Fairness and Child Benefit cuts : the end of the welfare state (?)

So, the government wants to child benefits for those earning over £44,000 a year. Cue hostility not from the left, but from the right. This is nothing of course to do with the fact that most of the London media are on that sort of wage- nay they consider it to be 'average', but because of the unfairness that the cut brings- i.e. those couples who potentially earn £43,999 each, will still get the benefit.  

It is also true that this highlights the possible difficulties for the upper middle and lower middle classes, when the country is ruled by two  multi millionaires, for whom the cuts will mean nothing as they will always have the money to do whatever they like.  From the left, there has been much gloating about how the Tory media has gone into overdrive when the cuts attack their constituency and to be fair if it had been a proposal to get the so-called 'benefit cheats'  benefits cut then the left would be rioting by now and the right would be gloating.

But let us look at these in a different way. The left has more to loose by the government action, than the right. This may sound strange, but  the basis of my argument is to suggest that  the welfare state , its capstone if you will, is that the few pay for the many. It is not hordes of poor people who pay into the welfare pot, like some giant co-operative, but in reality it is the middle earners who pay most into the pot (the super rich have good accountants who help them avoid this burden).

Thus as the state deprives these middling earners benefits, the less and less reason they will have to support the welfare state, which is and always was, a redistributive mechanism of wealth, albeit via stealth. This system has survived because successive governments have used the universality of the benefit system to keep the middle classes buying into it. Once that is gone, well, the middle classes would being to wonder what advantage the welfare approach has for them . Let us not forget that it is in the middle class suburbs were elections are won or lost and not in the rust belts of the northern towns or the Tory dominated shire counties.

But they are only child benefit cuts I hear you say. Well, this is just one example, but the process of disengaging the middle classes from the welfare state  was already started by the last government, perhaps unwittingly, when it introduced tuition fees for university education. Note, my argument here is not about the merits of this policy, but the fact that university education (labour's social engineering aside) is by and large the preserve of the middle classes, but that this benefit was paid from the universal pot of the welfare state. That's gone now. So will child benefits. Next will it be access to the NHS?

The ironic thing is that, the left seems to think these are good ideas and thinks it is all perfectly 'fair' as 'fairness' seems to be the current political watchword. This might be the case, but by banging the drum of fairness, the left is going to find itself in difficulty when people start to ask about the 'fairness' of paying such a vast amount of their hard earned money to the government, when they see almost no return from that.

So strangely perhaps this might be the beginning of the end of the welfare state. And when that happens, it won't be the middle classes who will have the greatest shock of their lives, but the left and their supporters. So please Guardian readers, keep saying this cut is 'fair' , as every time this occurs, you are driving a nail into the welfare coffin.