Free cars for bedwetters!

What the Motability scheme piss-take tells us about Britain

A new BMW i4 M Sport, worth £52,770, is available for free if you wet the bed

Did nobody at the benefits office notice the irony of approving a £52,770, taxpayer-funded BMW for people who claim disability allowance because they wet the bed at night? What about all those vehicles doled out to those with Munchausen Syndrome, which, as Allison Pearson points out today, is “a psychological condition where someone feigns symptoms of illness to gain sympathy or attention”?

But irony is in short supply these days, having gone the way of intelligence. Other cars have been handed to people with anxiety, depression, autism or ADHD, and as they can have up to three named drivers, they are often passed to relatives in full-time employment who can’t even be bothered to pretend they have a mental health condition. Meanwhile, the company running the scheme, Motability Operations, trousered £2.5 billion last year.

As Sam Ashworth-Hayes reported in his excellent investigation yesterday, “the number of people who could potentially claim a Motability vehicle has risen by over half a million since 2019, and the organisation now has 800,000 clients. The result is a bizarre behemoth: a car-leasing programme for the disabled that accounts for roughly one in every five new cars sold in Britain, and is one of the country’s largest issuers of corporate debt.”

What has happened to this country? Accelerated by the Covid years, Britain’s national inactivity rate — the number of working-age people who are neither employed nor seeking work — now stands at about 22 per cent, with more than half-a-million never having had a job.

In some parts of the north, as many as 83.2 per cent of people are “economically active” and nationwide, one in ten children grow up in a household in which none of the adults are employed. Enjoying lifelong support from the taxpayer, they are better off than they would be if they were working with a salary of £70,000.

A staggering £65 billion is now splurged on incapacity and disability payments annually; that figure alone amounts to six billion more than our entire defence spending last year, and is projected to rise by tens of billions in the coming years.

A quarter of the workforce, more than 16 million people, has now been registered as “disabled”, living off the sky-high taxes that are paid by the rest of us. Can there be that many genuine cases? Of course not. Many of them are bedwetters, and I mean that in the metaphorical sense. It is, I’m afraid, a piss-take.

Europe has taken a similar long-term trajectory. Angela Merkel once observed that although the Continent was home to seven per cent of the global population, it was responsible for half of the world’s welfare expenditure. Those who share the ethos of our grandparents, who would never dream of living on handouts as a matter of pride, are few and far between.

This is not just a matter of economics. The status quo has been deeply harmful to the spirit of the West. What is the psychology of a person who is content to live on the taxes of others? We will never know, but it certainly involves zero sense of duty to one’s fellow citizens. It also speaks of a profound pessimism, expecting nothing more from life than state-funded indolence from cradle to grave.

Yet it is those old-fashioned few who still believe in hard work, themselves and their country, and who would blanche at the prospect of wetting the bed, who keep the show on the road. Without them, there wouldn’t be any money for everybody else. Moreover, those are the sort of people upon whom we rely for our national defence.

Ibn Khaldun, the titanic fourteenth century Arab intellectual who forms a presiding character in Simon Sebag Montefiore’s masterpiece The World, remarked: “Many nations suffered a physical defeat, but that’s never marked their end. Yet when a nation becomes the victim of psychological defeat, that marks the end.” He identified asabiyya, or social cohesion, as a vital ingredient for societal health.

Similarly, research into “common ground and division” by the More In Common think-tank concluded that we faced a choice. “One path leads to the deepening polarisation that is being experienced in other countries,” it said. “The other path leads to a more cohesive society where we build on common ground and focus on the issues that we agree are more important than anything else.”

That is the most worrying thing about our handout culture: the distain for the country of which it speaks. Without national togetherness, we will continue to fall victim to maladies such as crime, depression, broken families, impoverishment, falling productivity, lack of cultural coherence and the reluctance to defend ourselves.

We cannot run on the fumes of previous generations for very much longer. If the Motability scandal reveals one truth that is more worrying than all the rest, it is this: our society is on the verge of “psychological defeat”.

Worst of all, we have done it to ourselves.