So, the government’s own advisers warned them that their housing benefit reforms would lead to social carnage but they went ahead anyway? What could be behind this? I mean, there really must be an overwhelming reason in the national interest to press on despite the risk of that kind of societal damage. Right?

The boss of a friend of mine has an arthritic condition that means she uses a wheelchair when travelling any significant distances. A few months ago she had a bewilderingly unpleasant cab journey across London during which the driver spent the whole trip exploring his theory that disability benefit was a swindle and that most if not all the people who claimed it were shirkers. This to (in case you missed it) a woman in a wheelchair with arthritis, who had done nothing to provoke him other than sit in a wheelchair and be arthritic. That taxi driver is now Under-Secretary of State for Welfare.

All right, no he isn’t, but he might as well be. “’Unable to work’? No such thing, mate”—these people put the “cabbie” in “cabinet minister”. It’s official, even if it isn’t true: all benefits are theft. Disability, housing; name it, you’ve stolen it and now the government want it back. All taxpayers are paying for scrounging families to live in luxurious accommodation far more expensive than their own, they claim grandly without ever actually producing the numbers to prove it. No-one should ever get free money, they lecture us sternly while investigating the easiest way to abolish inheritance tax.

Even occasional readers of this blog may be familiar by now with my surmise that the Tories are governing by their instincts and prejudices rather than necessarily based on any facts, often because the facts clash inconveniently with what they have already decided. I’m afraid I have to serve this reheated dish up once again: those instincts and prejudices, not the financial train wreck that the banks bestowed on us, are the first and only reason for the reforms.

Ask Howard Flight, the recently ennobled ex-MP for Arundel who was sacked in 2005. He had made a speech, when he considered that he was among trustworthy right-wing friends, that laid out how the Tories’ proposals for £35 billion in savings in welfare spending, far from being the full extent of them, represented only the start of what the party wanted to do. Their findings, he said, had been “‘sieved’ for what is politically acceptable and what is not going to lose the main argument”, but “everyone on our side of the fence believes passionately that it will be a continuing agenda”. This, remember, was in 2005, when we were doing comparatively well—there was no imminent financial catastrophe to be cited as the axe was swung. The speech was leaked to the Times, the public for some reason got the idea that the Tories were being dishonest about what they planned to do when they got back into power, and the whole incident contributed to their failure to dislodge Blair that same year. But the “continuing agenda” simmered away, and now the party has its chance.

Intriguingly, it turns out that one of the chief exponents of the exciting potential offered by benefit-slashing and poverty isn’t even in the Tory party (or the other one^[1]). Thanks to Wikileaks, it turns out that Bank of England governor Mervyn King may have had a hand in creating the coalition’s deficit-reduction strategy and played a key role in ensuring that the cuts are as savage as planned. Not that Cameron and Osborne will have needed too much encouragement; the same cables reveal that King himself felt strongly that the pair of them were concerned only with the political impact of their reforms, not the economic. In other words, if for whatever reason you’re unable to work and you’re now scared of losing your home or whatever security you currently have, be under no illusion: these people really do hate you. They’re not concerned with any wider economic benefit of slashing your benefit—they just genuinely think you shouldn’t have it.

Ultimately, any arguments against are simply academic. The coalition outnumbers its opponents in Parliament and, like the previous administration before it, can drive enough of its own through the division lobbies to vote at the elected end of the building, while it can safely ignore any attempts by the unelected end to curb its legislative excesses. It doesn’t need to win the argument—it just needs to win the process. And it has very little incentive to listen to any voices of protest, even if they come from its own ranks, as it wages its total war against the straw men.

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^[1] That measurable Lib Dem contribution so far:

(1) Persuading the Tories not to destroy the BBC overnight but rather to delay the process (their flagship achievement)

(2) Persuading the education department to label part of its existing education spending as the “pupil premium” (not sure what the point of this was)

(3) Backing a tuition fee system that will see the less well off ultimately pay more than the rich because they won’t be able to pay their loan interest off as quickly

(4) Abandoning pretty much everything else they ever claimed to stand for on immigration, nuclear power etc etc

Have they got something really special up their sleeve? Because so far they seem to be living up to the most sarcastic expectations of their detractors.  ^Back