Tory MPs should find their consciences and vote with Labour to protect tax credits

By Owen Smith MP and Seema Malhotra MP

Today it looks as though the Tory Party are lining up to write off their attempted rebrand as a party for the workers, before it had even got out of fanciful first gear.

At their party conference a few weeks ago, David Cameron tried to link his party to the values of security and opportunity.  What a cruel irony this will be to the 3 million or so British working families who will receive letters just before Christmas telling them that they stand to lose an average of £1,300 per year as a result of tax credit cuts. It’s hard to feel ‘secure’ as a family, when you’ve just lost over a thousand pound a year and what does driving 200,000 more children in to poverty next year alone say about this government’s real attitude towards ‘opportunity’ for the next generation.

Since Parliament last debated these changes, wave upon wave of expert independent analysis from bodies such as the IFS and the Resolution Foundation has emerged, showing how devastating the true scale of the tax credit cuts will be. We now know that one million single parents in work will be £1,000 a year worse off as a result of these cuts, and one and a half million married women will be £600 a year poorer.

We have also seen the government’s flimsy case for saying the cuts would be offset by an increase in the minimum wage disintegrate. Just 26% of the losses will be compensated for by the increase in the minimum wage, exposing the fact that in reality it is nothing close to a genuine living wage. What is more, the hundreds of thousands of self-employed workers who depend on tax credits do not stand to benefit from the increase at all.

With such a poor case to back up their argument, it is unsurprising that the Tories couldn’t find any MPs to defend their tax credit cuts on Newsnight last night and the Today programme this morning. It is a shocking state of affairs that the governing party’s MPs are too ashamed to face the public and defend the cuts they are overseeing to the incomes of working people.

The reason they are so shamefaced is that they know if these changes go ahead they will make low and middle-income families significantly worse off, the length and breadth of the country, hitting thousands of people in every constituency. Little wonder that Tory MPs and think-tanks have been lining up to take pot shots at the government. Just yesterday even that bastion of Thatcherism, the Bow Group – whose Patrons include such radical left wing figures as Norman Lamont and Norman Tebbit – came out to attack the tax credits cuts, branding them a risk to ‘Britain’s entrepreneurial economy’.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Labour has called an Opposition Day debate on tax credits that provides an opportunity for MPs to avert these deeply damaging cuts to the incomes of low and medium paid working people across Britain. Members of Parliament have the chance to stand up for working people in their own constituencies and across the country. So we call on Tory MPs to find their consciences and vote with Labour to protect tax credits.

Owen Smith MP is Shadow Work & Pensions Secretary and Seema Malhotra MP is Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury