What follows is the second chapter (of 26) in Trevor Pateman, The Best I Can Do (2016) available from Amazon or Blackwell.co.uk. It has not been updated
Bus Passes and Benefits
I’ve never claimed my Free Bus Pass. I would be ashamed to wave it while paying passengers watch. Imagine that it was Coloreds who paid and Whites who didn’t .Where I live, looking at workers boarding the bus and paying their fares on the way to low-paid jobs, that’s not far from the reality. Nor is it far from the reality that poor people pay and better-off Over Sixties don’t. Yet the Over Sixties, quite solidly and sometimes fiercely, now seem to believe that they have a Human Right to bus travel paid for by others – even though Bus Passes are a very recent invention. How did this come about? The fault lies with our political parties, always looking for cheap ways to gain the favour of those most likely to vote. Any party now proposing to withdraw the passes would face a backlash of unreasoned wrath. My Benefits, right or wrong!
Bus Passes are not
Pensioner Passes. You qualify by virtue of reaching your 60th birthday, well
below the ages at which most people qualify for state pensions. At sixty, many
people are still working, their children are gone, and they have paid off
mortgages. They are better off than at any time before. Many of those waving
Bus Passes – of course, not all – are better dressed than they have ever been.
They can afford to be. Eventually, they will become old and even frail. It’s
always stressful to watch a frail elderly person board a bus, struggling with
shopping bags and sticks. They don’t need a Bus Pass any more. They need a
once-a-week Taxi Pass. Or, rather, they need adequate pensions. Free bus passes
are not only electoral bribes; they are also one of the cosmetic means by which
feckless governments have sought to disguise the inadequacy of State Pension
provision in the UK.
In relation to former
earnings, that pension is much lower than the European average: about one third
against an average of a half across twenty-seven other European nations. Our
governments have been too fearful to force people to pay enough into retirement
income schemes to fund adequate pensions and reluctant - until absolutely
forced by a huge rise in life expectancy- to raise the pensionable age. Until
very recently in the UK, the State Pension age for women was set at sixty. Men
at sixty-five. No one challenged that extraordinary bit of entrenched sex
discrimination. It had its origins in discriminatory thinking: women filled up
the workforce during two world wars and thus qualified for pensions. But
allowing them to take their pensions at sixty was also meant to ease them out
of the workforce, leaving more room for men who had fought. Over time, the
discrimination transformed from discrimination against women to discrimination
in their favour. But for decades no one challenged it.
Self-respect is very
much connected to the ability to make your own choices. Older people generally
benefit from walking or even cycling but politicians want you to take the bus.
The bus companies are happy enough; they get paid. The Bus Pass is a clunking
decision by politicians to make choices for you: Here, my good woman, take this
Pass and use that bus over there! And show some gratitude!
In a better world,
older people would dispose of enough income to make their own choices and thus
maintain an important aspect of personal dignity. It would be acceptable to
withdraw the Bus Passes and add to the State Pension the equivalent of the
money saved. All that you lose is the self-satisfied smile of the politician
who wants you to doff your cap and thank him (Gordon Brown, Ken Livingstone).
*
The Bus Pass is a
symptom of a deeper problem which resides at the core of the British Treasury
and the way it relates to British governments. The Treasury hates two things
above all: ring fenced money and entitlements. It is committed to the ideas
that all revenues should go into a single big undifferentiated Pot under its
own control and that all outgoings, whether to government departments or
citizens, are a matter of discretion. That is, of course, an understandable way
for a Treasury to think. It gives you the maximum of flexibility in what is
often – thanks to politicians – a struggle to make the books balance. But it is
also completely symbiotic with the interest of party politicians. They too want
maximum discretion.
Let me give one
example. British prime ministers now normally want to pick at least one war to
fight during their time in office. These wars of choice can be vote-winners.
