TOPICS OF TIIE DAY.
THE OLD-AGE PENSIONS BILL. THE text of the Old-Age Pensions Bill, which was published on Tuesday, amply justifies the criticisms passed in these columns and elsewhere on the dangers and follies of the proposal. The Government were faced, with this dilemma. If it was by means of a clear, just, adequate, and comprehensive scheme that they carried out their principle—namely, that it is the duty of the State to make some other provision than that of the Poor Law for the old age of the "veterans of industry," male and female—the burden on the taxpayer would be so colossal that it would at once become obvious to the nation that the State could not be—to use the words of one of the late Roman Emperors—" a universal Pro- vidence." The scheme must have collapsed from its own weight. The other alternative was to admit the principle, but to limit it by so many devices for reducing the number of pensioners that the financial burden, at any rate to begin with, would not seem impossibly onerous. The Government have chosen the plan of cutting down the pension-list by numerous rules and regulations intended to prevent too many persons becoming pensionable. The result is a scheme so cumbrous, so coercive, and so essen- tially unjust that it is exceedingly doubtful whether it can pass in anything like its present shape, and it is certain that even if the party majority is used. to force it through, it cannot last more than a year or two unaltered and unexpanded..
In order to show that we are not exaggerating, we will give some of the chief points in the Bill. It begins with the general establishment of pensions of os. a week: for both sexes after seventy. It then proceeds to whittle away the gift. To begin with, the full 5s. a week will only be paid where there is not more than one person of seventy in a house, pensionable or unpensionable. If there are two or more persons over seventy who live together in the same house, whether they are a married couple, brothers or sisters, or friends and relatives, the pension sinks to 3s. 9d. Again, if one of the inmates has an income of over £1, the other inmate of seventy is held to have become infected by the fact, and. ceases to be pensionable. It is easy to see how this monstrously unjust regulation, for monstrously unjust it is, granted that a person of over seventy has a right to expect a pension from the State, has been arrived at. The Government, in their eagerness to cut down the pension expenses, were attracted by the notion that an old couple would not require so much as 10s. a week to keep them out of the workhouse, or to relieve their sons and daughters from the natural obligation of support- ing their parents. Accordingly they fixed 7s. 6d. a week as the maximum for a married couple living together. But at once arose the very natural and proper criticism that they were putting a stigma upon marriage, and that old couples who had lived together, but without being married, would be 2s. 6d. a week better off than persons who had married. Again, the rule would act as an incentive to separation in the case oi aged married couples. In order partly to gloss over these difficulties, the precious plan for penalising old-age pensioners who happen to live in the same house was invented, —another proof of how Governments flounder and bemire themselves if they once plunge into the bog of State interference. It is most right and natural, not only that an old man and. his wife should live together, but that two old brothers or sisters, or an old brother and sister, or two old friends should do the same. The Government, however, step in and do their best to forbid so reasonable and natural an alliance. They tell the old people that if they insist on living in the same house, the Government will fine them 2s. 6d. a week. The present writer has in his mind at the moment two old sisters of over seventy living in a village in the West of England. They have been friends as well as sisters all their lives, and since they have become past work they have occupied a single cottage. For them the Government Bill takes the form of a bribe to break up their home and to induce them to live apart. An Act of Parliament that has consequences so foolish and so unjust as that is not likely to prove very popular. The next method of whittling down the pension-list is the clause depriving a man of a pension who has an income exceeding £26 5s. a year, or 10s. id. a week. The injustice of this proposal is so patent that we feel almost ashamed of restating it. Put in concrete form, the pro- posal means that a member of the Engineers' Union who has an old-age benefit of 10e. a week will receive 55. a week from the State when he is seventy. A member of the Boilermakers' Union, on the other hand, who obtains an lls, pension from his Society will receive nothing from the State. But, it may be said, all the boilermaker will have to do will be to arrange with his Union to keep back a shilling of his pension each week in order that lie may be a person pensionable under the Act. Unfortunately for him, however, as the Daily News points out in a powerful leader on the subject in its issue of Wednesday, paragraph 3 of Clause IV. of the Act absolutely prohibits such anarrangement. This section declares "that if it appears that any person has directly or indirectly deprived himself of any income or property in order to qualify himself for the receipt of an old-age pension under this Act, that income or the yearly value of that property shall, for the purposes of this section, be taken to be part of the means of that person." In other words, the unhappy man who has been prudent and thrifty beyond the Government minimum of 10s. id. a week is not to be allowed under any pretext to escape the damaging results of his prudence. The Government will permit no evasion, but will pursue him to the bitter end with the consequences of his self-sacrifice, and exact the full penalty from him in the shape of a total disqualification for any help from the State.
