Ed Miliband has to defy the skiver talk instead of vainly propping up the status quo or doing the Tories' work for them
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Jonathan Freedland
The Guardian, Friday 5 April 2013 20.00 BST
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George Osborne and Ed Balls clashed over welfare in the wake of the Philpott trial – just as the chancellor intended. Photograph: Reuters
That was no gaffe. When George Osborne linked the sickening case of Mick Philpott – now jailed for the manslaughter of six of his own children in a house fire he started – to the state of Britain's benefits system, he knew what he was doing. A student of US politics, he was deploying a favoured technique of the American right, honed during the decades-long culture wars. Dip your hands in the slime of an episode that stirs revulsion – and smear it all over your opponent. In the role of Willie Horton – the rapist notoriously used by Bush the elder to discredit Michael Dukakis – enter Mick Philpott. Message: if you hate him and what he did, then you ought to hate the "benefits culture" and the Labour party that supports it.
Labour should be on notice. This attack was the beginning, not the end. There'll be more in the same vein, from now until 2015. Come the next election, Tory posters will doubtless depict an imminent, double Labour bombshell, warning that Ed Miliband will raise your taxes to foot an ever-rising welfare bill.
That's because the evidence suggests it will work – that on welfare the voters are on the Tories' side. The British Attitudes survey shows a dramatic shift over just 20 years. In 1993, 24% believed that benefits were too high and discouraged work, with 55% disagreeing. Now a thumping 62% hold what was once a minority view. Countless surveys show the same trend: a collective hardening of the heart towards those receiving the state's help. So, when faced with a deficit that refuses to be tamed, the government decides it's the welfare bill that should be squeezed. When 37% believe that most people on the dole are "fiddling", you can see why.
Which leaves Labour in a very awkward spot, the same zone of discomfort the party inhabits on immigration. Should it attempt the daunting task of shifting public opinion, persuading the voters that they are wrong, their views built on prejudice – or accept that the people are where they are and try to meet them there?
Much has been made of Labour's unity since 2010, but on this issue the tribe is split. In the first camp are those who want Miliband to do what Polly Toynbee does in this paper, fighting Tory fire with facts.
They wish Labour would explain that most benefit recipients are not feckless, but working hard to make ends meet in low-paid jobs that do not provide a living wage. They want the face of welfare – renamed "social security" – to be the woman doing two cleaning jobs to feed her kids, not Philpott. If they could only channel public anger upward – at the bankers who have never paid for the disaster they inflicted on us all, three more condemned yesterday, or at the millionaires who this weekend will receive a £54,000 tax cut – then attitudes would shift.
Opposing them are the remnant Blairites, who believe Labour will only get a hearing when it demonstrates that it understands public rage and is willing to be as tough on welfare and the abusers of welfare as the Tories.
The trouble is, both approaches are badly flawed. The first is noble, but the work of a generation: all the facts in the world will not soften that anti-welfare hostility in time for June 2015. The second, even if it were right, is unlikely to convince the electorate. If they're looking for someone to run Britain as a Dickensian workhouse, they'll choose Osborne over Miliband every time. The Labour leader posing as the scourge of the spongers will simply not be authentic: voters will see through it, knowing that the Labour party's heart is not in it.
But nor can Labour say nothing, offering a statement here or a press release there instead of a vision of the future welfare state. Such a vision could begin with addressing the root of the problem, the reason why people need benefits in the first place: jobs.
As one senior Labour figure puts it: "The welfare state has a legitimacy problem in Britain" because there are too few jobs and "too many crappy jobs" that pay too little and which have to be topped up by benefits. Labour has to go into the next election with a serious, costed and credible plan to boost and transform employment. It will mean spending money not just on getting people into any job, no matter how "crappy", but on training and delivering new skills, as well as regional banks that can funnel capital to new, local businesses.
Next comes a recognition that a Labour government – even one that makes the likes of Amazon, Google and Starbucks pay their taxes and that stops featherbedding the rich – will have to make savings too. Labour needs to send a signal – soon – to that majority now grown cynical about welfare.
It need not deliver a full 2015/16 budget now, but can announce a few totems: means-testing the winter fuel allowance and free TV licence, for instance, so that the well-off elderly no longer receive those state subsidies. Next, it could explain that a massive chunk of social security spending currently goes on pensions, including to those who are relatively well-off. This terrain is politically perilous – pensioners vote – but serious savings would come with an increase in the pension age. Remember that it once stood at 70, back when people lived much shorter lives. With guaranteed protections for the elderly poor or sick, this may be the only way.
Above all, Labour has to address the sentiment that lies at the heart of those anti-welfare poll numbers: resentment at the thought that people are getting something for nothing. Jon Cruddas and the Blue Labour camp have interesting ideas on reviving the contributory principle originally championed by Beveridge, making welfare more like an insurance policy: the more you put in, the more you get out. Some want to demand that benefit recipients have to give if they are to get, doing socially useful tasks, whether visiting the elderly or cleaning up the local park. There are dangers: ensuring that these duties are not seen as punishment and don't block jobseekers finding paid work. But surely few would dispute the value of an element of reciprocity.
Such ideas could draw the sting from welfare, visibly defying the talk of skivers who take but do not give. This is the territory Labour has to aim for, neither vainly seeking to tell people the status quo is fine nor doing the Tories' work for them. Fail to find it, and Osborne's smiling face will haunt them long after 2015.
