Two former Prime Ministers attack Osborne on tax credit poverty

[LeftishBrit]

Two former prime ministers have launched powerful attacks on poverty and inequality as George Osborne faces demands from MPs for a full rethink on his tax credit cuts. In a newspaper article ahead of a major speech on welfare, Labour's Gordon Brown said the Chancellor's cuts would help land the UK with "one of the biggest poverty problems in the western world". And Sir John Major, Tory premier from 1990 to 1997, said in a hard-hitting lecture that the level of inequality in modern Britain was "shocking" and has left poor people trapped and condemned to live "meaner, shorter lives". The twin onslaught came as a Conservative-dominated committee of MPs published a damning report demanding a one-year pause in Mr Osborne's tax credit shake-up and a major overhaul of the system.


Seriously, Mr Osborne, don't take it out on the family, and the children.
Former Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown

In its report, the Work and Pensions Committee calculated that a single earner with two children working 35 hours will increase their net income by £323 a year under the National Living Wage, but will lose £1,701 in tax credit cuts, leaving the family £1,378 worse off overall. The MPs said only about one third of those affected by the tax credit cuts would benefit from the increase in the National Living Wage, even by the time of its full implementation in 2020/21. A Tory member of the committee, Heidi Allen, who attacked the cuts in an explosive maiden speech last month, said: "We talk so often about 'all being in this together': now is the time to put that mantra into action."


I have never forgotten living in such circumstances. There is no security. No peace of mind. The pain of every day is the fear of what might happen tomorrow. It is terrifying - and it never leaves you.
Former Tory Prime Minister John Major recalls growing up in south London


https://uk.yahoo.com/digest/20151111/two-former-prime-ministers-attack-osborne-tax-credit-poverty-00993691


(Interesting perhaps to note which former Prime Minister hasn't commented so far...)

[Ironing Man]

1. ...

i wouldn't be surprised if Blair feels the same way - yes, i know, he's Satan, he's Hitler... blah - its just that Blair is politically toxic, if he co-authored such an article there'd be a 5 million strong demo in westminster at the weekend demnanding that anyone with an income of less than £30k be shot.

i don't know a single tory voter, or member etc.. who doesn't think that Cameron and Osborne haven't taken leave of their senses, both moral and political, over this tax credits shambles.

[LeftishBrit]

2. I certainly don't think that Blair is Satan or Hitler - though I have a slightly conspiraloony work

colleague who has explicitly compared him with both individuals!

I do, however, sometimes suspect him of being Cameron.

Don't know what's got into Osborne, apart from being a Chancellor of Very Little Brain. On the one hand, I suppose I should be glad that this lunacy may bring the Tories down - 'the new poll tax' as it's sometimes described. On the other hand, an awful lot of people may suffer in the meantime.

[T_i_B]

3. If anything, I would doubt that hypothesis

The reason being that the Blairite wing of the Labour party originally didn't want to oppose this. A strategy that backfired disastrously for them and played a major part in the election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/jul/12/harman-labour-not-vote-against-welfare-bill-limit-child-tax-credits
http://www.politics.co.uk/blogs/2015/07/09/labour-oppose-almost-nothing-in-george-osborne-s-budget
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10888161

As to the Tories, I suspect that Cameron & Osborne simply thought that they could get away with this after their general election win.

[Ironing Man]

4. ...

do you think the blairites didn't publicly oppose it out of support for it, or an acceptance of what they percieved to be real politik?

personally, i have no problem with the principle of the thing - Tax Credits have become not a redistrobutive measure, but a cheap labour subsidy paid to employers - my problem is that the implimentation of it pulls the rug must faster, and to a greater degree, than that rug is replaced by the tax cuts and higher wages. if lots - 50 to a hundred or so - Tory MP's are deeply unhappy with it, then i think its unlikely that even blairtes are more keen than they are.

i have no understanding of what Cameron and Osborne are playing at, whatever logic they are using completely escapes me - perhaps its simply that they just don't 'get' that for the families involved, £50 a month is the difference between feeding your kids and the loan shark. in truth, i've not been in remotely that situation since i was a student - though with the bank of mum and dad at the end of the phone, so not really in that situation - and i'm sure the grim reality of it is long gone from my memory...

