Politics is the art of the possible and not about the creation of ideal solutions, about which few are likely to agree in any case. It's important that this is understood because far too many political debates argue over the pursuit of goals that are unachievable.
This is the audio version:
The transcript is as follows:
Perfection is the enemy of the good. I wish I didn't have to say that. I would have thought it was glaringly obvious. And yet, time and again, when I am engaged in public debate, I come across people who argue that we must have a perfect outcome to a situation. And if we can't, then we shouldn't do something.
So, for example, and I'm going to use an example which is very familiar to people who've been following my videos of late, let us look at the vote to remove the winter fuel allowance that Labour has put through Parliament.
Many people have said this is justified because there are people who are pensioners who do have sufficient income and who do not need the £300 payment, and therefore, they should have it taken away even if those who are in the most marginal situation where they cannot claim pension credit because their income is just above the allowable limit lose as a consequence.
In other words, seeking a perfect solution to get rid of people like me, they must get rid of those people who actually really very badly need it but who don't qualify for pension credit and will be in poverty as a result.
This is an idea that represents perfection being the enemy of the good. Yes, you can argue that I don't need the winter fuel allowance. Yes, you can argue that I should pay tax on it, and I would agree with you. But if you want to get rid of paying it to me, you are at some point going to create a crisis for those who need it and who don't qualify for it.
What is more, you'll create a crisis because we know that throughout the entire history of non-universal benefits, like the pension credit system, that there has been a major problem with people making applications for such benefits because they don't know how to do so, or they can't face the administration of doing so, or these days they do not have the digital access which is virtually a prerequisite of making the claim.
So, what we know is that however hard we try to get a system that will preclude me from getting the winter fuel allowance, we will also be punishing those who need it.
And what we have to accept is that there is a tradeoff. The tradeoff is either a very expensive system with a much higher threshold for excluding people, which will not punish those who are likely to need it, but which therefore requires a whole new application process, or we accept that that is just too expensive and too onerous and too unlikely to work and therefore we do instead accept that there is a cost to paying people like me but it's worth doing because we achieve the social gain of ensuring that people aren't going to die of hypothermia because they will have enough to settle their winter fuel bills.
There is no perfect answer to the problems I've just posed. Whichever one we opted for, we would end up with a compromise which would not suit everyone. There would be some people who gain in some systems, some people who lose with significant cost in other systems. Whichever way we look at it, we've got to accept that we're making a choice which will be suboptimal. And that's what politics is about.
Politics is about deciding what is the least worst choice in very many cases, and not what is the best choice. So, you have to have a criterion for deciding what is the least worst choice.
And the criteria for that is the least worst choice is the one that benefits the most vulnerable the most.
So the choice that has been made by Rachel Reeves is not the best one because it punishes some who are vulnerable very heavily. That is not a good choice as a consequence.
She could, instead, maintain the current system. That would have been a good choice, because that ensures that the most vulnerable are protected, and that is the criteria for an ethical decision.
And she could have decided to build the £300 winter fuel allowance into the basic state pension, because that would also have protected the most vulnerable.
But she chose the worst of the options.
Whenever a politician has to make a choice, they will never be able to achieve perfection.
They have to be suboptimal, but their suboptimality must, and I cannot stress this enough, always be biased to the vulnerable. If the vulnerable and the poorest are not protected by the decision, it will always be a bad decision when there was a better one available that did protect those people. It's as simple and straightforward as that.
And that is what ethics is all about - having a guiding principle that makes sure that those most in need are protected from whatever it is that society is exposing them to unnecessarily, even if as a consequence some others gain perhaps inappropriately.
We must have a bias to the poor. That is what this is all about. And without that bias to the poor, we will not have good decision-making from Labour or any other government, because the role of government is to protect people in this country from harm. And one of those harms is poverty imposed by government by poor decision-making, and they have a duty not to do that.
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Whatever decision process one uses there will always be some that get benefits unjustly/fraudulently and some deserving/needy folk that don’t get the payment.
It can be no other way.
Problems come when media stereotypes drive policy. “Wealthy boomers get winter fuel payment” or “young mums having babies to secure child benefit” or “lazy scrounger living off the state”. What policy do you get? No winter fuel payment, two child cap, punitive unemployment benefit regime.
Exactly
“lazy scrounger living off the state”
@Clive Parry
Are you referring to the British Royal Family? They seem the poster children to me.
