Benefit cuts: the devil in the detail

The story, though, was fair enough. It was an attempt to compare public attitudes since the time of the welfare state's founding with attitudes now. Use was made of the most recent British Social Attitudes Survey (BSAS). Who argues with statistics?

Who argues, meanwhile, with the sentence imposed on Mick Philpott for the mad, despicable scheme that cost six children their lives? Fifteen years minimum is not remotely unreasonable for what the judge called a "shockingly dangerous enterprise" in which Philpott plotted to torch his house and frame a former mistress in a child-custody fight. His wife Mairead and his "friend" Paul Mosley were also jailed, but the scheme was his.

Philpott didn't work; he refused to work. He was pocketing thousands in child benefit for 11 of the 17 children he had brought into the world. He was also robbing the women in his life of their miserable wages as cleaners. Philpott was, beyond question, a thug and a parasite. Public opinion is clear where his kind are concerned.

According to those BSAS statistics, clarity is not confined to one case. In the BBC reporter's precis: "More than a third of the population (37%) thinks that most people on the dole are 'fiddling'. Almost two-thirds of people (62%) think unemployment benefit is too high and discourages work. In 1993, during the last recession, the figure was 24%.

"Today six out of 10 people agree with the proposition that 'around here most unemployed people could find a job if they wanted one'. In the early 1990s, only three out of 10 people agreed."

Half-way down the tale, in a single-sentence paragraph squashed between historical stuff, there was this: "Today policy-makers talk with alarm about the 340,000 households in which no-one has ever worked."

That is, undeniably, a big number. It might explain why 62% think as they do about unemployment benefit. It would certainly explain why Tories have seized on "welfare" as the reason for Philpott's parasitic lifestyle and crimes. Surely that big number tells us everything?

Try other numbers. How many households are there in the UK? According to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), there are 26.4 million of them. In other words, in 1.288% of households "no-one has ever worked". How many people are in those households? The ONS says 29% of all households contain just one person. The haul of scroungers begins to dwindle.

You can press on. The Office for Disability Issues says there are 11 million people in Britain with a "limiting long-term illness, impairment or disability". The Disabled Living Foundation estimates that there are 770,000 disabled children under 16. So the number of households in which no-one has ever worked begins to acquire a context.

In December 2010, meanwhile, the NHS Information Centre calculated that (in England and Wales) 12% of people over 16 were caring for a sick, disabled or elderly person. That equates to five million carers. For many, a job is a physical impossibility. Would anyone treat those who must stay at home, who might have been caring for a relative for decades, as akin to Mick Philpott, or as metaphors for moral chaos?

Foolish question. The Government no longer bothers to deny that one in three households containing a disabled person will lose £156 a year with the 1% benefits cap. Meanwhile, George Osborne, our Chancellor, has been inflicting a lie remarkable even by his standards on supermarket workers in Kent.

First, the Chancellor says that "around nine out of 10 working households will be better off as a result of the [welfare] changes we are making". Then he says the Government has had to take "difficult decisions" in order to cut the deficit. Some of us verge on stupid, but Osborne is claiming that he is saving on social security by making people better off.

George Gideon Oliver Osborne's welfare needs are minimal. At 41, he gets £134,565 a year, earns rental income from a London house, and has a trust fund in his name worth 15% of the value of Osborne & Little, the family wallpaper firm. At the last estimate the fund was worth £4 million. He still managed to "flip" his second home amid the MPs' expenses scandal, saving himself a bundle in corporation tax.

Osborne has never worked, not in the public or the private sector at least. He has filled his time as a researcher, "special adviser", speechwriter, parliamentarian and a Chancellor who tells low-paid Kent depot workers: "For too long, we've had a system where people who did the right thing – who get up in the morning and work hard – felt penalised for it, while people who did the wrong thing got rewarded for it."

Osborne has had plenty to say about Philpott. Last week, he said: "It's right we ask questions as a government, a society and as taxpayers, why we are subsidising lifestyles like these." The Tory chorus could already be heard. In the Daily Mail, the Philpott headline read: "Vile product of Welfare UK."

So there it was: social security causes manslaughter or worse. Give money to the undeserving poor and moral collapse will follow. The proof, there on the front page of the Mail, is in the career of one thug and in a statistic that can be picked apart in 10 minutes.

Osborne is the unlikely strategist in a Tory campaign to persuade us to despise the poor. What's more unlikely is that he is succeeding.

Let's put it on the record once more. Osborne's chief victims will be those who are in work but underpaid, their children and the disabled. They are "welfare dependent" because they are poor and need help, not because they are morally flawed.

In answer, Osborne wants to cut the minimum wage. Those robbed once to settle bankers' debts face destitution and victimisation. It won't be worth a headline in the Mail. It might leave a small, nasty scar on the conscience of the great British public.