The decade that broke Britain: the disastrous decisions that left millions in a cost of living crisis
Listening to the prime minister and his colleagues, you could be forgiven for thinking that the mounting cost of living crisis came out of the blue. As they see it, along came the war in Ukraine and what Boris Johnson has called “the aftershocks of Covid”, triggering rocketing inflation. Suddenly, the gap between people’s incomes and rising prices turned lives upside down.
In fact, for millions of people in Britain, 2022’s growing sense of disaster is another chapter in a story that goes back at least 10 years – to rules and regulations that turned the welfare state into a mess of trapdoors and tripwires, to the hacking back of benefits, to the dire treatment of disabled people and to a new world of work where chronic insecurity and flatlining pay are an everyday reality.
How did we get here? During the New Labour years, between 1997 and 2010, there was an emphasis on clamping down on “benefit cheats” and making Britain’s social security system more stringent. But the Blair and Brown governments also vowed to cut child poverty by at least 1 million by using such measures as tax credits. Despite an upward blip around the time of the crash of 2007-08, they succeeded.
The government of David Cameron, Nick Clegg and George Osborne was rather different. The tone and the language leading politicians used to talk about benefits, poverty and work became even more toxic, opening the way for drastic changes to what was now being called “welfare”.
Now, the prejudices and resentments of people outside the benefits system seemed to matter more than the people who needed help to try to stay afloat. “Fairness isn’t just about who gets help from the state,” said Cameron in October 2010, five months after becoming prime minister. “The other
Read more on theguardian.com
