The Tories are trying to turn us against each other

By Anna Turley / @annaturley

Last week ministers released a list of the top twenty most ridiculous excuses used by benefit cheats. This could just be seen as a shameless media stunt to grab a few colourful headlines, but it’s far worse than that.

It reveals a more chilling and unpleasant side to this Tory government. Its real purpose is to use extreme examples of the behaviour of a wrongful but tiny minority to insult our sense of fairness and to provoke public indignation and outrage at those who cheat a system that relies on us all abiding by the rules.

It is about turning us against one another – a deliberate fostering of disharmony, and it works well when there is such a cultural, class-ridden acceptance of a sense of ‘them and us’, as Polly Toynbee highlights today.

It aims to undermine and devalue the consensual contract which underpins the very concept of the welfare state – namely that we are willing to pay our taxes in order to support one another in times of genuine need.

Its aim is to prepare the ground culturally for a kind of reform that means ‘getting tough’, ‘cracking down’, ‘cutting back’, and ultimately reducing support for those in need. And it’s about passing blame for economic failure onto people themselves rather than politicians taking responsibility for the consequences of the decisions they take.

It’s the oldest trick in the book – to create a common enemy that threatens your way of life, you oh law-abiding, hard-working British family that plays by the rules. And then the government can claim be the defenders of your way of life by taking a tough stand with those individuals. It’s clever politics, but it’s shameful.

The list of those on the receiving end is long – benefit scroungers, teen mums, asylum seekers housed in mansions, wasteful public servants and town hall bureaucrats. Create the common enemy and it’s easy to deflect blame.

We have been here before. The Tories in the 80s tried to turn us against one another in a decade when unemployment rose to 3 million, when crime rose to a record high, when society was fractured and individualist. It was easier to blame rising dole queues on the lazy and the feckless and to tell them to ‘get on their bikes‘ than to admit it was the failure of macro-economic policy that saw unemployment as a ‘price worth paying’.

One of the things I had most hoped for in a New Labour legacy was that the culture had shifted. I hoped we had become a more compassionate society that cared about equality of opportunity and social justice, that understood and valued public services for the many, not just for ourselves.

I remain optimistic. However, we cannot turn a blind eye to an approach that attempts to unravel this sense of compassion. So much for building the Big Society. The Tories are yet again trying to build a selfish, insecure and divided society.

It’s a difficult and frustrating place for Labour to be. We cannot allow ourselves to be portrayed as the party that is not on the side of decent hard-working families. But we cannot allow the Tories to sow their seeds of hatred and mistrust.

We must fight it not simply by shouting louder and hoping people hear us, but by listening to people and taking the argument head on. We need to respond more sharply to peoples concerns over the economy, insecurity, and crime but without reinforcing prejudice. We must show them that their hard work will be rewarded and that fairness is at the heart of what we stand for.

Above all, we must keep the focus on why this is the government’s fault – their failure, their incompetence, their cruelty. We must highlight people’s traditional fears of them – show the rebranding hasn’t worked. Above all we must work to keep people united, and reveal the true enemy of our society.