Benefit cuts: Monday will be the day that defines this government

Those on low incomes, after all the vicious talk dismissing them as cheats and idlers, will be hit by an avalanche of cuts


Polly Toynbee
The Guardian, Thursday 28 March 2013 20.51 GMT

Not many know what is about to happen on Monday: neither those about to be knocked down nor those sailing too high above them to notice. But historians will see it as the day that defines the Cameron government. An avalanche of benefit cuts will hit the same households over and over, with no official assessment of how far this £18bn reduction will send those who are already poor into beggary.


In his 2009 Hugo Young lecture, David Cameron spoke with apparent passion of the damage done by inequality: "We all know, in our hearts, that as long as there is deep poverty living systematically side by side with great riches, we all remain the poorer for it." The wise saw the wolf beneath the sheepskin: sure enough, once in power, the language he and his ministers used to blame the poor for their plight was cruder and fiercer than in Thatcher's day. You need to go back to Edwardian times to find ministers and commentators so viciously dismissing all on low incomes as cheats, idlers and drunks.

On BBC news, Iain Duncan Smith, confronted with irrefutable cases of hardship, said: "It's about trying to get as many people as possible out of the welfare trap and into lives they can control themselves." As the economist JK Galbraith observed: "The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy: that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."


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