This week we have had a fine demonstration of how the middling classes will cling to their welfare payments every bit as tenaciously as the workshy & the scroungers & the ASBO bearing classes.
Because it is just not fair that some (small?) number of families where the mother stays home to look after the children while father goes off to a job will, under the Chancellor's proposed changes to Child Benefit, ‘lose out’ to the couple next door who both go out to work, albeit at jobs which are less well paid.
Of course the complainers wish to see this anomaly rectified without any complicated forms to fill in or any government department prying into their personal living arrangements. And they certainly do not wish to see any return to the system of taxing the combined incomes of husband & wife as if they were one.
I have had a lifetime of feeling that these child benefits are JUST NOT FAIR but I have learned to put up with it.
For it was a very childish feeling, born out of the fact that from their beginning, as Family Allowances, in 1945 & for the next thirty years, they were paid only for the second & any subsequent children in a family.
Was this just to keep costs down, or was it a deliberately pro-natalist policy at a time when the slow growth of the British population, as typified by the parent’s strike of the 1930s, was a focus of policy concern, as would be demonstrated by the Report of the Royal Commission on Population of 1948?
Whatever the reason the first born got nothing – or so it seemed to me, despite my mother’s reassurance that it was for all of us.
I just knew that it was just another way in which little sisters got all the indulgence & big sisters got all the blame.
Because it is just not fair that some (small?) number of families where the mother stays home to look after the children while father goes off to a job will, under the Chancellor's proposed changes to Child Benefit, ‘lose out’ to the couple next door who both go out to work, albeit at jobs which are less well paid.
Of course the complainers wish to see this anomaly rectified without any complicated forms to fill in or any government department prying into their personal living arrangements. And they certainly do not wish to see any return to the system of taxing the combined incomes of husband & wife as if they were one.
I have had a lifetime of feeling that these child benefits are JUST NOT FAIR but I have learned to put up with it.
For it was a very childish feeling, born out of the fact that from their beginning, as Family Allowances, in 1945 & for the next thirty years, they were paid only for the second & any subsequent children in a family.
Was this just to keep costs down, or was it a deliberately pro-natalist policy at a time when the slow growth of the British population, as typified by the parent’s strike of the 1930s, was a focus of policy concern, as would be demonstrated by the Report of the Royal Commission on Population of 1948?
Whatever the reason the first born got nothing – or so it seemed to me, despite my mother’s reassurance that it was for all of us.
I just knew that it was just another way in which little sisters got all the indulgence & big sisters got all the blame.
Related posts
Sisterly love
Sisterly love
