The empty, divisive mantra of “working people”

When David Cameron returned to Downing Street after visiting the Palace on May 8^th, he lost no time in reminding the country that his manifesto was “a manifesto for working people”. This endlessly-repeated slogan of standing up for “working people” is worse than meaningless. It is a rhetorical trick designed to smooth the way for further savage welfare cuts. If the Labour Party wants to avoid fighting – and losing – another election on terms set by the Conservatives, it must have the courage to be the defenders of welfare.

‘Working people’ might seem like just another soundbite, getting its moment centre-stage now that the ‘long term economic plan’ has been flogged to death, but its intentions are much more serious. By repeatedly claiming to represent “working people”, the government embeds the idea that the world can be split between those who choose to “work hard and do the right thing”, and those who choose not to work, instead living off the largesse of the hard-working majority. It is the language of the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor, pursuing by subtler means exactly the divisive, scapegoating attitude to welfare exemplified by George Osborne’s 2012 speech bemoaning the unfairness for the shift-worker who “looks up at the closed blinds of their next door neighbour sleeping off a life on benefits.”

This slogan persists despite the implausibility of claiming that a manifesto containing £12bn of welfare cuts can possibly be good for working people. By propagating the idea that those who don’t work do so by choice, the Tories can suggest that cuts in welfare will affect only the lazy and workshy, and lead to lower taxes for the ‘working people’ who fund their lifestyle choices. The reality is nothing of the sort. Not only does Jobseeker’s Allowance make up one of the smallest elements of the welfare bill, the Conservatives’ spending plans mean the cuts will overwhelmingly hurt those already in work.

By combining their promise of £12bn of cuts with a commitment to protect state pensions and universal pensioner benefits, the government has excluded more than 40% of the welfare budget from cuts, meaning they will almost entirely fall on working-age recipients. Few cuts have yet been outlined in detail, but it is hard to see how George Osborne’s July budget (predictably billed as “a budget for working people”) can avoid hitting those who are already in work, but who rely on the welfare state to compensate for their low pay and rip-off rents.

Labour must combat this toxic rhetorical device, exposing its hollowness and its divisiveness. In the months following the 2010 election, the Conservatives were allowed to define the crash as one caused by Labour’s borrowing and supposed over-spending, rather than the reckless behaviour of an under-regulated financial sector. Instead of tackling this ideological distortion head-on, the party spent five years only half-heartedly defending their record, before making economic credibility the very centre of their pitch in the last weeks of the 2015 campaign. By letting the Conservatives set the criteria by which they were judged, they were forced into an unconvincing, insincere, imitation of their rivals.

Labour faces a similar challenge in 2015 to that which they ducked in 2010.

Instead of adopting language which divides the country into ‘strivers’ and ‘scroungers’, Labour should have the courage to loudly praise, explain, and defend welfare as a central feature of a compassionate, modern society. A Conservative majority government will attack welfare through its language, as well as its cuts, and the party that founded the Welfare State must now defend the idea itself.