In the latest edition of the magazine – on newsstands from tomorrow – I have interviewed shadow work and pensions secretary Liam Byrne. It is a revealing conversation in which he insists that, contrary to received Westminster wisdom, welfare policy will be a vote winner for Labour by the time of the next election. (The Tories are working on the assumption that voters are so filled with scorn for the benefits system Labour bequeathed that they can keep on cutting with impunity and force the opposition into unelectable defence of “scroungers”.) Not so, says Byrne. “Labour will win on social security.”
The reason for this confidence is, broadly speaking, that coalition economic policy is failing, the welfare bill is rising and so the real cost of cuts is felt by people in work – so by definition not George Osborne’s target shirkers. As that fact becomes apparent, voters will come to be increasingly appalled by the social impact of Osborne’s axe raid on the safety net. “The Tories have crossed the threshold of decency,” says Byrne. “They’re very good at conjuring up another vulnerable group to kick the crap out of … As working people feel the kicking they’re going to get next year and as they see the way our country becomes divided, they’re going to recoil. It will remind them of the things they rejected about the Tories in 1997.”
To make that point Byrne poaches the Downing Street campaign lexicon, talking repeatedly about the impact of cuts on “the strivers”. This is the low-income segment of working households who once flocked to the Tories under Margaret Thatcher’s banner of middle class aspiration but who suspect Cameron and friends are not on their side.
“It’s not Britain’s shirkers who are having to pay the cost of failure, it’s Britain’s strivers,” says Byrne. “The Tories are screwing Britain’s strivers.”
There’s more in the magazine, including some interesting lines on how Labour would offer a new settlement without promising to spend more money.
To ram home the point about how ill-targeted and politically motivated the coalition’s austerity policies are, Byrne’s office was keen to pass on some research in which they have collaborated with Newcastle council to match the scale of local authority cuts to the relative accessibility of work in different areas. Despite the nakedly partisan source, the data are pretty interesting and so worth sharing.
Broadly speaking, the conclusion appears to be that the cuts hit hardest where jobs are fewest. The research uses a range of data from the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) to draw up a league table of councils according to the value of cuts per head of population they have experienced. That was then tallied with data on the average benefit claimant count per vacancy.
What emerges is a very clear correlation between local authorities where the cuts are deepest and areas where the highest number of people are chasing the lowest number of jobs.
So, in areas where the cut per capita was £200 or more, the average number of jobseekers per vacancy was 9.3.
Where cuts per capita were £150-199, there were, on average, 6.5 claimants per vacancy.
In areas where cuts were £100-149 per head, there were 5.4 claimants per vacancy. For the £50-99 per had band, there were 4 jobseekers to every job and in the £1-49 group just 2.5 claimants per vacancy. (The national average is 3.7)
The top five affected councils are as follows:
|
Local Authority |
Claimant count per vacancy Oct 2012 |
Cumulative change per person (scale of cuts, by Newcastle methodology) |
|
Hackney |
26.4 |
-£244 |
|
Knowsley |
9.4 |
-£229 |
|
Liverpool |
6.2 |
-£229 |
|
Newham |
11.7 |
-£227 |
|
Tower Hamlets |
10.7 |
-£203 |
Notably, they are all Labour-controlled. There are only three Tory-controlled councils in the top 50 hardest hit areas and all ten of the least affected areas are Conservative.
Partly that just tells us that the cuts hit inner city areas, which happen also to be areas of high density unemployment. There is, no doubt, a Conservative spin on these figures which would claim that Labour councils were likely to be higher spenders and more wasteful and so are facing a more extreme belt-tightening relative to where they were in 2010.
Another way of looking at it is that the cuts are shafting people in the poorest areas and that the people out of work in those places are also the ones who face the bleakest labour market conditions. Also, that the coalition is funnelling the pain of austerity into safe Labour seats, which makes sense politically but is hardly in the spirit of keeping us all in it together.
We’ll try to get full tables up later.
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