With the government under fire on welfare, the submarine Chancellor has surfaced. George Osborne will give a rare speech today attacking the “vested interests” opposed to welfare reform while boasting that the changes announced in the Budget mean that 90 per cent of working households (around 14m households) will be better off by an average of £300 a year. Osborne’s figures, however, do not include unemployed families (a jobless couple without children will lose around £150 a year) and Labour is rightly pointing to the fact that the average family will be £891 worse off a year as a result of the cumulative effect of tax and benefit changes introduced since 2010.
Expect Ed Balls and co. to also take yet another opportunity to remind voters that the biggest tax cut of all has gone to the highest earners. The reduction in the top rate of income tax from 50p to 45p this Saturday will benefit the UK’s 13,000 income millionaires by an average of £100,769 a year and all high earners by at least £42,000. Whether or not they accept the economic logic behind the tax cut, an increasing number of Tory MPs recognise that it has made every austerity measure that much harder to justify.
Meanwhile, Iain Duncan Smith’s claim that he could live on £53 a week (fisked by Alex yesterday) has given every journalist in the land a licence to ask the Work and Pensions Secretary’s colleagues whether they could match his frugality. Treasury minister Greg Clark told Radio 5 Live this morning that anyone earning “the comfortable wage” that an MP has would “certainly struggle” to live on that amount and Osborne can expect to be asked the same question if and when he takes questions after his speech to Morrisons workers.
The petition challenging Duncan Smith to “prove his claim” has garnered more than 118,000 signatures – in excess of the 100,000 required to trigger a debate in Parliament (although it was not put forward for consideration). And the Chancellor’s dubious description of the benefits system as “generous” (prompting the inevitable rejoinder: have you tried living on £71 a week?) means he is vulnerable to similar scorn.
Content from our partners
Related
