THE early signs are that George Osborne's political manoeuvre on
welfare cuts might have backfired already. The Chancellor decided
to usher in the New Year with an announcement designed to
wrong-foot the Labour Party, and effectively declare open the 2015
General Election campaign. But his move revealed, intentionally or
not, something about the morality of this Government's attitude to
the poor.
Another round of spending cuts is to be at the heart of the
Conservative election strategy, it seems. Of the £25 billion
proposed cuts, half will come from taking the axe once more to
benefits. Old-age pensions are to be exempted, apparently because
older people vote more than do the under-25s, whose housing benefit
is the only specific target announced in the new welfare cuts.
The subtext, apparently, is that this will paint Labour as "the
scrounger's friend", ever-ready to squander the taxes of
"hard-working people", to use another Tory catchphrase. Many in
Conservative Party ranks, however, are unimpressed with the idea of
balancing the budget on the backs of the working poor and those
without jobs.
There is, however, a deeper subtext. It revives the old
distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor, of which
our Victorian forebears were fond, with their Poor Law to
incarcerate paupers in the workhouse.
Earlier in the life of this Government, Lord Williams, then the
Archbishop of Canterbury, warned against "a quiet resurgence of the
seductive language of deserving and undeserving poor". Not all
churchmen agree. His predecessor, Lord Carey, responded, in the
Daily Mail, that "hand-outs given to the long-term
unemployed" exacerbated the problem of a "bloated" system of
"welfare dependency" that rewarded "fecklessness and
irresponsibility".
The general public tends increasingly tothe latter view. The
2012 British Social Attitudes survey suggested that 37 per cent of
the population thinks that most people who are on the dole are
"fiddling". Some 62 per cent think unemployment benefit is too high
and discourages work.
This is almost a threefold increase on what people said during
the last recession, in 1993. The public now sees the occupants of
the 340,000 households in which no adult has ever worked as idle
caricatures from the TV series Shameless rather than
people who, in Lord Williams's words, are not "wicked or stupid or
lazy", but who need help "because circumstances have been against
them".
Clearly there is a balance to be struck between the duty of
solidarity with those in need, and the requirement to create
incentives for individuals to take responsibility for themselves
and their families. The Work and Pensions Secretary, Iain Duncan
Smith, has for years been grappling bravely with this issue.
The Office for Budget Responsibility and the Institute for
Fiscal Studies have both said that Mr Osborne's new cuts will hit
disproportionately the sick and disabled. This cannot be right. And
both say that tax increases will be difficult to avoid, if the
public deficit is to be reduced. Paying taxes is also a moral
issue. It's odd, then, that we hear nothing from Mr Osborne, who
previously cut taxes for millionaires, about the undeserving
rich.
Paul Vallely is Visiting Professor in Public Ethics and
Media at the University of Chester.