1 How arguments are used in the Social Sciences

In Chapter 1 of Book Two you were introduced to the idea that argument is a key skill in Social Sciences. Indeed by now you probably realise that argument and debate are essential to the Social Sciences. It is not so much that empirical facts are in dispute but rather how facts are interpreted and explained. Indeed, a guiding principle of D218 has been to argue that to understand the construction of facts we have to examine the discourse, the reasoning, the argument in which these facts are embedded. This tape is going to explore processes of argument. More specifically, it's going to allow you to evaluate the adequacy of argument by putting on trial the welfare system and in particular Social Security payments to the poor. In the Media notes, we suggested that you read Section 5.31 of Chapter 1 in Book Two. One of the key points made there is that a soundly constructed argument has a clearly stated and easily identified proposition. The proposition is the statement that the speaker or writer wishes to prove. On this tape, the proposition is that: the failure to discriminate between the deserving and undeserving poor has caused the cost of welfare to inflate uncontrollably. It has distorted the British economy, undermined the work ethic and produced a less fair rather than a fairer society. We are going to use a radio programme broadcast on Radio 4 in early 1997 to illustrate these points. It's a perfect example of different styles of argument. Chapter 1 also made the point that a well-structured argument is one in which the proposition is backed up by relevant evidence and logical reasoning. In the programme which follows, you will hear the prosecutor, the person arguing the case for the proposition, presenting his case and calling two witnesses, who will be examined with the aim of supporting the proposition. Your role is to listen and assess whether or not the case for the proposition is logical and can be sustained. Has the proposition been adequately established and logically reasoned, such that we can maintain with confidence that the failure to discriminate between the deserving and undeserving poor has caused the cost of welfare to inflate uncontrollably and that it has undermined the work ethic and produced a less fair, rather than a fairer society. To help you asses this claim, the Defence will attempt to show that the arguments made to support the proposition are flawed. So you also need to assess the adequacy of the arguments being put by the Defence. Finally, don’t forget that assertions are often presented as though they were arguments. Assertions are statements which offer no supporting evidence, explanation, or reasoning, where arguments do furnish supporting evidence and make their reasoning explicit. The case for the Prosecution is put by Dr Digby Anderson of the Social Affairs Unit, a Think Tank that has specialised in Social Policy. The case for the Defence is put by Bea Campbell, a writer and journalist. You are the jury. You must adjudicate. Is the welfare system, as charged, guilty or not guilty? You should make notes, in your own words, on the arguments, evidence and reasoning in this debate. You may want to do this while listening to it or you may prefer to stop the tape to make notes. Dr Digby Anderson opens the debate.

Just before this programme, the Audit Office, which is an independent body, found that the Social Security System last year handed out five hundred million pounds too much. Fraudulent claims in that same period cost the taxpayer, that’s you and me, 1.4 billion a year. And that’s the ones they know about. For eight years now, the Social Security Accounts have been unable to be finally and completely audited and approved because they are in such disarray and the rot goes deeper still. Most decent people, regardless of their politics, want to help those in need, especially those fallen on hard times through no fault of their own, the widowed, the orphaned, the disabled. The objection to the Social Security System is that it does not help such people efficiently and at the same time it showers hand-outs on many others: the short term unemployed, who have been working for perhaps twenty years and could have made provision for brief unemployment. Those who expect the State, that is other taxpayers, to pay the costs of their sexual adventures in subsidies for the children of a series of absent fathers. Those who are needy but use their handouts in an improvident way and get themselves immediately back into debt.

That’s Dr Anderson’s opening statement. The case for the Prosecution is now developed.

The system is not working and ordinary people know it. More than fifteen years ago my Institute, the Social Affairs Unit, said something similar in a report called “Breaking the Spell of the Welfare State”. It said the system was out of control, out of financial control and moral control, and it was misleading and mesmerising people especially intellectuals. We were then regarded as eccentrics. All would be well, the policy experts said, if only the taxpayers were taxed harder and more money was spent on welfare. Well, now even most of the experts have come round to our view. The system is doing damage, moral damage, and must be reined in.

Could you please get these estimates typed for me? We need to get them off today. We need to get these out…

The McEwan family run a small building firm in Liverpool. The father, Charles expresses the concerns of many who like him are angry at those who just take from the system.

