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However it ends, the row over Universal Credit tells us some incredibly depressing things about politics and policy in this country. A quick thread.
First, the constituency for fiscal discipline within the Tory party is at its smallest for decades. Anecdotally, MPs telling govt to stand firm vastly outnumbered by those saying 'make the emails stop'
Second, the ratchet effect is in full swing. The temporary always becomes permanent. It is always far harder to cut spending than to increase it. (Many of us saw this coming - I even predicted the Rashford endorsement - but you didn't exactly need to be Nostradamus...)
Consider the fact that even as this debate is raging, millions of financially comfortable pensioners are wondering exactly why the Government keeps giving them £100/£200/£300 for their heating bills each winter and which charity to donate it to.
More broadly, there has been absolutely no discussion of whether this is actually the right thing to do. Even the Treasury's own defence is purely and simply 'it's really expensive'.
If, before this all started, you'd got together a load of welfare experts and said 'you can permanently increase welfare spending by £6 billion or so, where's it going to go' I would have been *very surprised* if 'raise the basic rate of UC and extend free school meals' had won
The focus from most of those on the centre-right - and probably others - would have been on making work pay better. For example @CPSThinkTank has proposed slashing the taper rate (at which UC is withdrawn as you earn) from 63p to 50p, which this would more than cover
Others, eg @NeilDotObrien, would argue for an uplift in UC allowances. (In fairness, in our polling for the pay report, people did say on balance that UC wasn't generous enough. But they also said that improving incentives to work should be the focus of the welfare system.)
But we can go even broader. That £6bn is more than enough to plug the gap in the social care system, or to implement the Dilnot proposals with an extremely generous cap https://www.health.org.uk/news-and-comment/charts-and-infographics/REAL-social-care-funding-gap. Isn't that where the govt should be putting any extra cash?
Instead, we focus on the £20 on UC because it's the thing at hand. And we keep on increasing structural spending, meaning that the Covid crisis won't just be a one-off hit to the balance sheet but make it permanently harder for the govt to make ends meet without raising taxes
And as I lamented in Nov, we're still waiting for the robust pro-growth agenda that can deliver anything like the cash we need to pay for all this... https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/in-case-no-one-has-told-you-yet-debts-piling-up-and-theres-only-one-way-out-growth-prllcwpmx
(Correction: in the social care tweet, that should be AND do Dilnot. If I were told I had to spend this money, that's probably where I'd put it - though obviously I'd do @CPSThinkTank & @DamianGreen's version... https://www.cps.org.uk/research/fixing-the-care-crisis/)
