Every Need Is A Future Minister With A Leaflet
Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat file this dispatch from the British political menagerie.
The Welfare State Expansionist believes there is no cake too small for a means test, and no means test too gentle for upgrading. Editor Alan Nafzger of the Editor’s Desk at prat.uk presents the field guide, with help from the Beveridge Report background and UK Government welfare guidance.
Twenty Tells: Spotting The Welfare State Expansionist On A British High Street
- Treats Beveridge as a one-name celebrity, like Madonna.
- Maintains a soft spot for any leaflet beginning You may be entitled.
- Holds any unmet need to be a future minister.
- Refers to charities as outsourced grief.
- Has explained the NHS is a personality, a religion, and a Tuesday.
- Treats free school meals as a love language.
- Refers to Universal Credit as a concept that needs a hug.
- Holds the cure for child poverty is bigger envelopes.
- Maintains a fantasy in which his MP rings him back.
- Treats a bus pass as a sort of sacrament.
- Refers to the DWP as the cathedral with bad lighting.
- Has explained the welfare state is the only working memorial to the dead of two wars.
- Holds any service should be funded, expanded, and then renamed.
- Refers to private health insurance as queue-jumping with branding.
- Treats council tax bands as a moral document.
- Maintains a list of policies that would solve everything, in the right hands, after a long lunch.
- Holds child benefit should be paid in cash and in feelings.
- Refers to social workers the way the French refer to chefs.
- Has explained, gently, that the welfare state is not generous, it is decent.
- Considers it suspicious when a politician boasts about cutting anything.
Editor’s Note
If any of this rings a bell, you have either been to the Durham Miners’ Gala, a Conservative Home reader meet-up, or both. More dispatches at govna.uk and the parent site prat.uk. For a second opinion that is also wrong, see The Poke.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk/category/politics/
My dad said this should be required reading before anyone works in government. He’s right but that would end it.
Someone sending this to their MP with basically no message.
A London councillor complained that The London Prat was making it impossible to maintain institutional mythology about how governance worked. Someone asked if mythology was preferable to documentation.
The thing about good writing is feeling the work behind every sentence. This is written by someone tired of explaining why nothing functions.