The people who’ve no intentions of working, I’ve no time for them at all. I don’t think they should receive benefits and they should be forced to work. It's difficult enough to cope today. The staff are under stress, all of us, trying to cope with things. But these people are out there with no other stresses, no other problems, don’t pay tax. I mean we are a hard working family firm. I have been in business for thirty-nine years. I still only live in a semi-detached house. So are my sons. You know, we work very hard for it.

Ordinary people knew long before the experts, that scroungers were a problem. The experts always belittled it. “The number of people abusing the system is minimal, grossly exaggerated. The real problem, in fact, is those not claiming their rightful benefits” they said. Well the experts were wrong. No one of any repute across the main political spectrum now denies that social security fraud is a major problem. Frank Field is a leading Labour Social Security expert and Chairman of the Social Security Select Committee. He has said and I quote: “The age of large scale re-distribution of income by Welfare Benefits has gone. Politicians who argue otherwise are a public menace.” Much welfare need is not caused by lack of money but by the behaviour of those who are in need. Failure to put aside for a rainy day, irresponsible sexual behaviour, bad budgeting, failure to look for, or to stick at, work. The Social Security System does not distinguish between these people and people genuinely in need. Miles Harris is a London GP who sees welfare recipients in his surgery. He knows the difference between those who deserve and those who don’t deserve help.

You get people for instance who do things like thieving, mugging, not working, lying around in bed, not trying to get jobs, taking drugs and so forth. But they don’t meet with any form of disapproval from the services that help them. They go to counsellors and people and they are met by very non-judgemental, empathic, non-directive counselling.

In his experience the welfare system as it stands today rewards bad behaviour and poor character just as much as it throws a lifeline to decent people who have fallen on hard times. It is blind to character and it’s blind to moral worth. It is therefore an immoral system and worse it entices people to behave badly so as to get benefits, to be feckless, to have children without the means of family support to look after them. It encourages irresponsibility.

I think many doctors would agree that they see patients who certainly are going to get a two-bedroom council house because they’ve got a couple of children and they are single parents. And the system encourages it in the sense that it says nothing about it.

The time has come to stop debating whether to change the social security system and to start thinking about how to change it. The challenge is how to cut it and how to moralise the little that is left. That means benefits conditional on decent behaviour and much more voluntary effort replacing government handouts at a local level. Dame Barbara Shenfield was Chairman of the Women’s Royal Voluntary Service.

People tend to think that these voluntary things are just a little extra, ladies’ coffee mornings kind of things. I mean the WRVS for instance, what they deliver thirteen and a half million meals a year and about another million and a half in clubs. They work in about seven or eight hundred hospitals. They give the National Health Service four and a half million pounds in cash. They send thousands of people away on holiday. They do an immense amount of work. And I mean that’s just one organisation. If you look at what two hundred and forty thousand of these organisations turning over what fifteen billion a year, somebody’s estimate of the value of the work they do if you had to pay for it would cost you about forty one billion pounds. It’s a huge resource.

There can be welfare without the massive wasteful, immoral, government bureaucracy. True welfare comes from those on low incomes being prudent, faithful to the other parent of their children, and working hard. It also comes from the better off being understanding and generous to those less fortunate than themselves. The Social Security System encourages neither. It's time to cut most of it and to re-moralise the little that is left.

Digby Anderson’s proposition is that the welfare system treats the deserving and undeserving poor in the same way. The consequence of this, Anderson argues, is that those who do pay taxes are subsidising the undeserving and irresponsible poor. Those who abuse the system and those who by failure to take responsibility for their own lives are the authors of their own misfortune. Indeed, by providing welfare assistance, the system itself is culpable in that such payments encourage irresponsibility, immorality, and welfare dependency. Bea Campbell will now present the case against the proposition.

Well, there is only one conclusion you can draw from the prosecution’s division between the deserving and the undeserving poor: that the poor produce their own poverty; that they are feckless and reckless and that they should be restrained from reproducing themselves by the withdrawal of the welfare state. This motion means a new kind of eugenics. A kind of economic, ethnic cleansing to cull the so-called subpopulation. But a quarter of this country is deemed poor. They are living on less than half the average income. We all know poor people. Some of us are poor people. They are not “them”; they are “us”. The welfare state has produced not poverty but some stability, security, and growing equality. But the government’s retreat from investment in an economy rocked by seismic shift in the global economy has produced not prosperity but permanently pauperised communities, living in a state of economic emergency.

