George Osborne drives Tory tanks up to Gordon Brown's front door

When on Black/ White Wednesday we lost our reputation for competence we were truly sunk as a party (until now).  If Labour loses its reputation for fairness then it will head for as bleak a time.  That's the political importance of Iain Duncan Smith's social justice agenda (although, of course, the agenda is much more than political).  It's tanks-on-Labour's-lawn-time.  Chief tank driver today is George Osborne.  Overnight he's launched a dossier that documents the extent to which Britain is becoming unfair under Labour - it wins widespread attention, including in The Sun and Guardian.  Labour hate these attacks.  Just like the 10p tax fiasco they hit at the party's core self-image.  This weekend's Observer reported Labour "fury" at the suggestion that they weren't the party of fairness anymore.

The full Tory dossier can be read as a PDF here.  In his introduction to An Unfair Britain Mr Osborne highlights four main trends:

1. 900,000 more people in extreme poverty than in 1997 and the gap in life expectancy is greater than in Victorian times.
2. Stealth taxes have fallen most heavily on the poor.  Mr Osborne asks: "Is it fair to reward enterprise and effort, yet for someone earning £100 a week, for every extra pound they earn they take home just 6p?"
3. Failure to undertake schools reform means that the gap between the poorest and richest pupils is widening.
4. A shift of burdens from today's Britons to the next generation: "Rising public borrowing and economic incompetence is putting unfair burdens on future generations."

Most of Unfair Britain is a new presentation of existing data but it does contain one important new finding, quoted by Nicholas Watt in The Guardian: "Osborne claimed that this year's 4.2% increase in the guarantee credit - a minimum income for poor pensioners - would be "eaten up" by inflation, which hits pensioners harder. Inflation for pensioners is between 5.2% and 5.6%, meaning that a couple will lose £98 this year and a single pensioner £90."

Comments

[Mark Brooks]

Labour always makes the poor poorer, always have done and always will. It is the biggest insult you can throw at them and this report is just the ticket to prove it.

[James Maskell]

Its all well and good documenting how Labours screwed the country over (to be honest I suspect large swathes of Britain dont need reminding to realise this) but without well explained and reasoned Tory policies to deal with the problems the country faces, its a waste of time doing this. If the Tories already have policies, and I recall theyve announced a few, surely now is the time to start advocating them publicly and with force rather than a one off press conference. You need to drum them into the public psyche over a preiod of time. The public wont suddenly turn come polling day.

Diagnosing the problem is one thing, prescribing a cure another.

[Sammy Finn]

Good stuff.

[Tony Makara]

Good to see this attack on Labour. The poor have been hit harder under this Labour government than any previous govt that I can remember. In previous years it would have been unthinkable that the poor would lose access to basic dental treatment, but under Labour that has happened. We've seen the poor forced to work for 50pence an hour under the New Deal complusory work-experience programme, in other words stocking shelves for 30 hours a week in supermarkets that donate to the Labour party. Pensioners have been hit hard and Labour thinks it can rectify these problems with flash-in-the-pan winter fuel payments. Do you all remember Neil Kinnock's grandiose speech " I ask you not to be poor, I ask you not to be old, not to grow sick " etc, how Labour, and indeed Mr Kinnock, might consider those words now.

[Dorian Grape]

I have a cunningly camouflaged tank that no one can see. It’s also got fairness written all over it but no one can read the words. The unfairness applies to 85% of the UK population applies to the elderly, the terminally ill, the deprived, applies to a fundamentally iniquitous constitutional settlement and applies direct culpability to Labour.

Can you see it yet? It applies in the Tory heartlands of England and equally to the supposedly disposable North and yet the party of England, the Conservative party, continues to flirt mercilessly with the forlorn hope of one MP and electoral oblivion north of Gretna.

Talking of tanks. Did we know that Scottish armoured regiments can display the Saltire in place of the Union flag but English formations cannot display the red and white

[Matt Wright]

Very good move by Osbourne. The essence of Labour thinking, despite some good intentions, does lead to the poor getting poorer. Labours inherent mode is central control and by trying to level down inequalities they always end up reducing things to the lowest common denominator rather than harnessing aspiration to raise the overall game. When you add this to the elements within them that still seem to want to perpetuate class war, you have a cocktail that holds back Britain.

[Tony Makara]

" by trying to level down inequalities they always end up reducing things to the lowest common denominator "

Matt Wright, good point. The minimum wage has done more to drag wages down than it has to pull wages up.

[David_at_Home]

Every time I visit London I am struck by the contrast of third world slums cheek by jowl with the fabulously rich who seem to delight in flaunting their wealth. I imagine that pre-revolutionary France and Russia must have been like this.

