When the Labour Party returned to office in 1997, a shocking 27 per cent of British children were living in relative poverty. Three terms of carefully targeting benefits and tax credits later, that proportion had almost halved. By 2010, even though the number of children in Britain had increased, the number growing up in poverty had fallen by nearly a million. It was one of the Blair and Brown governments’ signature achievements.
It’s been largely undone: by 2023, the figure stood at 22 per cent before housing costs, and 30 per cent after. Much of this reversal can be attributed to a single, ruinous policy: the two-child benefit cap, introduced in 2017, which stops families from claiming certain benefits for more than two children regardless of need. The Tories ostensibly introduced the policy to send a message to parents about responsibility, as if no family’s finances ever took an unexpected turn for the worse, or as if punishing children for the actions of their parents is OK. But everyone knew it was also there to save money. No British politician ever lost votes by punishing welfare claimants.
Which is why, even though it’s widely agreed to be the single biggest step it could do to address child poverty and the generational problems that result, the government has absolutely no intention of scrapping it. “If they still think we’re going to scrap the cap then they’re listening to the wrong people,” says the inevitable anonymous source. “The cap is popular with key voters, who see it as a matter of fairness.”
Note the way that decision is justified there. There is no attempt to push back on the argument – made by such hotbeds of social radicalism as Barnardo’s, Save the Children and Citizens Advice – that this will push a record number of kids into poverty right around the time the next election rolls around; no attempt to justify it as a policy at all. The cap is popular with “key voters”; that is enough. This isn’t governing. It’s campaigning.
It is also not unusual. Other lines coming from the government in the last few weeks have included that it should be harder for struggling people to claim disability support payments, but easier for US tech giants to get tax breaks. (Good thing, too, otherwise they might rip off the output of some other country’s valuable and successful creative industries to train their AIs.) This is deemed necessary, apparently, in the hope of a trade deal from the mad king across the Atlantic. The alternative path, of making the case for Europe, remains off limits: key voters won’t wear it, you see.
The Home Secretary Yvette Cooper is thus refusing to countenance free movement for students, even though it’s about the smallest concession imaginable, and has widespread public support. League tables of which nationalities are committing the most crimes will be just as good, I’m sure.
The government’s response to the Supreme Court’s recent gender ruling, meanwhile, has been blithely to suggest trans people should choose a toilet based on their biological sex. This will inevitably put members of vulnerable and frightened communities at increased risk, so one might suggest it requires a thoughtful and detailed policy response. Ministers, though, disagree: enough, apparently, to assert that trans women are not women, all the while smiling back at key voters in the hope of approval.
The reason so many of New Labour’s achievements did not endure was that the Conservative Party which returned to office in 2010 systematically undid them. The Conservatives’ own achievements, such as they are, seem not to be at similar risk. Jeremy Hunt’s irresponsible tax cuts remain untouchable. So does the new electoral system used in mayoral elections (which has made it more likely that Labour will lose them). In too many areas, the government is making little effort to run the country, let alone to change it, instead contenting itself with appealing to a tiny group of swing voters they’re convinced will be key to re-election.
That seems unlikely to be true. Going all out to appeal to older voters on the right means insulting those on the liberal left as if they have nowhere else to go, when they obviously do. More than that, as an enjoyable recent Economist piece argued, it’s entirely possible that a significant number of the key voters in question are quite literally dead.
Even if it does work as a strategy for winning the next election, there’s a question: why bother? The Blair government did more than its share of things of which liberals or the left disapproved, but it also had a clear vision of the country it wanted to build and how it would differ from one run by the Tories. Nearly ten months in, it feels like Keir Starmer does not. He seems to have little interest in convincing the voters of his point of view, or even a point of view to convince them of. Governing with one eye always on the next election surely makes you less likely to win it. But even if it didn’t – what’s the point?
[See more: The nastiness and cowardice of Kneecap]
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