Austerity Britain

AS BRITAIN enters its new age of austerity, the debate on universal benefits is spreading. The BBC recently interviewed a collection of former cabinet ministers, some of them of pensionable age. It is a sign of the times that one of them, a multi-millionaire former deputy prime minister and peer of the realm, found himself admitting under questioning that no, personally, he did not need the free bus pass and winter fuel allowance to which he is entitled.

What of child benefit, paid to all parents, regardless of income? The coalition, it is said, is not minded to introduce means-testing for this, partly because that costs a lot in terms of bureaucracy, and partly for reasons of politics.

Presumably the government could, in the spirit of the Big Society, call for volunteers to forego child benefit, if they feel able to do without it. The benefit is paid tax-free to parents of all children still at school and is worth £20.30 a week for a first child, with £13.40 a week for each subsequent child. But even that step seems doubtful. Watching David Cameron meet voters in Manchester a few weeks ago, I heard him explain that if those paying taxes into a system feel they get nothing back from it, that can have its own negative consequences. I suspect he is right.

Still, the dilemmas keep coming. A universal tax benefit for parents in Britain is that children's clothing is sold free of VAT, which is not the case in much of Europe. Even assuming that British retailers take some of that in profit, it is still noticeable that children's clothes are cheaper than Belgium, for example. Even this posed your blogger with an ethical test this week, as I shopped for sports kit for my children. Hunting for the right junior sizes, I was startled to realise that the largest sizes were not just big, but bigger than the sizes I take: eg, shorts with a 40" waist. That is a large teenager: just when did British children become so big? And as it happens, I needed some sports kit myself: here was some my size, and all tax free. Was it ethical to buy it? The age of austerity was in collision with an age of British obesity. The Big Society was changing meaning before my eyes. Reader, I buckled, and bought.