Britain as a Nation and Government Chooses Poverty

And Yes Poverty Is a Choice 

Kaled Hassan 

 

 

One of the universal phenomena about humans is that they don’t wish to take responsibility for their own actions. Very few are willing to raise their hands and say, “This went wrong because I made terrible choices”. Instead, everyone is happy to pass the buck, point fingers, and dramatically explain how they are the victim. Muslims do it, Jews do it, Hindus do it. It is our most convenient insurance policy for when something goes wrong. Britons and their government have been indulging in this vicious cycle of passing the blame to others and embracing victimhood for too long, and it’s why we’re here today, at the lowest moment in Britain’s history.

You see, experience teaches us that poverty is largely the byproduct of a mindset. I’ve seen people who had virtually nothing rise to become leaders in their field, and millionaires wasting away inherited wealth through bad habits and poor choices. The former found, and created, meaning from suffering, while the latter only ever knew meaninglessness in their world of comfort. This is the kind of mindset Britons embraced with open arms after the Second World War. The generation of WWII veterans saw horrors few can imagine, whether it was the liberation of concentration camps or broken young men traumatised by the loss of friends, limbs and loved ones.

This generation of heroes wanted comfort, peace and security to be their inheritance. They wanted a society in which the vulnerable were looked after by the state to be their heirloom, their legacy. But there is an important distinction between the settlement they envisaged and the mindset that would later take hold. The post-war welfare state was built around social insurance, work and the principle that collective security should protect people against hardship without extinguishing individual responsibility.

Over the decades that followed, Britain lost sight of that balance. Politicians discovered that expanding state provision and promising ever-greater benefits could win votes, while public expectations of government grew accordingly. Gradually, the relationship between individual agency and collective provision shifted, with the state assuming greater responsibility for people’s welfare and personal responsibility becoming an increasingly contentious issue.

It is like a child being spoon-fed drugs by an irresponsible parent, only to grow up addicted, terrified of withdrawal and unable to imagine life without the substance on which they have come to depend. Rather than confront the problem, the parent increases the dose, perpetuating the very dependency that threatens to destroy them both. Neither can bear the thought of withdrawal and the uncertainty it brings, so the cycle continues until the child has become a dangerous, drug-dependent adult.

Britain’s addiction to this toxic mindset is why so few politicians are willing even to contemplate the radical changes necessary to reverse the country’s economic and moral decline. The prospect of electoral annihilation makes any serious attempt at reform a political gamble few are prepared to take. Instead, they pay lip service to the need for change while largely preserving the status quo.

As the American author Sue Grafton observed, “You can’t save others from themselves because those who make a perpetual muddle of their lives don’t appreciate your interfering with the drama they’ve created. They want your poor-sweet-baby sympathy, but they don’t want to change.”

But how did Britain reach this point? The answer is eye-opening, depressing and revealing.

In his 1942 report, Social Insurance and Allied Services, William Beveridge, a British economist, civil servant, academic, and social reformer, wrote that the state should provide security without undermining individual incentive, opportunity or responsibility. He envisaged a national minimum on which people could build a better standard of living for themselves and their families.

The report's underlying principle was that social security should be a partnership between the state and the individual, not a substitute for individual initiative.

What the state did was exactly the opposite of what he envisaged. According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, in 1948/49, only 3.9% of national income was spent on benefits. By 2015/16, that figure had risen to 11.1%.

By 2025–26, Britain's social security bill had reached a forecast £333.7 billion a year — equivalent to 10.9% of national income. More than one pound in every nine generated by the British economy was being spent on social security, with pensioners accounting for approximately 55% of Great Britain's bill. This is not a nation investing in its future, but, to many, saying so would be viewed as a betrayal of the elderly (whom I believe should be looked after by family, not entirely the state).

But the danger lies in the public’s attitude towards benefits. According to the 2023 report on British Social Attitudes by the National Centre for Social Research, Britons have become more supportive of handouts since 2010.

The report, which examines “The rise and fall of anti-welfare attitudes across four decades: politics, pensioners and poverty”, shows a troubling pattern. 

 

 

 While the report acknowledges a rise in support for additional spending on benefits, even if this means higher taxes, from 29% in 2010 to 37% in 2023, it goes further, celebrating this shift as evidence that the British public has become “substantially more generous”.