One of the reasons why the poor get poorer is that we persist in flooding the country with low and unskilled immigrants from the third world and Eastern Europe. The obvious result as an increasing number of poor people in the country and a lowering of the levels of pay at the bottom of the workforce (please no waffle about the minimum wage).

The overall effect is to discourage some unskilled native Brits from working at all (it is easier just to claim benefits) and to create an ever expanding underclass of both natives and immigrants.

Neither the Labour nor the Conservative Parties want even to think about this problem but it will cause terrible civil strife, one day.

[Matt Wright]

Well the issue is very much one of the problems with the welfare system. Sadly what started out as a good idea about a saftey net has had some major unintended consequences. In some areas we now have significant numbers of people where generation upon generation have no intention of working. Those areas are as poor as they were 11 years ago and risk heading down further over the next couple of years. The great irony is that being out of work and on benefits is for many of working age actually unhealthy both physically and mentally, thus exacerbating the problems.

[Tony Makara]

If James Purnell wants to improve living-standards through his work-for-dole programme he must pay any work undertaken at the going rate. This would be away of getting people back into a working environment again and showing that work does pay. The great danger with a purely punitive system is that people may simply sign-off altogether and drift into criminality to fund themselves. I fully support the idea of government providing work for the unemployed, but that work must be fully-waged and not just a scheme to use the unemployed for cheap labour.

[scribbler]

Can anyone come up with a definition of poor, that does not invoke income? People of low income very often do not have to provide the basics of life for themselves. They are given housing of a reasonable standard by the state, education and health care is free. They even get an income from the state inorder to buy food and huge flat screen televisions.

This is not supposed to be a rant, but a genuine question: what is 'poor' in 21st century Britain? Absence of certain material things? a sense of entrapment in a set of circumstances? All ideas welcome.

[Tony Makara]

Scribbler, I don't think anyone can claim that a single person on JSA is well off, even with free rent etc. However there are occasions when being the head of a large family on benefit can lead to a considerable disposible income. For this reason in such cases part of the benefit to large families should be in the form of food and energy vouchers.

The solution to JSA is to turn the benefit into a community wage and pay any work undertaken at the going rate, which of course would be offset against the benefit itself taking into account such factors as rent and council tax rebates. In this way the state would be getting something back in return for its money in the form of manpower which it could use in many different ways, from renovation to care work.

The problem as I see it is that governments are only coming up with punitive measures to deal with benefit dependency, going from welfare state to workfare state, when what is needed is a middle ground in which those on benefit can work, but earn, eventually moving on to work proper.

[Mark Wadsworth]

Mr Osborne asks: "Is it fair to reward enterprise and effort, yet for someone earning £100 a week, for every extra pound they earn they take home just 6p?"

FInally, the penny drops! The answer is simple - reduce the generosity of the welfare system right at the bottom, and use the money saved to reduce the impact of means-testing, preferably to no more than the basic rate of tax/NI.

[Ian Miller]

Basic National pension circa £5,000 p.a.

Council Tax circa £2,500 p.a.
Other stealth Taxes £2,500 p.a. Result = Labour Hates Pensioners!

[Jake]

This is good stuff . Hits Labour where it hurts and destroys any pretensions they have to being the party of equality, equity or fairness.
Bullet points like this register with the journalists too!

In particular the whole area of the poor being taxed at a higher effective rate than the rich and that inequlity has widened under Labour, should be emphasised.

Any danger of a foray into the inequality of the Barnett Rules and the nationalist discrimination against England inherent in them, next?

[Craig Barrett]

Funny...there seems to be no report on the BBC about this document...

[Dave]

'Mr Osborne asks: "Is it fair to reward enterprise and effort, yet for someone earning £100 a week, for every extra pound they earn they take home just 6p?"

FInally, the penny drops! The answer is simple - reduce the generosity of the welfare system right at the bottom.'

Posted by: Mark Wadsworth

The welfare system isn't generous right at the bottom. It's a subsistance rate. It's also politically irrelevant, as people who like to see welfare recipients hounded will vote Tory anyway, and so can safely be ignored.

That's why I think that, in the run up to the election, we'll announce that the poorest paid will be lifted out of tax altogether. This will help us to win the votes of previously Blair/Lib Dem supporting sections of the middle class.

This report lays the groundwork for that.

[tally]

Not a mention about the Barnett Formula,West Lothian Question or the unfairness of the lisbon treaty imposed by new labour. nuff said.

