Today must count as one of the most encouraging days for the centre right in British politics in recent times. Labour’s apparent abandonment of universal child benefit is a massive blow to the 1945 settlement. It is akin in significance to when Labour began to accept the privatisations of the Thatcher era.
Now, there’s no intellectual difference between declaring that better off pensioners won’t receive winter fuel payments and that better off mothers won’t receive child benefit. But in symbolic terms, the difference is huge. The winter fuel payment is a recent addition to the welfare state, introduced by the last Labour government. It is not fundamental to it. By contrast, child benefit—or family allowance, as it was initially called—is one of the pillars of the welfare state, an original recommendation of the Beveridge report. If it can cease to be universal, why can’t the state pension?
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