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| Labour, drop the benefits doublespeak and let’s hear your underdog-whistle | Labour, drop the benefits doublespeak and let’s hear your underdog-whistle |
| (about 4 hours later) | |
| A hailstorm of Twitter fury pounded Labour’s Rachel Reeves last week when she told the Guardian: “We are not the party of people on benefits … We’re not the party to represent those who are out of work.” Rage, despair and walkouts ensued. Doesn’t Labour know most people relying on benefits are in work anyway? Reeves hastened to explain: she meant Labour would tackle root causes of rising benefits with lower rents, better jobs and higher pay. When she promised that “Labour will be tougher than the Tories”, she meant on cutting the bill, not benefit rates. | A hailstorm of Twitter fury pounded Labour’s Rachel Reeves last week when she told the Guardian: “We are not the party of people on benefits … We’re not the party to represent those who are out of work.” Rage, despair and walkouts ensued. Doesn’t Labour know most people relying on benefits are in work anyway? Reeves hastened to explain: she meant Labour would tackle root causes of rising benefits with lower rents, better jobs and higher pay. When she promised that “Labour will be tougher than the Tories”, she meant on cutting the bill, not benefit rates. |
| There’s no doubt her arrival at the Department for Work and Pensions would transform its purpose overnight. Managers are in for a sharp retraining: no more targets that pressure jobcentre staff to remove claimants’ benefits, on pain of dismissal. Yesterday’s belated work and pensions committee report revealed that the sanctions regime now consigns 500,000 people to months of food bank hardship, 10 times more than in 2010. Reeves offers guaranteed paid jobs to the young unemployed, no more unpaid slave labour. She wants to revive the culture of jobcentres that helps rather than punishes, that makes food banks redundant, that abolishes the bedroom tax and speeds up payments for the thousands left in limbo. Having watched her with people in despair at losing their homes to the bedroom tax, I don’t doubt her decency. | There’s no doubt her arrival at the Department for Work and Pensions would transform its purpose overnight. Managers are in for a sharp retraining: no more targets that pressure jobcentre staff to remove claimants’ benefits, on pain of dismissal. Yesterday’s belated work and pensions committee report revealed that the sanctions regime now consigns 500,000 people to months of food bank hardship, 10 times more than in 2010. Reeves offers guaranteed paid jobs to the young unemployed, no more unpaid slave labour. She wants to revive the culture of jobcentres that helps rather than punishes, that makes food banks redundant, that abolishes the bedroom tax and speeds up payments for the thousands left in limbo. Having watched her with people in despair at losing their homes to the bedroom tax, I don’t doubt her decency. |
| But there is another truth. She didn’t quite misspeak: she is meticulously cautious with language. Challenged that Labour was seen as the “welfare party” her reply was a dog-whistle, sounding tough without committing Labour to anything nasty. | But there is another truth. She didn’t quite misspeak: she is meticulously cautious with language. Challenged that Labour was seen as the “welfare party” her reply was a dog-whistle, sounding tough without committing Labour to anything nasty. |
| She has the hardest shadow post, reconciling the party’s mission to stand with the underdog while facing a public fed by a stream of statistics-free anecdotes about welfare cheats. A TUC survey found 64% of Labour supporters – yes, Labour – backed benefit cuts. Polls show the influence of poverty-shaming documentaries: Channel 4’s Britain’s Benefits Tenants yet again films the most dysfunctional people without background histories or statistics. Tomorrow’s British Social Attitudes survey may show a softening national mood, but when last in power Labour failed to shift the enemy’s terms of engagement, hiding its own good actions behind tough talk. This mirrors too much Labour policy, foggy messages hiding agonised ambivalence – and voters smell out that inauthentic verbal triangulation. | She has the hardest shadow post, reconciling the party’s mission to stand with the underdog while facing a public fed by a stream of statistics-free anecdotes about welfare cheats. A TUC survey found 64% of Labour supporters – yes, Labour – backed benefit cuts. Polls show the influence of poverty-shaming documentaries: Channel 4’s Britain’s Benefits Tenants yet again films the most dysfunctional people without background histories or statistics. Tomorrow’s British Social Attitudes survey may show a softening national mood, but when last in power Labour failed to shift the enemy’s terms of engagement, hiding its own good actions behind tough talk. This mirrors too much Labour policy, foggy messages hiding agonised ambivalence – and voters smell out that inauthentic verbal triangulation. |
| On benefits, most voters are conflicted: no one, least of all those working hard for very little, wants people cheating. But most want civilised care for the sick and unlucky. Labour can’t win this internalised tussle by replicating it, but could earn credit by encouraging the nation’s better instincts. George Osborne’s monstrous welfare cuts offer an open goal. | On benefits, most voters are conflicted: no one, least of all those working hard for very little, wants people cheating. But most want civilised care for the sick and unlucky. Labour can’t win this internalised tussle by replicating it, but could earn credit by encouraging the nation’s better instincts. George Osborne’s monstrous welfare cuts offer an open goal. |
| What the chancellor plans is impossible – and he knows it. A £12bn benefit cut is imaginable only to those determined not to examine it. The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) has rarely sounded so indignant as when its director, Paul Johnson, found it “frustrating” to be “left guessing” on such “radical” cuts. The hapless treasury minister David Gauke was sent out to say details would be given – but not until “after the election”. | What the chancellor plans is impossible – and he knows it. A £12bn benefit cut is imaginable only to those determined not to examine it. The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) has rarely sounded so indignant as when its director, Paul Johnson, found it “frustrating” to be “left guessing” on such “radical” cuts. The hapless treasury minister David Gauke was sent out to say details would be given – but not until “after the election”. |
| Related: IFS challenges George Osborne over £12bn welfare spending cut plan | Related: IFS challenges George Osborne over £12bn welfare spending cut plan |
