Making people poorer really isn't 'compassionate'

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There is a traditional image of a vicious headmaster, about to deliver a good thrashing to one of the boys in his ‘care’, declaring that ‘this will hurt me more than it hurts you’. It’s not true, of course; and it looks like an effort to turn the abuser into an unwilling victim of circumstance, in his own mind at least. I doubt that any of the recipients of such ‘loving care’ ever believed it, and if it doesn’t work on terrified boys, there is no reason to believe that it will work on adults. It is, though, the chosen strategy of the Labour Government when it comes to welfare cuts. They want us to believe that driving people deeper into poverty is something that they really and truly don’t want to do, but are left with no choice because … well, because of an arbitrary financial rule which they themselves invented, and which magically doesn't apply to spending on weapons and destruction.

This week, the Work and Pensions Secretary told us that reforming the welfare system is an act of ‘compassion’, which will restore ‘opportunity and dignity’ to those relieved of benefits to pay for their food and housing. She also told us that, “Unless we reform [the social security system], more people will be denied opportunities, and it may not be there for those who need it”.  In plain English, which it’s easy to understand why she would want to avoid, that amounts to saying that the government will deliberately choose to see some people going without the basics of life in order to save money on the budget. There is nothing inevitable or pre-ordained about that; driving more people into poverty is a wholly deliberate choice that the government is willing to make.

There is nothing wrong with some of the specific elements of the proposals: helping more people to find suitable work and easing the transition from benefits to employment are sensible investments, although they don’t differ greatly from what governments of all colours have been claiming to have been doing for years. But what previous efforts have taught us is that it isn’t as simple as looking at numbers in a spreadsheet might suggest. People have complex needs, which are often only obvious when looking at individuals, and looking at individuals rather than numbers is not what governments do. There’s also an element of distraction: the changes to Personal Independence Payments have little or nothing to do with getting people back into work, yet government statements seem to be deliberately conflating the two.

It would be hard to fault a government which came up with serious and specific proposals to reduce the need for welfare payments by matching more people with suitable and worthwhile employment, and which was prepared to follow through on those in the hope that the welfare bill would be reduced in the end. That isn’t what they are doing, however: they are starting with an arbitrary target for the amount of savings that they want to make, building those savings into their forward budgets, planning to cut payments to achieve that, and then assuming that enough people will either move into employment or be deprived of the essentials of life. Maybe they have polling evidence telling them that such an approach would be ‘popular’, but when Sir Warmonger talks about doing the ’right’ thing, it’s not at all clear that he understands that there is a difference between the two words.