And if you go down the Whitehouse Road, there’s the Whitehouse Road into Price Centre now, which fourteen year ago, used to be the abattoir but now it's….

Tyneside is typical. An industrial icon, laid to waste, abandoned by the government and by business. One of its pauperised communities is Scotswood. It was built to house engineers and shipbuilders; thousands of men would walk down the banks of the Tyne to Vickers, the world famous engineers. The government called a halt. Amazing! Britain doesn't build ships any more. And in Scotswood – no ships. No work. No wages. Mary Ray is a community activist who watched her neighbourhood’s nemesis.

It was down to politicians and Vickers themselves that wanted to take Vickers out of this community and put it somewhere else. But they didn’t want to take the workforce with them. So what do you do with them men and women? You put them on unemployed. And apart from them being tradesmen, they have got no other trade to go into unless they want to do re-training but there is not much re-training around. It devastated the community because when you have been a community that are used to people working, getting up to go out to work, and they haven’t got that there now, what does the community do?

This is typical of neighbourhoods in every city in Britain, regarded by its critics as a ghetto, a nest of scroungers and single parents. But Scotswood tells another typical tale, what mothers do to improvise self-help systems and survival strategies. Mary Ray’s networks toil, both for public peace and for economic renewal and she refutes the notion of welfare breeding dependency.

I don’t think people are standing out there, standing waiting for handouts. People have got off their backsides and done a hell of a lot in Scotswood. And that wouldn’t have happened if it hadn't have been for the likes of the people that had been on benefits and that had been forgotten and I think the women of Scotswood are very, very strong women. And they believe in Scotswood as otherwise this community wouldn’t have been changed around if it hadn’t have been for the women. I think women gave quite a lot and I think the biggest thing the women gave is themselves.

This is one of the poorest places in the country. Yet it's alive with active citizens who do their gardens, put the tea on the table, wipe noses, bottoms and tears. Mostly mothers – often lone mothers – the most maligned people in Britain. There’s been a cultural revolution in the last two decades. Women increasingly prefer poverty, rather than putting up with the pain of a useless or a dangerous partner. Women of all classes. The reputation of St. Mellons, a new town in South Wales became notorious after a visit by the then Welsh Secretary, John Redwood, in 1993. “Feckless women”; “fatherless families”; “starve them of social security”, he said. Sue Shepherd is one of those St. Mellons single mothers, singled out for criticism.

It’s a stance really that they people just stand up and turn around and say ‘well…well people are just getting pregnant to go on Benefit’. Well I am awfully sorry. Being a single parent myself I wouldn’t put myself in that position to go on Benefit because I tell you what, it's damned hard work.

If it's not single mothers, it's the homeless for whom the streets seem safer than their families. Or the long-term unemployed, apparently hibernating at home when they should be out looking for work. But despite the best efforts of the government’s researchers to discover a dependency culture, it seems it's a phantom. John Hills is an economist at the LSE.

The effects of social security benefits on labour supply, on people’s willingness to work, one of the biggest areas of economic and social research over the last few decades, what's extraordinary about a lot of that research is how little effect most studies have found. And most of the studies that actually talk to people in depth who are currently out of work, a recent study of this kind was just published by the Department of Social Security, show very strong attachment to the idea of work by the overwhelming majority of claimants.

People want to work but they haven’t the skills. They haven't the childcare. Sometimes they haven't the clothes to pass at an interview. And there aren’t the jobs. “On yer bike!” they say. “Any job is better than no job.” Well is it?

If people are simply scratching around to make a living – I’ve seen in Third World countries, people hawking bicycle pedals – that is a way of survival at a minimum level if there is no alternative. It doesn't seem to me to do anything very constructive in terms of building up that person’s long-term career. But nor, from a macro economic point of view, does that seem to me to be a very profitable route for the UK economy that if we want to compete in the World, low-skilled, lowpaid work, if you like the dive for the bottom, is something where there is very little limit to how low you can dive.

Economists like John Hills remind us that safety nets work not only for individuals but the economy as a whole. The alternative is a society dangerously polarised. Joe Cafrey is a Community Work Manager at Newcastle City Council who tells us that if you look around what you see is communities that aren’t the problem, they are part of the solution.

