Return to Strife

When people ask what good the last Labour Government (1997-2010) actually did, the list is embarassingly short. But at the very least one can reach for those unimpeachable few first term measures including the minimum wage and family tax credits.

These policies meant, for the first time, the key constituency of "hard-working families" could guarantee a full week's work would be worth £200. The effect was two-fold; to give people the mimimum standard of living and also to eradicate the "benefit trap" where it was only marginally better to work on low pay than be unemployed.

Not so says the Secretary of State, Iain Duncan Smith who claims tax credits themselves created, "a sorry story of dependency, wasted taxpayers' money and fraud." Smith paints a highly misleading picture of the purpose of the policy as if it were all the money was spent on dossers and couch potatoes. Anyone receiving the benefit will not recognise themsleves as part of the shirkers but the hard workers. And won't be voting Tory neither.

Smith's tirade to the Daily Telegraph appears driven by some bitter Victorian ideal that any financial help creates sloth in the working classes. His rhethoric also chimes with Chancellor Osborne's attempts at social division by implying anyone receiving any benefit is languising in bed with the curtains drawn while the rest of us are out there striving. The Conservatives have also sought to use the same means to justify slashing housing benefit when 90 percent of the recipients are in work simply struggling with exhorbitant rents.

When Tory Chairman, the aggravating Grant Shapps, was asked on Five Live yesterday what we could look forward to from the Coalition in 2013 he actually referred, with all bravery, to IDS's Universal Credit. It is Whitehall's worst kept secret that this rollout is an utter disaster in the making. The briefing by HM Treasury officials has already started. The policy doesn't add up, people can only apply online and the IT doesn't work. As one indicator of the chaos insider IDS's department, the relatively straightforward benefit cap of £26,000 per family has been delayed again, again, Sneaking the news out by written Parliamentary statement four days before Christmas is a sure sign of disharmony and diconnect between Ministers and officials.

So for all IDS's pernicious bluster, he make be due a great fall. He finishes his hateful article by claiming "Labour used spending on tax credits as an attempt to gain short-term popularity. They knew what they were doing – it was a calculated attempt to win votes."

If he is right on that point and is detemined to continue his philosophical opposition to help supporting milllions of already squeezed families then he will have single-handedly cost his party the next election.