Cruel leftist compassion

A London based publication, The Business touches on the failure of welfare “as we knew it” which continues to enrapture the modern European left’s notion of being human. Like most of their failed notions, they’re actually meant to inoculate themselves of feelings of guilt. In fact it has the effect of spreading misery. The article benchmarked what welfare reform in the U.S. has done:

Further proof of the programme's success can be seen in the reduction in the child poverty rate, which fell from 21% in 1995 to 17.8% in 2004, according to an analysis from the Heritage Foundation. There are 1.6m fewer children living in poverty today than when welfare reform was enacted. Black child poverty was higher in 1995 ( 41.5%) than in 1971 (40.4%), despite billions of dollars spent on anti-poverty programmes; since 1996 black child poverty has plummeted at an unprecedented rate, to 33% in 2004. The drop in child poverty for single-mother families has been just as striking dramatic: after stagnating for about 25 years, the child poverty rate among single mothers fell from 50% in 1995 to 42% in 2004.

The lack of political will to actually unburden people of poverty in the UK is the article’s point. They note that the idea of reducing poverty by giving people little checks remains pervasive. Nor is the political will there to change it.

In the run-up to their landslide victory in 1997, when they [Blair and Brown] were united by a common desire to modernise the Labour Party, both came back from America with notebooks full of ideas from the Clinton New Democrats.
...
But Mr Blair soon met the limitations of his party, which was never as "new" as the prefix implied. In December 1998 when he cut benefits for lone parents, dipping a pusillanimous toe in the waters into which Mr Clinton had plunged, he was met by his first Labour Party rebellion: it took just 47 Labour rebels to give welfare reform a bloody nose.
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Why? Because the British Labour Party, however "new" it claims to be, is congenitally and ideologically incapable of delivering welfare reform. In America, even on the liberal-left, a family on welfare is seen as both wasteful and a tragedy; there is now a broad consensus that old-fashioned welfare spending merely sustained (indeed encouraged) poverty. But the British Left regards welfare as income redistribution in action – the more of it the better and to hell with the consequences. Family breakdown, welfare dependency as a lifestyle, sink estates patrolled by feral youths, generations blighted by an endless cycle of deprivation – none of it really matters as long as welfare benefits keep on rising to salve their conscience (surely poverty will fall if we increase welfare) and satisfy their ideological purity (welfare equals income redistribution so it must be good).

Part of that affection (requited generously by patronage) is the notion that central government can create employment too. In any self-regenerating or meaningful way, it really can’t. It can hire more flunkies itself, and only create jobs by burdening the sectors of society that would create more jobs than any government itself could anyway. Demanding more from the state to cover otherwise capable people simply drags them further down instead of letting the aid go to those who really need it.

By casting their net so wide, they effectively create a class of social parasites who logically see a handout from others as motivation to do less for themselves, all the while distracting from the needs of the truly needy, and blurring the notion of what people can expect from society.

For example, why is the NHS paying for this at all when they flunk out on health basics? All it is, is a transfer payment from the society at large to a untouchable political faction who isn’t at medical risk themselves at the cost of less unreasonable people. The goal? To bilk a personal benefit of some sort, just like welfare taught you.

The question remains: why do governments get into that business at all?