Not in mind when I wrote…. but you are spot on.
The “lazy scrounger” stereotype is one Starmer has aligned with specifically. “Handouts lack the dignity of work,” he claimed in June. And Reeves thinks the same way: Labour is not the Party of people on benefits, she has pronounced. The Mr Bumble and Mrs Corney of the 21st century.
Sad, very sad that Labour won’t challenge the Daily Express/Mail/Telegraph narrative.
“Handouts lack the dignity of work,” he (Starmer) claimed in June….as he collected his freebie clothes, suits, glasses, football tickets & wife’s free dresses……you couldn’t make this up !
The Daily Express and Telegraph effectively write the Labour Party’s policies. Different language of course, but the underlying message is the same. We have no money. The only way out is more austerity; the same Fiscal Rules. We are going to have twenty years plus of austerity as the road to growth. This is the same austerity we had for the last fourteen years; no growth, a flatlining economy and collapsing infrastructure. How do you distinguish newspapers from undiluted political propaganda? You don’t.
The face value of everything you read in the mainstream press is invariably NIL. Start from there.
“First do no harm to the vulnerable” should be a key principle of government.
I think ending the Winter Fuel Payment the way it was done shows black and white thinking. In the grey area they could have reduced the amount, better to have something than nothing, or split it in two with the most vulnerable getting both parts but the better off getting just one or none at all.
I haven’t heard of this suggestion before, sounds interesting!
I wonder what the cost would have been if they’d done the figures. Say £150 to everyone but those on pension credit get an extra £150.
It MUST ‘save’ money while protecting the vulnerable.
This is an excellent post. It reminds us that after decades of self-centred Thatcherism what British society needs to re-learn is the importance of balancing individual needs against those of others. It should now be obvious “Free Gear Kier” and his cabinet aren’t going to do that!
The £300 winter fuel payment is a peculiar thing. We could increase the basic state pension by £6 per week (which taxable, clawing back some from those with most income who are also likely to be the same wealthiest) and hope pensioners will budget for the increased cost of winter. We could make a one-off pension payment of £300 for say Christmas (ditto) but timed for colder weather. We could provide £300 of free fuel, just like the free TV licence (so government pays the provider direct – or expects then to provide that for free as part of their conditions for licence to trade, passing the cost on to other customers). But instead we provide a one-off tax-free benefit, now with additional administration and compliance overhead for both the state and claimants.
Why was it ever designed like this? Is it just a political message to deal with a political problem – that is, public concern about failures of policy that result in too many pensioners in poverty?
Increasing the state pensions (we must remember there are a couple currently extant) will be largely futile unless the tax thresholds are properly adjusted accordingly. As it stands it won’t be the much better off who lose gains through taxes, it’ll be almost everyone. My point is while I agree the state pensions do need to be far more substantial to be realistic, it’s important to look at the idea in context. This needs sorting out fast too – how long before people in their 20s, 30s and up start asking themselves why they’re bothering with their side of the social contract (ie peacefully observing the law and not rioting) if all that awaits them by way of reward is being frozen and starved to death in their dotage?
Not as things stand. The full basic state pension is £169.50. For 52 weeks that is substantially less than the personal allowance of £12,570. Many claim additional state pension on top but there is no fixed or basic amount. The full new state pension is £221.20, which is £11,500. So even adding £300 would not go above the personal allowance, not just yet.
The collision of inflation-linked increases in the state pension with the frozen personal allowance is a problem for tomorrow.
@Bill Kruse
I believe politicians and corporations have brain washed people (especially in the USA and UK) to believe that life and society is a Zero Sum Game.
I see this in the USA with Mr. Smith believing that if real need poor Mrs. Jones gets something from the government to make her life easier then that is that much less that the government can do that will benefit him. Mr. Smith does not see that helping real need poor Mrs. Jones will also benefit him greatly in the long run.
Andrew,
The problem is always at the margins (and these are large, unstable margins), which with fiscal drag, static personal allowances inevitably drag more and more people into the net of taxation. Therefore, look at someone who has been sucked into paying income tax through fiscal drag, but by a modest amount. The £300 WFA was tax free, and has gone. This becomes an enormous burden to try and recover (pre tax, almost a £400 wage increase required just to stand still). For people in that predicament, facing 10% energy price rises this winter, this is crushing. And while inflation has fallen, people are still paying the baked in huge inflationary price increases, that are now effectively permanent fixtures. It is also a disincentive to employment when the jobs available may only be low paid, zero hours, with no escape from the tax effectively offsetting the reward for working.
