Tories can’t tackle poverty because they don’t get it

DEALING with a problem involves understanding it. This is as true of poverty as it is of the political party that plunges so many people into it.

As a cut in Universal Credit threatens to tip thousands of families into various forms of hardship, Prime Minister Boris Johnson pushed his “levelling-up” credentials at the Tory party conference – leaving many to wonder how such contradiction escaped the notice of those cheering on the bumbling fool.

This savagery occurs in the same week that the Pandora Papers revealed the UK is not simply implicated in the system of offshore havens (which allow the wealthy and powerful to hide their assets from HMRC) but is in fact situated at the very heart of the global tax avoidance scandal.

So how is it possible for Conservative politicians to speak on one hand of making Britain a fairer society while saying nothing of this clear corruption, and in the same breath double down on the biggest cut to benefit in the history of the welfare state?

It’s quite simple really – they live a parallel moral universe.

Universal Credit created food poverty on an industrial scale. The two-child benefit cap led to rape victims being asked to provide proof they were sexually assaulted or risk their children going hungry.

And changes to benefits for people with disabilities led to a spike in attempted suicides among claimants, as well as many being declared “fit to work” just weeks or days before succumbing to their illnesses and conditions.

But in every instance, behind each of these policies (and you’ll struggle to wrap your head around this) lay a genuine desire, on the part of Conservative politicians, to improve people’s lives.

To modify aspects of the welfare system with the aim of producing fairer and more favourable longterm outcomes for all concerned.

“How could they possibly believe that?”, you might ask. Well, it’s not a hard belief to adopt and retain if you’ve never been in the position where losing £20 a week would be a massive deal.

Whether they admit it or not, the idea that welfare is socially harmful when it is too “generously” distributed is pretty common among conservatives.

Especially those who have never fallen on hard enough times to need help from the state. They believe a golden age in social mobility in the mid-20th century came about solely because of the liberating power of free markets – when socialist reforms in health, education, the labour market and welfare are what drove it.

While the conclusion that conservatives do not care about the poor is not hard to draw, what must be understood is that from their perspective, “lefty” reforms in areas like criminal justice and welfare are regarded as impediments to the development of personal responsibility – the ultimate conservative virtue.

Conservatives are not opposed to a generous welfare state because they are mean, but because they often genuinely regard it, in the long term, as a disempowering social force.

Any meaningful long-term action on the broader issue of social inequality requires the firmest possible grasp of just how some of these Tories really think.

The ideology that drives these policies must be smashed, whether it’s the belief you can punish someone out of addiction, frighten them out of being unemployed, or shame them out of being poor.

While it’s cathartic for some to use labels like “evil” and “scum”, the truth is, in believing there’s nothing more to the Tories than self-interest, we misunderstand them (and the people who vote for them) as woefully as they misunderstand the nature of poverty in the 21st century.