Blow a billion quid – only fatties and idlers need apply

After the riots of 2011, which were so massive and so terrifying that I can’t remember where they were or what they were about, or how much damage was done, the government decided that everyone would go back to an Enid Blyton-style state of contentedness if the nation’s poor people were given £448 million.

On paper this looks a promising plan because if someone who is fat and unwashed is suddenly given a large lump of money it’s likely he or she will immediately send their child to school instead of letting them do burgling and drugs.

And a child who’s read Milton and Chaucer is statistically less likely to throw a brick through a shop window than a child who hasn’t. There’s no actual proof of this, obviously, but we know it to be so.

The trouble is that, having decided to narrow the gap between Waynetta Slob and Roman Abramovich, the government faced a bit of a problem. Because it couldn’t just load £448 million into a van and drive round council estates in the north of England throwing bundles of it at anyone in a tracksuit. Ministers needed a system so they could work out who was deserving of the money and who was not.

And they decided that this responsibility should be handed over to local authorities, which, again, sounds good on paper. You ask a government minister where all the poor people live in Bolton and he won’t have a clue. But people on the borough council will.

There is a problem, however, with this scheme in practice, and it’s this: by and large, the people who work for borough councils are just traffic wardens who got lucky.

Think about it. No one grows up dreaming of the day when they can work for the local council. It’s what you do when the pox doctor says he doesn’t want a clerk any more.

Have you met someone who works for a local council? No. Strike that. It’s a silly question, because of course you haven’t. You only see them in the town hall, behind a glass partition, below a sign saying, ‘I am useless at my job. I know that. But if you remind me, you will be prosecuted for verbal assault.’

Certainly, I wouldn’t trust the deputy assistant to the equalities officer on a council to manage a village hall tombola, let alone the distribution of hundreds of millions of pounds. But that’s exactly what the government decided to do …

After a little while the government started to ask if the councils were happy to have been sent a large amount of money. And it turned out, amazingly, that they were. Thrilled, in fact. Overjoyed.

They sent reports to London saying the scheme had been a huge success. And they released figures showing that 90 per cent of about 117,000 families selected to benefit from the handouts had turned their lives around and become model citizens. They really did. They said that 90 per cent had been cured of their sloth and their violent tendencies and had turned over a new leaf.

And what’s more, they argued that, having invested £448 million in the scheme, the government had saved £1.2 billion, thanks to a reduction in the cost of policing and providing truant officers and benefits, and so on.

Back in Whitehall, the government believed them. It really and genuinely thought that £448 million had solved the nation’s great divide. It also believed, amazingly, that it had got a threefold return on its investment almost instantaneously. So, figuring that the more it handed out, the more it would save, it decided to give the councils £900 million to share among a whopping 400,000 families. With a net that wide, even Elton John was likely to get a knock on the door asking if he’d like a bit of extra cash.

The way this whole enterprise was being described, you’d imagine the police in places such as Barnsley and Preston were shutting up the stations at night because there was simply nothing to do any more. Naturally, when I read about it, I saw in my mind classrooms full of rosy-cheeked children, all with their hands up, eager to answer the teacher’s question. And, outside, parents in well-cut jeans talking about the lovely little bar they’d found in Val d’Isère last year.

However, and this will come as a surprise to no one at all, it seems councils may have exaggerated the benefits of having a money-distribution van. Because a report released last week found that the scheme had no impact. The people who wrote it actually used those words. It had ‘no impact’. As in: none. Diddly-squat. Zilch.

Nearly half the families who took part in the scheme were still claiming benefits a year and a half later. And you find the same percentage among similar families who did not take part. Truancy levels were no different either. And neither were the numbers of those being cautioned or convicted of a criminal offence. This means the government has in effect thrown away more than £1.3 billion.

It makes my shoulders sag, because surely by now people with a modicum of intelligence must know that social engineering just doesn’t work. Give everyone in the country a quid and by next week two people will be multimillionaires and everyone else will have nothing. That’s just a fact.

Give 400,000 jobless fatties nearly a billion quid and by next week all of it will be in the hands of Allied Breweries, Ladbrokes and Pablo Escobar. You can’t change that.

We’ve watched countless leaders in countless countries attempt to level the playing field. And they’ve all failed. The only reason Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters haven’t realized this is because, mostly, they haven’t grown up yet. And they haven’t been to Cuba. Certainly, they haven’t realized that some people are born to be rich and some are born to be poor.

Trying to do something about this is as impossible as deciding that life would be fairer if everyone were good-looking. Yes. But some of us aren’t. And there’s nothing that can be done to change that.

So, Mrs May. Here’s a tip. The next time there are riots, don’t spray anyone with money. Spray them instead with a water cannon.

23 October 2016