What you see are real people. Real people with real aspirations. People with hopes and those people need opportunities. They need opportunities to come together to organise in their communities. They need opportunities to allow their families to develop, to have a sense of hope for the future, and that costs money. Those resources are absolutely necessary in those communities. And I think just to suggest that we can stop that and forget those people and leave what could be ghettos behind, I think it's utterly shameful.

What he tells us is that if you look around, what you see is communities that aren’t the problem- they are part of the solution.

Bea Campbell’s argument is that there is no evidence for Anderson’s position. There is no evidence for the existence of a dependency culture. Rather, people on welfare are victims of circumstances beyond their control. But despite this, those on welfare are struggling to overcome these major obstacles. We have now heard the case for the Prosecution and the argument against, put by the Defence. What evidence is there for the Prosecution? What follows is an edited version of the radio debate between Anderson and Campbell, in which you will hear Anderson’s evidence. In listening to the rest of the tape, consider the evidence and the reasoning given to support the Prosecution’s argument. How convincing, how cogent is it? What other explanations might be possible? What further questions might you want to ask?

My first witness is Professor Patrick Minford, from the University of Liverpool, a widely published economist. Professor Minford, the clips we have heard in the presentation for the Prosecution, describe the sorts of faults there are in the Social Security System. Do you agree with them and if you do, can you say how big a problem we’ve got?

Well I think we can start by noting that it costs fifty thousand million pounds a year to pay out the benefits that we currently pay out and that works out at about one and a half thousand pounds a year for each tax payer. The second point is the loss of output; what we could produce if we in fact were using all the people who are made idle by the welfare state. That’s probably of the order of forty thousand million a year – about five per cent of national income.

Any thinking about the social security system has to take into account not only how we would like it to be here, but the international climate, especially the state of our competitors. What would be the effect of trying to compete with other countries in the world, who are less shackled with high welfare costs, without reducing ours, and indeed are there countries with lower welfare costs than ours?

The basic problem is that as in fact Bea said, there is a globalised economy in which there is huge competition for our own workforce from millions of low waged workers around the world. And of course that competition enables them to improve their living standards. But the problem for us is that if we create a culture where there isn't the incentive to get education, where there isn't a properly motivated workforce, you are clearly going to have a workforce there that can't compete properly, can't make the best use of the opportunities that exist in a developed country. And instead of course they have to compete directly by falling wages.

You were asked particularly about international comparisons. Are there any that would illuminate here?

Well of course if you look at Asia, you find there’s no welfare state at all.

Before you’re passed over to the Defence, I would like to put one other point to you. You used the phrase: ”made idle by the welfare state”. I imagine you meant to use that phrase. What did you mean by it and how do you justify “made idle by the welfare state”?

Well I think the basic mechanism by which unemployment is created through the welfare state is by raising wages. If you create a minimum on welfare you can't get people to take jobs at wages below that minimum. That is the most basic mechanism by which welfare creates unemployment and dependency.

Thank you. That’s fine. I’d like to pass you over now to Bea Campbell to cross-examine.

You’re one of the government’s wise men. Now give us a clue. When you say if we could get people back to work – it's been in power a long time – what could it do to get people back to work and how far would you go to shrink this welfare state which you argue is making millions of people idle?

Well I think we want to see a flexible labour market, which enables people to use the phrase that’s a nice convenient one, “to price themselves back into work”. I think at the same time you need to have an economy that…where monetary policy’s working properly, and recovery is proceeding.

But don't we already have a low wage economy? And how much lower do you want us to go and how far would you actually be committed to following the…your…your argument about Asia, which is to withdraw benefit altogether from the unemployed?

Well it is a fact that the Asian economies have no welfare state at all.

Is that what you want?

Well I think in the long term that’s what we need to aim at because we need to have people providing for themselves over their lifetime. And what has happened is the State has moved in, replaced people's own self provision and if we had self provision that would create the incentives first of all to get education, and secondly of course to get jobs; to get on to the bottom of the jobs ladder and acquire training on the job, which is a good way of improving yourself in the work place.

But tell us, how far would you go, and how quickly would you go there? Would you now withdraw benefit from the unemployed?

Well I think anybody looking at the situation where we are, wouldn’t say, “do it tomorrow”, of course not. This is a programme that has to be done over a long period of time. There are people in the system….

…How long, how long please Professor Minford?

