If You Think People Shouldn’t Have Kids if They Can’t Afford Them, Think Again
There seems to be a disconnect with this concept. Because it means that poor people don’t have the moral right to have sex. That just doesn’t work, does it?
The dirty war has begun; the early signs are that this will be the most poisonous, socially damaging election campaign for many a long year. Corrosive malice will be poured over anyone on any benefit. The Conservatives are convinced they are laying a killer trap by branding Labour as “the welfare party”.
Time and again ministers, including David Cameron, drop ideas for new cuts into the headlines. Depth charges include the prime minister’s plan to bar the under-25s from housing benefit. Not a week goes by without a new Iain Duncan Smith punitive plan: this Sunday it was a doubtfully legal ban on benefits for non-English speakers. These one-day wonders are designed for front pages to say the “ballooning” benefit bill will be cut. It’s not ballooning, remaining at the same proportion of GDP per capita, except for pensions. But since few understand the fiendish complexity of the benefit system, few will know which of these brash announcements is ever implemented: nasty words speak louder than actions in benefit politics.
The big splash in Sunday and Monday’s Mail has been the call by the Tory MP Nadhim Zahawi to stop benefits to families with more than two children: in or out of work, they should lose child benefits and tax credits for the third child and subsequent ones. This comes from a man of weight in the party: the multimillionaire co-founder of YouGov, one of the Free Enterprise Group of 2010 MPs, and recently appointed to the No 10 policy board. He is not a man to float a career-endangering plan only to have it knocked down by the powers in Downing Street. When they declared it was not “government policy and is not supported by the prime minister”, you can bet he was not discouraged.
Outriders are floating ideas only slightly more outrageous than the ones the government is reported to be working on. It softens up public sentiment.
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