Suppose someone in this WFA predicament may receive some help from other Government sources; but that assumes they apply for it (and the Government already knows that many elderly are proud, and do not wish to apply for handouts, which they consider demeaning. Why would a Labour government not understand this, and the unpleasant history of ‘means testing’; or do they secretly say – ‘good’, low uptake saves the Government money?). Yet there is a vast bureaucracy just to monitor this Byzantine application nonsense; when universal benefits fit for purpose are cheap to administer.
Andrew I’m on the new state pension, which includes, for me, a ‘protected payment ‘ related to my employment history. My state pension this year exceeds the tax free allowance. Many will be in a similar position.
Pension credit is designed to increase the old state pension to the basic level of the new state pension.
A good number of points. You could argue that to make WFA fairer (if you think giving it to high earners is a real problem – though I can think of other issues relating to high earners), and to simplify the system – (its an additional payment and involves a degree of bureaucracy working out the different rates), then incorporate a basic amount into the state pension which is taxable. Easy to do!!
As for the need to make any cuts – highly debatable – and where to raise funds, I came up with about £74billion using your analysis and other sources. So more money could be found if necessary. Again it seems that this government is simply not up to the job. What is annoying is that people are still making excuses for them “Oh well they are better than the Tories”, (not that I had noticed! – in fact if you did not know that there had been an election you would assume it was a Conservative government which was doing all of this), or “Its early days, things will get better”. If this is what we get in the early days, well the future is pretty bleak!
Reference Andrew @ 08:19. “We could increase the basic state pension by £6 per week (which being taxable, claws back some from those with most income) and hope pensioners will budget for the increased cost of winter.”
A simple solution! I like it very much so ‘Liked’ it with a click on the ‘Heart’ image. Maybe more readers of this blog should respond to those who comment on Richard’s work to give him even more feedback. I’d prefer a choice between ‘thumbs-up’ & ‘thumbs-down’ so I can vent my anger at the trolls.
Thumbs down attracts trolls…
I tried it and that was all that happened
Do you not think it i strange that the removal of the winter fuel payment has caused much concern, yet we have a pension system that pays pensioner A 25% less than pensioner B who was born 24 hours later and we don’t blink an eye lid? Simply calling them the old and new state pension makes Ok.
I agree: that is absurd
Yes having two pension rates is absurd. Should raise all state pensions to the upper level. Commentators and the govt seem not to recognise that if people have a bit more money to spend they will usually go out and spend it which keeps others in employment! Even those who have read the Noddy book of economics should know that!
Indeed, Peter Wills, that’s the reasoning behind social security.
Rather than a punitive fudge to solve a symptom, I would like to have seen the government- any government – fix the problem.
And that problem is the subsidising of energy companies and adherence to a pricing mechanism that keeps energy prices linked to international gas prices therefore guaranteeing windfall profits.
In Scotland where at times renewables gives us 100 % of our needs for almost nuppence per ‘therm’, we pay the highest prices for our energy which adds insult to injury.
Mike Parr of this online parish I’m sure could give us a guesstimate of how much lower ALL fuel bills would be if only we had a government interested in tackling root causes.
And that also leads to the need to check any of the economically illiterate mutterings that are bound to come out of Liverpool in a fanfare of faux solutions this weekend. They will be designed to appear to solve symptoms, not upset the donors, sponsors and elite chums who benefit from the staus quo.
It is disappointing that the new government has taken no action to tackle the high cost of energy by reviewing the absurd way that prices are calculated. Why are generators of nuclear or renewables paid more when gas prices increase? Perhaps the budget will include a windfall tax but I doubt it.
It might be worth pointing out that the current formulation of politics actually protects the rich from meeting their responsibilities in a system that seems perfect for them.
They can influence policy and law through funding politics.
They can raid other’s wealth through markets without consequence to themselves.
They can displace blame onto others.
They’ve even go us worshiping them and seeing their lifestyle as a sign of success and desirable.
Nicely sewn up if you ask me. In fact its a paradise for them.
For the rest of us mortals it increasingly feels like a penitent existence just for being normal (human?), as the Welshman said..
It’s just poor reasoning.
