This post is prompted by a number of comments I’ve recently seen regarding benefit cuts. Many people are suggesting that benefit cuts will put people into poverty. This presupposes that there are people who are presently receiving benefits, but whom we would not call “poor”. This has jarred with my (somewhat unexamined) perceptions of the welfare state.

It has seemed to me (as someone who grew up in South Africa, which has no welfare state) that the welfare state exists specifically to help people who are facing hardship. In South Africa one simply had to provide for oneself and if one couldn’t, one starved. The welfare state, on the other hand, exists to ensure that no one slips between the cracks in this way. It is, essentially, society at large rallying round those who face misfortune and helping them. It is, in the end, charity.

But if this perception is correct, then those who are supported by the welfare state are presumably people facing misfortune. They are the people who would have slipped through the cracks if they had lived in South Africa. They are, in short, poor.

And now that I think about it, my family is in receipt of benefits. We receive child benefits, simply by virtue of having procreated. Granted the amount is not vast, but it’s not insubstantial either and we received it even when I worked at an investment bank. We also receive child tax credits, primarily because we needed this while I was an ordinand and the Church of England assumed we would receive it and gave us correspondingly less grant money. Things will change come April because I’ve been receiving a stipend since July 2012, but even then we’ll still get something.

Now, here’s the thing, we really don’t think of ourselves as poor. We don’t see ourselves as facing misfortune, and we don’t think of ourselves as being supported by a caring society which is helping us out. We don’t think of ourselves in receipt of charity. Which suggests that the welfare state is not what I described above. Or that it is, at any rate, more than what I described. It may, indeed, be charity, but isn’t it also a system which exists to top up the income of those who are not paid enough? Is this what we really think? Is this what we intend from the welfare state? It would seem so.

So, finally, here is my question. Would a healthy economy have people who are gainfully employed but whose income from their employment is insufficient to meet their needs? Should we consider such a situation just? And if not, why hide the injustice by failing to call such people “poor”? After all, when working people are forced to receive food from a foodbank, we cry out about the wrongness of an economy which would allow this. So, why accept the situation when the help comes from the government?