David Cameron has waded into the increasingly absurd debate over the lessons from the Philpott case, backing George Osborne’s comments (“absolutely right”) and declaring that “we want to say welfare is there to help people who want to work hard, but it’s not a lifestyle choice”
What the Prime Minister either doesn’t know or won’t say is that the problem in this instance was emphatically not one of “welfare dependency”. Both Philpott’s wife and girlfriend were in work and so would have been unaffected by the coalition’s £26,000 benefit cap (an unjust and ineffective measure in any case). The problem was that their benefits, like their salaries, were paid directly into Philpott’s bank account. The guilty party, as I wrote yesterday, wasn’t the welfare state but a violent, misogynistic bully intent on controlling the lives of the two women and their children. No one should believe, for instance, that limiting child benefit to two children per family (as Iain Duncan Smith has proposed) would have prevented his crimes.
If there is a lesson for government policy from this extreme and unususal case, it is for the need for earlier and more effective intervention by social services. The idea that we can reasonably draw any useful conclusions about the welfare system should be rejected by all sane-minded people.
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