Aditya Chakrabortty is an old favourite of this blog, a journalist whose outpourings as the Guardian's Chief Economics leader writer have been a regular source of irritation and comedy over the months and, on reflection, years it has been in operation. In so far as I can bear to read his column in G2, it continues to fascinate, appal and amuse in equal measure.
What has Mr Chakrabortty been up to now? Well yesterday he wrote an obituary of the Welfare State as envisaged by Beveridge. "The proximate cause of death was a change in child benefit from being available to all to a means-tested entitlement", he intoned. "That marked the end of one of the last remaining universal benefits, in turn causing a fatal injury to welfare . . . It expired peacefully on Monday 7 January just weeks after marking its 70th birthday". You get the lumberingly humorous picture. Because welfare is apparently only for the needy now, it is dead in the water.
I am sad to report that my family's entitlement to Child Benefit ended on Monday as well. Faced with the information that we would be taxed at 100% on the sum (£150 or so every month for our three children), the neat and tidy thing to do seemed to be to go on to the Government's website and cancel it. Which I did on Friday.
Given that Mr Chakrabortty thinks the loss of Child Benefit for people like me marks the end of the welfare state, he might like to know what my wife and I spent it on.
To be clear, we didn't need the money. Contemplating the vast sums we have forked out endowing our children with i-Pods, i-Phones and finally i-Pads, not to mention expensive and unsuccessful skiing holidays ("There was too much snow", complained one of our daughters), my wife and I decided to spend the Child Benefit, on the whole, on wine. We thought that since we paid tens of thousands of pounds tax every year, we might as well get some pleasure back courtesy of the Government.
To start a wine cellar requires that you buy it faster than you drink it. So in the family cellar there nestle quantities of Wirra Wirra Church Block, Domaine de Mourchon, Auxey-Duresses, Chateau des Carbonnieres, various fruits of the D'Arenburg vineyards in Australia, together with quite a lot of champagne, for which we have a weakness. Sitting somewhere in France there is also quite a lot of Rhone red, mostly from Cairanne, "easily the best of the Southern Rhone villages", according to Hugh Johnson (we prefer the lighter reds to the heavy Bordeaux classics), which will be delivered in due course. 2009 and 2010 were particularly good years, and I'm looking forward to getting stuck into the Rhones, which will be drinkable fairly soon.
All bought at the Government's expense. Well, actually at the expense of taxpayers everywhere, including my wife and I, if you think about it.
Amazingly this situation, no doubt replicated in well-to-do households up and down the land, is one which Mr Chakrabortty thinks should continue. Moreover, he thinks that because the Government has put a stop to it that means the welfare state is now dead.
Oh my Lord.
A couple of points about Mr Chakrabortty generally. I haven't got it in for him personally. He is not clever enough to do his job well, but the real idiots are the Graun's management team for employing him in the first place. True, he isn't in the same class of duffer as Polly Toynbee, but then she is out on her own, and, to be fair, was probably quite good once. It must hurt Larry Elliott, the Graun's main economics writer, to see Chakrabortty cavorting across the pages of G2 while his own writings are secreted away in the paper's flimsy business section, perused only by economics geeks like me.
The second thing is that cutting Child Benefit for those who can afford to spend it on wine might be better viewed as an economic necessity for a country that is borrowing about £2,000,000,000,000 every week just to stay afloat.
The Welfare State was set up by Beveridge in an entirely different social context. At that time people worked because not do so was to risk social shame and destitution.. The provision of benefits for the jobless changed attitudes to work irrevocably. Admittedly the time to do something about that was during the Gordon Brown boom rather than now, when it is so difficult to find a job, but it's a stable door that desperately needs shutting all the same.
The real threat to welfarism is not its withdrawal from people like me, but rather the changing economic and demographic circumstances which have rendered it unaffordable as presently constituted. To give but one example, the average life expectancy of a man at the time of Beveridge was 48. It has increased by at least thirty years in the intervening period, with the attendant massive consequences for the amounts, still rising, HMG must pay out in pensions. I'm still hoping there'll be a state pension for me when I'm 66, but I'm not banking on it.
(In fact only days after posting this, a White Paper proposed that the years NI contributions we will need to get the state pension should increase from 30 to 35. As someone who has 27 and was nearly there, this was something of a sickener)
It saddens me that the Guardian thought it a good idea to get rid of Martin Kelner, who until very recently wrote an intentionally funny column on Mondays, but not Aditya Chakrabortty, who still writes an unintentionally funny one on Tuesdays. Go figure.
