Future Lives by Bachchoo
In a third-class railway carriage in India few years ago, on a two-night journey in a six-sleeper booth I made friends as one does with fellow passengers. It’s a tradition of rail-journey camaraderie, asking where you come from and offering to share your parathas wrapped in cloth or your tiffin carrier containing aloo-gobi with all and sundry. By the second night, having sponsored a round of tea at some big stop, one has made new if temporary friends.
On the second evening of this trip, after our professions and domiciles had been established, one of my new friends asked me, with the rest joining in, if what he had heard about England where I lived was true.
“Yehi puchna tha, aap naraaz tho nahin hongey ” he began. I said he could ask me anything and the saval of being naraaz didn’t arise.
His question in Hindustani was: “I’ve heard that in England those who don’t do any work are given money by the government anyway ”
I said it was sort of true. It was not really for people who didn’t want to work, but for people who were, for one reason or another, unemployed. They get welfare benefits.
My audience was perplexed and curious.
“Then why does anyone work ” another asked.
“Well, the welfare payments are just about enough to keep you in rent and food and perhaps a packet of cigarettes and some clothes once or twice a year.”
“Me I only need dal and a handful of rice,” another said.
I was at pains to explain that one had to register for these benefits and had to apply for any appropriate job that the welfare office found for you. It wasn’t really for people who just refused to work and wanted to live off the state, though that did happen.
“How do you get to England ” another of my new friends asked.
I hope I didn’t give them the wrong impression as I tried to emphasise that living on welfare wasn’t easy. I suppose they took that in, but I am sure they thought that living on tight welfare was better than living on nothing at all.
Today, all over Europe, the question of welfare benefits has been raised by the severe political if not economic crisis that Europe faces through the influx of about 20,000 refugees a day arriving from war-torn Syria, Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan and from the oppressive and capriciously murderous territories of Eritrea and Somalia.
It is obvious that the countries to which these asylum seekers and refugees come — Greece, Hungary, Italy, Austria, Germany, the UK, France, Denmark and Sweden — can’t house these numbers on arrival, find them work, or process them instantly to find their own way in European cities. They hold them in camps and feed them; or they restrict their entry across their borders. The refugees then set up their own camps and the only food and shelter they get relies on the goodwill of voluntary organisations and the charity of the local populations.
Denmark has, this week, debated a law which would bring the regulations for receiving welfare benefits, on which the asylum seekers rely, into line with those which apply to Danish citizens. This will mean that in Denmark any asylum seeker will not be allowed to hold more than the equivalent of £1,000 in cash or “wealth”, which could mean jewellery, extra watches for sale, antiques or any disposable items. Wedding rings, religious items and things such as expensive watches in personal use will be exempt. The Danish police will be responsible for discovering and confiscating all such “excess wealth” and will hand it over to go towards paying for the food, clothes, shelter, medical care, etc., of the asylum seekers.
There has been widespread criticism of this measure in Europe but the Danes point out that this is precisely what happens to Danish citizens who apply for welfare and that it’s only fair for the law to apply to the new immigrants.
This same question of welfare, which seems, as it did to my fellow passengers in the Indian railway carriage, like a something-for-nothing proposition, divides British politics today. Prime Minister David Cameron’s governing Tory party has promised the British public a referendum on whether to stay within the European Union or to leave it. Mr Cameron and several of his ministers are for remaining in a “reformed” European Union.
The Prime Minister is even now negotiating these reformed terms or concessions with other European heads of state. Mr Cameron knows that the Eurosceptic population of Britain is most concerned with other Europeans, and now refugees, turning up in Britain and claiming welfare benefits. Or as the paranoid but untrue assertion goes, living off the taxpayers of Britain.
What Mr Cameron is trying to get the other European governments to agree to is that people who come to Britain will not, for the first four years of their stay, be eligible to draw any welfare benefits. If they remain and work for four years and pay their taxes, they will have contributed to the economy and the British taxpayer will be happy to support such a person if they become, for some reason, unemployed.
There is very little evidence that Europeans who have free access to enter Britain are coming in droves to live off welfare benefits. Quite the contrary. There are statistics to demonstrate that they pay substantially more in taxes than their entire workforce takes in benefits.
But, of course, Mr Cameron’s move is a political tactic. If he can convince the other EU countries to let him pass this four-year-benefit-stand-off law, he can appeal to the British public saying “look, no more scroungers” and persuade them to stay in the global capitalist economy of the EU. Whether he’ll get the British police to take jewellery off asylum seekers until they find employment, he hasn’t said.
