Labour’s acting leader Harriet Harman and I are not going to agree about George Osborne’s cuts to tax credits paid to the working poor. Her assertion that Labour should be “grown up” and accept the will of the electorate won’t wash with me because the electorate were never told before the election what specific cuts to welfare Osborne would make after it. The argument must surely be this: if the Labour is not for working people, what is the point of it at all? But, having said all that, she is definitely onto something. The public has grown to hate welfare.
More specifically, the electorate has, to a large degree, accepted the media-trumpeted government distinction between strivers and skivers. If you are in work, you are a striver, if you are on benefits, you are a skiver. A huge generalisation and wrong on both counts. But if there were all these skivers about, why would DWP Secretary Iain Duncan Smith have made hundreds of benefit fraud investigators redundant and why would councils close down their fraud teams altogether?
Osborne’s attack on the working poor – and that, make no mistake, is precisely what the tax credit cuts are all about – will not affect the vast majority of people in the country. It won’t affect pensioners who have been protected from all government cuts because they vote and it won’t affect the middle classes. Osborne is betting on the Great British Public not giving a toss about the poor and so far he is winning. You might think this is very cynical, but then Osborne is the most cynical of political tacticians, forever plotting the next short term advantage. His calculation is right: a lot of people don’t care because they don’t get tax credits anyway. Labour’s job – Harriet Harman’s job – is not to simply acquiesce to the Tory narrative. It is to present an alternative argument, that low pay is a blight on working families, it is a blot on society. She shouldn’t say, “Look, most people don’t give a toss about the working poor, so why should we?” A Labour Party worth its salt (and soul) should look to win the argument because there is one to be had.
Let’s put this into raw numbers. 13 million poorly paid people will lose around £20 a month, some three million will lose £90 a month. Now for many people, these figures are a drop in the ocean, a small round at the pub, a Sky TV subscription, but for those on more modest incomes – and don’t forget that many are on £6.50 an hour or just slightly more than that – it is a lot of money.
Harman unwittingly endorsed Duncan Smith’s ghastly House of Commons fist-pumping when Osborne, showing yet another breathtaking sleight of hand, announced the “National Living Wage”, which of course was no such thing – merely an increase in the national minimum wage – immediately after having announced his tax credit cut to the working poor. Yes, you read it right: Duncan Smith was joyously fist-pumping at the announcement of a naked assault on the strivers on the minimum wage. Compassionate Conservatism, my arse. The Nasty Party is back in charge and Harman thought it was a good idea to be nasty with them. Wrong!
At least Labour’s acting leader has started a national debate of sorts. If she has reduced Labour to even smaller rubble, then at least do it in the first few months of a new Tory government and not in a couple of years time. The bar that Labour will need to win seems impossibly high right now so it is true that it does need to engage with the electorate in a way it has not done so in years. But it doesn’t need to swallow every Tory budget, every Tory slogan about immigration and anything else that it perceives might be temporarily popular.
Labour should not head off in the direction of obliteration which would be ensured by a Jeremy Corbyn led opposition, because the politics of purity will not win the election for the party. Labour does need to capture the middle ground of politics, but not just by following public opinion, but by leading and by creating a vision for how a country would look under them. Fairness, aspiration, equality of opportunity, a genuine meritocracy – that’s what Labour should be about.
Harman’s approach is to offer Blue Labour, but the truth is that if the public wants Blue politics, it is more likely to vote for the real thing.
If Labour turns its back on the working poor, I will cast my vote elsewhere or more likely nowhere at all.
