House of Lords does right thing?
Did the House of Lords overstep the mark in delaying proposed tax credit cuts?
George Osbourne’s new favourite line to describe the Conservatives is “the party of working people”. Over the last three years, since he was booed at the London Olympics opening ceremony, Osbourne has undergone a transformation, reinventing himself as a person and a politician.
He’s lost two stone to try to improve his public image, widened his political vocabulary to include all kinds of clever political spiel and tried to re-brand the Conservatives as a party in the centre of the spectrum in an effort to close the political gap between them and Labour.
The House of Lords hasn’t done this in 100 years and some senior Conservatives are up in arms that an unelected body of peers can overturn their proposals.
But however hard he tries to make us believe it, the Conservatives can’t be the party of working people if they take away money from working people.
Before the 2015 election, David Cameron appeared on TV and stated that if his party won, they would not cut tax credits, a scheme introduced by Labour to boost the salaries of low paid workers and families. Now they are in power, they are trying to introduce a cut to tax credits that will affect two million working families with children and low household incomes, something that directly contradicts another of Osbourne’s buzzphrases – that he wants to “make work pay”. £4.4bn pounds worth of cuts are planned, with an expected average loss to families (with children) of £1000 each in the year 2020.
The plan isn’t just unpopular with Labour and the Liberal Democrats, it has even caused a schism in Osbourne’s own party.
As of Monday, the House of Lords has joined in too, voting to delay Osborne’s proposed cuts, and complete a more thorough assess ment of their impact. The House of Lords hasn’t done this in 100 years and some senior Conservatives are up in arms that an unelected body of peers can overturn their proposals.
While the House of Lords is outdated and needs reforming, I think that in this case, they have done the right thing. The Lords may be unelected, but this part of the Conservatives’ election campaign was a lie. And of course, they’re getting all the bad news out of the way now in the hope that it will all be forgotten by 2020.
The argument against tax credits is that they effectively subsidise companies who don’t pay their employees a high enough wage. While there may be an element of truth to that, this is not the way to go about reforming the situation.
In trying to justify Osbourne’s tax credit cuts and reform to the system, Boris Johnson said that he “hopes” more companies will sign up to the London living wage. What kind of a reform is one that takes money away from working people and relies on “hope” to give it back?
