A STATE CAN'T CARE (via Harry):

How welfare killed Victoria: Officials didn't visit the doomed eight-year-old. They went to a seminar on child protection (Daniel Kruger, The Spectator)

As Lord Laming, the chairman of the inquiry which reported this week, put it, the victim died from "a gross failure of the system". It is not too much to say that the welfare state killed Victoria Climbie.

It was the welfare state, for a start, which first brought the eight-year-old to England. Her parents gave her into the care of a great-aunt, Marie-Therese Kuoao, on the understanding that she would go to school here. In fact, Kuoao wanted Victoria for the purpose of another service offered by the taxpayer: child benefit. A minor earns its guardian 15 pounds a week from the government, to say nothing of supplementary benefits such as housing allowances. There are thought to be thousands of West African children traded in Britain for this purpose, acting as cash-generating domestic slaves for their keepers. Victoria never went to school; she was never allowed out of Kuoao's council flat. When she developed incontinence, and when beatings didn't seem to cure it, Kuoao (and Carl Manning, her live-in boyfriend) forced her to sleep in the bath. To prevent her soiling the bath, she was tied in a bin-liner. Sometimes she was left like that for days. [...]

Ultimately, it is not the particular incompetence but the general assumptions of the public services that are most to blame for Victoria's death. The culture of "non-judgment" led social workers to disregard her obvious terror of her great-aunt: they thought they recognised, in the words of one, the "formality" and "sense of respect" common in "Afro-Caribbean families" (the Climbies are West African). In the same way, some of these professionals of humanitarianism dismissed the marks of belt-buckles and bicycle chains on Victoria's back: "physical chastisement" is also rumoured to be common in that vague country where the multi-cultis come from.

So it is that "tolerance" becomes patronising superiority, and the idea that black people cannot be expected to behave as decently as white folk. The only people who acted at all sensibly in this dreadful saga were those unconnected with the system: the relative who phoned Brent social services to warn them of Victoria's impending death, and the child-minder and her daughter who took Victoria to hospital on their own initiative, to similarly little avail. Meanwhile her "case" must have been "handled" by more than 100 public servants in more than a dozen public agencies.

That is the welfare state.

It is no coincidence that de Tocqueville wrote his Memoir on Pauperism after a visit to Britain:

[I]t is easy to see that the richer a nation is, the more the number of those who appeal to public charity must multiply, since two very powerful causes tend to that result. On the one hand, among these nations, the most insecure class continuously grows. On the other hand, needs infinitely expand and diversify, and the chance of being exposed to some of them becomes more frequent each day. We should not delude ourselves. Let us look calmly and quietly on the future of modern society. We must not be intoxicated by the spectacle of its greatness; let us not be discouraged by the sight of its miseries. As long as the present movement of civilization continues, the standard of living of the greatest number will rise; society will become more perfected, better informed; existence will be easier, milder, more embellished, and longer. But at the same time we must look forward to an increase of those who will resort to the support of all their fellow men to obtain a small part of these benefits. It will be possible to moderate this double movement; special national circumstances will precipitate or suspend its course; but no one can stop it. We must discover the means of attenuating those inevitable evils that are already apparent.

But what could be evil about a system designed to have the State provide welfare to those in need, rather than depending on uncertain private charity?:

[I]ndividual alms-giving established valuable ties between the rich and the poor. The deed itself involves the giver in the fate of the one whose poverty he has undertaken to alleviate. The latter, supported by aid which he had no right to demand and which he had no hope to getting, feels inspired by gratitude. A moral tie is established between those two classes whose interests and passions so often conspire to separate them from each other, and although divided by circumstance they are willingly reconciled. This is not the case with legal charity. The latter allows the alms to persist but removes its morality. The law strips the man of wealth of a part of his surplus without consulting him, and he sees the poor man only as a greedy stranger invited by the legislator to share his wealth. The poor man, on the other hand, feels no gratitude for a benefit that no one can refuse him and that could not satisfy him in any case. Public alms guarantee life but do not make it happier or more comfortable than individual alms-giving; legal charity does not thereby eliminate wealth or poverty in society. One class still views the world with fear and loathing while the other regards its misfortune with despair and envy. Far from uniting these two rival nations, who have existed since the beginning of the world and who are called the rich and poor, into a single people, it breaks the only link which could be established between them. It ranges each one under a banner, tallies them, and, bringing them face to face, prepares them for combat.

What's most remarkable about little Victoria's tragic story is not that the Welfare State failed her, but that there were individuals who still felt socially connected enough to try and intervene, sadly to no avail. Posted by Orrin Judd at February 2, 2003 1:35 PM