In another post, I lamented the Labour leadership candidates' apparent willingness to throw benefit claimants affected by the Benefit Cap 'under the bus', rather than challenge this despicable policy and the negative stereotypes wheeled out to justify it. It now seems that, in Harriet Harman's Labour Party, future Tax Credit claimants with more than two children can go under her sickly pink battle bus too.
Looking at the Benefit Cap, Channel 4 News helpfully showed us what these people look like, interviewing a single mother of eight and chiding her for her irresponsibility. What they failed to explain was that a family with twice the number of parents and half the number of children face an identical cut in benefits. Perhaps it is this style of reporting that convinces Harman and co that they cannot win an argument against benefit cuts, though I would argue that in truth, they have never tried to have that argument.
Let's consider the 'two child' limit. It's popular because, when you talk about large families on benefits, people picture the single jobless mum with eight kids. Show them instead a picture of a second-time-around suburban married couple, with three children between them from their previous relationships and the bouncing baby they had together before dad unexpectedly lost his well-paid job due to sickness, and all the talk of 'fairness to the taxpayer' starts to sound much more hollow.
Then show them the woman fleeing a violent partner with the four children she had little choice about conceiving, or perhaps the divorced youth worker, happily keeping her three children without Tax Credits - until Council budget cuts meant her hours and take-home were slashed too? The divorced and remarried father raising a family with his new wife, again with no state support, until a crisis meant the children from his first marriage had to come to live with dad? From 2017, these would all be 'new' claims, either for Tax Credits or Universal Credit, with the two child limit applied. Who's going to stay together? Who's going to have to split up? It would make compelling reality TV, wouldn't it?
And here's a classic 'poverty trap'. A family currently getting Tax Credits for four children have the offer of much better paid work, which will lift them out of benefit entitlement altogether - while it lasts. But it's a one year, fixed-term contract; at the end, if they need to claim CTC or UC again, they would be making a 'new' claim so will get no support for two of their children.
It seems to me that Harman and her ilk continue to fall into the trap of dividing the population into 'workers' and 'claimants', failing to understand that very many of us, our friends and our families, will migrate between these states, whether we like it or not. It isn't 'welfare' for 'them' - it's Social Security, for us all.
