Westminster and welfare: the politics of 'them and us'

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/06/westminster-welfare-them-us-editorial

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Call it the "them and us" strategy. Ever since taking office, David Cameron has sought to justify historic cuts to benefits as a defence of hard-working, hard-pressed "strivers" against the "slackers", as his ministers refer to the long-term jobless. This framing has been crucial in the debate over taking tens of billions out of the annual welfare budget. The polls suggest it has been successful – so far. Vital both to the coalition's viability and to the outcome of the next general election will be how far voters go along with the notion that the benefit cuts are happening only to "them" and not to "us" as well. But starting this week, and increasingly over the second half of this parliament, ministers will have a hard time keeping up an increasingly false distinction.

Monday's changes to child benefit are an excellent case in point. Starting this week, it effectively becomes a means-tested entitlement, as well over a million families with a member earning £50,000 or more lose their child benefit either in full or in part. This, it should be said, is not a "them and us" tactic at all – and that is a large part of the problem. It falls instead under the category of "all in it together", in which the rich are soaked alongside the middle and working classes. This explains why Mr Osborne has been trailing it ever since moving into No 11. Except that opens up two serious and discrete problems.

The first is technical: this change has all the hallmarks of a cock-up. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has blasted it as "incoherent", while senior Conservative MP Ian Liddell-Grainger has previously described the change as "virtually unenforceable". The cut requires high-earning households to declare that they don't want the benefit – or the taxman will claim it back. Parents will have to be absolutely open with each other about how much they are earning, and what they are claiming – which may be a tricky conversation for any couple in a rocky relationship. It also raises the prospect of a shortfall for the Treasury and tens of thousands of unexpected brown envelopes hitting doormats in January 2014.

But the other snag is even larger: ministers cannot claim to be on the side of strivers while also taking their benefits away. The electoral politics of such a tactic do not add up, yet it is hard to see how the coalition, which has set itself the task of taking up to £28bn out of the annual welfare budget, can avoid making the same forced mistake over and over. Simply put, the required cuts are so large that they will require serious pain for previously loyal Tory and Lib Dem voters. When Ed Miliband came up with his appeal to the "squeezed middle", he was criticised for coming up with a term without a precise definition. But as time goes by, the very lack of definition may well prove an electoral boon.