The state should be there when things go wrong in our lives
Some years ago, just after I had become a parent for the first time and got a job I probably shouldn’t have got, I was stopped in my tracks by something one of my new colleagues said: “Nothing’s gone wrong in your life, has it”.
This was undeniably true, of course. I had waltzed from a privileged, stable upbringing, through school, university and Whitehall, and now been put in charge of a lot of very capable people who were much older and wiser than me. I’d recently married, moved to the city I love the most and was emerging from the newborn days with a baby son I adored.
But my colleague should have added an extra word: yet. “Nothing’s gone wrong yet”. The fact is, things go wrong in everyone’s life. You can have extremely lucky runs, like mine, but you can’t escape misfortune forever. In my case, it didn’t take too long for something to go wrong: soon afterwards, my son was diagnosed with a learning disability and one of my parents with a neurodegenerative condition on the same day.
Now, it’s not quite right to describe these as things going wrong. I love my son very deeply for who he is, and he brings an incredible amount of light to my life and to many other people’s. But he also has very significant needs, and will very likely need life-long care — which I may not be able to provide for all of his life, and frankly have no idea if the state will help with.
But the point of this piece is not to bemoan my own balance of luck, which still remains overwhelmingly weighted towards good. This piece is about the fact that things go wrong in everyone’s lives, and about how the state can and should support people through their misfortunes.
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The ways in which things go wrong in our lives are manifold. For instance, we will all, unless our lives are cut short, experience the loss of our parents. For some of us, this may be preceded by a period of decline on their part. Both can be extremely painful experiences, but they are widely shared. Grief can come at any point in life, but it cannot be escaped, only postponed.
Children are a net positive in most parents’ lives — they certainly are in my life — but they bring plenty of challenges. They require a huge investment of time and money, and parenting remains largely incompatible with high-flying careers for at least one member of a household. And of course, things can go wrong in children’s lives too.
Most of us are likely to experience illnesses, and these are debilitating if we are unlucky. For those of us lucky enough to grow up healthy, this may feel like a distant prospect for the early decades of our lives. But healthy life expectancy in the UK is below 63. If you live long (and luckily most of us can expect to), you are very likely to require at least some ongoing treatment, possibly much worse. That is before we get on to the challenges of mental health, which are not to be taken lightly.
Divorce, relationship breakdowns, domestic violence, widowhood, loneliness or worse are all far more likely to happen to us than we care to admit. While the the right to divorce and to leave partners safely is incredibly important, separations can impose huge costs, especially where children, caring responsibilities or shared property are involved.
Unemployment is an ever-present risk, and surprises most people in how debilitating it can be. My own, mercifully brief period of unemployment in 2008 sapped my confidence to an unimaginable degree (some would say there was a lot to sap) and radicalised me in support of full employment. Unemployment tends to be concentrated during economic downturns, but it can also be concentrated in places where local economies do not recover from downturns. When it becomes long term — and then often bound up with long term ill health — it is especially painful.
And these problems often compound. For instance, being disabled, or having significant caring responsibilities, affects your chances of finding work. Being out of work may further erode your mental and physical health. Parenting or caring on your own is much harder, and makes it even harder to work.
And on top of this, there are many other things that go wrong in our lives: burglaries, frauds, floods, eviction, crashes, injuries, fires. All can be incredibly distressing.
We all, of course, have to take some personal ownership for the things that go wrong in our lives. We buy insurance against some of the financial losses we experience during life, for instance. Sometimes we also have to accept a measure of blame when things go wrong. But many of the things that go wrong in our lives — even the ones that are inevitable — are marked by bad luck. And there is an overwhelming case for the state to support people through things that go wrong. Indeed, this is probably the biggest single role the modern state plays, and certainly the most expensive.
But in the UK, the support you get from the state varies enormously depending on what goes wrong in your life.
Get ill? If it’s life-threatening, you should get a good standard of care. But if it’s longer term, requires a non-emergency operation or involves your mental health, you’re much less likely to get the care you need. Because the NHS is over-stretched, and because we put too little emphasis on prevention.
Have children? The state provides a good education for most children for free, and some support is available. But have more than two children and your benefits are capped. Have a child with additional needs and it’s highly uncertain whether you’ll get the support you need, and it will certainly take a long time. Because local government and the whole special educational needs system is grossly under-funded and in disarray.
Have a parent who needs long-term care? You might be asked if you can provide the care, and if not will face an uncertain journey to provision. Because adult social care sits with local government and is grossly under-funded.
Lose your job? You should get support in the short term, but it may become more challenging — and dehumanising — if you cannot find work. Because cutting back on working age benefits always seems to be a politically attractive option for Chancellors of the Exchequer.
The challenges and expectations we put on the welfare state have, quite rightly, risen over time, as we live longer, as medical treatments advance, and as we focus more on supporting vulnerable people. In the UK, we have failed to keep pace with these expectations, either through increased funding or a more effective state.
The UK now has the outline of a modern welfare state, but it is increasingly failing to fill in the gaps. Those gaps let far too many people fall through, and the consequences are both individual misery and collective decline.
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This leaves the UK with a choice it needs to confront, between: closing these gaps in the welfare state, spending more money in the process; and reducing the number of things the state does for people. The current status quo, which is increasingly expensive but also leaves millions of people destitute and ill, is only getting worse over time. Making a choice, and being honest about why we need to make it, would greatly improve the quality of our political debate.
My argument, of course, is for the first option. I believe that the state should be consistent in supporting people through the things that go wrong in their lives. If that means raising taxes — and it surely does — we should embrace that. The UK is still a rich country. What else do we want to pay for more than support through a longer, happier life?
But there are some widespread attitudes — sometimes promoted by politicians — which undermine support for this. One is the tendency to demonise those who suffer misfortune, and to attribute blame to the sufferer rather than to brute bad luck. There is a corresponding tendency for those who do well in life to put too much emphasis on their own efforts, and too little on brute good luck.
The other is the belief that bad things happen to other people, not to you. This is a classic form of human myopia, like thinking the face-eating leopard party won’t eat your face. I’m sorry to break the news, but bad things will happen to us all. Maybe soon, maybe later. The only questions are about scale and timing.
These beliefs — especially that the welfare state is for other people — are not borne out by the evidence. In practice, the welfare state — healthcare, pensions, education, benefits — really does help everyone. The vast majority of fiscal transfers are between different phases of life — from working age people to the young and the old — than they are between different people. Most people get out from the welfare state a similar amount to what they put in.
The problem is that the welfare state — and many public services alongside it — do far too little to support those who suffer more than their share of misfortunes. I think we all have an interest in changing that. To do that, we need to be reminded that the welfare state is there for all of us, especially when things go wrong in our lives.
