The joys of simplicity, revealed in the blessings of universal credit

Simplicity is so much to be preferred to complexity, isn’t it?

Britain had a real mess of a system for providing benefits – what other people call social security – to people who need them. To mention just the main ones, there was housing benefit and invalidity benefit and unemployment benefit and, just to confuse everything, even tax credits in employment, to boost the earnings of the low paid.

Who had a right to which? For how long? And under what conditions?

So it made sense to put an end to this chaotic mess. Replace this whole raft of multiple criss-crossing benefits and replace them with just one, tailored to the individual. Why, we could call it universal credit and have it replace all the rest.

Iain Duncan Smith
A remarkable track record. To which he keeps adding

It was the brainchild of one Iain Duncan Smith. He made his name as leader of the Tory Party, taking over after its disastrous general election defeat by Labour in 2001. However, in 2003 he lost a vote of confidence of his MPs, convinced as they were that he could not lead them to success, and resigned. But he refused to go into his long goodnight as he might have done, instead reappearing as the minister responsible for benefits under David Cameron.

You don’t remember Cameron? Don’t worry. He was immensely forgettable. He enjoyed a brief and ill-deserved moment in the limelight as British Prime Minister before returning to the far more merited obscurity from which it’s unfortunate he ever emerged.

In the meantime, Duncan Smith got his chance to introduce universal credit.

A brilliant idea, as I said before.

Except that a brilliant idea in the hands of a Tory Minister, in a government wedded to austerity, is unlikely to look as generous on closer scrutiny as it sounds on the surface. So it turned out with this one. As this enlightened minister made clear in an article for the favourite paper of the Tory party, the Daily Telegraph (or Torygraph as those of us of another persuasion like to call it):

By restoring the incentive to work and ensuring that work always pays, universal credit is the strongest statement of this Government’s commitment to helping people get the security of a good job.

See the sleight of hand? “Incentive to work” is Tory doublespeak for “we’re going to make this so mean that no one could possibly live on it so they’ll be forced to take a job, however dismal”. A “good job” in this context is Toryspeak for “a reduction of one in the unemployment figures”.

Just to avoid any possible doubt, Duncan Smith also explained that “our reforms are forecast to save a total of nearly £50 billion cumulatively across this Parliament.”

Saving money. Always a welcome message for the recipients of state benefits, who know it means a major effort of generosity on the part of government.

Duncan Smith brought to the task of designing universal credit all the flair he’d shown in leading his party.

It’s taken five years to build the system. It’s being trialled right now in several local council areas. The results have been eloquent: there’s been a huge increase in dependence on food charities and in rent arrears. One food bank, according to Patrick Butler in the Guardian has reported a 97% increase in demand.

Meanwhile with that pesky housing benefit out of the way, councils are reporting huge increases in rent arrears. One council, the Guardian again tells us, reports dramatic figures:

Southwark said that although just 12% of its social housing tenants were on universal credit, they have built up £5.8million in rent arrears. The average universal credit household £1,178 in arrears, compared with £8 credit for the average council rent across the borough.

That’s why they call it universal: it spreads joy everywhere. Not just the tenants who can enjoy piling up rent arrears, and celebrate the fact down at their local food bank, but the council who sees its rent income falling.

As Duncan Smith so eloquently put it, he was building “a system that supports people to secure independence for themselves and their families.”

The wonderful thing is that, although he was sacked by Theresa May, our soon-to-be-former Prime Minister who replaced David Cameron (remember him now?) he keeps popping up and speaking out on the subjects he cares about. Most notably, he’s terribly keen on Britain getting out of the European Union. Just the other day, I heard him on the BBC explaining why Britain had nothing to fear from Brexit and everything to hope for.

It’s extraordinary, with his track record, that there are still people out there prepared to listen to him.

And, still more difficult to understand, believe him.

Callous indifference and lack of compassion: they may just reflect a Prime Minister's inability to make an effort

The Devil, they say, makes work for idle hands.

With an idle mind, however, it’s far worse: the Devil makes its owner his tool.

Underneath the surface, and despite the crass indifference of the entitled, David Cameron may well be a not entirely unpleasant human being. He’d probably be most upset, say, by the sight of a woman starving with her children. He’d almost certainly want to help.

The problem is that he has no imagination. He can’t see that woman when she’s out of sight. He can’t connect the effect of his actions as UK Prime Minister with the damage they do to women such as that one. That’s not because he lacks the capacity for compassion, or even the intellectual ability to picture someone else’s suffering, it’s because he simply doesn’t make the effort to exercise them on a scale above the individual.

It was fascinating to read a piece by Fraser Nelson in the Daily Telegraph, in other words by one of the most outspokenly Conservative commentators in one of the most loyally Conservative of newspapers, which warned us that “it’s David Cameron’s laziness that should worry us.” 

