Three quid is less than the price of a pint in most central London pubs. It’s just about enough to get a small salad in the subsidised canteen in the offices where I work. And coincidentally, it is roughly 5% of the top whack rate of Jobseekers’ Allowance, which currently stands at £64.30 for the over 25s.
Benefits are usually increased each year in line with the September Consumer Price Index figure, normal times, three quid is the extent to which most of the 2.57m people in this country who are out of work right now would expect would to see their income increase.
It’s not exactly a lot, is it? Yet Tory MP James Wharton – a privately educated lawyer, I do believe – believes that it somehow would be unfair on working people not to inflict a real-terms cut in living standards on those who do not have a job right now. Downing Street may take notice and act accordingly, it seems.
The logic seems to be that because many people in employment are facing the imposition of a below-inflation pay rise, or no pay rise at all if they are in the public sector, the already hard-up jobless should be rendered even more skint.
Only a couple of weeks ago, work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith told a fringe meeting at Conservative conference that the Tories are now ‘the party of the poor’. At the very least, Wharton’s remarks demonstrate that not all of the backbenchers are on message on this one.
The thing is, millions of us who now hold down jobs know firsthand what it is like to sign on. Millions lucky enough not to have had that experience appreciate that few sectors of the economy are recession-proof, and there is nothing to say that they will not themselves be scanning the boards at Jobcentre Plus this time next year.
Even as a populist shot, then, Wharton’s argument is weak. But in so far as it highlights the sheer unlikeliness of IDS’s claim that Conservatism has suddenly gone all tender hearted on us, he should at least be commended for his frankness.
