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.
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