The government enacted the biggest ever overnight benefit cut last week. In one fell swoop, low-paid parents and unpaid carers of disabled people have lost more than £1,000 a year from their annual budgets, at a time when energy and food costs are steadily climbing and many are still feeling the impact of the pandemic. The result of these political choices is that more children will grow up without the fundamentals no child should ever be without: a warm and secure home; going to bed without feeling hungry at night. Not even Marcus Rashford, the footballer who speaks with such moral clarity about child poverty and who has forced the government to U-turn from enacting policies that cause harm to children, could extract a concession from the government this time.

It has justified this unconscionable policy on two grounds. First, the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, has argued this is not a benefit cut, but simply a removal of a temporary and pandemic-related uplift to low-income families with children. Second, Boris Johnson claimed in his speech to the Conservative conference last week that by dramatically reducing low-skill immigration in the wake of Brexit, he was setting the country on a path to productivity and wage growth that we are led to believe will more than compensate for his decision to slash financial support to parents and carers.

Both are rhetorical sleights of hand. The £20 a week boost in universal credit introduced at the start of the pandemic must be set in the context of a decade of cuts to financial support for low-income parents that cost some families thousands of pounds a year. These were delivered while Conservative chancellors initiated income tax cuts to the tune of billions a year that disproportionately benefited more affluent families. Even taking into account the pandemic uplift, low-paid parents are much worse off than they were in 2010.

It has long been an accepted principle of the welfare state that it should support parents with some of the costs of bringing up children: from free schooling, to help with childcare costs, to financial support via child benefit and targeted tax credits. This is to ensure that it is not just the wealthier half of the population who can afford to have children without exposing them to significant hardship. Raising children is expensive, particularly in a country with the highest rents in Europe, and the minimum wage would need to be set at an unfeasibly high level to eliminate the need for financial transfers to low-paid parents altogether. Our fertility rate has already declined to a level that is creating an ageing population, where there will be a decreasing number of working-age taxpayers to shoulder the increasing costs of ensuring that the UK is a decent country to grow old in. Some people in their 20s and 30s say they are already putting off having children because they feel they cannot afford them.

By eroding financial support for low-paid parents so significantly since 2010, the Conservatives have fundamentally undermined the social contract through which society subsidises the costs of having children. This consigns many to growing up in hardship: as Marcus Rashford has rightly highlighted, almost one in three children are living in poverty and the universal credit cut will increase those numbers even further. It also makes it harder for young families to have children when they want them: because of the impossibility of making becoming a parent work financially when they are juggling a minimum-wage job without guaranteed hours, paying out an unsustainable proportion of their income on rent and unable to meet the costs of the childcare needed to retain a job after having children. This is bad for them and bad for society.

The government has claimed that wages will rise as a result of Brexit and falling immigration. But it would take an implausibly huge and immediate rise in real wages to counteract the universal credit cut. Moreover, the government’s economic workings are risibly incoherent. There is no correlation between productivity and wages on the one hand and low-skill immigration on the other, and little evidence that cutting low-skill immigration will force improvements in productivity and sustainable wage increases across the economy. Wages may go up in some limited parts of the economy – for example, for HGV drivers – but unless there are across-the-board improvements in productivity, shortages will simply push up inflation and erode real wages for everyone else. The only way to improve productivity as part of a strategy to boost living standards is through long-term economic reform, such as investment in skills. But beyond the government’s loose rhetoric of “levelling up”, no such strategy exists.

This encapsulates Johnson’s populist approach to governing. The formula is well-worn: construct an unfair scapegoat for economic grievances, in this case, a mix of Britain’s membership of the EU, the immigrants our health and care systems rely upon to function and parents who do not work hard enough to support their children. Tell voters that there are simple workarounds to complex economic conundrums that have confounded policymakers for decades. Pledge to turn things around with simple sentiments such as putting British workers first by cutting immigration and encouraging parents to get better-paid jobs that don’t exist by cutting the tax credits that hold them back from doing so.

None of this will work as claimed. Johnson cannot evade political accountability for this for ever. But the tragedy is that in the interim, millions of children will bear the burden of his dishonest brand of populism, a burden that will affect them for the rest of their lives.

Source: The Guardian

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