poor who were seen by the elite and the middle class as the constraint on resolving the economic prospects of the country. What is not gaining proper consideration is what economy we actually need. The elite, the middle class and the other powerful vested interests are trying to avoid change by holding on to what they have, while hoping that there will be a return to a 'normal' of wasteful and exploitive investments and get rich bubbles. As always the working people of the country are waiting and willing to work for a better future and as always, those with the power and control of wealth are looking for the next chance to line their pockets, without any sense of vision.

We live on a small, densely populated island and rely on food, goods, materials and energy from around the world to maintain our way of life. As the rest of the world struggles with its own challenges, it is becoming less and less dependent on the little we can offer in return for what we want. We need to be able to offer more that is of real value. We need to want less. We need to develop the social, economic and cultural systems that are compatible with living sustainably on a finite planet carrying billions of people who, if they had any sense at all, would be working out how to avoid the awful consequences of a collapse of the ecological systems that support us and the depletion of the natural resources on which we rely. This is the context for our economic direction and has been for years. The failure of our policy makers to engage with this bigger picture has much to do with continued existence of poor irresponsible households. If the elite and the middle class want to cling on to the structures of power and wealth distribution that have failed to enable us to come to grips with our real challenges they can not blame the poor and powerless for being left in a limbo land where most of the time it doesn't really matter what they do.


The days where exploitative capitalism is the right strategy for creating wealth are over. We need to consolidate our gains. We need to get on with ensuring that everyone lives in a decent home that is easy to maintain and requires the minimum of energy. We need to take a good hard look at our food and ensure that everyone has access to a sustainable supply of healthy food and is not being sold toxic industrial food that is undermining their health. We need to ensure that everyone has the opportunity to develop the skills for cultural and social inclusion, including how to prepare food, play music and other creative expression. We need to redesign our spaces to minimise the need for transport, while making our public spaces enriching. We need to make our energy supplies sustainable. The list goes on and we know what needs doing. The challenge is to create the structures and systems for this to happen and to liberate ourselves from absurd economic notions that we must first pile our energy, time and resources into competing for the profits from exploitation of people and planet. Our aim should not to be endlessly rich, but to be prosperously poor. When we see headlines like today's Daily Mail we should see them for what they are: blame culture distractions to conceal the very fundamental failure of our leaders to even face in the right direction, let alone get to grips how we can be liberated to get on with the work that needs doing.