George Osborne has sometimes seemed like a cartoon villain, whose Machiavellian cleverness has thwarted Labour at every turn. Within weeks of the 2010 election, he had set about the construction of a giant trap – propagating the narrative that all his public spending cuts were absolutely necessary to fix the mess that Labour had left behind. If Labour objected to any of them it was evidence that we were still the profligate spendthrifts who had caused the budget deficit, but if we accepted all of them then we would just come across as a less competent version of the Tories. Its political brilliance lay in the fact that it came at no cost. Osborne accurately calculated that most of the biggest losers from the cuts were never going to vote Tory anyway.
It is incongruous that in an age of ‘anti-politics’, this most political of chancellors was for many years, the favourite to succeed David Cameron as prime minister. But over the last week Osborne’s machinations seem to have finally caught up with him. The unlikely figure of Iain Duncan Smith arrived to dramatically pull away the chancellor’s mask, exposing his “inevitable” decisions as deliberate and cynical political choices. This offerd Labour a real chance to get across our message that the government’s divisive politics are not fair, not right and not necessary.
There is little to argue with in Duncan Smith’s scathing assessment of Osborne’s fiscal policy. Of course, given that he has been secretary of state for work and pensions for exactly the same amount of time as George Osborne has been chancellor, his claim that he had nothing to do with the six year systematic assault on the welfare budget is absurd. If he was not complicit, then this implies that he was either too weak to stand up to the chancellor, or too incompetent to realise he was being done over. My suspicion is that complicity, weakness and incompetence all have a place in the Duncan Smith story.
However, satisfying as it is to point out Iain Duncan Smith’s hypocrisy, we should really be leaving it to the Tories to play the man whilst the Labour party focuses on the ball. In this case, the ball is the construction of a credible, alternative narrative to Osborne’s divide-and-rule austerity, which finally seems possible after the events of this week. It is a little disheartening that Duncan Smith achieved greater cut-through with his critique of Osbornomics within 45 minutes last Friday night, than Labour has managed in six years, but we are in no position to look this gift horse in the mouth.
For if we leave aside the question of Duncan Smith’s sincerity, and focus on what he claims he believed in (following his revelation on witnessing the abject poverty in the Easterhouse council estate in 2002), then his apparent beliefs in the power of government intervention to lift people out of poverty and unemployment, are far closer to the values of the Labour party than to those of the Conservative government. The Labour party was founded on the basic belief in the dignity of work – hence the name. We are not, despite the worryingly widespread belief to the contrary, the unemployment party. We do not believe that people have the right to be lazy at the government’s expense, but neither do we believe that everyone who is poor, sick or unemployed should be punished for it.
Suddenly, this view is getting a hearing. Many left leaning Tory members of parliament have had enough, and effectively forced the government to retreat on personal independence payments. Like many of their voters, they initially bought into the idea that cuts were only falling on the undeserving. But now they feel queasy about targeting the disabled, the working recipients of tax credits and many ordinary people whose local services have been axed – particularly when money can be found to hand out little treats to middle and upper earners.
In scotching the inevitability of Osborne’s decisions, Iain Duncan Smith has opened the way for us to put forward a Labour view of the nation – not as a warring set of demographic groups to be bribed or punished according to how they vote, but as a whole community. A community which supports and helps those who need it, but which equally expects everyone to take responsibility for putting their fair share back into that community. Iain Duncan Smith was always hampered in his desire to alleviate poverty by his Victorian workhouse ethics, which dictate that beating people financially round the head is the best way to persuade them to earn more. Labour now has the opportunity to put forward a fairer and a wiser way forward, to an electorate which is surely starting to doubt that Osborne’s ‘two nation’ economics are really necessary.
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Christabel Cooper is a member of the Labour party
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