Cameron: no effort is too small

Nelson points out, among other incidents from Cameron’s time in office, that when he lost the parliamentary vote on military intervention in Syria, “it was the first time in two centuries that a Prime Minister lost a vote on war and peace – through a basic failure to prepare.”

A failure to prepare. Yes. He simply can’t find it in himself to do the work that’s needed to understand what he’s doing and the effect it will have. Fraser Nelson claims that Cameron didn’t read the NHS Reform Bill, which led to one of the most disastrous reorganisations of the NHS we have seen – and there have been many others that have been dire – until the draft legislation was published.

Nelson’s account is wholly plausible. After all, recently Cameron ruled out any kind of tax on high-sugar foods and drinks to fight obesity. He then admitted that he hadn’t read the report which recommended such a tax. That didn’t stop him rejecting its recommendations.

Nelson also describes him as “utterly loyal to his inner circle” which is perhaps why he stood by the hapless Health Secretary, Andrew Lansley, who introduced the NHS measures. It took years before he was shifted away from Health, and even then it was a while before he was dropped from government entirely.

Returning to our fictional woman, Cameron presumably simply can’t imagine the suffering he’s causing by actions over the NHS which will deprive her, or her family, of the kind of care which her own mother’s generation had come to regard as a right.

Now, though, there’s worse news for her. She’s struggling to get by on a minimum wage job while bringing up her children alone – yes, I’m assuming she’s a lone mother – and Cameron’s government intends to reduce her benefits, in the form of cuts to tax credits. She is likely to lose £1000 a year or more, which is painful since she only earns £15,000.

The move to cut her benefits has suffered a setback, with the House of Lords voting for transitional arrangements to be put in place to lessen the impact on people like this woman. That was effective opposition from the non-Conservative parties. The leader of the biggest of them, Jeremy Corbyn of Labour, followed up that powerful move by demanding of Cameron that he guarantee to the House of Commons that there would now be no negative impact on tax credit recipients.

Corbyn dedicated the whole of his ration of six questions at Prime Minister’s Question Time to this theme. Six times he asked. And six times Cameron failed to answer.

At one point Corbyn claimed that “he must know the answer.”

Actually, Jeremy, I think you may be wrong. It does sound like standard politician’s deviousness, ducking and evading a question he’s uncomfortable with. But Cameron’s not a clever politician. It’s far more likely that, actually, he doesn’t know the answer.

To know it, he’d have to read some of the background briefing material. Which is quite boring. He simply can’t find it in himself to make the time for it.

And so, with his idle mind, he ends up doing the devil’s work.

Labour: it's got to be Cooper or Burnham

The main mouthpiece of British high Toryism, the Daily Telegraph, is involving itself in a Labour Party election.

The Telegraph gets stuck into the Labour leadership election

This is made possible by the rules adopted for the election of a new leader to replace Ed Miliband. The old system gave massive weight to the voice of the Trade Unions, which is what gave us Ed Miliband in the first place. This time round every member of the party has exactly one vote (“one member one vote”, as the system is accurately if not imaginatively called).

To accommodate the many trade unionists who are Labour supporters but not Party members, a special category has been created which allows such people to register and, on payment of £3, take part in the election.

The Telegraph has decided to urge Tories to register themselves as Labour supporters and vote for the most left-leaning of the candidates, Jeremy Corbyn. This is because it has rightly decided that Corbyn would stand no chance of winning a general election. Indeed, the paper believes that as leader, he would bury the Party for good.

No one younger than their late forties will have been particularly aware of politics the last time the Labour Party elected a leader from the Left. This was Michael Foot, in the early eighties. Foot was one of the gentlest, most tolerant and most intelligent of leaders the Party has ever had. An expert on Jonathan Swift, he could be regularly seen in the British Library researching the author of Gulliver’s Travels, when he might have been in the House of Commons.

That gentle soul was crucified by the right-wing press. On one occasion he turned up for the annual ceremony commemorating British war dead in a duffle coat. He was mercilessly hounded in the media, as though what mattered in a potential British Prime Minister was his willingness to dress conventionally.

In 1983, Foot led the Party to crushing defeat by the Tories under Margaret Thatcher. The Party took fewer votes than at any other election since the end of the Second World War. Indeed, although there has been much heart searching about the disastrous election result earlier this year, the 1983 results were nearly 900,000 votes worse.

The depth of the disaster was due in large part to a massive, radically left-wing manifesto which has come to be known as the longest suicide note in history. It is a measure of the capacity for self-delusion of certain people on the far left – not I think Michael Foot, who was far more of a realist – that another veteran of that wing, Tony Benn, described the result as a major success for socialism.