[T_i_B]

5. Well, the Blairite "realpolitik" didn't work did it?

Getting back to the policy itself, I do wonder if it's something that's been done in a hurry. They certainly didn't campaign in the general election this year on this policy.

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2015/10/23/tax-credits-michael-gove-deny-cut-manifesto_n_8367926.html

[Ironing Man]

6. ...

well, ill-thought out and ultimately dropped policy is hardly a new phenomenon in the government of the 'born to lead' is it!

forestry commision sell off, child benefit (part 1), SDSR 2010, changing carriers and aircraft and then changing them back... for a government of so few smokers, they seem to spend a lot of time scrawling on the back of fag packets...

i might have seen it here, but i'd agree with the idea that theres a lot of policy that looks like its been made on the hoof - perhaps it was initially created to be hollow coalition fodder, 'reluctantly' cast aside in favour of something more limited that was actually what was wanted in the first place, and now they are stuck with it.

agree with your view that this was very much not discussed during the election, so that might blow a hole in my theory....

[Denzil_DC]

7. That might have been me,

but the idea wasn't original, I'm sure.

A number of the policies in the Tory manifesto (I mean other than the things they promised they wouldn't do) seem to have been drafted in the expectation that there'd be another coalition government, so could be seen as bargaining stances - abolition of the Human Rights Act, for instance, the fetishistic fox hunting bill and the welter of measures they've tried to pass as statutory instruments rather than going for full-blooded Acts or amendments.

Then they won an outright (albeit relatively slim) majority, so punted some of those measures into the Chamber early, on the basis that if they passed, they passed. They wouldn't be the first government to bring forward less than popular (or indeed effective) legislation early in their term, on the assumption the electorate are stupid and easily distracted, have short attention spans, and would either have forgotten that things were ever different or who to blame for the initiatives by the next time they were asked to put pencil to paper, or would be so wound up over the latest wedge issues that the earlier legislation would blend into the historic mess (we'll also have been through the EU referendum, which ill no doubt be ... interesting). It's a large-scale variant on the Gish gallop.

I don't think that explains everything, obviously. It looks like Osborne is driving a number of the current more outré policy moves - maybe spurred on by the assumption that Corbyn's a non-starter, so anything goes - and Cameron's just along for the ride since he's supposedly out of there by the next election anyway.

[muriel_volestrangler]

8. Getting the more unpopular ideas out of the way early on makes political sense

They said they wanted to cut the deficit, and if they saw an opportunity to get the tax credit cuts through early, with many Labour MPs dithering about them, it'd help them look less draconian later on - even if they hadn't thought they'd have the opportunity, as you suggest.

The sad thing is that so much of the parliamentary Labour party was so timid in standing up to them as soon as they were announced.

[Denzil_DC]

9. I also have the wicked

and maybe somewhat sacriligious thought that maybe the Lib Dems were more competent in coalition than we give them credit for, and the lack of the discipline of having to negotiate through even the Lib Dems' apparently half-hearted opposition to some of the Tory measures in the last parliament has exposed just how incompetent (not to mention divided) and flailing Cameron's cabinet and the party as a whole are!

As for Labour, don't get me started. Corbyn has faults aplenty, but as we saw in the early stages of this paliament under different (lack of) leadership, I fear their pursuit of "reasonableness" and cravenness before the media would have seen them actively backing a lot of the measures we're objecting to, and just tinkering in the margins. The SNP have their own faults, but they have filled the gap by providing a relatively coherent (and despite the ridiculous media slurs, intelligent and civilized) opposition, albeit without enough votes on their own to back it up except in a few notable instances.