Frank Field

I became aware that there was real destitution in modern Britain five years ago. Destitution, as I see it, arises when a family or individual is hungry, unable to afford gas and electricity, and on the brink of homelessness. It was apparent to me then that too many people at the bottom of the pile who fall on hard times are slipping through holes in the nation’s safety net — some are even forced through those holes by the modern welfare state. The model of how society worked, which I had picked up as a child of the 1945 Attlee Government, survived my decade at the Child Poverty Action Group and many of the years I have spent as Birkenhead’s MP. It is the model that most voters held — a great story of British progress.

Life in Britain has become much cruder, meaner and more spiteful practically everywhere. It can be seen in people’s behaviour on the street; in those abominable neighbours from hell; in companies piling up the profits with no care whatsoever for the degree to which they are sweating their workers on terms that, until quite recently, would have been unimaginable. The incivility of one to another can be seen most sharply and poignantly in the degree of cruelty to children which, at the beginning of my working life, would have had every alarm bell ringing wildly. Children have to be almost on the point of being murdered before they are taken into care. Outside that protection, some are subjected to brutal treatment by parents who are also brutal creatures.

Life in Britain has become much cruder, meaner and more spiteful practically everywhere. It can be seen in people’s behaviour on the street; in those abominable neighbours from hell; in companies piling up the profits with no care whatsoever for the degree to which they are sweating their workers on terms that, until quite recently, would have been unimaginable. The incivility of one to another can be seen most sharply and poignantly in the degree of cruelty to children which, at the beginning of my working life, would have had every alarm bell ringing wildly. Children have to be almost on the point of being murdered before they are taken into care. Outside that protection, some are subjected to brutal treatment by parents who are also brutal creatures.

The light is at last beginning to dawn on the immigration debate. Today’s Migration Advisory Committee report on the impact of low-skilled migration to this country sheds a small amount of light on what has been blindingly obvious for a long time to people at the bottom. In total there were almost three quarters of a million Eastern Europeans working here last year. The number of citizens from Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Slovakia, Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia living in this country grew from an estimated 167,000 in 2004 to just over one million in 2012. Working- and lower middle-class voters have serious and justified concerns about the impact of this mass immigration on their lives and on our society.

Much is prattled on about social mobility. Practically the whole emphasis, however, is put on schools. Yet by the time most children reach school, life’s race for many of us has been determined. The report I wrote for the Prime Minister published in December 2010, The Foundation Years: preventing poor children becoming poor adults, had this as its main conclusion. Drawing on all the evidence we have available to us, the report suggested that the very first stages of life, in pregnancy, and during the first two years, are crucial as to where most children will end up in adult life. Using one of the national cohorts, Leon Feinstein showed that, probably at 3, but certainly at 5, the life destinations of children are clearly marked.

Welfare as we know it is doomed to defeat. It looks like going down to defeat from three major challenges, and each challenge comes from the sea change that is now so marked in public opinion. First, welfare has moved from one based on the duty to contribute before the right to help was conceded. Increasingly benefits are provided only after a test of income. Voters do not approve of this significant change. The next challenge comes from an increasing reluctance by voters to pay an ever growing share of their income in taxes, of which the largest part goes to a form of welfare with which they strongly disagree – means-tested welfare. The third fundamental change is generational.