Michael Foot and Tony Benn
Didn't work out so well as we might have liked

His argument was that never before had eight and a half million people voted for so strongly socialist a manifesto. To Benn it was apparently irrelevant that nearly 21 million had voted against, 13 million of them for the Tories. And as a result one of the most radical right wing governments we have seen was elected with a massive parliamentary majority.

The Daily Telegraph may be obnoxious and unprincipled, but it’s not stupid. It has realise that Jeremy Corbyn as leader would be as disastrous for Labour today as Michael Foot was 35 years ago. It’s a lesson Labour members need to bear in mind. Corbyn may be the choice of many activists, as Foot was. He does not appeal to the floating voters we need to attract back to us, any more than Foot did. To elect Corbyn is self-indulgent and it plays into the hands of the Telegraph and its ilk.

So who should we choose?

I recently listened to Liz Kendall, one of the other candidates, and heard her describe herself, unprompted, as a “fiscal conservative”. We have plenty of those in office at the moment, within the Conservative Party. It’s also beginning to feel as though across Europe, a movement is starting in reaction to the austerity politics such figures represent. In Greece, of course, in Spain too, in Scotland, even in Germany, where protestors have been taking to the streets against the behaviour of their own government towards the Greeks.

It also seems likely that austerity politics may begin to hurt wider sections of the British population who escaped relatively unscathed during the last five years. As they lose faith in the economic policies of the present government, it would seem unfortunate if all we could say to them was “the fiscal conservatism of this government has failed; now give our version of fiscal conservatism a try.”

That leaves only two candidates, Andy Burnham and Yvette Cooper. Both are former ministers, and therefore arguably damaged goods, tainted by their association with the Blair-Brown governments. They are also highly experienced, intelligent politicians. Do they have the courage to take the country in the direction it needs to go? I don’t know. But I do know there is no fifth candidate.

Cooper or Burnham may not be the most inspiring of choices. But neither would take us in the direction of the wilderness of 1983, or into the embrace of the very policies that are failing in the government we oppose.

Avoiding either of those alternatives strikes me as vital if we are to give Labour another chance. And the Telegraph the comeuppance it deserves.

Money moving among the wealthy: a neat arrangement

In Britain, we’re being regaled by the tale of an Osborne and an Oborne.

The Osborne is George, Chancellor of the Exchequer in the present British government. In the midst of the current scandal about tax avoidance schemes being peddled by the Swiss subsidiary of HSBC, one of the major pillars of our fine banking industry, it has emerged that back in 2003 he was offering public advice to invest in some such tool.

“I probably shouldn’t be advocating this on television,” he added. I’d say, George, I’d say.

Peter Oborne: left the Telegraph and rather slammed the door

The Oborne is Peter, a journalist who has just resigned from the leading organ of respectable Conservatism, the Daily Telegraph. He felt the paper was a quality publication, dedicated to informing its readership of what was happening in the world, and doing so honestly, albeit from a specific point of view.

To live that way, a paper must maintain a strict separation between its editorial and its advertising departments. Unfortunately, Oborne feels that such a separation has gone at the Telegraph, one of whose major advertisers is, precisely, HSBC. As a result, he feels, the paper has given the scandal minimal coverage.

“You needed a microscope,” he writes, “to find the Telegraph coverage: nothing on Monday, six slim paragraphs at the bottom left of page two on Tuesday, seven paragraphs deep in the business pages on Wednesday.”

On the other hand, HSBC has maintained its advertising with the paper.

This, Oborne feels, is nothing short of deception: “The Telegraph’s recent coverage of HSBC amounts to a form of fraud on its readers. It has been placing what it perceives to be the interests of a major international bank above its duty to bring the news to Telegraph readers.”

Certainly, it’s fascinating to have the workings of the HSBC-Telegraph nexus exposed in this way. Because, actually, it’s three-way nexus.

George Osborne:
much to be gleeful about, as the cash registers keep clinging

On the one hand, we have a government that seems at best relaxed about the kind of activity HSBC undertook. Challenged on the subject four times by Ed Miliband, leader of the Opposition, David Cameron evaded the issue four times in Parliament. That contrasts with his much more severe attitude towards other kinds of financial fraud, such as illegal benefits claims, or even legal claims he feels are without moral justification: he’s just announced new plans to force young people to work for benefits if they don’t find work, in a market where there simply aren’t enough jobs to go round.

Next we have the people who were benefitting from the kind of clever financial products HSBC was offering. Rather a large number of them seem to have been donors to the Conservative Party. They figure, in other words, among David Cameron’s and George Osborne’s paymasters.

Finally, there’s the Telegraph, speaking for those same Conservative interests represented by Cameron and Osborne and by the donors who took advantage of HSBC’s sleight of hand. The Telegraph that breaks its own editorial principles so as not to offend HSBC. And by doing so benefits financially from it.

It is also one of the major figures in the overwhelmingly right-wing media environment in Britain, that contributes to keeping the Conservatives in government.