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Challenges

May 01 2025

A perception-warping, thought-provoking piece on the different challenges people face across our society. By André Rostant

Jonathan is married, with a five-year-old child. He and his wife struggle to cope due to an unfortunate condition they share. Jennifer is a specialist who provides support, she lives in and helps around the house, largely managing the care of little Matilda. Never a quitter, Jonathan works three hours a day, four days a week, with the aid of Sharon who organises his schedule, assists him with admin and correspondence and makes sure he eats at the right times. Jonathan inherited his condition, so his parents knew what to expect. Fortunately, they found a place in a charitable school with small classes, supplemented by extracurricular and pastoral provision.

Like many in his predicament, Jonathan’s lifestyle is underpinned by state support, a significant proportion of which comes in the form of housing benefit paid to his tenants. The condition in question is Unchallenged Entitlement Syndrome. His main income comes as dividends from investments anchored against the rentable value of a largely residential property portfolio. Jonathan proudly tells people he is a self-made man. He describes the money he gets as ‘passive income’.

Cally is one of those tenants by means of whom Jonathan obtains his housing benefit. She lives in poverty, along with over two million fellow Londoners. Her rent is £515 a week, £490 of which is paid by the DSS. Like many of Jonathan’s residential lettings, Cally’s home is a former local authority property, snapped up during Thatcher’s buy-to-let blitzkrieg on council housing. Cally occasionally skips meals and often sits in the cold with no heating.

Cally is a single mother with a three-year-old child, Kevin, but she cannot afford to stay at home to care for and raise him because the government would consider her economically inactive and stop her benefits. Consequently, she is obliged to send him to a nursery where economically active strangers scrape a living looking after him while she squeezes as much work as she can from a zero-hours contract as a barista in a local coffee shop. Her employer is subsidised by taxpayers to the extent that Universal Credit chips in much of the difference between the amount she actually needs to live on and what they pay her. The economically active nursery workers also need to claim Universal Credit, which is means-tested and doles out the bare minimum income needed to get by.

Cally does not vote and is not interested in politics. Jonathan and his wife are enthusiastic supporters of their local Conservative Party branch. Cally does not believe in unions and has no time for hobbies. Jonathan is a Rotarian, a member of the National Residential Landlords Association and of the British Chamber of Commerce.

Why should we be tempted to blame either of them? Cally is not apathetic, she is just busy, addled by scrambling to make ends meet. There is no inference to be drawn from her being a single parent: reflect on the scenarios and impressions that information conjures in your mind, because they tell everything about you and nothing about Cally. Likewise, Jonathan is largely a product of the circumstance and opportunity he grew up with. Attributes with which we are born are beyond our control. Neither Jonathan nor Cally had any say in their background, their families. Each merely plays the cards life deals them as best they can, from their perspective.

What they have in common is the economic system in which we are all entangled. In this system it makes sense for Jonathan in London, whose friend Fred is in hospital with cancer, to go to Manchester and run a marathon, or travel thousands of miles to Africa and climb Mount Kilimanjaro to raise funds toward Fred’s care. Our government thinks it also makes sense to cut disability payments while holding the tax on Jonathan’s dividend income over £125,140 at 39.35%, instead of the 45% he would pay had he worked conventionally for the money. Had he made a mere £30,000 in dividends, his tax rate would be 8.75%, as opposed to 20% if he had been employed by someone else.

Jonathan has other challenges, though: the tax axe fell on his old primary school, and little Matilda’s attendance will be £6,500 dearer this year, thanks to VAT.

It’s all about money: what should be a simple emollient to trade and commerce has become the object of all activity. We need things like food, shelter, education, health. All our current economy is geared to offer are employment and investment opportunities, neither of which can cure Jonathan’s condition.

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