Hard-working families are being destroyed to pay for the children of the benefits class

We are stuck in a compassion trap where the productive are forced to provide for the rest of society Daily Telegraph 17/11/25 link There are two ways to raise a family in Britain. The first is the traditional route: you take a job, work until you are financially secure enough to be able to afford a stable home where your children can go to the same school for at least some period of their lives, take on a mortgage, pay for childcare, keep working, and end each day torn up about the amount of time you spend with your family.

The second route is simpler. You just have children, whether or not you can afford them, and rest secure in the knowledge that the parents of the first family will also pay for yours. The so-called two-child benefit cap – now apparently for the chop – did little to alter this reality. Despite the harsh language, it never prevented families receiving larger housing elements in their Universal Credit payments, and it didn’t cap their eligibility for child benefit either. After all, to do so would have contradicted the fundamental logic of the British state. For someone to go without is wrong. The needs-based society requires that needs are met. Those who choose not to plan out their lives should not suffer too grievously as a result. Those who take responsibility must provide for those who do not. The implications are straightforward. The productive and the hard-working should be shackled to the state, and forced to provide for the rest of society. We can call this redistribution, or fairness, or justice, or whichever form of veil over violence we choose to comfortably distance the language of tax and spend from the implicit threat of force which backs it. The ultimate consequence is still the same: the creation of the welfare state has resulted in the creation of a welfare class, which will vote itself a large share of your income. From a certain perspective, the result is that the most successful people in Britain are not CEOs or doctors or bankers: they’re the fathers who have 11, 14, 26 children while living on benefits, and get someone else to pick up the bill. In some cases, they may live straightforwardly better lives than their working peers: I’ve set out before how families on incomes of £100,000 per year can be worse off than those on welfare in social housing. Look at the share of families who claim Universal Credit or live in social housing, and the spike in those with four or more children is remarkable. Similarly, if you line the population up by “deprivation”, those in the most deprived areas have more children than those in the wealthiest parts of the country. We can break this down, too, into the components of deprivation: perhaps the most important significant relationship is with the share of the population “involuntarily” excluded from employment. It would be easy to write this down as the cost of being a decent society: a little money taken from those with, to give to the children of those without. Easy, but wrong. For whatever reason, people find it hard to think about counterfactuals. And the counterfactual in a world where hard-working, middle-class households weren’t paying for £141bn in child and working age welfare isn’t a world in which they keep the money. It’s a world where they spend it on families of their own. And for those who’ve spent time and effort trying to create the stability that their future children deserve, there is a real prospect that paying for the fourth child of a family on welfare, somewhere, has come at the cost of having a further child of their own. The result is a sort of compassion trap. Our determination to do the right thing leads us to absurd consequences. The same humanitarian urges that lead to surges in immigration that our culture cannot absorb lead us to create systems where hard-working families are effectively pushed to have fewer children of their own in order to provide for others, to create welfare structures based on rights that have no cap and no natural limit: whatever it takes to keep the system going, whatever resources have to be expropriated, will be, until the burden eventually becomes intolerable. The costs of this approach can be considerable. In A Farewell to Alms, the economic historian Gregory Clark sets out how economic success in English history correlated with the number of children families had, and in turn how this spread the values and culture that created that success through the population. Britain, at the moment, appears to be in the midst of an experiment in reversing this process, encouraging habits which are hard to break. The link between a parent claiming welfare and their child going on to do the same is well-established. The result of a welfare state with few guardrails to its generosity and few incentives to escape the benefits trap could be to mould a population more reliant on government handouts, and less able to fund them. Actively seeking to shift this can seem cruel, telling people that they shouldn’t have the children they can’t afford. But at the same time, that is in effect how our current system works: there is no effective limit at the lower end, while successful parents look at their budgets, look at the chunks coming out of their pay cheques, and decide to exercise restraint on their own. From a certain perspective, there is no such thing as a neutral policy. Whatever framework the state sets up – whatever combination of benefits, taxes, or their absence it chooses – will favour one type of family and one type of parent over another. Rather than being guided by heedless compassion into creating a system that penalises success, shouldn’t we give at least some thought to the sort of country we want to build?