We should stop giving people food, they may get food poisoning (33 million die each year)
https://www.who.int/multi-media/details/estimates-of-the-global-burden-of-foodborne-diseases
People must stay in bed, getting out of bed kills over 400 Americans per year.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21884400/
Eat ultra-processed foods which have added vitamins and nutrients.
https://world.openfoodfacts.org/product/4800361310031/corn-flakes-nestle
Smoke Camel cigarettes, more doctors smoke Camel than any other brand.
https://www.greathealthnaturally.co.uk/2015/08/27/throwback-thursday-health-the-backwards-era-when-doctors-promoted-smoking/
Read: “The fight for universalism” by RobinMcAlpine (credit: Ron Arnott)
https://robinmcalpine.org/the-fight-for-universalism/
This is a really important issue, which Richard and Clive Parry have effectively identified the facts, in the real world. Then there is the Tabloid Fantasy world. It is an issue the Right and the their Tabloids constantly exploit to defeat fairness and the effectiveness and authority of the tax and benefit system. This is why they spend so much time obsessing about benefit cheats, or the marginal imprecision of universal benefits; solely to draw attention to the relatively insignificant in money and cost terms, and away from the really significant problems of relative poverty. The Right focuses instead on the lurid exaggeration of benefit cheats as the major issue which they stoke in the Red Tops with lurid examples of the worst examples they can find. The purpose is to demand perfection. I suspect Conservative governments spent more money pursuing benefit fraud (and spending it badly), than they saved pursuing it. Meanwhile tax avoidance and tax evasion is allowed to run out of control and vast amounts of tax is lost, because HMRC does not have the resources to gather the tax that is available by focusing attention on what really matters in money terms, rather than what matters to politically motivated tabloids who care nothing about facts.
The progressive income tax system can quite easily compensate in its higher rate application to recoup any universal benefits paid to the better off. Any marginal imprecision created by a tax and benefit system cannot be fixed by ANY tax system; broad fairness is the objective; unless the proposal is now that every tax payer has his or her own à la carte tax system. But the marginal inaccuracy is typically paid by those best able to pay, and least affected in their standard of life by the imprecision. If à la carte tax was attempted for every tax payer (suppose it was even possible, just as a thought experiment), it would collapse almost immediately in a welter of outraged public accusations of unfairness and unfathomable difficulties of application.
In terms of yield successive governments have spent vastly more on chasing benefit errors than tax abuse. The need to change that bus high.
The person to whom I would defer to on this matter is Prof Paul Spicker. The last book I have by him as ‘How Social Security Works’ (2011 edition). He is I think at Aberdeen’s Robert Gordon University – I cannot post links in my posts as it loses them but Spicker has a blog of his own ‘Social Policy: Commentary’. I discovered him when a housing student and he is fair and sensible in my view as well as an advocate for social security.
In 2011 he pointed out that benefits without means testing had less fraud/mistakes than those with (p.247) and that the problems of fraud are exaggerated.
There are 3 main contributing factors of estimates in fraud concerns:
1. Genuine fraud
2. Over payments through customer error
3. Over payments through official error.
Pension Credit (Means Tested):
Fraud: 1.5%
Customer Error: 1.5%
Official Error: 2.1%%
Retirement Pension (age qualifying but serves the basic client group as above);
Fraud: 0%
Customer error: 0.1%
Official error: 0%
Claiming pension credit is more difficult than a retirement pension.
In my housing career, I have seen quite a few over-payments in rent accounts being clawed back by the DWP over the years and also been on the phone to benefit offices pleading cases of hardship created by mistakes.
Overall, it is changes involving hardship – either going into it and even coming out of it where mistakes are be made on benefits.
You cannot say hardship is a causal element among those fraudulently abusing the tax system – can you?
The other thing worth noting is that as states seem to like to let markets to ‘rip’ and price everything increasingly higher, it is moans about benefits that get louder. Why?
Why not curb prices and even nationalise more to curb the costs of living to control benefits.
But oh no, we can’t do that – can we!!
Thanks
Seeking “perfection is the enemy”. That is so true in science/engineering, especially in education of students/PhDs etc – it’s changing the mindset that’s tough. Do the damn experiment or project, it’s what you learn on the way in the form of results, discussion of those data (with others) and the error/mistakes made on the way. By this method there will be more fun (think of why Johnson does the clown/jeopardy act compared to high-minded Starmer).
