Some commentators compare Danny Alexander to a missing member of the Sesame Street cast. While such disrespect may annoy and upset him, he’s lucky to be described in such cuddly terms. For when I listen to him and his Lib Dem colleagues, I hear echoes of something far worse and far more sinister – the Militant Tendency.
Admittedly there aren’t the hand gestures, but there is the absolute conviction of the convert to a totalising ideology. By which I mean an ideology that can offer an explanation for every woe. For Trotskyists, it’s capitalist monopolies that wreck lives; the solution: nationalisation. For the coalition, it’s debt; the solution – deep cuts in spending.
It’s not just what they say, it’s the way that they say it – with complete and utter conviction. The budget is redolent of this. Osborne’s speech spoke of the world in black and white. He was right. Labour was wrong. Cuts would not, indeed could not possibly, endanger growth. You can – and must – cut welfare benefits and not put families into poverty.
As the saying goes, I wish I believed in anything as much as the chancellor believes in everything. For this is in one way a budget that is ‘bold’ in the Whitehall sense of the term – bafflingly betting the house on being absolutely right that neo-Keynesians are wrong.
“And if there’s no growth”, as Stephanie Flanders asked Danny Alexander? Answer came there none. But his face was the very picture that was worth a thousand words – an extraordinary synthesis of fear and complacency.
Yet in another sense this is truly a direct and brutal end to the Lilley/Darling/Hutton welfare settlement. Housing benefit cuts on the scale envisaged will mean arrears, evictions and homelessness.
Tax credit clawbacks will hurt working mums who regard themselves as getting by, not getting feather-bedded. And cuts to DLA to improve work incentives? It’s paid to people in work, you muppets – it compensates for the very real costs of being disabled, whether you are in work or not.
Still, I personally am looking forward to this. I was involved the last time a government tried to take money away from existing claimants. We saved £55m from lone parent benefits – and then because of the political furore we gave over £1bn extra to benefits for children in the next budget. And when we looked at modernising (not cutting) disability benefits, a friendly cabinet colleague leaked one of Harriet Harman’s discussion papers and disability activists chained themselves and their wheelchairs to the gates at No 10.
You see, the problem with an ideology that frames the world in black and white is that others have equally powerful frames. And sometimes their sense of fairness trumps yours.
Tags: Budget, Danny Alexander, George Osborne, John McTernan, Militant, Sesame Street
Its not taking money from people to stop giving them somebody elses.
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Housing benefit cuts on the scale envisaged will mean arrears, evictions and homelessness….Tax credit clawbacks will hurt working mums who regard themselves as getting by…
“Still, I personally am looking forward to this. I was involved the last time a government tried to take money away from existing claimants. We saved £55m from lone parent benefits “–
So Mr McTernan is unrepentant, about the time when it was him taking food from the mouths of the poor… and now he looks forward to more attacks on the poor , because Danny Alexander might be made to look stupid on Newsnight.
Of course Mr McT has form … he once described Mrs Thatcher’s industrial policy as “painful but necessary”
“sometimes their sense of fairness trumps yours”… indeed but some people start of with a sense of fairness. Unlike Gideon .. or , on this showing , Mr McT.
Mr McT, and all those who’ve found his pedestrian observations (and nostalgia for the good old days when he got to cut benefits) would be doing us more of a favour if they left off the schadenfreude – never very attractive – and came up with some practical ideas about how we can organise to mitigate the effects of benefit cuts, help keep public services being delivered and help people save their