[Michael McGowan]

If Osborne is sticking to Labour's spending plans in the current environment, then he won't be able to afford to cut anybody's taxes. The question will be which taxes he will be raising. The reason that the poorest pay income tax and VAT is because there is no other way to raise the prodigious amounts of money required by Government.

[Helen Wright]

George Osborne is a lightweight, hindered by his British upbringing.

The real unfairness is England being the only country in the UK not allowed any element of Home Rule and the people of England forced to pay the highest stealth taxes for the least return.

Osborne doesn't really want to talk abour fairness. He knows very well that the Scottish PM won't dare to mention the REAL inequalities.

Both parties are 21st century Luddites. This will come back to haunt them and deservedly so!

[Ian Campbell]

I'm just amazed that George Osborne does not see fit to mention that the English as a nation are treated most unfairly of all in the UK. MPs from Scotland, Wales and N Ireland can and have imposed on England policies which their own countries rejected. The Barnett formula works to the disadvantage of the English taxpayer (and in particular to parts of England like the North-East) to the extent that English towns on the border express the wish to be transferred to Scotland and Wales. The Labour Govt spent a risible sum on promoting St George's Day and does everything it can to deny the existence of the English as nation - and George has nothing to say about this at all. One day the people of England will asky why.

[Al Lane]

Good stuff from boy George. But he knows he will do b**ger all for poor people himself.

[E justice]

No mention of the "English Question"
The English are your Party's voters.
Time to come out of the closet and think of England.five main trends
1 Drugs that are denied the English patients
while given freely to the rest of"Britain"
2 English students top up fees.
3 English pensioners having to sell their home to pay for care.
4 And you must remember the Barnet formula ?
5 While Scotland and Wales have their own Parliaments,when are the English going to get theirs'? the Parliament at Westminster is a UK Parliament

[James Matthews]

As others have pointed out, the most glareing unfairness in the UK. both political and financial, is to the English. Time for an end to the Barnett formula and a full answer to The West Lothian Question.

[Alan Douglas]

I don't see why Labour should lose their "fairness" reputation.

What with the 10p rate and VED changes, they are on target to take everything from everyone. What could be fairer than that !

Alan Douglas

[Dorian Grape]

Today Sir John Major is lauded for Lottery based gold medallage. He should also be lauded with laurels for being about the only Tory Englishman who has stood up and openly stated that he rather likes being English rather than shuffling about looking at his shoes and vaguely murmuring something about British values.

Anyone else want to stand up and be counted? For the only nation which is not a nation in Brown’s brave new world of UK nations and regions.

[Dave]

'If Osborne is sticking to Labour's spending plans in the current environment, then he won't be able to afford to cut anybody's taxes. The question will be which taxes he will be raising. The reason that the poorest pay income tax and VAT is because there is no other way to raise the prodigious amounts of money required by Government.'

Posted by: Michael McGowan

Exempting the lowest paid from taxation would balance out because of the savings we'd make in welfare payments.

At the moment, the 'welfare trap' exists because the pittance some families get on welfare is more than the pittance they'd get if the parents did unskilled work.

But by lifting the poorest paid workers out of taxation, you'd reverse that and make it worthwhile for people to get off benefits and into work.

It's not that radical an idea. Cutting taxation in order to encourage enterprise is a tried and tested Tory tactic.

[Tony Makara]

" by lifting the poorest paid workers out of taxation, you'd reverse that and make it worthwhile for people to get off benefits and into work. "

Very true, however we need to create more jobs than the 667,000 that are available, we have 1.67 million on JSA and no doubt many more will join them from IB when stricter qualification rules apply. We are going to need a million more jobs to end welfare dependency. The problems surrounding welfare are more complicated than most people imagine.

[Dave]

That's a fair point, Tony, but even if the bulk of the jobs available today became worth doing from a welfare recipient's point of view, imagine what a boom in the economy that would create.

It wouldn't just be half a million less welfare checks for the government to write, but half a million more people with money to spend and a whole load of expanding companies.

Obviously no plan ever fully survives contact with reality, but I think that a policy of tax cuts to incentivise people back into the workplace would be cost neutral at the very least.

Politically, it's also a perfect bit of 'Compassionate Conservativism' in that it uses traditional Conservative principles to addresses a modern social problem.

[Tony Makara]

Dave, yes, I agree absolutely and I applaud your positivity, such a contrast with those who 'accept' unemploment as being a natural consequence of the economy. We certainly should strive to fill as many of those 667,000 jobs as possible, even then there is a problem with skills matching jobs and this is an area where employers can help by not being so specific in their requirements for employment. Often people might not have a specific skill but are capable of learning it on the job itself. Perhaps employers ought to be given the opportunity to take people on for a short training period, in which the prospective employee can learn the ropes, while still receiving benefits, but with a guaranteed job offer at the end if they prove suitable? In a nation that is overqualified those that are underqualified really struggle to find work because they are unskilled.

