Out of control welfare is destroying Britain and the Conservative Party

Sunak and his acolytes are hopelessly reticent about making the moral case for shrinking our benefits bill

You know that politics is a busted flush when the big issue of the week doesn’t have a chance in hell of getting any traction. So hopeless is the cause that the Prime Minister could only mutter it under his breath during the Sunday media rounds, hitting the kind of sorrowful tone oft-mastered by Big Four accountants. He was prepared, he said, to take “difficult decisions” to “control welfare” in the pursuit of tax cuts in the March Budget. Those words are already a forgotten echo. One can barely hear anything over the battle cries and blood-letting as the Tory civil war over Rwanda recommences.

What is doubly frustrating is that a frank national conversation about the grotesque size of Britain’s welfare state is the key to solving so many problems. It is the missing part of the puzzle when it comes to controlling immigration. Government rebel Robert Jenrick recently intimated that the Tories’ are scrambling to solve the small boats crisis as consolation for the record levels of legal immigration. Yet this is so high in part because millions of Britons are on benefits instead of retraining to fill job shortages. Britain’s bloated welfare state is the biggest obstacle to ending the country’s economic stagnation; we cannot afford the package of tax cuts and stimulus investments that will deliver growth because the tax coffers are being splurged on benefits for those “incapacitated” by anxiety and an unsustainable triple lock pension.

Now more than ever, then, the Tories ought to be making the case for cutting the welfare state. Instead, Rishi Sunak has pretty much already lost the argument. This is for the painfully simple reason that neither he, nor his party, are willing to make the moral case for a rollback. Instead the PM relies on the “abacus argument” that we must cut the welfare state to balance the books, even though this approach will be no match for the grandiose pietism of the anti-austerity movement. Lest we forget, David Cameron ultimately abandoned his own plan for radical welfare cuts after a two-year war of attrition. Already, Left-wing activists are polishing their new narrative that after 14 years of “mean, cruel, punitive” Tory austerity, the party is about to make things worse for society’s most vulnerable.

Despite the Conservatives having little choice but to make a spirited moral case for cutting welfare, this obviously hasn’t happened. Whether that’s because the party is being compromised by cowards or infiltrated by political crossdressers who in truth find real conservatism rather ghastly is a moot point. What is clear is that making a principled argument for work would take the Tories well out of their comfort zone. One must go back almost 40 years, to the Thatcher era, to find a Tory government willing to make the ethical case for a smaller state.

Yet there is no shortage of arguments that the Tories ought to be advancing. Take the medicalisation of everyday stress, which threatens to reduce us to self-pathologising amoebas, a paradoxically flaccid yet also uptight new breed of modern human.

Consider the egregious tragedy of wasted human talent in a country where millions are not realising their potential through work. While the anthropological theories of underclass families trapped in a “culture of poverty’”, popularised by Margaret Thatcher, might today seem outdated, Tories need to find new ways to talk about the transfer of deprivation and multi-generational welfare dependency – ideally avoiding rants about “crap parents”. And even if ministers can’t realistically be expected to advocate raising the pension age this close to an election, surely there are backbenchers who might point out the indignities of encouraging idleness among fit and dynamic septuagenarians.

Then there is the curious rise of the middle-class “welfare queen”. One seriously wonders whether a “culture of prosperity” has developed in parallel to the “culture of poverty”. Although it has deviously cloaked itself in social democratic righteousness, the bourgeoisie has increasingly adopted a regal sense of entitlement. More than half of the population now receives more from the state than they contribute in taxes. There is mounting evidence that the middle-class benefit from welfare more than the most vulnerable, most recently with the expansion of “free” childcare. The triple lock pension effectively ensures that working families raising children in accommodation sprayed with mould can subsidise millionaire retirees.

Not that your average Tory MP would ever dare to go there. One can almost see the awkwardness radiating from the PM and others, espousing “the nobility of work” as if they were incanting the phrases of a dead religion. Perhaps that is because, in truth, the Right has lost its zeal for the glory of proper graft. On the Left, thanks to millennial socialists like Aaron Bastani popularising concepts like “fully automated luxury communism” (FALC) – a Left-wing utopia in which technology liberates us from work – Marx’s claim that labour-alienating capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction has acquired a modern gloss.

The question is, what is the conservative equivalent to the FALC Shangri-la? Surely it is a society in which everyone is earning a good wage doing skilled and rewarding job; where the UK has transitioned from a low-wage economy in which a quarter of jobs only require primary level education, to a high-skill, high-wage power, specialising in the creative industries, life sciences and AI.

To be truly compelling, such a vision has to be anchored in an actual conservative philosophy. One that stresses the obvious that work is not only the lynchpin of free market capitalism but also crucial to each person becoming the best version of themselves. As the Scottish-american moral philosopher Alasdair Macintyre has eloquently argued, not only do we derive pleasure from the “excellence” of the final product or performance of work, but the act of work should also help us to develop virtues that are crucial to us becoming the best versions of ourselves.

It is surely not beyond the capability of a moderately skilled politician to capture such lofty yet simple ideas. Instead it seems we are doomed to endure Rishi Sunak’s talk of “trading” tax cuts for welfare cuts as if all of politics, hollowed of all meaning, has been reduced to barter.

Work is not only the lynchpin of free market capitalism but also crucial to each person becoming the best version of themselves