Is it such a disaster for the Labour party that its MPs split when voting took place over the government’s latest bout of welfare reforms at Westminster on Monday night? Or that 48 MPs defied their acting leader, Harriet Harman, and voted with the SNP and Lib Dems, with Ulster’s DUP and the Greens’ Caroline Lucas?
Not necessarily. The country is split over such issues as the benefit cap – being cut from a maximum of £26,000 a year to £23,000 in richer areas – and the proposal to limit child benefit (not retrospectively) to no more than two children. Parliament’s debate (you can read it here) reflects such divisions in wider society, which is what it should do.
No, it’s not ideal and the normally robust Harman must have woken up feeling a little bruised on Tuesday morning. She’s holding the fort while her party decides whether to get back into the election-winning business or to settle back into its comfort zone by electing Jeremy Corbyn.
Monday night’s vote was partly about that sort of choice and the Tories who goaded Labour ahead of the vote – “are you going to be soft on welfare or listen to voters who denied you victory on 7 May?” – are playing politics with Iain Duncan Smith’s bill, too.
George Osborne is good at such tactics, not so good at squaring the circles he claims to square between compassion and economic efficiency . That higher minimum wage won’t offset in-work benefit cuts.
Tactical footwork looks thoroughly unattractive to most outsiders and helps get politics a bad name, a bit like professional fouls in sport. Haven’t these MPs just accepted a £7,000 (10%) pay rise at a time when the public sector is being capped at 1%? Yes, they have, though under an independent system unwisely forced on them by an earlier bout of public outrage over expenses in 2009.
Tactics apart, the vote was also about matters of real substance, of course. A wealth of research evidence suggests that child poverty, which the Blair/Brown years (1997 to 2010) managed to dent significantly, is on the rise again after six years of austerity. Single-parent families are also vulnerable for reasons the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) can readily explain.
Opposition MPs who called plodding IDS’s bill wicked or shameful in the debate have a powerful point, though they also have an obligation to say what they would do to foot the bills. The mere rhetoric of hostility to austerity is not enough, as Syriza MPs in Greece have painfully learned these past few days.
Many voters, not all of them interested parties or bleeding hearts, are repelled by what they see as the Cameron/Osborne focus on society’s poorest as it struggles, none too successfully, to keep both national deficit and accumulated national debt under control in hard times.
It’s unfair and it builds up more trouble, costly trouble, for the future, they suggest. They’re often right: short-sighted remedies come back to bite. Look at Margaret Thatcher’s costly switch from bricks and mortar social housing subsidies to personalised housing benefit.
But Harman is also right when she says that more Labour voters support the idea of a benefit cap – the notion that no one should be better off on benefit than in work – than oppose it. Are the latter mostly in higher socio-economic groups or not? Perhaps you know.
Certainly most of the MPs and parties which voted against IDS, as well as against Harman’s abstention policy, represent parts of the country where benefits play a significant role in sustaining social cohesion and economic demand. Even Ulster’s DUP can see where a lot of the province’s bread is buttered and Sinn Féin, while not recognising the British state, recognised its cheques.
In more affluent times, Gordon Brown had a luxury denied to George Osborne and IDS. He too wanted to incentivise work, raise skills, support families, send kids to school or playgroup on a proper breakfast. He also had the money rolling in to pay for a lot of it: that stopped when the bankers’ tax base collapsed along with the banks in 2008.
In 2015 IDS is left preaching reforms that improve both individual lives and society’s wider good while crafting changes to the system which are presented as incentives but can all too often sound like cruel cuts.
It lacks coherence and credibility, but will probably still command grudging support because most voters can’t see better alternatives and most opposition politicians seem unable to provide them.
Tax the rich? OK, but they have more choices where to park their money than most of us. Cut spending on defence or foreign aid? OK, but that’s taking a risk on Putin or Islamic State as well as abandoning the world’s really poor.
Labour’s overnight confusion reflects society’s wider dilemmas. A new leader may restore certainty and direction after 12 September. But don’t bet on it. The range of options are narrow or very risky. Syriza found that out too.