As you say if we can fill the jobs that are available it will have many positive effects that go beyond a person finding a job. Labour's New Deal has clearly failed, in spite of its claims to have a 40% success rate, that is a 60% faliure rate, youth unemployment is up 20% etc. A simple job-matching system would have been far more effective than the New Deal with its gravy-train providors milking the state coffers.

[Don Beadle]

Fully agree with E Justice 19 Aug. By announcing that he does not want to be the first minister of England David Cameron has fofeited a lot of support but he might retrieve it if he made it clear that he would support someone else in that post with the PM of the UK government no longer having to carry out both roles.
He should take a look at John Major's Autobiography page 518 in which he found the strains of attending interntional summits much greater than other national leaders who did not have to directly with so many domestic political matters and could therefore more easily concentrate on being a world leader.
England is being unfairly governed directly by the UK government who cannot just think about and speak for England whose interests become subordinate to the wider interests of the whole UK. Completing the devolution already accorded to Scotland, Wales and N.Ireland would be of great benefit to everyone

[David Sergeant]

Just to make another diversion like the English votes contributions. The reason why Black Wednesday lost the Tory party the image of financial competence is because the Tory party said nothing while every one else made anti-Tory noises. In the case of fairness, however reasonable Osborne's claims, expect Labour politicians to not go to sleep and to keep fighting. Hence, the fiarness issue is unlikely to equal the effect of Black Wednesday.

[John Moss]

Scribbler. True poverty is being unable to feed, clothe and house yourself and family, if you have one. Being unable to do all three is poverty.

Socialism has defined it by reference to income and they keep changing it. When it was "half average earnings" it was easier to ridicule by stating that if somebody on average earnings could afford to have two cars, somebody with only one car was therefore "poor".

While ever we allow poverty to be defined in relative rather than absolute terms, we will contintue to have the ridiculous situation where "poverty" levels rise in times of growth, when avergae earnings rise and fall in times of recession.

[David_at_Home]

I find the English Nats here as obnoxious as the Scottish variety. I am British as is everyone has been who born in England or Scotland since 1603. (Yes I know that the Act of Union was not until 1707 but James 6&1 arranged thatanyone born in either country after his accession to the throne of England had common nationality).

True the Barnett Formula and the West Lothian Question do need sorting out but these are not really issues of poverty.

One of the two elephants in the poverty room is mass immigration but, for some reason, no-one wants to think about this. The other elephant is the benefits system and Frank Field has some pertinent observations on this but, being Tories, I fear you won't want to listen to him.

[David_at_Home]

I find the English Nats here as obnoxious as the Scottish variety. I am British as is everyone has been who born in England or Scotland since 1603. (Yes I know that the Act of Union was not until 1707 but James 6&1 arranged thatanyone born in either country after his accession to the throne of England had common nationality).

True the Barnett Formula and the West Lothian Question do need sorting out but these are not really issues of poverty.

One of the two elephants in the poverty room is mass immigration but, for some reason, no-one wants to think about this. The other elephant is the benefits system and Frank Field has some pertinent observations on this but, being Tories, I fear you won't want to listen to him.

[Dorian Grape]

Hi David at Home. Who said this?

"I hope to still be around when we see an English parliament established because that is what voters want and what justice demands".

"Time to consider a devolved English parliament"

'At some stage — perhaps very soon — the English Question will explode into British politics, and will decisively change the political landscape.'

'The guts of the English Question are as follows: Scottish MPs have a say on English matters that do not usually apply to Scotland; moreover, power is devolved to Scotland and to a lesser extent Wales and Northern Ireland, but English taxpayers still pay for any differences in policy followed by the devolved governments.'

That'll be that obnoxious Frank Field then.

[Helen Wright]

I think you'll find the issue raised by Osborne was "fairness," David_at_Home. Therefore, the Barnett Formula and denial of equal decmoratic rights for those in England is highly relevant.

It is also extremely ignorant to assume that people who post on political forums are members of any particular political party. That's the whole point of the internet. Communication between various viewpoints. It's something I've found Tories welcome, whereas Labour do not. That's one thing I'll always praise them for.

[David_at_Home]

"It is also extremely ignorant to assume that people who post on political forums are members of any particular political party. .... It's something I've found Tories welcome, whereas Labour do not. That's one thing I'll always praise them for. "

Helen, I am rebuked and justly so. Conservative Home is indeed an excellent website with some first rate contributors.

