Vindictive Tory attacks on welfare have led to soaring levels of destitution and hardship, but we’ll have to fight to make Labour reverse Tory policies, argues Steph Pike

For the past fourteen years, the Tories have been waging a war against people on benefits; a war borne not out of financial necessity but out of political ideology. Since 2010, when they came into power, they set to work at a breathtaking pace to impoverish ordinary people and to demonise people claiming benefits. The cuts to welfare benefits came thick and fast; huge structural reform including the introduction of the widely criticised Universal Credit and increased conditionality with a punitive sanctions regime; the destruction of the long-standing principle to uprate working-age benefits annually in line with inflation, so that benefit rates increased by only 1% for three years and has not increased at all for four years; the freezing of Local Housing Allowance, despite huge rises in rents; and the introduction of the cruel and widely condemned 2-child limit and benefit cap.

The impact of these policies has been devastating, not only plunging more people into poverty but also deepening the poverty that people are already in. Families with children have been hardest hit, driving up child poverty levels and driving the explosion in the number of people (including working families) forced to rely on food banks. Compared to 2010, all working-age households on benefits have lost out by an average of £1500 a year with couples with children losing £1900 a year, lone parents losing £2600 a year and families with three or more children losing out by a staggering £4600 a year.

The savage cuts to benefits combined with the cost-of-living crisis and the enormous rises in fuel prices mean that many families are now destitute with the number of people living in temporary accommodation doubling since 2010 and food banks giving out more than three million food parcels. In the same period, the rich continued to accumulate wealth, with the number of billionaires in the UK increasing from 55 in 2010 to around 177 today. Since 2022, as fuel prices rose astronomically and many people struggled to heat their homes and pay their bills, the world’s largest oil companies including BP, Shell and ExxonMobil made record combined profits of $223 billion. Whenever redistribution of wealth is talked about, the Tories and the Labour Party are both quick to dismiss it as unworkable and unrealistic.

The bitter irony, however, is that in a sustained period of austerity, successive Tory governments in power since 2010 have been doing just that; but they have been redistributing wealth from the poorest in the society to the richest in society. As ordinary people have grown poorer, the rich have grown wealthier, accumulating eye-wateringly vast sums of money.

Legacy of austerity

One of the most shameful legacies of this period of Tory government is child poverty. The number has reached a record high with 4.3 million now living in poverty, an increase of 700,000 since the Tories came to power in 2010. That is 30% of all children in the UK, which rises to a shocking 47% for children of black and minority ethnic groups. One of the biggest drivers in the increase in child poverty has been the much-criticised 2-child limit and the benefit cap affecting welfare payments. 

Abolishing both of these cruel pieces of legislation would immediately lift 250,000 children out of poverty and reduce the depth of poverty for another 850,000. The Tories’ mantra that work is the way out of poverty is a lie designed to attack and demonise people who are out of work. In fact 70% of children living in poverty have at least one parent in work. The Tories’ relentless attacks on working conditions including low pay, zero-hours contracts, the gig economy and insecure part-time jobs have meant that, for many people, however hard they work, poverty is inescapable.

It is low wages that are the main driver of poverty; an increase in wages for workers, the abolition of anti-union legislation, and the abolition of insecure zero-hours contracts are crucial to ending poverty in what is one of the richest countries in the world. If the money is there to build arms that will kill children, then the money is there to bring in measures to eradicate child poverty; it is not a fiscal matter but a matter of political ideology and will. The cost of doing nothing is unthinkable, with the Institute for Fiscal Studies estimating that the 2-child limit will affect another 670,000 children by the end of the next parliament. 

With a manifesto commitment to tackle child poverty, how confident can we be that an incoming Labour government will take the easy step required to raise at least a quarter of a million children out of poverty overnight by scrapping the 2-child limit and the benefit cap? We only have to look at the record of the Labour Party over the past twenty years for the answer. Apart from a brief hiatus when Jeremy Corbyn was party leader, the Labour Party has pursued a similar ideological approach to welfare benefits as the Tory Party. In 2008, it was a Labour government which introduced the much-criticised work capability assessment and first introduced conditionality for benefit claimants too ill to work. In 2015, Harriet Harman instructed Labour MPs not to vote against the Tory government’s Welfare Reform Bill, arguably one of the most cruel and destructive pieces of welfare legislation in history.

Shamefully, Starmer has repeatedly refused to commit to scrapping the 2-child limit and the benefit cap. As with his stance on Gaza, Starmer again finds himself woefully out of step with public opinion; research has shown that public attitudes to benefit claimants have improved, with the majority of people thinking benefits should be increased, even if it means raising taxes. If Labour, as is widely expected, wins the general election on 4 July, we will still have a battle on our hands to fight for policies that undo fourteen years of Tory damage; as socialists, it will not be the time to hang up our activist gloves, but to tape them firmly on for the fight of our lives.