A Spectrum of the Victorian and Edwardian Morality?: the Conservative's Welfare Reform and the Public Opinion

Current Conservative government has proposed to impose tougher sanctions on those particular unemployed people who do not seek a job or refuse to accept a job offer.

The new credit will be underpinned by a tough new sanctions regime in which recipients will lose their benefits for up to three years if they refuse a job or community work. These sanctions will be imposed in four steps:

• Claimants who fail to prepare for work, where this is required, will lose 100% of their benefits until they comply.

• Failure to seek employment, or be available for work, will cost four weeks' benefits for a first offence, rising to three months for a second offence.

• The "most serious failures" – those on jobseeker's allowance who fail to accept a reasonable job offer – will lose benefits for a fixed three months. This could rise to three years for those who have "serially and deliberately breached conditions".

• Lone parents with young children will face sanctions if they fail to attend "work-faced" interviews.

Tories hail radical benefits overhaul (The Guardian, 11 Nov 2010)

The work and pension secretary Ian Duncan Smith says that Britain's "dependency culture", in which 1.5 million people have been placed on out-of-work benefits for nine of the last 10 years, had led to a national crisis.

It is noteworthy that while some research institutes alert that this will be likely to cause serious stigmatization of the unemployed, a survey suggests that the public seems to be rather supportive of government's tougher approach: a survey for Channel 4 News by YouGov showed that 58% thought the coalition should "cut benefits more, or have got the balance of change about right".
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/nov/11/coalition-backlash-hardship-payments-scrapped?intcmp=239

BBC has made an interesting analysis by comparing such public opinion with that of the pre-welfare state era in Britain. At that time many working class people were actually very supportive of the idea of distinguishing 'the deserving poor' from 'the undeserving' and imposing sanctions on the latter. There was a broad moral consensus that unless you do not contribute yourself to society, mainly through employed works and houseworks, you have no rights to claim any relief from the state:

There are always the so-called "working poor", resenting those on welfare enjoying similar living standards to theirs without working.

In the Victorian and Edwardian periods, it was often the working class that policed its own welfare morality. Historian Jose Harris of Oxford University has studied trade union schemes. A man receiving help "would regularly be visited by a brother from the local union committee, who would make sure he wasn't working on the sly".

This approach, she adds, fed into the creation of the welfare state, whose designers wanted it to be an insurance-based system, with a clear relationship between paying your dues and deserving help.

(The deserving or undeserving poor? (BBC, 18 Nov 2010))

Looking back at history, then, there may be no wonder why many people nowadays seem to support government's tougher reform plan towards the long-term unemployed. In a way, such an attitude might have had an effect of legitimizing working people's receiving various benefits (for housing, council tax, etc.) for supporting their low incomes. This seems to make a vivid contrast with the situation in Japan where any kinds of benefits for the people of working age tend to cause stigmatization.