Tom O’Grady is a lecturer in Quantitative Political Science at UCL and he has written an interesting article on the Welfare State. Using House of Commons speeches on welfare from the late 1980s to 2015, he finds that declining support for the benefits system was a top-down phenomenon. Shifts in political rhetoric – especially from the Labour Party – did not occur after public opinion changed, but took place slightly before the public was changing its mind about benefits.
Universal Credit represents merely the latest reform, the culmination of several decades of ‘welfare to work’ initiatives. These have taken Britain from a relatively generous welfare system to perhaps the least generous set of programs in the developed world. Benefits have been cut at the same time as the screws have been tightened on users of the system, subjecting them to ever more stringent conditions in return for their benefits which have proven popular with the public and were seen as a clear vote-winner. According to his research, O'Grady found this shift in public opinion occurred mainly in response to changes in the way that politicians have framed and discussed both the welfare system and its users over the past thirty years. As the public heard increasingly harsh rhetoric, their opinions altered.
Public dissatisfaction with the benefits system reached its peak in the late 2000s and early 2010s, just as Cameron came to power and began the Conservatives’ program of welfare reforms. Since then, only a slight softening in opinion is detectable. In fact, the biggest declines in confidence in the welfare system occurred not during the post-2010 era of radical reforms, but during the New Labour era of the mid-1990s to mid-2000s, when the 'reforms' began. Those earlier opinion shifts left the country in a position where further radical changes to the benefits system post-2010 were likely to prove popular.
It would be hard to argue that welfare-to-work policies under the Major, Blair, and Brown governments failed to reduce unemployment. By the mid-2000s, unemployment was at an historic low, and had declined even amongst hard-to-reach groups like lone parents and young people. Nor is there any evidence of large rises in benefit fraud, even though the public’s perception of fraud did go up significantly. Actual spending on benefits generally fell, too, but the public continued to want ever lower spending on them. This wasn’t merely the product of the booming late-1990s and 2000s economy lowering the public’s demand for government help. If that were the case, we would expect to see the declines in support going into reverse when the economy took a turn for the worse again. But the declines in support for benefits largely persisted during and after the financial crisis of 2008.
The fall in support for the benefits system was not driven by specific subgroups who did well over the period, like higher-income people or those from skilled occupations. Instead, the shifts in opinion were broad-based. For instance, support fell in the poorest income quartile almost as much as amongst the wealthiest.
In the 1980s and early 1990s, benefits recipients were depicted mostly as deserving, and the system itself was talked about as a highly legitimate means of poverty alleviation. That began to change from the mid-1990s. Users of the system became stigmatised, and benefits were depicted as ineffectual or even wasteful.
A break down parliamentary speech about the welfare state into sets of topics. It shows that from the late 1990s to the mid-2000s – in a very sharp break from the 1980s – Labour devoted substantially less time to talking about the benefits system and its users in positive terms than it did to problems with the system and the need for reforms. Positive mentions of welfare dropped and were drowned out by more negative discourse.
These shifts in rhetoric did not occur after public opinion changed. Politicians were not responding to public opinion; they were leading it. O'Grady says the large reversal in public support for benefits can only be explained as a reaction to the discourse of politicians, filtered through the media.
Young people changed their views more than older people. Younger cohorts who were socialised in an environment of much harsher criticism of the benefits system began their lives more opposed to benefits than previous cohorts did at the same age. Those altered views have tended to stay that way over the past 20 years. Labour supporters, too, were more likely than those of other parties to shift toward opposition to benefits, which is consistent with a ‘follow-my-leader’ dynamic. Circumstantial evidence shows that when representative samples of the British public are exposed to the same rhetoric that was used by politicians over the period, their opinions shifted in exactly the same manner as the real over-time shifts in opinion that occurred over the 1990s and 2000s.
The reason regressive program of reforms has proven highly popular has been that the public is simply unused to hearing welfare and welfare recipients talked about in positive terms. This may be starting to change, with increasing recognition of problems in the rollout of Universal Credit but if past experience is anything to go by, it will take a long time for the public to turn around their opinions. By then, British welfare provision will be almost unrecognisable compared to a generation ago O'Grady concludes.
One thing the article did not try to address was the question of why the Welfare State, that was originally supported by Labour and Tory governments alike, began to be dismantled. The blog tentatively suggests that it is a question of who pays the piper, calls the tune. The capitalist class was finding the cost too heavy upon the share of their profits which goes in taxation to the government and sought to reduce the price of providing for the poor.
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