How politics stole Christmas

Christmas is fast approaching and, for Scotland’s politicians, things will soon begin to wind down.

As we speak, John Swinney will be putting the finishing touches to his budget, while wearing his jazziest festive jumper and avoiding Nicola Sturgeon’s mistletoe selfies. Patrick “stop-saying-I’m-a-sea-turtle” Harvie will rail against commercialism while whittling his own toys out of driftwood. Stewart Stevenson will eat a bowl of uncooked chestnuts.

Willie Rennie, meanwhile, will be wearing a bow tie and standing on his own, next to a grand piano, hoping someone will come and join him for a good old-fashioned Christmas sing-song, as he does every year. Keep smiling Willie.

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But the holidays have not arrived quite yet. In Westminster, austerity still hangs in the air, and like Christmas waiting for snow, there are still some surprises to come.

In fact, Jeremy Corbyn even looks like an austerity version of Father Christmas, as if Santa had been wizened and shrunken by budgetary cutbacks: forced to trim his beard for a jobseeker’s interview; losing weight and sleep from the knowledge that his elves are planning a right-wing mutiny; and compelled to put Rudolph in the spare room to avoid the bedroom tax. Imagine the mess.

And with a Tory majority, it’s a tough time to be an anti-austerity Labour leader, as shown by Department for Work and Pensions questions in the House on Monday.

There certainly are questions to answer over the DWP strategy. In fact, a critic might suggest the Government has a welfare policy in the same way that the parents in Home Alone had a childcare policy.

But the debate was still illuminating. Iain Duncan Smith had started things off by asserting that “growing up in a working family is crucial for the life chances of children”. True. Too many children are work-shy nowadays. Lazy little brutes. Smith himself has four children, each of whom works around the clock, cleaning chimneys, shining shoes and drafting the majority of DWP’s policy papers.

Victoria Atkins then claimed that in her constituency, the Government’s welfare reforms were apparently very popular, before inviting IDS to visit her local Aldi with her.

Graham Evans, Tory MP for Weaver Vale, then asked if IDS would come and pay tribute to his local job centre.

Tory Tom Pursglove followed suit, telling Priti Patel there is a new Primark opening in Islip, and asking whether she would she like to go there with him.

Patel said she would love to come and open it. No one had asked her to come and open it. But that’s what Christmas is all about, the giving but not always the receiving.

But it did seem very strange. Why were these MPs so keen to get a visit from Iain Duncan Smith? That’s the last thing most people would want for Christmas. Like asking the Grinch to come and stay for the holidays – except at least the Grinch wouldn’t cut your social support. IDS probably wouldn’t even have the decency to speak in rhyme.

It should offer some comfort to most people, knowing that no matter how badly a working day goes, there is basically no chance it is going to end with having to give IDS an awkward tour of your home town.

In fact, Iain Duncan Smith has never seemed that festive, even if he does look like a Brussels sprout all year round.

But at least the Secretary of State was on message, indeed, David Cameron had made many of the same points in a much vaguer way the same day, while attempting to defend his government’s record.

“In every case, we’re changing the way that things are done, because after all, that’s what real change is about,” he boasted.

Changing things is what change is about. Brilliant. It is actually slightly worrying that Cameron has waited until five years into being Prime Minister to tell the nation’s media that he now knows what a reform is.

Moving on, he claimed that when it comes to welfare, the Government has certainly found a “fundamentally different ways of doing things”. The problem is that a fundamentally different way of doing things is not always a fundamentally better way of doing things.

A dog eating its own sick has arguably found a “fundamentally different way of doing things”, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you should applaud it.

And this different way of doing things seems to involve cancelling the tax credit cut, while ploughing on with £12bn in welfare spending reductions. So IDS may not be the Grinch, but he has hardly saved Christmas either.