One of the lines being spun by the Treasury team this week is that the child benefit press storm was not just anticipated but positively desired, clearing the way for a general culling of benefits. The more the middle class mums squeal, the easier it will be for the Coalition to justify capping Shameless multiple-benefit households. By misdescribing higher-rate taxpayers as "top rate taxpayers" (a mistake which has occurred on air too often to be accidental), grouping £45,000 a year families with millionaires and categorising them as the "broadest shoulders", the Government may temporarily succeed in convincing the public that this cut is about confiscating the pocket money of ladies-who-lunch.
But in engineering this particular row, the Treasury has chosen a uniquely bad target, and at a stroke has undermined a narrative painstakingly crafted by the Prime Minister over the last five years: that his brand of modern Conservatism is pro-family.
Being pro-family is not just about supporting marriage through a token, long-postponed £150 a year allowance. It is about much more: understanding the interdependence in a family where one parent works and the other parent cares; acknowledging that responsible parents who work hard and raise children are net contributors to the social good (as well as to the Revenue); that a mother (for it is usually she) who leaves the workplace to be with her children for a few years need some recognition (not to mention pension protection, currently tied to the receipt of Child Benefit). Being pro-family is also about understanding that Child Benefit (as Paul points out) has a long and respectable history as a tax allowance for families, not a welfare handout. Unlike the Brown crowd-pleasers of winter fuel allowance and free travel for all those baby-boom pensioners, Child Benefit is not an electoral bribe.
Yet another Daily Mail-inspired re-announcement of "recognition for marriage in the tax system" will not mend this particular broken pledge. A billion saved has been dearly bought.