But this is not the only method pursued by the Bill for penalising those who have acquired by themselves any sort of provision for old age over 10s. 1.d. a week. The Bill takes account not only of the actual income in a man's hands. If he may reasonably expect to receive during the succeeding year in cash an income greater than 10s. a week, he will be disqualified, and the expectation, it appears, is to be judged by the income actually received during the preceding year. For example, if old Mr. Jones, now over seventy, owing to the kindness of former friends and employers, last year received sums which, together with the rent of a cottage which he may have bought in prosperous times, came to over 10s. a week, he will not be pensionable, though the death of an old employer might at the beginning of next year easily cut off half his income. Again, if an old man is not making the best commercial use of any property that belongs to him, he will cease to be pensionable. Take, for example, the case of an old man living in a cottage with a biggish garden in some Surrey village where land has greatly increased in value, and where the cottage and acre might very well be worth £400. In that case he would not be pensionable, because by living on in his own cottage and tilling his garden during the remainder of his life Ile would not be making the best use of it as an investment. That, at any rate, is how we read Subsection (c) of Section 1 of Clause IV. No doubt there will not be very many hard. cases of this kind ; but still they are examples of the injustices of the Bill, and will tend to bring it into hatred, ridicule, and contempt among the poor.
Last week we drew attention to the fact that under the scheme as propounded in Mr. Asquith's Budget speech Boards of Guardians would be able to transfer the greater part of the old persons in receipt of poor relief from the rates to the Imperial Exchequer. This point, and the resulting increase of the burden on the Exchequer, seem to have been noted by the Government, and the scheme has been modified so as to make it impracticable for the Guardians to shift their responsibilities in the way sug- gested. No person who during the year 1908 has had poor relief, either indoor or outdoor, such as would disqualify him for a Parliamentary vote, will be able to obtain a pension. The Government thus avoid the danger of having their estimate exceeded by some four millions a year. Against this proposal for cutting out all persons who have had poor relief the Daily News enters a very strong, and; as we cannot help thinking, a very reasonable, protest. If it is a crime for an old person over seventy to receive help from local government funds, why is it not a crime to receive such help from the Imperial Exchequer ? But it is clearly, in the opinion of the Government, not a crime to
receive such help from the Imperial Exchequer, for their Bill is constructed solely to give such help.
We now come to the most extraordinary of all the cutting-down proposals of the Government. The second subsection of the first section of Clause III. dis- qualifies any man "if, before he becomes entitled to a pension, he has habitually refused to work or habitually refrained from working when he was physically able to work, or if he has been brought into a position to apply for a pension through his own wilful act or mis- behaviour." This clause must either prove a sham, or, if not, and if it is strictly administered, must practi- cally rule out almost every normal working man, and a great many -women, from the receipt of a pension. There are very few men in this country who have reached the age of seventy who have not "been brought into a position to apply for a pension through [their] own wilful act or misbehaviour" in not having made proper provision for their old age. The statistics of the Friendly Societies in town and country show that it is and has been well within the power of the majority of the working classes in Britain to make provision for their old age. Even the most poorly paid class of all, the agri- cultural labourers, as is shown by the records of plenty of rural societies, can, and often do, make provision for their old age. Of course there are tens of thousands who have made no such provision ; but if the Pensions Com- mittee make their inquiry a real one and not a farce, and if they strictly put every labourer to the test, we venture to say that they will find very few cases where the man has not, through his own wilful act, neglected to make provision for his own old age.
