UK Poverty Post

Are we really all in it together….? And who is ‘we’ anyway?

The Conservative’s tag line of We’re All in this Together is going to be seriously put to the test in the next twelve months.  The Institute of Fiscal Studies’ verdict on the Comprehensive Spending Review already put a dampener on things. 

But amidst all the post-Comprehensive Spending Review analysis, I see a few chinks of light (although I would plead guilty to any charges of grasping at straws…).  Setting aside the large scale cuts to welfare for the most vulnerable and the lack of any clear mechanisms for job creation, there are one or two areas of emerging policy that strike me as pretty darn sensible.

One has been the announcement of a Green Investment Bank.  Another is the rise in apprenticeship places.  And another is the apparent willingness (to make an effort at least) to tackle abuse of the tax system.  It has been good, if surprising, to see George Osborne on the BBC’s Andrew Marr show (17^th of October) asserting that tax evasion is immoral   It is even better to see him backing this up with increased enforcement capacity.  

In doing so he is joining the claims by his new Best Friends Forever (Nick Clegg and Danny Alexander) to crack down on rich tax evaders - joining Alexander’s description of tax evasion as ‘morally indefensible’. 

I’m holding my breath a wee bit because how effectively such promises are implemented will be the true test of the extent to which we truly are ‘all in it together’. 

Early hints are that the better off are flinching – see their reaction to the ending of child benefit for those earning over £44000 a year.  Or remember the much vaunted, (though little evidenced) exodus of high earners from London if tax rates rise too high.  Or, perhaps worse of all, note the rise in the number of organisations offering their well-off clients advice on tax avoidance – when I typed ‘tax minimisation advice tax solutions’ into a search engine, I got over 18000 results.

All this reminds me of the experience that we’ve all had of sitting in a car in a traffic queue, where 99% of cars have respected signs to merge into one lane (to accommodate road works, for example).  There is always one driver that ostensibly thinks his time is more precious, his tasks more urgent or his destination more important, that he drives up the inside lane then nudges his way into the front of the queue.  Clearly this is a driver who doesn’t feel any sense that ‘we are all in it together’ in such situations. 

With such chasms between the experience of the recession and the subsequent funding cuts, claims that ‘we’re all in it together’ from men clearly able to weather the storms are patronising at best, at worst completely ignorant of the trade offs and sacrifices that people in poverty make every day. Recent research figures show that the poorest people are unable  unable to afford items deemed essential – such as buying all weather shoes or replacing worn out furniture.

So I’ll keep an eye out for how the few promising policies in the CSR are implemented, hoping for policies that act as true indicators of how substantive the mantra of ‘all being in it together’ really is.