 

 

 The report then attempts to explain the decline in what it calls “anti-welfare attitudes”:

The views of Labour and Conservative supporters have also softened largely in parallel. In 2005, 49% of Conservative and 35% of Labour Party supporters agreed that many benefits recipients “don’t really deserve any help”; these figures now stand at 19% and 11% (a gap of 8 percentage points).

The cause of the change in attitudes is difficult to discern and not due to one single factor. It appears to have been occasioned by a combination of several factors, including changing political discourses, more positive coverage in all newspapers, decreasing welfare generosity, and the perception that poverty has risen.

In other words, there’s hardly a difference between so-called conservative attitudes to welfare and their Labour counterparts. Although this was one of the defining differences between the right and the left, the public, regardless of political allegiance, has grown increasingly supportive of handouts. This is happening due to “more positive coverage in all newspapers” (i.e. indoctrination into believing that poverty, like illness, is never the by-product of our choices). Britain was evidently growing more accustomed to state dependency and moving towards an unquestioning acceptance of left-wing grievance politics. We have been told that those who don’t support handouts are not “generous”, while those who do are becoming more generous and kind.

What mad politician would attempt to reduce our benefits bill if it meant risking losing the support of 81% of Conservative voters and 89% of Labour voters?!

It is evident that even the report, which ought to be impartial and dispassionate, portrays support for benefits as “generosity”, while referring to opposing views in negative terms as “anti-welfare”. This demonstrates that Britain is largely incapable of having a sensible, grown-up conversation about benefits. The result is a political system in which politicians fundamentally believe that preserving the status quo is the safer electoral strategy, while promising change “tomorrow”. It very much resembles my approach to weight loss. Going on a diet is always something I will do “tomorrow”, for one reason or another.

It’s precisely why Labour Chancellor John Healey announced the UK’s budget on 28 October with no changes whatsoever to our welfare bill, and promised on the 29th, the very next day, that there would be a reduction in Britain’s welfare bill before the next election. In a moment that perfectly exemplifies the good old practice of kicking the can down the road when it comes to making difficult decisions, Healey promised that “There will be a reduction in the benefits bill, we’ll do that in a Labour way and we’ll do that because it is simply not good for Britain or progressive to have a bigger and bigger benefits bill”.

We don’t know when or how they will reduce our benefits bill, but, in keeping with British modern political practice, he will probably find the courage to advocate these tough measures only once he’s out of office, when he’s no longer calling the shots but merely writing in national newspapers to explain how his successors should do what he himself lacked the courage to do.

This is why, according to the UK Budget 2026 (announced on 28 October 2026 by Labour Chancellor John Healey, who increased the minimum wage), the lowest earners will make £25,759.50 per year at the new National Living Wage rate, while those defined as high earners start at £50,270. Thus, Britain’s definition of a high earner is increasingly difficult to reconcile with ordinary economic reality. Under the existing tax system, the higher rate of income tax begins at £50,270 a year. Yet the OECD estimates that the average full-time worker in Britain earned £55,983 in 2025. In other words, the higher rate begins at a salary almost £6,000 below average full-time earnings, making the UK threshold lower relative to average earnings than the comparable thresholds for Germany, the Netherlands, Australia, Canada and the US.

In the UK, workers need not be wealthy, own substantial assets or enjoy an especially comfortable standard of living to find themselves paying the higher rate, yet they are nonetheless expected to fund Britons’ addiction to handouts.

The status quo has ramifications that extend beyond the socio-economic state of our country. In fact, it defines how we deal with the most pressing issues of our time, including national security and foreign policy.

The status quo is why Palestinianism is increasingly popular in the UK. Fundamentally, Palestinianism is a movement about grievance. It is built on and sustained by a blinding sense of victimhood. Its founders, leaders and icons see themselves as forever victims. They believe they have done nothing wrong. Even the slaughter and kidnapping of innocent civilians, including infants, is justified in the name of “resistance” as they imagine themselves being freedom fighters against evil, Western imperialism. This is why Palestinianism found a home in Britain. Palestinians believe they are the hard-done-by victims in the story of modern humanity, while the modern Briton believes they are the victim of the government, wealth generators (i.e. millionaires and billionaires), capitalism — anyone but themselves.

This status quo is why the recent budget was described by a UK bank chief executive as “Taxing the engines of growth to reduce VAT [Value Added Tax] on gherkins is end-of-Rome level of stupidity”.

Tragically, Britain is indeed experiencing its own end-of-Rome moment.