My father, a political journalist who spent more hours of his life in Westminster than is good for you, always told us not to be too cynical about politicians. For every bad apple, he would imply, there were five good ones. You might not share their politics, but you knew that most of them were in it for the betterment of their constituents and the betterment of their country.
I have struggled with this at times in this age of 24-hour news, deeply polarising social media and rampant culture wars, where so many politicians seem happy to fan the flames rather than urge restraint. But it’s a good thing to keep in mind. After all, if we all succumb to pure cynicism, the bad apples will have made the whole crate rotten.
So much that is wrong with Labour, captured in a single phrase
And yet, every now and then you do wonder. Reading recently in The Guardian that Labour ministers are privately ruling out scrapping the two-child limit for universal credit or child tax credit in England, I found myself reflecting on this quote from a Labour source:
“The cap is popular with key voters, who see it as a matter of fairness.”
One sentence. Just 15 words. And yet if you were to try to distil into the fewest words possible all the things that most anger you about the people who seem to have captured the Labour Party, you might come up with this.
It’s all there. The substitution of moral leadership with amoral followership. The obsession with focus groups over basic questions of right and wrong. The explicit recognition that, under an electoral system that suits the Labour leadership just fine, some voters matter and some don’t. The hiding behind unconscionable Tory policies in the bid to out-Reform Reform, thus helping bit by bit to accelerate the rightward shift of our politics. Even a whiff of sadism, with that misplaced reference to fairness. And all, clearly, uttered without a hint of self-consciousness by that anonymous Labour source.
Questions that should be asked
There are so many questions you’d like to ask.
“Yes, yes. But what about ‘you’? Do ‘you’ think it’s unfair?”
“Do you think there’s room for ethics in politics these days?”
“Do you really think some voters matter more than others? If that’s the case, what does that say about our electoral system?”
“Can you imagine a time when you might stand up to a focus group and tell them you disagree?”
I do recognise the genuinely tough spending choices Labour have to make, all the more so in light of the chaos unleashed by Donald Trump. This column isn’t an attempt to critique one policy over another, even if there does seem to be unanimity among charities that changing this particular policy would be the best way to reduce child poverty. The Child Poverty Action Group is quoted in the Guardian article as estimating the number of children in poverty would increase from 4.5 million to 4.8 million by 2029 unless urgent action is taken.
A discriminatory policy
But even in the toughest of times your starting point has to be to rule out policies that are morally wrong. And this policy is morally wrong. Not because of the spending restraint in itself, but because it is blatantly discriminatory against those children who happen to have more than one sibling.
In any case, note that the argument here has moved on from one of budgets (always a handy catch-all position in the current climate) to one of fairness. In other words, even if this government had all the money in the world, this Labour source would want to retain the cap because not do so would be “unfair”.
As with so much of today’s politics, the moral compass here has gone haywire and ended up pointing due south. The only way, surely, you could see this as a question of “fairness” is if you regard the adults as unworthy recipients and the children as little more than their possessions. In this world view, having two siblings and being poor is a sort of original sin, with a sense that being poor is some sort of moral failing. Why think about the child’s welfare when you can focus your anger on the adult scroungers? “It’s not our fault those people had more kids than they can afford”, you can almost hear those “key voters” say.
Maybe they’re key voters for the Labour Party.
But not for poor children.
If only they had a voice.
This article was first published by our friends at Bylines Scotland, and is reproduced here by kind permission. Richard used to write for us, but then he moved back to Scotland and we had to concede that we no longer had first dibs! But we are all on the same side and anxious to get good writers under the noses of sympathetic readers, wherever they are, so sharing is vitally important. Thank you, Richard and Bylines Scotland!