If the problem is a moral one, we need a response based on morality as well

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Labour ministers have been trying to present their proposals on reducing the cost of benefits by presenting the issue as one of morality. On Wednesday, Sir Starmer attempted to explain why he thinks that cutting benefits, or making them hard to access, is a moral issue. As he put it:

“I think one in eight young people not in employment, training or education, that’s a million young people, I think that’s a moral issue. Because all the evidence suggests that someone in that situation, at that stage of their life, is going to find it incredibly difficult ever to get out of that level of dependency.”

Taken in isolation, it’s a reasonable argument. It is indeed a moral issue that, as a society, we are letting down young people to such an extent. The problem isn’t so much with what he had to say about that, but with the response he proposes to deal with it, which is to ensure that those people are never allowed to get into a dependency on benefits because he's making those benefits inaccessible. Addressing the problem might well be driven by a sense of morality; leaving people with lower incomes is definitely not a moral response. What they are doing is pretending that a solution based on withholding access to funds is the answer to an entirely different problem. It’s based on assumptions (not always clearly stated) that: (a) the only validation of worth in society is through paid employment or preparation for paid employment, (b) that anyone not in work has deliberately chosen to put himself or herself into that position, and (c) that keeping people in poverty somehow magically changes their situation and enables them to find employment.

As an exposition of the underlying ideology of rampant twenty-first century capitalism, it’s hard to fault. As an exposition of traditional Labour values, not so much. Young people are facing real challenges, and the UK is wasting a lot of talent and ability, and that is indeed a moral issue – those statements are unarguable. The leap, though, from accepting that to implementing reductions in income for some or all of the people in that group is not only not a moral position, it’s a complete non-sequitur. The paucity of government thinking on the underlying causes and how to address them ought to be shocking, but sadly is not. Like the Tories that they’ve replaced in the corridors of Whitehall, Labour ministers seem to be incapable of looking beyond the pounds and pennies to the real people they are supposed to be representing.