They allow the prime minister to walk tall. Mr Cameron was deeply disappointed
in 2013 when he was not able to get his war in Syria, supporting Syrian
jihadis. He had better luck in 2015 when Parliament agreed to his new plan to attack
jihadis in Syria. It put him up there with the Big Boys. But equally a
government going to war does not want voters to think about the financial
costs. The last thing it wants is being forced to impose a War Tax. That would
make voters think twice about their gung-ho enthusiasms for bombing far away
countries. Fortunately, the Treasury pot is usually big enough to absorb the
costs of a small war, one which sticks to the cheap route to failure, that of
bombing civilians. Money can be shifted between notional budgets and, if not,
borrowing can be discreetly increased. But when monies are ring-fenced and
there are entitlements, it becomes more difficult. As a result of this way of
thinking, both Treasury and politicians are committed to the ideas (though they
would never admit it) that All Benefits
are Voluntary Hand Outs and No
Benefits are Entitlements. In other words, citizens have no rights.
The obvious way to
create entitlement to benefits is through insurance schemes. People pay into
the scheme and, at the same time, they are informed of their entitlements under
the scheme. That is what Britain’s National Insurance system was once supposed
to be about. But now it isn’t. No one pays in anywhere near enough to accumulate
entitlement to the benefits they can claim. Nowadays, it is merely a concession
to the idea that there can be benefits to which you are entitled because you
have insured for them. If the Treasury had its way, even that concession would
be abolished. The Treasury loathes the idea of insurance. It gets in the way of
tax and spend. The Treasury has almost a winning hand in one simple fact about
our psychology. We hate it when we see money removed from our pay packet before
we even get it: Pay as You Earn taxes, National Insurance. If National Insurance
was for realistic sums of money we would hate it even more. But when it comes
to paying 20% Value Added Tax on virtually everything we buy – well, we don’t
even notice it (often we don’t see it separately itemised). This is the
Treasury’s winning hand – taxes we don’t notice. Not only that, such invisible
taxes are not linked to any specific government expenditures. The Treasury gets
just the kind of money it wants, money it can use as it (or its political
masters) please. In addition, VAT quietly and effectively reverses the
progressive character of Income Tax and produces the desired overall result
that the poor pay a higher percentage of their income in tax than the rich.
The symbiotic Treasury
- Politician commitment to avoiding entitlements and favouring handouts
immediately opens the door to the parlour game known as Benefits Scrounging, in
which the winners are those who work out every handout for which they can make
themselves eligible and promptly claim them all. Those who celebrate their 60th
birthday by claiming their Free Bus Pass are benefits scroungers. They have no
entitlement to the pass, they have done nothing to deserve it, they often don’t
need it – but it’s there, a handout, yours for the asking.
*
We have an increasingly
shaky idea of what it means to be a citizen. The benefits culture, created by
politicians and sustained until very recently by an all-party consensus, has
been disempowering. It encourages childishness at election times as voters shop
around looking for the party which offers three for the price of two. No more
than that. No expectation that you think about the future, about your children
and grandchildren; certainly no expectation that you think about right and
wrong, justice and fairness. An obvious route towards re-building ideas of
citizenship involves, among much else, dismantling the Handouts culture and
re-instating the idea of a contributory system: you pay in for health care,
unemployment benefit, and pensions. That must be the expectation for nearly
everyone,
with a non-contributory but generous social safety net principally for those
who are born disabled or become so. It also involves challenging the Treasury -
Politician collusion. There is no reason why money should not be ring-fenced,
why taxes on X should not go towards paying for Y and only for Y. If
politicians want a war, then they must use a War Tax to pay for it. If voters
want a war, then they should be obliged to put their money where their flags
wave.
Probably the only
interesting alternative to this approach is the idea of a universal Citizen
Entitlement to a flat monthly income about big enough to live on. Everyone
would get it, regardless of income or age. For those in work, for example, it
would simply lower their tax bill. For those not earning, for whatever reason,
it would be a handout but without the disfiguring features of the electoral
bribes currently on offer to selected groups, most obviously and repeatedly in
the UK, the voting over 60s. The idea has the merit of threatening the
destruction of a thousand benefits bureaucracies, most of which end up in the
newspapers for incompetence of one kind or another. So it is a sleek proposal.
It has the de-merits that it hands money to people who don’t need it and, in
practice, will still have to include small print provisions for special cases
like those of people whose disabilities oblige them to make use of expensive
equipment or carers. From where I am coming from, universal citizen entitlement
has the demerit that it puts all citizens in the position of state dependents.
I have yet to read an argument that persuades me that is not the case.
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