The welfare cap seems to me one of the biggest policy issues in the budget. Of course it is designed as a bear trap for Labour. In practice I cannot see how any Chancellor thinks they will ever cap the increase in social security payments to a limit that may be lower than inflation and which makes no consideration for population change or ageing. What struck me though from the budget report was just how all embracing the new cap will be:
The Jobseekers Allowance and old-age pension may be excluded, but otherwise just about every benefit is covered.
The message is a simple one and is aimed at the old, children, new parents, the disabled, those who've suffered accidents at work, those on low pay, pensioners on low income and others for whom the social security safety net was designed. That message is clear. It is " you are going to pay for the mess that bankers made of our economy."
I have read a lot about what fairness is of late. I have come to the conclusion that there is no objective answer to that. Whatever one person thinks is fair is, apparently, acceptable to at least someone, somewhere. That is why it comes to fairness majority opinions matter. On the welfare cap I have no doubt the majority will consider what is being proposed to be profoundly unfair if they realise just who is affected.
I sincerely hope some politicians will have the courage to fight this.
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Would love to say you are right, but having worked alongside others for WOWpetition for over a year we are finding that the image the media and television have portrayed as work shy feckless individuals, we are swimming against a sea of PR and rhetoric. Unless the Labour party change that perception instead of swimming with it , ( please ignore the poor metaphors=tramadol) we are sunk.
I am an optimist, I know
I’m just wondering if the sheer list of benefits in the left hand column gives a bit of political wriggle room, particularly for a Labour Government?
If you were getting dangerously near the cap could your response be just to remove one of the benefits that figure has to cover, say winter fuel payments?
It would be hard to attack this, as that invites the response “aha! so you want to steal pensioners’ winter fuel payments!”
I am of course here giving Labour the benefit of the doubt that the only say these things to appease the tabloids. Rather than like the Tories having a genuine desire to hurt the needy.
If you vote labour in Scotland your doomed and so will your family be under Westminster.
Labour’s economic policy, such as it is, at the moment seems to consist of signing up for every crazy right-wing idea the Tories come up with. For instance:
AME welfare cap? Labour supports it.
Benefit cap for individual households? Labour supports it.
Help to Buy? Labour supports it.
All three of these policies are at best idiotic and at worst malicious. Until Labour opposes all three of them it’s simply not worth voting for.
As Natalie Bennett from the Green Party said yesterday, benefits should be paid on the basis of need, not some arbitrary cap set by George Osborne.
Agreed