As to the "refusal to work" or "habitually refraining" provisos, we confess to a sense of blank bewilderment. How is the disqualification to be proved—except by local gossip ? Frankly, it is a ridiculous piece of legislative rhetoric, like the common passage in Socialist speeches about Socialists being the real enemies of the "work-shy." Upon this subsection as a whole the comments of the Daily News are so significant that we will quote them at length :— "The second paragraph of this same third clause introduces yet another disqualification, which seems to depart from the premises which Mr. Asquith laid down. It was understood that a Liberal Pensions Scheme would introduce no test of merit or character. We give not because we admire struggling virtue, but because we wish to relieve human misery. Even if we could trust a man's neighbours to judge of his failures and shortcomings, the attempt to do so would still destroy the value of the scheme as a measure of humanity. But here in paragraph (b) it is laid down that the local Pensions Committee shall undertake au investigation into the applicant's past. It is required to refuse a pension if a man's poverty can be traced to any fault of his own. There is not even a period of proscription, and the sins of a man's youth may doom him to the workhouse at seventy. It is laid down that a person shall (not may) be disqualified, if he has been brought into a position to apply for a pension through his own wilful act or misbehaviour.' What is 'misbehaviour ' ? The State as such has no concern with morals. It knows only crimes. But 'misbehaviour' is a word which covers every con- ceivable departure from any standard of conduct which any local committee chooses to apply. There is no time limit. A hot word spoken in youth, or one night of drunkenness, has put many a man and woman into a position which would force them later in life to apply for a pension. A tolerant committee would no doubt scrutinise the past of its applicants with a kindly eye. But before a body dominated by the ideas of the Charity Organisation Society, how many of us would be justified ? Even if most committees applied a fairly easy standard to the behaviour' of applicants, the mere knowledge that they establish an inquisition into a man's past would suffice to damn the whole scheme in the eyes of not a few of the self-respecting poor. Are they to answer questions about their temperance, their industry, their continence, or present a curriculum vitae as though they were candidates for a University Chair ? Or is some official devil's advocate to collect a case against them, as though they were saints applying for canonisation ? "
Though we hold that men can and ought to make pro- vision for their old age, we are bound to say that we strongly sympathise with a great deal of what is said by the Daily News. The idea of raking into all the town and country scandals of the past offers an appalling prospect. Probably the advocates of the Government scheme will say :. If we do not have such an inquiry, how will the pensions differ from mere Imperial outdoor relief to aged persons ? Our reply is—how indeed ! Therefore the only wise plan is to abandon the scheme altogether. . Before we leave the subject we may meet shortly a dialectical objection which is sure to be made to what we have written above. Our critics will of course say :— " You are trying to have it both ways in your hostility to the scheme. First you attack it because it is too lavish and too much money is spent, and then you turn round and oppose it because it is not lavish enough, and because the Government attempt to keep down by restrictions the burden of the pension-list." A moment's reflection, however, must convince any reasonable man that there is nothing either unfair or illogical in our method of com- bating old-age pensions. What we have endeavoured to do is to show, as we have said at the beginning of this article, that if you give pensions on a wide, com- prehensive, and impartial scale, you will completely overburden the State, while if you try to get out of this difficulty by restrictiug the pensions and limiting the number of persons eligible to receive theni, you will fall into another set of insuperable difficulties and create a system involving injustice, confusion, and in- quisition. Therefore our conclusion is that the only wise plan is to abandon the attempt to create a. system of old- age pensions. It cannot be done without either bankruptcy or injustice. It was this fact that led Mr. Charles Booth years ago to the conclusion that either we must have universal pensions without inquisition or restriction, or no pensions at all. This is the root-fact of the whole matter, and it is impossible to escape from it. As we want neither national bankruptcy nor injustice, we oppose, and mean to continue to oppose, any and every non- contributory scheme of old-age pensions.
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