With the benefit of hindsight: a short history of easy gifts and hard graft.
Christmas brings to mind my early days working for Barlow Myers – a forklift truck company on the outskirts of Maidenhead on the side of the airfield at White Waltham which has seen gallant service in the Battle of Britain. This all seems very long ago. It was long ago. It was just after I left school in 1972. I was barely eighteen.
A rickety old coach carried the staff from various pickup points in Maidenhead out along the A4 – the old Bath Road – down Cherry Garden Lane and into the industrial estate on the airfield. I worked there in the accounts department chasing payment from clients. The days seemed long. The work was dull. I think I started on a salary of £800 per annum. When I left a year later I was earning the princely sum of £1500.
It was my first proper job and the first time I had payed tax and National insurance; and additionally what was then called Graduated Pension. These were the days before bank cards and before credit cards. Looking back £800 a year seemed to go along way but I do remember it didn’t feel like that at the time. But whatever these times lacked they were times when there was plenty of work particularly in areas like Maidenhead.
But in the midst of that I understood that my taxes were paying for the National Health Service; and also provided me with insurance against ill health; unemployment and an old age pension. I knew these benefits would not keep me and would need to be supplemented by my own savings. On this basis I paid taxes all my working life until a few years ago I was forced by ill health finally to take early retirement.
Back in 1972 it was still customary for companies and their staff to give gifts and to receive them at Christmas time. And many businesses also gave their staff a gift. Sometimes it took the form of the chicken or turkey; or wine; or a car that could be used for private as well as business purposes; or, the least favoured a bonus – unless paid cash in hand.
Gifts in kind as opposed to the gifts of money were attractive because at that time they were not taxable. Gifts between companies and their representatives also largely consisted of bottles of wines; sherries; ports and most favourite spirits. A supplier often took out the customer for a meal at Christmas. A good salesman might hope to be kept very busy in his favourite restaurants for the month or so before Christmas day. No one believed they were placed under any obligation by giving or accepting such a gift. It was merely part and parcel of an accepted way of doing things. But like all plausible lies it was an untruth because gifts always buy favours in return.
In the 1970s governments of all political colours attempted to limit the value of such benefits in kind by taxing them. As ever the resultant messy compromise did more for the accounts departments of many businesses than for the taxman. It is never difficult for an ingenious mind to find an ingenious solution to a financial restriction. And as we now know to our collective cost – ingenious financial solutions inevitably leave someone else to pick up the check. But after the recessions of the late 1970’s and early 1980’s even in the city of London gifts in kind became unfashionable and eventually they went the way of that other favourite perk of the times, the business lunch.
Benefits in kind of course may buy all sorts of gits and those to political parties tend to buy political honours as well as access to ministers. And these as with the free lunch may not cost the Minister anything and they may be tax deductible for the donors but usually they cost the taxpayer something – which makes me wonder on what basis ATOS makes donations to the Conservative Party and on what basis the Conservative Party accepts them. For as they imply the Labour party is corrupted by donations from the Unions; and the working poor are corrupted by tax credits from the state; it surely certainly follows the Conservative Party is corrupted by donations from wealthy individuals and corporations which the corrupted Honours lists merely corroborate in kind.
I’m reminded of all this by the fact that Ian Duncan Smith, the Secretary of State for Work & Pensions has chosen this particular moment of the year to attack recipients of what he terms state benefits. Mr Scrooge could hardly have chosen a better time to make such a public observation than Mr Duncan Smith has by speaking out on this matter over Christmas.
One of might expect him to be ashamed of himself for sullying the season of goodwill by this display of bad faith. But politicians historically are always most shameless when they have something of which they rightly feel they should be ashamed. Mr Duncan Smith has made himself somebody by being the nobody who briefly led the Conservative Party only to be dismissed for poor job performance. Since his famous loss of employment he has remade himself as something of a Guru offering advice to the unemployed. He, we are assured, understands the complexities of the dependency culture because he has been both its victim and beneficiary.
However, like many who only perceive problems only in terms of their own experience Mr Duncan Smith (and his cohorts in the Department of Work & Pensions) overlook many inconvenient truths in their search for a convenient solution to the state’s obligation to pay benefits to the sick, disabled and unemployed.
When it comes to lost causes Mr Duncan Smith’s own experience has not tempered his capacity to make others the victim of injustice and unfairness. In his latest public sortie he claims without any evidence that £10 billion of public money have been wasted upon the tax credit system introduced by the last Labour government. Like most unsupported assertions this one is at best misleading and at worst mendacious.
Where Mr Duncan Smith and I would agree is that the state cannot provide benefits to the citizen like some Santa Claus; or even as a gratuity in the same way that a benefit in kind or a gift for a Christmas box was once provided to grateful employees in the lost Victorian past.
Where Mr Duncan Smith and I disagree is that the payments he characterises as benefits in these terms have in fact been paid for by the citizen in the form of National Insurance and other general taxation. The fact that governments chose in the 1950’s to fund these commitments to the welfare system out of ordinary revenue does not mean that current recipients have not paid for their benefits. Indeed, they’re beneficiaries only in the sense that they now draw upon an insured benefit – as they might on car insurance after a road accident or indeed a house insurance after some domestic emergency.
Political debate from time immemorial has polluted the crystal streams of fact with the poison of opinionated fiction. And from top to bottom this coalition government only goes through the motions of listening before it speaks. And when it does speak it talks the language the sewer – in relation to poverty and to the poor. Better men and women might be ashamed to stoop so low. But these men and women are no better than one might expect of the privileged who always perceive their own perks as well earned as they seize the mite from the dispossessed widow for their rent.
As we have the politicians we deserve they’re no less prone than their predecessors to stoop for an untruth to make a cheap case in public.They are shameless opportunists. And amongst the worst lies they have told is that the cuts they propose are both deserved and will not cause unsupportable hardship to those most in need. In characterising all as feckless shirkers unworthy of practical consideration they make the public discourse the poorer. If the poor were dogs or cats – or perhaps helpless as puppies or pretty as kittens – they would doubtless treat them better and blame them less.
But as greed knows no shame and as shame is a poor relation of conscience we can I fear expect not less but more of this denigration of the poor from our Rich Masters who have never suffered more than the passing indignity of missing a meal at high table as opposed to the shameful necessity of having to beg for one.
Since the Romans lost their Republic to Empire and their consciences to the Caesars we have deluded ourselves that politics is a noble profession. The oldest of professions owns more honour; more nobility and more honesty by comparison with the serial amorality of these men and women.
Although experience leads us to believe it will always be the same, I hope with all my heart that we may yet make something better than this farrago of injustice that we call government. Some might think that writing persuasively or arguing patiently will change minds. But these minds are closed; they are not open to persuasion. And when argument is made by means of deliberate distortions no correction will undo the lie.
Today, I read Peter Kellner’s article for YouGov. In it he argues that by New Year’s Day 2016 Mr Cameron will have been re-elected with a small working majority. He presents a plausible case. Of course like any exercise in fortune-telling the best guess may be the wrong guess. Truth told no one knows how the next election will turn out. Some may wish for a Labour government; some others for another coalition; some for Conservative government. As ever in politics we will only be wise after the votes are counted and after the event. The benefit of hindsight lends wisdom to our opinions which they never own.
Meanwhile, we must argue. At least those of us who can speak for ourselves will be heard even by those who now wrongly take our rights. But those who do not have the words; but those who cannot speak for themselves; for the poor left hopeless; for them we must find phrases to employ and work for words that may yet soften the heart of those in power who only see the begging bowl and have lost sight of the beggar.