Making people poorer is not the first step to curing poverty

It is difficult to stick to your story when you don’t actually have one. That’s the problem the Labour government has as it tries to explain why cuts to overseas aid and welfare are part of a coherent plan for the country.

Both are a mixture of morality and pragmatism, apparently, when neither quality is readily apparent in either. They are certainly not as obvious as a jerk of a knee.

The cuts are necessary since President Trump decided that Europe should pay more for its own defence, something he has been advocating for more than a decade.

Plenty of time to plan then, but planning seems a rarity with an administration that took 16 weeks to produce its first budget.

Take overseas aid. It has been cut almost by half – £6billion. This is done with reluctant pragmatism, according to Keir Starmer. And it is certainly an easy choice to cut, as overseas aid is not popular with most voters. France has cut aid by more than a third. Belgium by a quarter.

But to do it in the name of national security – to transfer funds to defence – does not add up.
The US provided half of all global aid until Trump let Elon Musk all but close down USAid.

The White House has slashed American aid by nearly 90 per cent – a cut of around $65bn. The result of those cuts is that thousands, in time millions, will die unnecessarily from hunger and disease. That has already started. The spread of HIV, tuberculosis, malaria and the like will rise again rather than fall. States will fail. Illegal immigration and terrorism will rise.

In that context, if the moral case does not appeal to you, surely the pragmatic argument makes sense. Our security depends on these states not failing. On millions not dying of hunger and disease.

And to be cynical, in a contracting market the British aid pound would buy more international influence. Instead, the vacuum created by the withdrawal of western aid is likely to be filled by China, who, as an African friend of mine put it, may be imperialist but at least they pay for their imperialism. Anyone feel more secure?

Tough choices, the prime minister tells us. To govern is to choose. But to govern well is to choose wisely and this does not look like a wise choice.

Nor does the £6.4bn cut to health and disability benefits look like the moral crusade a number of ministers have tried to suggest it is.

With the whiff of the workhouse, ministers tell us that withdrawing benefits from those with a disability will make them find work and be happier more prosperous people. The logic of their position suggests if you cut all unemployment benefit everyone would find work. Indeed, perhaps cutting the minimum wage would make people work harder and solve our national productivity problem.

Not even Norman Tebbit at his most fevered would have argued, as the Chief Secretary to the Treasury Darren Jones did, that cutting disability benefit was like him cutting his children’s pocket money so that they got Saturday jobs and ended up better off. The Chancellor Rachel Reeves endorsed that view, well for the 24 hours before they were both forced to apologise. But what an insight it gave.

The fact two Labour politicians were not instinctively repelled by that kind of argument is deeply worrying.

Yes, the inexorable rise in welfare spending needs to be curbed. The fact that one in eight of our young people seeks sickness benefit has to be investigated and addressed. The scandal of communities where worklessness is generational not because of laziness but for lack of aspiration must be solved.

But making people poorer is not the first step to curing poverty. It is remarkable that Labour thinks the Tories can be such the multi-purpose bogeyman that it can accuse them of “throwing millions onto the scrapheap” because they gave disabled people benefits which Labour are now taking away.

But the Tories are not the only bad guys. When the Office of Budget Responsibility estimates that the welfare cuts will push 50,000 children into relative poverty, Labour ministers accuse them of not telling the whole story.

Yes, people will be poorer when their benefits are cut but, Labour argues, the OBR has not taken into account the well-paid jobs their ‘cured’ parents will find thank to the government’s tough love. And Thatcher wept.

That this is not thought-through is patent. If it were, the government would not be asking disabled people to try to find jobs just as they raise employers’ National Insurance Contributions by a record amount, discouraging job creation. 

There is not even a suggestion of an employers’ NI holiday for every person they engage who was on disability or sickness benefits. Nor have they taken into account the changes to employment law which all but abolish probationary periods.

These are decisions looking for justifications. Incidents seeking a story. Actions in need of a thought. Decisions made not by Maoism as much as ‘eeny meeny moeism.’

From the axing of universal entitlement to the Winter Fuel Allowance to these latest cuts, it looks like the government leaves things late, is forced into making random decisions, sees brutality as bravery, and then plasters a few phrases together to fill word shaped holes to get through the moment. What it is not is a coherent narrative.

This feels like a government lurching from event to event in its last year, rather than an administration setting out its stall in its first.

Stories have a beginning, a middle and an end. This government has started rather than begun. It needs to create a compelling story in the middle. Or at the next election it will finds its end.