| Can David Cameron last the campaign on fantasy figures? A leader in the Times, which these days usefully parrots Conservative central office, suggests the Tories think breezy indifference to reality doesn’t matter. “The cold shower from the IFS was expected,” it reads dismissively. Britain must press on with reducing its “unsustainably generous welfare state. Cutting it down to size in pursuit of Mr Osborne’s vision of world-beating prosperity is not callous. It is optimistic, aspirational and essential.” But if the leader writers listed £12bn of “unsustainably generous” bits, even their readers might blench. | Can David Cameron last the campaign on fantasy figures? A leader in the Times, which these days usefully parrots Conservative central office, suggests the Tories think breezy indifference to reality doesn’t matter. “The cold shower from the IFS was expected,” it reads dismissively. Britain must press on with reducing its “unsustainably generous welfare state. Cutting it down to size in pursuit of Mr Osborne’s vision of world-beating prosperity is not callous. It is optimistic, aspirational and essential.” But if the leader writers listed £12bn of “unsustainably generous” bits, even their readers might blench. |
| Here’s why Osborne’s plan is impossible: despite the harshest cuts inflicted by a postwar government, the benefits bill never fell. More baby boomers are retiring. Despite severe caps and the bedroom tax, soaring rents push up housing benefit. Pay has stagnated, so more people on negligible wages push up tax credits. Biggest cuts have come from freezes and changing the inflation measure – less noticeable, but deep poverty-generators. | Here’s why Osborne’s plan is impossible: despite the harshest cuts inflicted by a postwar government, the benefits bill never fell. More baby boomers are retiring. Despite severe caps and the bedroom tax, soaring rents push up housing benefit. Pay has stagnated, so more people on negligible wages push up tax credits. Biggest cuts have come from freezes and changing the inflation measure – less noticeable, but deep poverty-generators. |
| How callous can any government be? There’s a limit. The DWP is in a meltdown of backlogs, failing to make promised cuts. Take a prime example: its planned 20% cut in disability living allowance was to eject 500,000 people from benefits by moving to a personal independence payment, with some 120,000 also losing their motability car. But it’s been impossible to reassess 2 million people, however crudely, so they were parked – savings unrealised. Add them to the vast backlog of people on employment support allowance, awaiting work capability assessments – and those savings written into Osborne’s budgets have also vanished as the system collapsed. | |
| No more linguistic duplicity. Labour's authentically 'optimistic, aspirational' policies deserve a louder megaphone | No more linguistic duplicity. Labour's authentically 'optimistic, aspirational' policies deserve a louder megaphone |
| Osborne can ignore campaigners, but an outcry against the chaotic unfairness of Atos tests for disabled people came from Tory backbenchers embarrassed by surgeries filled with cases of ill and fragile people judged fit for work. Professor Malcolm Harrington, called in to assess the assessors, was fiercely critical, and thereafter fewer recipients were judged capable of work – and savings evaporated. | Osborne can ignore campaigners, but an outcry against the chaotic unfairness of Atos tests for disabled people came from Tory backbenchers embarrassed by surgeries filled with cases of ill and fragile people judged fit for work. Professor Malcolm Harrington, called in to assess the assessors, was fiercely critical, and thereafter fewer recipients were judged capable of work – and savings evaporated. |
| Even the Tory press has a limit to what it can tolerate, faced with stories of people dropping dead days after being found fit for work by some underqualified Atos checker. The petition that followed David Clapson’s death after his benefits were cut off, illuminated all those other deaths and disasters of people left penniless. No wonder the government tried to blame the Trussell Trust for the proliferation of food banks. No wonder it imposed the Lobbying Act to gag charities campaigning in election year: note the silence from many. Will interviewers force ministers to reveal how £12bn can be cut in just two years? UK unemployment pay is already exceptionally low, and post-election figures will show poverty and inequality leapt up on Cameron’s watch. | Even the Tory press has a limit to what it can tolerate, faced with stories of people dropping dead days after being found fit for work by some underqualified Atos checker. The petition that followed David Clapson’s death after his benefits were cut off, illuminated all those other deaths and disasters of people left penniless. No wonder the government tried to blame the Trussell Trust for the proliferation of food banks. No wonder it imposed the Lobbying Act to gag charities campaigning in election year: note the silence from many. Will interviewers force ministers to reveal how £12bn can be cut in just two years? UK unemployment pay is already exceptionally low, and post-election figures will show poverty and inequality leapt up on Cameron’s watch. |
| The IFS says Labour’s slower plan to end the deficit needs no cuts – none. Labour is shy of saying it for fear of sounding feckless, despite public opinion turning against austerity. Rachel Reeves should be allowed to announce no more cuts to benefit rates, only efficiency savings in the DWP mayhem. But that demands an imaginative culture shift, shaking off fear of the “welfare party” tag by standing up for the good welfare state. | The IFS says Labour’s slower plan to end the deficit needs no cuts – none. Labour is shy of saying it for fear of sounding feckless, despite public opinion turning against austerity. Rachel Reeves should be allowed to announce no more cuts to benefit rates, only efficiency savings in the DWP mayhem. But that demands an imaginative culture shift, shaking off fear of the “welfare party” tag by standing up for the good welfare state. |
| No more linguistic duplicity. Labour already has authentically “optimistic, aspirational” policies, but they deserve a louder megaphone: lower rents, raise pay and build more homes. | No more linguistic duplicity. Labour already has authentically “optimistic, aspirational” policies, but they deserve a louder megaphone: lower rents, raise pay and build more homes. |
| • This article was amended on 25 March 2015 to clarify that the government’s planned disability benefit cuts aimed to move 500,000 people off benefits entirely |
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