For the past few weeks Ed Miliband has repeated the words ‘bedroom tax’ ad nauseum. The average voter may think that such a thing exists. His obsession makes little sense without historic context. The last time a Labour opposition succeeded in attaching the word ‘tax’ to something which a Conservative government preferred to call something else was in 1990 when the Community Charge became almost universally known as the Poll Tax. Labour’s strategy then, depicting the Conservatives as taking sadistic pleasure in trampling upon the poor and weak, had a devastating effect.
In those days, Labour posed as the party of compassion — and portrayed the Tories as economic obsessives who would crush the poor through the blackness of their hearts. The next 13 years saw Labour forfeit any claim to stand up for the poorest. It was generous with benefits, but this simply served to condemn a generation to welfare dependency. Most of the increased employment in the boom years was accounted for by extra immigration. Under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, at no point were fewer than five million working-age people on out-of-work benefits. This was not just a waste of money, but a criminal waste of human potential.
Iain Duncan Smith returned to frontline politics with only one objective: to end this outrage. He infuriates many on the left because he is impossible to caricature as a heartless cutter. Labour has now relinquished any claim to welfare reform and once again defines compassion by the size of the benefits cheque. There are hundreds of communities in Britain that can testify to the damage inflicted by this shallow, materialistic approach. This is perhaps why the IDS agenda carries remarkable public support, which infuriates the left even more. Newspapers are blamed for somehow indoctrinating the masses (even though most people don’t read them any more).
The reverse is true: you need to see the world through the lens of the Guardian not to grasp how the welfare system is harming the very people it is supposed to help. The coalition government’s basic proposal — that a family on benefits should not receive more than the average working family — is an easily understood and widely accepted idea. It may cause outrage in Islington, but certainly not in Ilford. The feeling in the council estates is, if anything, stronger and more venomous. No self-respecting MP would use the word ‘scrounger’, for example, but polls show two in five think that it applies to at least half of welfare claimants.
When invited to attend a Work Capability Assessment — a medical examination to see whether claimants qualify for Employment Support Allowance, the successor to Incapacity Benefit — more than a third (878,000 people in total) decided to stop claiming the benefit altogether. More than half of those who did submit for assessment were judged to be fit for work. Among them were claimants who had ruled themselves as unfit for work on account of acne or blisters. It is possible to see how such people can be described as ‘scroungers’. But the term is uncharitable and it is unforgivable for a politician, however hungry for votes, to use such terms.
George Osborne has joined the debate with a little too much enthusiasm. He senses, correctly, that Labour has ended up on the wrong side of the debate — but the Tory posters depicting ‘shirkers’ are deplorable. If the British government paves the way to welfare dependency, is it any wonder so many millions walk down that road? There is nothing wrong with the British national character, and it ought to be beneath any politician even to hint otherwise. As Iain Duncan Smith has made it clear throughout, the blame lies not with the people who followed the government-created incentives, but with the architects of the system.
Britain has become Europe’s capital for children living in workless and lone-parent households. Given that the family is the single most effective provider of health, wealth and education, the results of this social breakdown are all too easy to predict. The effect will be compounded by a state school system that still tends to corral, rather than educate, the poor while allowing the pushy middle classes to get their children a better bargain. And those who fail to finish school then face competition from the world’s workers when looking for jobs. It is a formula for social decay, and the blame lies not with the people but with the government.
The Conservatives are right to reform welfare, and right to want to become the new workers’ party. But this message would be more plausible if the Chancellor actually cut taxes for the poor. Raising the tax threshold is worth a mere £3.26 a week, a sum easily eaten up by the inflation he tolerates. The Tories can only become the workers’ champion by taking measures to help workers, not just by inflicting pain on non-workers. The Chancellor should be careful before seeking to insert himself into the debate and join those drawing a dividing line.
This week, the government has kept public opinion on its side. But it is worrying that Mr Duncan Smith seems almost alone in being able to strike the right tone and convey the sense of mission. The Chancellor ought to learn from him. The word ‘shirker’ has no place in the vocabulary of the modern Conservative party. Welfare spending is to rise every year of the parliament. Mr Duncan Smith has always made it clear that his main objective is to save lives, not save money. If welfare reform is to stand a chance of success, his colleagues must remember that message too.
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