Next week the Chancellor John Healey delivers his first Budget, and the headlines are full of speculation about possible tax rises and spending cuts.
This year, public spending is forecast to be £1,419 billion and rising. About 30% of this goes on pensions and welfare, and nearly 20% on the NHS. Defence spending is pledged to increase, and the government is considering expensive proposals to fund social care.
Funding is raised through taxation and borrowing, with government debt currently standing at 95% of GDP. Meanwhile, our population is ageing while birth rates (and immigration) decline, so fewer people are paying into the pot.
Is spending spiralling out of control? Should the state be doing everything we expect of it, or can we simply no longer afford the society we have created?
Our public services were created for a different time … when a smaller population lived shorter lives. Today we have a large and complex society, and there are tensions between the need for compassionate welfare and the desire to promote personal responsibility. It is easy to retreat into headline grabbing slogans: those on the right might call for benefits to be slashed, while those on the left cry for wealth taxes on the rich.
Christians will legitimately take different approaches regarding the role and size of government. From a Biblical perspective, our starting point is that all humans are made in God’s image, with innate dignity and worth. So perhaps we should reframe the debate to ask two questions:
How can government enable people as far as possible to fulfil their God-given potential? And how do we address the causes as well as the consequences of society’s challenges?
For as Paul Johnson, former Director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, reminds us, the benefits system does not just provide for the poor and vulnerable, it also “cleans up the mess that we have made elsewhere. It mops up after unemployment, low wages, chronic illness and high rents. It also risks contributing to each of them.”
So we should expect our politicians to consider how best to give people agency and opportunity in their own lives. We should support systems that treat people as human beings rather than numbers to be crunched or problems to be processed.
We should also champion stronger local communities. If we believe the state does too much, it will need to empower other parts of society to do more. This may involve short term investment for longer term benefits. Many local organisations have withered in recent years and many people feel they have no stake in their communities and no power to change things. The Church is uniquely placed to work in this context.
Ultimately we must think about how our society can make everyone feel valued, bestowing a sense of belonging and responsibility. Then people will be more willing to give back for the good of all.
Ultimately, we know that no human ideology has all the answers to these challenges, but we have a duty to be Christ’s hands and feet in our world until His return.
