Since the coalition set about dismantling the welfare state, a strange and unnatural consensus has formed. Frontbench politicians from the left as well as the right, together with a supine media that long ago stopped asking pertinent questions, preferring instead to reiterate David Cameron and George Osborne’s big lie, have convinced a nervous public that it is being driven to hell in a handcart by a collective of benefit scroungers, welfare cheats, the disabled, the fecklessly over-fertile and the downright lazy.
At least, they would constitute a collective if they were not all too busy finding new ways to cheat the benefits system while simultaneously saddling the National Health Service with the extra costs of treating self-induced lung cancer and liver disease. “This money is to be spent on food”, you can hear almost Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith saying.
“We demand an end to the something-for-nothing culture”, trumpeted Ed Miliband in his Labour conference speech. The public agreed. Tory millionaires queued up in Manchester to make the same point. Yet the news that company directors’ pay increased last year by a staggering 49 per cent was met with equanimity by many of those who have criticised the welfare state the loudest. Surely there is no more glaring example of “something for nothing” than these obscene pay hikes at a time when many low-paid and public sector workers have seen their wages frozen, constituting an actual pay cut in real terms?
The intimidation of the most vulnerable in society is nothing new. The recent trend of vilification began under New Labour as a ploy to win middle-class votes. But this Government has taken the targeting of the poor to an entirely new level – so much so that a report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies predicts that in the course of the next three years we can expect a drop in income of 7 per cent. This means that company directors will have to struggle by on a meagre increase of only 42 per cent.
For others, however, it will mean a life in poverty. That’s not relative poverty calculated by how many foreign holidays you can afford in relation to Liam Fox and Adam Werrity, but real poverty. By 2020, the IFS predicts, poverty will have returned to the level it was in 1999. 2020 is the year by which Tony Blair pledged to eradicate child poverty for good.
The present Government’s proposed solution is the Universal Tax Credit. At a cost of £2 billion, this will in no way compensate for the £19 billion annually that the coalition is taking from those most in need. This is even before the Government removes the indexation of social security payments in order to placate its backbenchers.
Following the general election, the Tory-led coalition announced its intention to ensure that only one in 10 children living in this country would do so in poverty – as though this in itself were some sort of ambition. If the IFS, which is not known for left-leaning sympathies, is correct, then by 2020 one in four children will go to bed hungry in over-crowded, under-heated homes. They will leave for school the next day wearing an incomplete school uniform and not having eaten breakfast due to the closure of their local Sure-Start breakfast club. Once at school, they will fail to gain the qualifications that might once have ensured their own children fared better than them.
I never realised that “Broken Britain” was an aspiration.
Earlier this year, Iain Duncan Smith delivered a lecture in which he admitted it had been a mistake for his party to ignore the issue of child poverty. “The result of leaving the field undisputed is that the last 13 years has seen a narrow interpretation of what poverty is and how to solve it.” With respect to IDS, I would hazard that anyone living in poverty knows exactly what it is, and what it means for them and their children. And it has nothing to do with the rising cost of hay. Let’s get one thing clear. Anyone who believes the best way to fight poverty is by making the poor poorer has never been poor.
The Government’s Child Poverty, Strategy published on the Department of Work and Pensions website, announces that it will “tackle causes, not symptoms”. It pledges: “From now on, we will make sure people are able to work themselves and their families out of poverty and reward those who do the right thing. Our reforms will move 350,000 children and 500,000 adults out of poverty instantly and the dynamic impact will change Britain for generations – a change for which we cannot wait any longer. This strategy brings together work across government that will improve the life chances of millions of children.”
That’s all very well, but if I was taken to hospital with a compound fracture after being knocked down by a car, I would rather the surgeon pushed my bone back where it belonged before he tackled traffic calming measures. All this reinforces the belief among those adversely affected by the Government’s measures that the world inhabited by the very rich IDS and his colleagues is not the same world in which they and their children live.
