Unemployment benefits "too high & discourage job seeking"?

Last week, I brought you some of the detail from the recently published Scottish Social Attitudes Survey. Much there of interest for those concerned with the authority of devolved institutions, but concerning notes on women's faith in the capacity of the Scottish Government to reach fair decisions. Concerning material too for Iain Gray's on the efficacy of his anti-Eck rhetoric on health and the state of the public finances. If the findings of the survey are to be believed, Scottish Labour may face significant difficulties tacking Sturgeon and Swinney to the wall with their storied tales of Salmond slumps and SNP cuts. Voters seem minded to follow the public penny from spending back to its source. Like Theseuses, lost and befuddled in the midst of a maze of competing claims about final responsibility for economic downturns, they pluck on the financial threads and follow the skein of Scotland's block grant back to Westminster. Unlike our Greek hero, who escaped Daedalus' labyrinth by following Ariadne's thread, Scottish voters find themselves faced with the plump spider's figure of the Chancellor of the UK Exchequer.  Some stop here and set about accusing the Westminster government - still others press onward and lay the blame, finally, with the occult forces of the global economy. Very few seem disposed to share the conclusion which the bull-headed, charging Gray invites them to reach, that an SNP government with extremely limited economic powers is primarily responsible.

One finding which I didn't mention but which is worth lingering over concerns recorded attitudes to unemployment benefits. Here is a reproduction of Table A.13 from the survey:

	1999	2000	2001	2003	2006	2009
	%	%	%	%	%	%
Too low and cause hardship	36	43	45	41	33	31
Too high and discourage job seeking	33	28	26	32	39	42
Neither	22	17	16	16	18	17
Other response	3	7	6	5	3	5
Don’t know	5	6	7	7	6	5
Not answered	*	-	-	*	*	-
Total respondents	1482	1663	1605	1508	1594	1482

Although the shifting direction of opinion since 1999 can be seen from the foregoing arrangement of columns, a tidy little graph visualises the developments in Figure 3.4, which I've replicated below. Just click on the image for a clearer view.

An important question which the researchers could have asked the respondents is - on your understanding, what is the weekly amount of jobseeker's allowance paid to the unemployed? And equally importantly -  what level income seems to you the minimum acceptable amount per week? Think about this yourself, if you are not familiar with the first figure. Just how much do you think it is? In a recent  Guardian article, also picked up by Joan McAlpine, David Conn suggests that in his experience, folk tend to answer around £100 a week or so. A look at the government figures, however, hastily disabuses you of such preconceptions. The maximum weekly figures vary depending on one's status. Single people aged under 25 receive £51.85. The seven-day benefit  for singletons older than 25 leaps to the dizzy heights of £65.45. Lone parents receive exactly the same amount.

It is a dominant theme of this week - but the devil really is in the detail and justice is in small places, close to home. Gusty rhetoric and hymns to the crowned, winged goddess Fairness will mean next to bugger all to those scratching out a living of amazing niggardliness on the penury of Jobseeker's Allowance. Yet increasingly, the Social Attitude Survey seems to suggest that many Scots have been distracted by dominant discourses that the unemployed are a tawdry band of lazy shirkers, idlers and would-be apprentices to the leech-craft of the professional and permanent state beneficiary. Labour must bear the great weight of responsibility for fostering this distorted attitude while neglecting the substantive, significant figures. It is  scandalous. That's why it is a pity that the survey didn't attempt to gauge the level of benefits which its respondents apprehended  were paid or challenge them with the actual level of money which this pinching paternalistic allowance allots to those who have lost their jobs.

How many of those who thought benefits were too high would be shocked, as their vague notions sharply impact with the reality? Faced with the figures, certainly, some die-hard opponents might well still insist that such benefits are pandering and unproductive. I would hope, however, that civil conscience would prevail in many, many more instances, when people realised the true levels of benefit paid to those out of work. Given the new coalition's disposition towards airiness and grand narratives, we can anticipate much skirting over of these concrete figures in the months and years to come. We must insistently, time and time again, throw the detail back in their faces, niggle at their good consciences and prick the noisy declarations of their own virtue and their much vaunted Fairness. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, as they say.