News: Scrounging on the state (2001)

From the June 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Scrounging on the state

Newspapers like the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph delight in reporting on “state scroungers”. This usually turns out to be some unemployed worker claiming unemployment money while doing a bit of part-time work on the side. Or horror of horrors, an unmarried mother claiming benefit while her boyfriend stays overnight some weekend. Such unprincipled behaviour is guaranteed to get Fleet Street into a frenzy of indignation. “State-aided fornication” or “benefit scroungers” are denounced by the righteous indignation of hacks who never report that the capitalist class live off the unpaid labour of the working class. Any fiddles that the working class might get up to fade into insignificance beside the quite legal state handouts to the owning class, as reported in the Observer, 20 May:

“The Duke of Westminster – Britain’s richest man, with estimated wealth of £4 billion has received £3m in taxpayers money to help boost his farms profits. The Duke, who owns a 6,200-acre arable farm neat Chester, has been enjoying around £300,000 a year in state handouts over the past decade through European subsidies… It was once disclosed that Princess Anne received about £400,000 in subsidies for farming at Gatcombe Park estate in Gloucester. Her former husband, Captain Mark Phillips, once admitted that these subsidies amounted to 90 percent of the farm’s profits, but Buckingham Palace would not provide up-to-date figures.”

Mad as all this seems, the complete craziness of capitalism is summed up by the news that the Duke of Westminster was getting hand-outs of “£150,000 a year for growing 1,400 acres of wheat, and almost £150,000 for growing 1,400 acres of oil seed and barley. He is also receiving, more than £30,000 from taxpayers for not growing anything on 390 acres of ‘set aside’ hand.”