Scotland on Sunday 16 April 2006 - http://news.scotsman.com/opinion.cfm?id=576972006

Twenty years ago, a discovery was made which changed the way America looked at poverty. An academic hired to monitor government benefit schemes proved a theory which sounded incredible: welfare was making poverty worse.

He spent the next 10 years being attacked as a right-wing zealot, especially as he found the institution of the family the best weapon in fighting poverty. Left-wing academics commissioned studies to prove him wrong, but found the same.

After setting the intellectual framework for Bill Clinton's acclaimed welfare reform, Charles Murray has become a world authority on welfare traps. But when he speaks about the most pernicious squalors of the planet, one sticks in his mind: Easterhouse.

In Washington last week, he was discussing his new book, In Our Hands - which proposes abolishing all welfare schemes and giving every adult in the country a flat £6,000 a year. Bankers, single parents, college dropouts and pensioners get the same.

The schemes of Glasgow stand out, on a world scale, because so much has been spent to alleviate poverty with calamitous results. The cash meant to end poverty instead creates jobless, drug-infested ghettos with dire life expectancy.

When British politicians - including Jack McConnell - talk about poverty they look at income alone. Families can be declared to have been "lifted out of poverty" if their package of benefits crosses a certain threshold. Murray has a different measure.

"Is there any place where it is harder to make a good life for yourself than Easterhouse? Imagine what you would do if you moved there. Maybe build a little wall for yourself with books and music, maybe venture out nervously to the street.

"But no matter what your income is, you will not find the friendly and supportive communities needed as the raw materials for a satisfying life. Perhaps you could find that when Easterhouse was first built. But not any more."

Anyone who considers poverty to be Scotland's most urgent problem should hear Murray out. His message will not be repeated in Westminster or Holyrood because he believes that politicians, of any hue, are the problem.

His starting point could be lifted from the Labour manifesto: that people can achieve more together than they do apart. Specifically, he believes that the welfare state has torn up links which previously bound low-income families and communities together.

The slums which Easterhouse replaced were cramped with no inside toilet, but they did have community. People looked out for each other. They had to: each was the other's primary safety net. But as the welfare state grew, the state took over.

This led to the atomisation of society. People's relationship was with the state: not with each other. Young men can now choose welfare dependency as a lifestyle. The state guarantees a father's income without his presence.

While the middle class can afford to be liberal about family break-up - lone parents usually have the money and family support needed - Murray believes this trend is wreaking catastrophic damage on the poorest reaches of society.

There are now reams of evidence, he says, showing that the children of lone parents are, for example, seven times as likely to fall into poverty, four times as likely to be expelled from school and twice as likely to go to prison.

If you accept these facts - which Murray says are unchallenged - then fighting poverty means fighting family-breakup. While this is the approach taken in America, by left and right, it is too moralistic a mission for any British politician to touch.

"In Britain, if you say the things people like me say you are seen as hard-headed, mean and nasty," says Murray. "I believe cruelty consists of a glib assumption that government support for children can compensate for the absence of the father."

The next charge he levels against the welfare state is spreading joblessness. While there are 81,500 claiming jobseekers' allowance in Scotland this is as nothing compared to the staggering 482,000 Scots claiming other out-of-work benefits.

The hundreds of thousands of immigrants who flock to Britain each year are proof that there are plenty of jobs going. Yet a quarter of a million Scots have been on benefits for five years or more and are statistically more likely to die than work again.

If it was not for the welfare state, how many of these would be forced to find work and break the cycle of poverty? When Clinton placed a five-year lifetime limit on benefit payments, welfare-dependency halved.

And something else happened, so dramatic that Americans are still stunned: violent crime collapsed to the lowest level since records began. An exact, horrific reverse has been going on in Britain where violent crime has trebled since Labour came to power.

While Scotland's crime rate has held steady, this is little cause for celebration. The UN has already named Scotland as the most violent place in the developed world, a picture that seems incongruous to those who live here.

Or, more precisely, to those who don't live in Easterhouse, Castlemilk, Dennistoun or the zones of Falkirk and Aberdeen where you are four times as likely to be hospitalised as in Scotland's many affluent and low-crime areas.

Every compass needle needs a butt end - which is why Scotland's ghettos are such a useful example for people like Murray. In welfare, as in healthcare, it points to the direction not to follow.

Murray's new book, not for sale in Britain yet, was given to Gordon Brown by a mutual friend last month. The Chancellor is genuinely driven by a commitment to tackling poverty, yet is gripped by belief that greater social tinkering is the answer.

"We know the limits of [government] interventions," says Murray. "The United States tried everything, we evaluated everything and nothing worked. That is not hyperbole, that is a statement of 30 years of research."

Since Labour came to power, life expectancy in Easterhouse has dropped two years to a Bosnia-league 65 years. Hospital admissions for alcohol-induced conditions have rocketed by 48 per cent. Half of all children are in now workless households.

Most of Easterhouse is also doubtless getting more money through government schemes, but can anyone really argue that life has grown much better?

This is Murray's point, and he believes Britain's political class is so keen to be seen as being generous to the poor that they cannot accept their interventions are - as he puts it - "compounding human misery rather than alleviating it."

Is Scotland ready for such an argument? Mr Brown and Mr McConnell both believe the answer lies in even greater government involvement. Murray says this will simply accelerate the disintegration of civil society in the poorest communities. It is too grave a warning, from too credible a source, not to take seriously. No one worried about poverty can reject it from gut instinct.

There is an easy way to resolve this. The facts are out there, and the Scottish Executive is fond of commissioning research. If Brown and McConnell disagree with Murray, all they need to do is commission the studies to prove him wrong.

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