As an underground mining engineer I can estimate the forces on the excavation we make to extract the ore but the rock strength varies and impossible to accurately to estimate the strength. When we design the size of the excavation and rock support support to make the excavations safe we always allow safety factors from 50% to 100%. We carry to regular inspections for signs of danger, if it is considered unsafe we increase the rock support of barricade off the whole dangerous area and fill the unsafe area. If a mine on the edge of bankrupt-ion can keep their workers safe why cant the government.
Excellent question
On the topic of “scroungers” – I ran a foodbank for 5 years. We kept very careful records (certainly we had better data than the DWP ever did on foodbank use). I often used to field comments about scroungers, about dependency, and people fiddling the system. But I had my records, including my “red file” of people who we had concerns about, possibly abusing the system. But it only ever had about 10 names in it, compared with several full lever arch files of families each year who needed our help. It always amused me that people who were NOT involved with the foodbank or helping those in food insecurity, thought they were better judges of character and circumstances than those of us who sat there week after week actually talking to our clients, assessing their needs and signposting them to agencies for specialist help. Did they think we were specially naive? I could spot a “scrounger” fairly easily – yes, they existed, but there were precious few of them,and they were vastly outnumbered by others who really needed the help we offered. And yes, foodbanks are a horrible judgement on our society, no they aren’t “uplifting”, and I wish we could close them, and no – they don’t solve the important issues of inequality and social injustice – but they do help people who need emergency help.
If anyone is worried about the well off not needing a winter fuel payment, then presumably they will be vocal in their support for a more progressive tax system that efficiently taxes those who have the most wealth in our society. That will more than make up for “wasted” winter fuel payments given to those who don’t need them.
Many thanks, and for what you have been doing.
Great post – your experience mirrors that about findings from Benefit Fraud reporting hotlines, where (circa 2001/2) such hotlines get 17,000 calls a month according to Hansard (2009) which resulted in 6, 385 people having their benefits adjusted (fraud, customer error, official error) INCLUDING having them raised yet only 768 cases were prosecuted – fewer that one for every 200 apparently were genuine fraud, even though the reporting was based on the assumption of fraud.
And yet, out tax offices and capacities are shrinking.
Splendid comment; and quite humbling. I couldn’t agree more about this telling observation in support of:
“a more progressive tax system that efficiently taxes those who have the most wealth in our society. That will more than make up for ‘wasted’ winter fuel payments given to those who don’t need them.”
I made a very similar remark in this same thread, but without the telling economy of execution.
I am not sure it’s an example of the best being the enemy of the good. My guess is it was expedient and not thought through – actually a piece of performative politics to signal even louder how responsible they are. Gordon Brown introduced this because he didn’t want to deal with a general pensions uplift so was seen as an easy target. Reeves wants to say “look at us we are being realistic” but, aside from the actual harm it is the symbolism is deeply wrong, here is why.
Universal, non means tested benefits signify that we are all citizens and that we are all equally treated. This powerfull idea has been steadily undermined in my lifetime. Over time, with the treatment of NI as just part of the general tax pool, the ending of Earnings Related unemployment benefit and the killing off of SERPS we have totally lost the idea of a common pool of money we all pay into and get help when it is needed. Because some people earn so much the very idea of universal benefits is made to seem risible – the cure for should be to mirror the minimum wage with a maximum one. If there is a floor below which you cant have a decent life there should also be a ceiling above which you’re just taking the piss.
We can clearly see where the lack of social cohesion gets us, riots and thuggery. I know it is not a simple relationship but there is such a thing as society, it is built on trust which is fragile. Individualism goes hand in glove with not caring for our fellow citizens (because they have to make it on their own). The loss of solidarity and communalism is massively corrosive over time.
And as many (here) point out there is money available.
Additionally but not trivial, the fact is that means tests have to be administered; it is by no means clear that it is always cheaper than a universal entitlement. Other solutions could be found, one could envisage just abolishing winter fuels payments for higher rate taxpayers, that would be quite simple.
The proliferation of means testing which can be demeaning, complex and daunting – make it very clear to people that they are not equal citizen excercising their rights. In this specific case there is an arbitrary cut off which hits people on the margin has been used to avoid the means test, as a result, putting “being tough symbolism” before its impact on people is just crass. The people who will miss it and those who really need it are not responsible for the plight of the country and neither are they are not getting free clothing to wear.