Who can end Britain’s misery?

Food bank use is exploding, poverty is rising and wages are falling

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This is the first of two pieces on the stunning problems the next Labour government will face.  It’s about the welfare state. But to be honest I could have written it about any other part of the public sphere. From the moment they take office, Labour ministers will be bombarded with demands for public money. Such has been the stagnation the Conservatives have presided over most of these demands will be justified. In my second piece, out at the weekend, I will argue that unless Labour commits to radical thinking it will be unable to repair the damage. The Starmer government will be a mere footnote in our national decline. But that is for later. For now let us confine ourselves to poverty. It’s hardly a small subject.

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You need to be pushing 30 to remember when 25,000 people used food banks each year rather than the one million who are dependent on charity today.  You need to be pushing 35 to remember when real wages rose for the mass of employees rather than stagnated and fell.

Because our current crisis has been building since the early years of the century, the problem of poverty is also a problem of arguing about poverty. How can you persuade the complacent that it deserves a sustained effort to, if not remove it, then at least ease it? The decay of the social fabric has happened slowly, not suddenly. Hunger, insecurity and needless suffering have been building for the better part of a generation, and people have become used to them. They are normal – natural even.  “The poor are with you always,”  Jesus said, as he proved he was not the social reformer today’s radical Christians want him to be. But the poor who are with us today are not a timeless phenomenon but the creation of specific political choices

In 2010 the new Conservative government began a programme of cutting support for the welfare state. It would not meet the costs of paying for the bailout of banks after the great crash of 2007/08 by raising taxes on those who could afford to pay them. It would reduce public expenditure instead. From that decision flows the collapse of the NHS, the debilitation of the public sector and the explosion of poverty.

But, and we should not spare the UK by forgetting this, the Conservative attack on the poorest was popular. They imposed a benefit cap on the spurious grounds that out-of-work families (actually, those working less than 16-hours a week) shouldn’t have a higher income than people in paid work. The cap took no account of housing costs or disability. They limited housing benefit detaching it from any connection with the real price of accommodation, and limited benefits to the eldest two children in a family – a distant echo of the eugenicists’ insistence that the poor should not be encouraged to breed.

Two thirds of the public approved.  From the Elizabethan poor law  onwards, the notion that the poor are not really poor but are undeserving scroungers is always with us too.

There is a bitter irony to contemplate here. Right-wing conservatives are now appalled that mass migration to the UK is continuing despite Brexit.  They want to encourage British women to have more children to lessen our dependence on foreign labour.

Miriam Cates MP, a rising star of the right, told the national conservatism conference in May that the UK’s low birth rate was “the one overarching threat to British conservatism, and to the whole of western society.” It was a greater concern that the climate emergency, Russia or China—which was quite a claim. Yet Ms Cates’s Conservative party has produced welfare and housing policies that might have been designed to deter couples from starting a family. For 13 years (and counting) it has failed to build homes, and presided over a slashing in benefits, a suppression of wages and a runaway inflation in the costs of childcare.

Few realise the extent of the resulting suffering because discourse is dominated by the concerns of the comfortable. Even the breakdown of the National Health Service, which affects everyone potentially, and has led to 7.4 million on elective waiting lists, does not receive the urgent coverage a health emergency deserves. The prevailing assumption of national debate is that readers and viewers are financially secure and physically well. You can blame the class composition of media proprietors and journalists for not wanting to tell the story. You can also blame their readers and viewers for not wanting to hear it.

The poor may always be with us, but they are not the same poor. The Conservative government has one undeniable achievement: it has changed the nature of poverty.

The tough love answer to poverty has always been: get a job, stand on your own two feet and earn the money to look after you and yours. The Conservatives and their Liberal Democrat allies sold the assault on the welfare state as a protection for hard-working taxpayers from layabout spongers. In 2010 George Osborne promised to end the "benefits lifestyle" that allowed claimants to lie in bed while "hard working families" headed off to their jobs.  Yet during the 2010s, rhetorical binaries between “grafters” and “grifters” became ever-less plausible. Year on year, the government’s own data reveals that a rising proportion of those officially classed as poor lived in working households.

For them, poverty isn’t one thing, it is every bloody thing: health, home, diet, debt, life and early death. Not one problem but a tightening knot of problems: worsen one and you worsen them all. Now the government is panicking because there aren’t enough low-wage workers to meet the country’s labour shortage.  It cannot recognise that the same impulse that drove its attack on benefits and its failure to build affordable, healthy homes also drove the underfunding of the National Health Service. With the waiting list topping seven million, there is a reserve army of labour that could be put to work, if only their illnesses could be treated.

A second change is almost as dramatic. From the Elizabethan poor law on, the elderly have been the prime recipients of welfare relief. They were infirm. They could not work. Naturally, they needed the most help. The opposite is true today. Pensioners are more likely to vote than any other age group and when they vote they are more likely to vote Conservative. Generous occupational pensions and property ownership has resulted in 3.1 million pensioners living in millionaire households.  The political power of the grey vote has ensured that the state pension is now worth three-times more than the woeful £61 a week the young unemployed are expected to scrape by on. Pick an older person at random and they are less likely to be below the breadline than a person picked from the population as a whole.

Nothing like this has been seen before. I am not complaining. The UK state pension remains low by European standards. But the tax breaks and freebies for rich pensioners remain impossible to justify. As does a double standard. How can the UK government justify keeping the under-65 in misery while lavishing freebies on its core voters? Politically, I know how it can do it. Anything that helps the Conservatives stave off a catastrophic defeat is justifiable. But why do they think that they can get away with it?