Bill Carmichael: We need dignity not just benefits

It is true that benefits didn’t make Philpott a killer. He has been a violent thug, preying on very young women, all his life and was sentenced to a ridiculously lenient seven years for the attempted murder of a teenage ex-girlfriend in 1978. But is it really so far fetched to argue that what has been called the “benefits culture” aided and abetted Philpott’s depraved lifestyle?

If you strip a man of all dignity, self-respect and self-reliance and give him an inflated sense of entitlement – as our benefits system does – you end up with someone like Mick Philpott.

If you encourage selfishness and irresponsibility – as our benefits system does – you end up with someone who is constantly on the take with no thought of ever contributing anything back to the community that pays for his lifestyle.

The benefits system infantalises people and persuades them that they need never grow up and take responsibility for their own behaviour.

Children cease to be blessings and become commodities – the more you have the bigger the monthly benefits cheque.

Producing children became Philpott’s family business and he did very well out of it. Before the fire he was pocketing £60,000 a year in benefits – the equivalent of a pre-tax salary of over £90,000 a year.

The Philpotts were not materially poor. Like everyone else on benefits, they were housed, clothed, fed and received education and health care – all at the expense of their hard-working neighbours.

But spiritually and morally they were deeply impoverished. Philpott treated his wife and mistress as slaves, sending them out to work and pocketing their wages.

The reason he started the fire was to get a bigger council house and to obtain custody of the five children – and £12,000 a year in benefits that went with them – taken from the house by his mistress.

During the last Labour government – at a time of economic boom – the benefits bill rocketed by an astonishing 60 per cent. Our country is broke and we can no longer afford such largesse. The current Government’s very modest changes to make work pay is a necessary start.

But this is about something more important than money – it is about human dignity. It is simply wicked to condemn generations of people to wasted lives of idleness and moral turpitude.

As a society we must care for those in need – the elderly, the infirm and the sick – but everyone capable of work should be required without exception to do so, for their own sake if nothing else.

Class divisions

MY dad was a Liverpool docker and my mum worked in a frozen food factory. I was born in a council house and attended the local comprehensive school.

So it came as a bit of surprise that according to the BBC’s Great British Class Calculator that I’m categorised as “Technical Middle Class”.

It seems that the fact I know a solicitor personally, own my home (albeit with a big mortgage) and occasionally visit museums, art galleries and the theatre, skewed the results. According to the BBC’s survey, the traditional class divisions of upper, middle and working have been replaced by seven categories, with the elite at the top and the “precarious proletariat” at the bottom.

I take the British obsession with class with a pinch of salt. What matters isn’t the number of categories or the distinctions between them, but how easy it is to move up the social scale. And the sad truth is that since the demise of the grammar schools, social mobility in this country has taken a huge step backwards.