Few issues have been as totemic and significant in British politics as the two-child benefit cap. In 2015, during the Labour leadership contest, Jeremy Corbyn was the only candidate who defied a three-line whip to abstain on the Tory proposal to cap child benefit payments to the first two children. It precipitated the collapse of the front-runner Andy Burnham’s campaign and propelled Corbyn to the leadership against the odds. Corbyn’s stance epitomised Harold Wilson’s famous dictum that the Labour Party is a moral crusade or it is nothing. However, insofar as Labour was ever a moral crusade, that is patently not the case now. The two-child benefit cap and Labour’s refusal to abolish it (the money is readily available despite ridiculous protestations to the contrary) speaks to the neoliberal ideology embedded in society and the Labour Party.
Margaret Thatcher said very early in her premiership that economics is the method, but the objective was to change the soul. The Thatcherite project was successful in changing the collective view on welfare, known as social security in the early 1980s. It was not just a terminological change that indicated the changing collective view. In the 1980s, the British Attitudes Survey consistently showed substantial support for higher unemployment benefits, peaking at 70% in 1993 at the height of the early 1990s recession. Thanks to successive Conservative and Labour governments, attitudes to welfare benefits and recipients have become harsher. One of the minor characteristics of this shift to the right is the role of Labour politicians who came through the student politics pipeline into positions of power and who make a virtue of their impoverished backgrounds.
An example of this is former NUS president Jim Murphy. A Blairite who would refer to his tough upbringing in a Glasgow housing scheme, Murphy as the minister for welfare, piloted the 2007 Welfare Act through Parliament which laid the groundwork for the Work Capability Assessments that have caused great harm to people with disabilities and introduced sanctions for social housing tenants found guilty of anti-social behaviour, including eviction. The Tory government from 2010 built on this foundation to make the benefits system even more punitive.
A consequence of this ratchet effect is that support for retaining the two-child benefit cap, according to the latest YouGov poll, is 60%. Labour’s record on child poverty during its last period in office is greatly exaggerated. It was largely driven through a focus on getting lone parents back to work using child tax credits – at the cost of creating an effectively high marginal rate of tax. Much of the emphasis was placed on labour market reforms including the minimum wage as well as the benefit of an unprecedented economic boom. Much of the decrease in child poverty was achieved by 2003/2004, and from 2005 remained steady or slightly increased. The emphasis has increasingly been focused on people pulling themselves up by their bootstraps or the Labour right’s favourite phrase: aspiration. if you come from a poor background and are not financially successful, you are a failure, or have not aspired to escape your poverty – an important characteristic of professional Labour politicians.
To solidify the neoliberal settlement and prevent the ruling class from losing the gains made under various Tory and Labour neoliberal governments, a political regime filled with professional politicians was necessary. With neoliberalism triumphant and all the big ideological questions settled, all that was needed were technocrats to manage the settlement. Social democratic parties like Labour only retained a residual and tattered ethical commitment to social justice, yet this would only be pursued within the contours of neoliberalism.
Not only did neoliberalism reconstitute society, but it also suffused the universities as well. At around the same time, as the neoliberal settlement was being established, a new generation of Labour student politicians emerged that would constitute the nucleus of New Labour politicians and their successors who now serve in the Starmer government. This coterie of trainee professional politicians is value-free, ambitious, convinced of their own inherent right to govern and obsessed with factional warfare against the left. Just as they used authoritarian or rigged processes to gain an advantage over the left in student politics, so now they use the same tactics within the Labour Party.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, this group paid some attention to political ideas only insofar as it gave cover for their accommodation with the neoliberal settlement and gave intellectual ballast to their modernisation agenda. At first, it was called new times, the idea that emerged from the pages of Marxism Today that celebrated individualism and saw the welfare state as a creature of old times. The left’s opposition to cuts in child benefits in the early 1990s was seen as defending old nostrums that were outdated and part of a redistributionist economic program that was no longer viable. Many of these student politicians came from working-class backgrounds, and advancement into the upper echelons of the Labour Party offered a rapid rise in living standards and social status. They had ‘pulled themselves up by their bootstraps’ and succeeded. If others in their class had not done so, then that was a personal failing that no amount of benefits could change.
To some extent, this explains why the current crop of Labour cabinet ministers who repeatedly refer to their own impoverished youths have taken such a hard line on keeping the two-child benefit cap. Wes Streeting wrote an autobiography documenting his journey from a council flat in Stepney to Cambridge University to Labour frontbencher. Streeting was also one of many NUS presidents who used that position to move up the Labour Party ranks and has taken the same approach to the issue of child poverty that his Blairite predecessors took, which is to not oppose Tory welfare reforms which increase child poverty by bleating that they understand hardship, and when in power will do something about it, only for them to preserve the Tory reforms. Bridget Phillipson, the new Education Secretary has spent much of her childhood growing up in a council house and being on free school meals. Her voting record also demonstrates a failure to oppose Tory measures that plunge more children into poverty.
What is remarkable about these votes is that the Tory measures reversed the New Labour achievement of lifting 500,000 children out of poverty between 1997 and 2010. This achievement is often cited by the Labour Right as being one of the virtues of being in power: reducing child poverty. Yet the fact that the professional politicians who laud Sure Start centres as a major achievement of the last Labour government whilst going into the last General Election not committing to restoring them demonstrates a thin commitment to reducing child poverty. A commitment which is contingent on both fealty to capital and a factional hatred of the left. To the eternal student politicians who comprise the upper ranks of the Labour government, the left is still the hated enemy who defends the ‘losers in society’ and does not understand ‘aspiration’.
Labour’s abstention on the 2015 Welfare Reform Bill that introduced the child benefit cap was to show that Labour was pro ‘aspiration’. Without the economic boom of the 1997-2007 period, a greater emphasis on fiscal responsibility to keep capital onside, the characters of the Labour frontbenchers described above and the climate of hostility towards benefits more entrenched after 14 years of Tory government, the promise of reducing child poverty from this government through a taskforce will most likely remain an elusive target.