[Eveleigh Moore-Dutton]

I understand that the economy that George Osborne will have to resurrect will be in a poor state, over-burdened with debt and with very little room for manoeuvre but I do wonder how much money is wasted in simply ‘churning’ the tax we take from the low paid and then giving back to them as handouts? The administrative cost is bound to be high and I know that Labour tends to like doing this because it turns more people into state dependents but Conservatives should be about freeing people from the burdens they are ill placed to bear and encouraging independence. If we raise the tax threshold perhaps we will save enough in administrative costs (think of the postage alone!) to make the exercise cash positive!

[B.Garvie]

Mr Osborne is correct in his analysis of Labour's record. Labour has made the poor much poorer.Their tax policies have stolen the retirement dreams of pensioners and the only people to benefit from Labour's policy changes are their own champagne socialist MPs who are stuffing their pockets before their kamakazi policies cast them into the dustbin of history.

Labour isn't working.

[Victor, NW Kent]

Let us put it simply - people who earn the minimum wage should not be taxed at all. There can be no justification whatsoever for taxing them and offering a chance to get some it back through a complex and fallible set of benefit schemes.

The very people who Labour claims to champion are the same group whose material poverty is continually worsening. A Conservative government should first concentrate on such problems before addressing the complexity of a tax system designed to favour the rich, richer and richest.

[working tory]

Perhaps Gideon will use his trust fund to bail out the nation, just like in the good old days of Stanley Baldwin.

Great research paper. Perhaps he should go back to writing them at CCHQ.

[Angelo Basu]

While it makes sense to write the report on poverty (etc) by the government's own measures and that there has been an acceptance by the shadow cabinet of relative poverty being relevant at least as an indicator of social cohesion, it is a bit disappointing that the report appears to have adopted the language of relative poverty in such wholesale terms. Understandable, because it provides great ammunitition, but regrettable because it is a poisoned chalice - on those measures it is near-impossible to make improvements other than by unappealing and economically damaging means which would not actually improve the position of people in poverty.

It would also have been nice if the report had been properly proof-read as it has a lot of glaring errors, but perhaps that can be put down to the likelihood that many of the young researchers working on it have had the disadvantage of having had most of their education under the present government.

[Iain]

But are the Conservatives going to deal with the real driver of this unfairness, mass immigration. Today its revealed that Labour have over seen an eight fold increase in immigration, this has severely impacted on the low paid, where in good economic times when they should be able to negotiated better terms and conditions, and close the gap, the gap has instead widened, and yet more and more people have to rely on Government hand outs to make their work pay.

[James G]

Osborne's vacuous article in today's guardian:

"Conservatives will tackle the root causes of poverty and spread opportunity by harnessing the private and voluntary sectors to help people into work."

"Conservatives have always stood against the utopianism of controlled economies"

It is the conservatives who are now the most obsessed with utopianism. They appear to be saying that their goal is a perfect society where everyone is in work as opposed to what they call a "broken" society where some people claim benefits. But all societies create marginalised minorities. The question is how do you treat them. In the 19th century, with little state intervention and no benefits, society still created many millions of unproductive and marginalised members. The difference with today is that most of these people died in the gutter at the age of 25 with their mouths wide open. And this despite a much stronger church and voluntary sector and stronger families in closer nit communities. So much for 19th century responsibility and morality.

The voluntary sector failed to intervene effectively in the 19th century which is why the state progressively took over, with cross party concensus, not for utopian reasons, but for pragmatic and humanitarian reasons, in order to support the market economy. And the resulting improvements in public health, social mobility, law and order and individual liberty were central to the west's post-war economic success.

What evidence do the conservatives have that going back to 19th century solutions will produce anything other than 19th century results (or perhaps worse given that church and family are now weaker)?

The conservatives are stuck in the 19th century, but are unable to learn the lessons this century taught their forebears. Claiming, falsely, that state intervention was designed to produce a "perfect" society, they seek to discredit the welfare state by pointing out that society is not perfect. This sounds like a clever soundbite for those who don't have 5 minutes to look a little closer at the issues.

Spending less on benefits will mean spending more on the police when many more people, cut adrift in our 21st century materialist, individualistic society, turn to crime. We are slowly seeing the welfare state replaced by a repressive state.

Sorry, you will never live in your perfect society Mr. Osborne. Your utopian ideology blinds you to this reality. But what is sad is that you cannot even come up with new ideas: yours is a "nostalgic" utopia, glorifying old solutions that didn't work in the 19th century, let alone the 21st.