This article from the Scottish Daily Record highlights the case of Richard Benyon, Conservative MP for Newbury and descendant of the old British Prime Minister Lord Salisbury.
Benyon is an outspoken critic of social security but does not demure at taking a total of £625,000 of housing benefits with regard to some of his tenants, or more accurately tenants of his family's company. To be fair Mr Benyon is stating that the figure is a clear overestimate, without elaboration, and I don't know how good a landlord the company is or whether it charges market rents or social rents or some combination of the two. However when someone is so vociferous about social security spending then isn't taking 1 pence of housing benefit money too much?
I think the article is also illustrative of the direction of travel in Great Britain today.
Firstly, the term "welfare" has become a pejorative term that slews the discourse. I always use the term "social security". I do believe that the case needs always to be made for there being a genuine safety net for people, including free medical care, free education and a basic income that can be relied upon irrespective of health or employment status.
Secondly, we clearly live in a country where someone with immense inherited wealth and a portfolio of properties can stand up and talk about a "something for nothing culture". I would like to think that his company's property portfolio consists of new built homes and properties brought back into use from a derelict state, but I am ever the optimist. More likely is that Mr Benyon's company own existing properties and has only marginally added to the local housing stock. So the rents, subsidised by social security payments, are an award to ownership and not to effort or hard work.
We live in a country where the "hard working families" agenda (ground over which the major parties squabble) is applied to people who sell their time to employers in return for an income stream. It is not to be applied to those who do not have to work to receive an income. It is therefore properly seen as an instrument of oppression.
In an economically just society we would expect all who could work to actually work, and we would also accept a responsibility for ensuring that work was available for all those that wanted it. That would also involve an examination of the economic rewards going towards profits and rents. I am firmly of the view that the rewards for mere ownership are too high, that the resulting wealth accumulation ensures that money does not circulate in the economy, providing jobs and wages, but instead accumulates in existing unproductive assets (financial assets and real estate).
An economic just society would also be a more robust society when economic and environmental shocks and crises struck. If we are genuinely all in this together then we should not allow politicians and other figures in the media to demonise a portion of the population for being cut off from participating in society because of the lack of financial resources.
Thirdly, I continue to notice the widespread incorrect framing of government expenditure as being funded from tax receipts. We have the great fortune to live in an advanced economy which has its own currency. There is no sense that the government needs tax receipts prior to meeting an expenditure in its national currency. In fact there is even an argument that it needs to spend to receive tax receipts, most particularly where economic conditions are depressed and where so much privately held wealth is accumulated in existing assets rather than being put to productive use.
Fourthly, it also demonstrates the importance of government money in providing for private profits and rents. The private rented sector is not a free market which brings out necessarily desirable outcomes. An important part of this is that we operate under conditions of uncertainty and in historic time, where income disparities and even greater wealth disparities often accumulate. But where where government money is such an important factor in sustaining those rents then those commercial rents will be subsidised and therefore higher.
