No, I absolutely do not believe this is sensible. In my opinion we should of course have a safety net but as I said in an earlier post, for all but the severely disabled this should be a contributory system like in most countries that have a welfare state at the level that the UK wants to maintain (Canada, Australia, NZ and other European countries).
It was always false that EU membership was the issue here. It was poor design of the UK welfare state. It was completely permissible and is still the case even for EU citizens that if you move countries you would not immediately be entitled to welfare, you have to pay in for a period first. It is the case in the vast majority that even state pensions are a proportion of salary so you get something out vaguely proportionate to what you pay in and your higher contribution is reflected (while also subsidising others who earn less, of course). It is the case that childcare etc are universal so that higher earners (while massively subsidising others as well as paying their own costs) still get to use the service themselves and therefore don’t mind this and view it as fair. It is the case that EU citizens in another country could use their health service BUT that service could recharge this cost to their country of origin: the problem in the UK was that the UK Government never bothered to implement this system in the NHS to even record who was accessing it let alone recharge it. It is the case that if an EU citizen moves from one country to another and then becomes unemployed that state can deport them back to the state that they came from if they cannot support themselves any longer. This was ALWAYS the case. It’s just that the UK didn’t bother to implement these measures then blamed the EU for this.
The UK has really messed up with how it has set up its welfare state. It isn’t the concept of having a welfare state that is the problem, it is the fact that it is set up very inefficiently. Over 50% of the welfare budget is being paid to pensioners, and 25% of those pensioners receiving it are millionaires. A further 25% don’t require it to have living standards far exceeding that achieved by working-aged people earning the national average salary. Meanwhile the welfare that is available for working-aged people has been funding the unproductive economy, largely through housing benefits and fuelling the British tendency to invest in property rather than business and productive activities. The effect of this has then been companies taking advantage of this fact because they will obviously recruit people at the lowest salary that people will accept (that’s economics, and why Government intervention and redistribution and how it is done - although it is necessary to maintain a decent democracy in a capitalist society - and its consequences should be thought through. This has created a low-waged economy and meant that our PPP has fallen significantly against comparable countries over the last two decades.
There are of course multiple factors, but the specific structure of our welfare system is a huge problem. The lack of any time-limit, the lack of a genuinely contribution-based principle (Bismarck-type system) which is what exists in most of Europe was a huge mistake. This needs to be unwound. Whatever the intentions were, “tax credits” from Brown caused huge economic damage to real-terms salaries (far more than immigration ever did) and we still see the effect of this now. But this kind of gerrymandering of the figures can be traced back into Thatchers time when suddenly lots of people were placed on “incapacity benefits” to make it look like fewer people were unemployed.
It’s hugely damaging, all of it, to aspiration, to the social contract which require higher earners to accept they’ll pay more proportionately and in total but will still get a fair deal. All of the things they valued: education, libraries, the arts - have been decimated. Increasingly they’re told they can’t even access the services they pay for, for everyone else.
Meanwhile those on lower incomes are struggling to survive because there have been no real-terms increases of any significant amount (unless you are earning minimum wage) for nearly 20 years while living costs have sky-rocketed.
Giving more money to the people who are now working full time but not earning enough to live will simply exacerbate the problem and give a green light for companies paying them below the amount they need to live to accelerate this further.
The answer would be to make the changes that I stated to public spending which would free up £80-90bn a year and double spending on education with a much larger focus on technical education for those whom would thrive better with this while making the UK a more favourable place to start and grow a business and take on apprentices. Most people, I think, WANT to work and be self-sufficient and not infantilised in this manner and beholden to the state. They give up in the end because what hope is there for them? We need to have a proper industrial and trading policy, invest in education, invest in small businesses (who make up 50% of GDP), have entrepreneurs go into schools, give people a way to work their own way out and build a decent life and then they will do so because they will see that by doing so other people have more and it is REALISTIC that they can too so will want to do so and do it.
Meanwhile resetting the tax system so that there are incentives for investing in the productive economy rather than bricks and mortar will make living costs gradually more affordable.
Like I said earlier, there is no immediate cake. The decisions made in the past have been economically disastrous. We need to fix them but it WILL NOT happen overnight. But there are solutions that can make things very different in 10-15 years’ time, if we’re prepared to take them and learn from the past, without suddenly leaving everyone who has struggled onto the housing ladder in negative equity and trashing the economy and - again - making everyone poorer.
It would be better if we’d never gone down such an obviously stupid route but it can be gradually reversed. The pre-requisite, however, is to redirect the money we do have to infrastructure and industrial strategy and education so that there are prospects for your people, and change the tax system to stop crushing aspiration and creating perverse incentives. Humans obviously follow the well-documented behavioural patterns that we know so give people incentive and hope and opportunity by creating the environment in which it is possible for them to thrive and they will do so. Then these stupid systems than undermine society can be rolled back on. But we must do the former first before we do the latter otherwise all you will get is riots or people starving in the streets.