I’ve argued that something like a decade is needed to get us back on the path of a properly functioning economy in which people actually provide for themselves. In fact one could argue two decades.

My second witness is Professor David Marsland of Brunel University. David Marsland is both an academic researching on welfare and is also one of the pioneers of training for work with young people. David, the social security system wastes money and it mis-directs it. But is the chief cost of misguided social security financial? What sorts of problems are we dealing with when we talk about welfare problems?

The economic costs are certainly huge but that seems to me the least of the problems caused by state welfare. It creates dependency. It blunts enterprise. It kills the virtues. It's a moral problem basically.

And you’ve studied countries, which do not have a social security system which does those things. Can you tell us something about them, without going into elaborate description? In particular, can you tell us something about two concepts: conditionality and liability to maintain?

There are precious few countries throughout the world, which have such a comprehensive state welfare system as Britain so the examples could be many. But I’m thinking of the United States in part, Switzerland in part, Japan in part. They’re important examples from across the world where it is assumed that one will be held accountable for what one is responsible for, including for example ones spouse and ones children. The welfare state destroys that.

How does that work in practice?

Professor David Marsland

It's simply written in as it was indeed in the Reform Poor Law in Britain until just before the war, that kin had obligations to support members of their family who were on hard times.

So that the State could step in and give some assistance but would then seek to have that paid for by any kin with the money to pay?

Yes. And it was a perfectly commonsensical assumption which socialists have had to work hard to destroy, that one should look after ones own.

And what do we mean by conditionality where payment of benefit is conditional on behaviour change?

Workfare is the best-known example, but the danger with state welfare is that it becomes a dole, which then destroys the people it's supposed to help. Our opponents will make it seem that we are attacking those who are helped. But on the contrary, my position, like yours, is that we should be looking after them and conditionality helps people when they are getting help to get out from under the destructive effect of the help.

Thank you. I’ll pass that witness over to Bea Campbell.

Professor Marsland, I’m interested in your moral prospectus. What would you do for instance about the remarkable rise in the era of Thatcherism of mothers preferring to parent alone, rather than put up with hurt, humiliation and abuse? Do you want to return them to the Poor Law?

Well, I think your way of describing the situation is very one sided and biased anyway, just as it was in your earlier presentation of it. The trend, which you describe, began and began to go steep long before the Conservative government in any case. But I would…

…But it rose exponentially during the era of Thatcherism

Nevertheless you are bracketing it off in a completely spurious way in order to try and blame Conservatism. What we are talking about is the decay of the family of which there are many causes.

But women aren’t skid addling from their kids are they? Many women are heroically bringing up children on their own.

Absolutely right. And they deserve all credit for that. But that doesn’t mean that giving them credit means that we help them most by simply giving them money and letting the men off, and not helping them to get skills and to move forward so that they can look after them even better as they should.

Well we are not letting the men off are we? But lets move on to another category which I think you are probably interested in – the young people who sleep on the streets, who’ve fled often abuse and cruelty at home. What do you want to do with them?

In regard to the homeless you need to make distinctions among them. There are among homeless young people a small proportion who have fled genuinely and properly from savage homes. Those children, young people, need direct and effective help of a sort we can't seem to provide. The state children’s homes seem to have become state brothels. But among the homeless young people there are many others who’ve left home over a tiff; who’ve left home because young people have been encouraged to think that they have a right to live autonomously at that age. They should be discouraged and you won’t discourage them by building Council houses for them.

You will have noticed the Prosecution witness making an emotive assertion in referring to “state brothels”. How does the Prosecution maintain that welfare systems cause homelessness, especially young people sleeping rough on the streets? David Marsland again

I believe the evidence is perfectly clear. The way it does it is by damaging the family, leading to dysfunction in the family, which drives them out. It causes it secondly by encouraging young people to think that they will be able to get help when, if they knew that they wouldn’t, they would be more realistic about little tiffs at home and they’d stay there.

That concludes the case for the Prosecution. They have argued that those genuinely and blamelessly in need, widows, orphans, disabled people, are short-changed by a system, which panders to far too many undeserving claimants. Those who through idleness, sexual promiscuity, financial fecklessness, or downright fraud, abuse society’s generosity. And what's more, threaten to bring the whole structure crashing down in the process. The system, they say, does not work. You must decide. Has the case been proved or are there other explanations, other arguments that present a different view?