Whilst out and about today in his
incessant search for new photo opportunities reasons to visit hospitals,
the PM answered a question about energy price rises by saying
that the government “… will make sure we look after people to the best of
our ability”. The immediately obvious catch in that promise is the bit
about the ‘best of our ability’, a caveat which, when applied to Johnson, puts
a severe limit on what is actually achievable. It – with almost refreshing honesty
– spells out that the limiting factor is the lack of ability of the PM and his
government, and not the availability of resource.
He went on to add that “… there’s a
limit to the amount of taxpayers’ money we can simply push towards trying to
deal with global energy price spikes”, prefaced by the wonderful phrase “Now,
we’ve got to be frank with people”, something he’s never achieved in his
entire life, and a phrase which guarantees, when uttered by Johnson, that what follows will be either a
lie or an obfuscation. And sure enough, it manages to be both. The decision as
to how much help to give citizens – and perhaps even more importantly, which
citizens should benefit – is far from being as black and white as he suggests.
It is, rather, a political decision. The PM and the Chancellor have decided how
much help to give to people facing a crisis not in response to some magical
financial limit completely outside their control, but in response to their
judgement about what they think they can get away with without losing the
support of voters, or being defenestrated by angry Tory MPs (who themselves share
the same motivation but disagree largely on the basis that they believe that the tolerance level of
their electors is lower than the PM thinks it is).
As another report
today highlighted, the decision to limit benefits to the first two children in
any family has not led to smaller families, merely to more poverty. It’s
another example of the same thing – government decisions which deliberately and
entirely foreseeably increase poverty levels, and which are taken not on the basis
of any real objective limit to what the government can do, but on the basis of
political judgements about the best interests of the Tory Party.
Can increasing the level of poverty really
benefit a political party seeking to remain in government for the long term? Absolutely,
with 2 caveats. The first is that the poverty predominantly hits the ‘right’
people – those who either don’t vote at all, or who will never vote Tory (and
for the tiny minority who still do, nothing will deter them anyway) – and the
second is that those not-so-poor who do or might vote Tory can be persuaded to believe that
the poorest deserve their fate. If the poorest can be sufficiently demonised,
keeping them poor is a very cheap way of distracting attention from the way
government policies benefit the richest. It’s certainly cheaper than actually
trying to help the not-so-poor.
The most depressing aspect of all is that
deliberately increasing the levels of poverty as a means of keeping the
Conservative Party in power in England might even work. Another reason or
exercising our right to opt out.
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