Facing the facts of the welfare conundrum

Karen Matthews has achieved far more with her life than she possibly could have hoped. She's sparked a vicious debate across the country about whether she should have happened or not. Suddenly, everyone has abandoned the welfare state, throwing it overboard in order to keep their personal ship of street-knowledge afloat. Everyone wants to show that they can clearly see, and have known all along, that this ridiculous hand-out system is destroying our nation from the inside and creating a do-nothing underclass that will be the undoing of us all!

Oh! What happened to the mighty left of British politics? Those great socialists who created the glorious welfare system that marks us as true altruists? It was buried under the Blatcher plastic face of centre-right boredom.

So here we are, on the point of dismantling welfare forever. We're friggin Victorians again. Not a soul is speaking in defence of philanthropy. Which is why I was so delighted to see the noble Diane Abbot, a Brownite by the way, protest just a little the other night. She pointed out the key flaw in the hand-out abolition argument, which is: what is the alternative?

No one denies that benefits can destroy ambition, drain the economy and build a culture of sloth and underachievement. But what are you going to do instead? This is one of those political issues that it is impossible to solve. Utterly impossible. And it would be foolhardy in the extreme to take action for action's sake. If you take away benefits, what happens to the people who genuinely need them? The single mother, who through no fault of her own, finds herself raising three toddlers and without a second to spare for even looking for work, let alone pinning down a full time job. The unskilled men who live in communities where all the factories are long-gone and the and no one will employ them, desperately saving so they can move to somewhere more prosperous. What happens to these people? And any kind of middle ground is futile too. If you keep benefits but allocate them according to deservingness only, who determines how deserving someone is, and who decides which of the deserving have to starve? You're dividing the poor into the damned and the saved, and bam! you're a Victorian again.

It's insolvable, I'm telling you. We should at least recognise this before we crucify the big-hearted welfare state, betrayed by the Judas of social outrage and mob-mentality.