“The Horror Stories Start Here”

Jun 26, 2010 2 Comments ›› Pat Dollard

Martin Ivens: The polls show the electorate understands the need for cuts. Next year there will be howls of anguish across the land

Times Of London:

by Martin Ivens

You had only to read some of the case studies of families that newspapers dropped in to lighten their coverage of the emergency budget to see the shape of things to come. The Times, for instance, grouped its human interest items under the helpful headline “Potential victims”. The personal is going to get fiercely political.

These photogenic “victims” of the cuts sounded nice people. They were also commendably frank. Laura and Robert Moisey-Smith, for instance, are respectively a teaching assistant and a structural engineer. Because their joint annual salary is more than £25,000 they will no longer be eligible to claim child tax credits for their children, Sam, 11, Imogen, 2, and Wilson, 8 months. The youngest two were beneficiaries of Gordon Brown’s Child Trust Fund, now scrapped by George Osborne.

Mrs Moisey-Smith delivered quite a bombshell: “I would love a fourth child, but I am not sure we will have enough money for that.” Observe your handiwork, chancellor, Osborne’s scaremongering opponents will say. You may have deprived a young couple of that most precious of all gifts, a human life.

There is, of course, an alternative way of looking at their plight. The Moisey-Smiths are having to make the same calculation that women and men have made for thousands of years: the joy of each new baby always comes at the cost of a personal sacrifice in terms of resources and freedom. Yet now their new Labour benefits have been taken away, how will the Moisey-Smiths be voting at the next general election?

Here’s another “victim” with a strangely double-barrelled name. Rebecca Mill-Wilson, a 25-year-old mother who receives £500-a-month housing benefit. She looks after her two children, Niamh, 5, and Johnathan, 3, who has learning difficulties, in a two-bedroomed flat in Warminster, Wiltshire. Many of us will sympathise with her when she cries out against filling in a 70-page form to claim disability benefit for her son.

“The idea of having to go through an assessment for him, too, is worrying,” she says, perhaps with less foundation. Mill-Wilson would like to move to neighbouring Bath, where plenty of jobs are available, but accommodation “is way out of my price league”. It sounds tough. But the government’s message has to be: life is like that — we can’t all get a home in the places where we would like to live. Indeed, who gave her the idea that she had such a right? Someone has to pick up the bill. The taxpayer. Yet I expect she will blame the government for her predicament.

This is just the start of the backlash. Today the opinion polls show voters understand the need for cuts. By next year there will be howls of anguish across the land. There will be real victims who fall between the cracks of the benefits system and social services. Departmental cuts of 25%, or even 33% if the defence and education budgets are spared the worst, will offend every pressure group, outrage every trade union and put every voter on the spot.

It amounts to a revolution from above. The cupboard is not only bare but it will never be filled again. The expectations of the Moisey-Smiths and the Mill-Wilsons of this world are going to have to change. The government will simply do less and encourage us to do more. Only the poorest will be helped.

Margaret Thatcher, Norman Tebbit and Nigel Lawson, who engineered a free-enterprise revolution in the 1980s in the teeth of left-wing opposition, were real bruisers. Their names still arouse hatred in parts of the country. David Cameron and Nick Clegg have hitherto been politicians who have liked to be liked. I wonder if they know what’s going to hit them.

Many crusty Thatcherites rejoice at what they see as Osborne’s conversion to the old religion, but some are privately sceptical that the government can pull off cuts of this magnitude. Surely these demands for retrenchment must amount to an opening Treasury negotiating gambit, they ask. If so, No 11 denies it.

It’s hardly worth bothering to listen to Labour in the midst of a leadership election — its candidates are literally irresponsible, refusing to accept their party’s starring role in this mess and failing to suggest alternative ways out — but in the Commons Alistair Darling quietly said the cuts couldn’t be done in this form. Michael Portillo, a former Thatcherite, agrees.

Ian Mulheirn, director of the Social Market Foundation, puts the price in concrete terms: “To cut £1 out of every £3 from the Home Office and Department for Work and Pensions is a huge ask. These cuts are equivalent to the entire running costs of the prisons and courts; more than half of spending on the police; and the entire pay bill for Jobcentre Plus. It is very questionable whether cuts of this size can really be found … It seems likely the chancellor will be back with more tax rises and cuts to benefits.” If so, the Moisey-Smiths and Mill-Wilsons of this world will be hit even harder.

In his budget speech the chancellor admitted: “It is simply not possible to deal with a budget deficit of this size without undertaking lasting reform of welfare.” But he didn’t make much of a start. He froze child benefit for three years rather than removing it for higher and middle earners. As the Joseph Rowntree Foundation observes, all pensioner benefits were treated as sacrosanct too — even the winter fuel payments that go to everyone over the age of 60 irrespective of need or income. Nearly half of the total welfare budget is off limits for the moment.

In the eye of the storm will be Iain Duncan Smith, the work and pensions secretary, a Christian rightwinger who converted his party to the cause of the poor. Even his worst enemies believe in his good intentions. But last week the former Conservative leader announced plans to phase out the default retirement age and raise the state pension age to 66 by 2016. He will also force couples and lone parents in social housing to downsize when their children leave home. Housing benefits will be cut.

Within weeks Duncan Smith must outline a programme for welfare reform that will start to make work pay for the millions of people solely dependent on handouts. Yet he once advocated spending on work programmes — £2.6 billion to be precise — over the short term to save future billions. “I don’t need it,” he now tells me, only begging his party to “commit” to his solutions: “I can make the scale of changes necessary.” Enough to make savings elsewhere in departmental budgets? “I would like to think so,” says he in his bravest former officer manner.

It amounts to a revolution from above. The cupboard is not only bare but it will never be filled again He must also divorce the middle class from the benefits system. Like many a Tory MP he has met high-earning working mothers obsessed about losing their child benefit.

“They should be worrying about the size of their taxes,” he says. Even if he gets his revolution right, Duncan Smith is likely to become public enemy No 2, behind Osborne.

President Bill Clinton and his Republican opponents in America, land of rugged individualists, pushed through similar harsh welfare reforms but in the midst of plenty. Here, in kindly Britain, we are only just emerging from recession, and unemployment will climb as the cuts bite.

Duncan Smith says “politics is both heart and head”. He blames Thatcher’s successor, John Major, for much of the sloganising that got the Tories the name for heartlessness, citing his catchprase “If it isn’t hurting it isn’t working”. “We underestimated the importance of language,” says Duncan Smith. “People end up hating you even if they agree with you.” You also need to show there is light at the end of the tunnel.

The language of hope is vital. But Duncan Smith and his coalition team will have to work with missionary zeal to convince this country that, in the American phrase, “a handup, not a handout” is all we can expect. Watch out for the horror stories.