The British government is planning to restrict benefits for foreign nationals who are new to Britain, fearing that the end of the transitional measures to stem the flow of migrant workers from Romania and Bulgaria will mean an influx of foreign workers. These restrictions will include access to the National Health Service. Rather incredibly, a recent Times editorial (dated March 5th) uncritically made the claim that ‘getting out what you put in is a basic and popular idea of fairness’ and thus ‘British welfare needs to embody that principle’ – needless to say, the editorial is in support of restricting access to welfare for foreigners. The Times might be increasingly (and worryingly) right about the popularity of the idea that there ought to be some kind of parity between contributing to and benefitting from welfare, but it’s wrong about the rest.
What follows seems obvious, but clearly it isn’t, since the usually fairly percipient Times seems to believe that the opposite is obvious, so perhaps it’s worth saying. Most fundamentally, the purpose of a welfare system is not to give to each what they contribute. If it were, the welfare system would simply be an exercise in moving money around and then giving it back to the original owner. Rather, welfare is about protecting the vulnerable in society by harnessing the productive power of the best-positioned. It protects the disabled, the old, the ill, and yes – the unemployed. It may not work all of the time and sometimes miscreants may exploit it, but I’m very glad to live somewhere civilised enough to provide those protections.
Of course, there has to be an expectation that those who are able will work and contribute to the system as best they can. But there is no reason that I know of to think that Romanians and Bulgarians will try any less hard than Britons. Indeed, many people believe that the opposite is true, and I’ve actually heard it posited that immigration should be limited because it’s unfair to lazy British workers to allow the better, Eastern European, model to compete with them.
One does need to justify and limit the redistribution of resources. A myriad of reasons have been given for allowing the accumulation of wealth and prohibiting unabashed reliance on welfare: that we would slow the economy by limiting the simple pursuit of self-interest; that, by coddling the poor, we actually prevent them pursuing any kind of meaningful life; that property is fundamentally of moral value and the state should seek to avoid truncating the right to it; that too large a state is dangerous to individual liberty in general; et cetera. There is no denying that these ideas have merit.
However, none of them have anything much to do with the issue at hand – why we ought to exclude specifically newly arrived foreigners from social welfare. ‘Getting out what you put in’, if it in any way reflected the rationale for the welfare system and furthermore if there were evidence to suggest that foreigners are likely to ‘put in’ less than Britons, might be a plausible argument for such exclusion. Neither of those conditions prevail though.
Another way of looking for a justification of exclusion on the basis proposed is to look at the limits of the way in which welfare is justified. A strong welfare system in a liberal democracy is an indicator of a strong civic identity; it is a reflection of the ability of government to call upon a common identity to justify the appropriation and redistribution of wealth. There is little or no national bond of community between Britons and Eastern Europeans, which might be said to weaken the grounds for including them in the welfare community.
I won’t answer this argument directly other than to say that limiting the rights of newly immigrated residents of Britain purely on the basis that they aren’t ‘really’ ‘British’ seems to be logically fairly circular. Essentially, such reasoning relies on the self-evident value of British-ness and the self-evident gradation of British-ness within the resident British population. Common subjection to a state has been drawn on as a defence of the resistance of wealthy countries to radical global redistribution (but there isn’t space to explore that now), but there is no difference between ex-Bulgarians and Britons with regards to British law. If crypto-xenophobia is the best we can come up with in support of the Government’s proposals, then I’m not satisfied.
About the Author
“I’ve actually heard it posited that immigration should be limited because it’s unfair to lazy British workers to allow the better, Eastern European, model to compete with them.”
How dare you, quite snobbishly I believe, refer to working class Brits as ‘lazy’? I guess it is to be expected from a jumped up Cambridge kid who gleans his political views straight from the Guardian comment section, rather than real life experience. You might not like to hear this, but huge immigration has drastically reduced wages in many skilled trades, particularly within the building industries. That has left thousands of men, who used to earn a decent income, now having to compete for jobs with a paltry £7-8 hour pay rate.
It know it’s trendy and populist to be emphatically pro-immigration, but I don’t think you can be a true social democrat and yet turn a blind eye to more seamy, and less edifying, sides to immigration.
I wouldn’t normally reply to comments, but this one is too much to bear.
I was not seriously referring to the British working class as lazy — that whole section is steeped in irony, as I was referring to somebody else’s view which I find fairly implausible. Note also the comparison of the British worker to the European ‘model’. That word-choice (‘model’) pokes fun at the perspective which sees ‘the worker’ as a ‘product’ of industry rather than as a person and sees industrial policy as a large conveyor belt on which to ‘produce’ good workers. (In case further explanation is required — the word ‘model’ invokes for example car production, and it isn’t normally applicable to humans.)
I am fully aware that immigration has pushed down the price of labour in Britain because immigrants often do better work for less money. But why do we find this objectionable? I refer you to the latter part of my article, in which I suggest that prioritising British workers as such over non-British ones is only a morally feasible position if there is some kind of crypto-xenophobia at play.
And I don’t read the Guardian.