The reports that George Osborne is likely to reduce tax credits for families with more than two children in tomorrow's budget are interesting indeed. Superficially, it appeals to the sort of people who think that you shouldn't have children if you can't afford to keep them - as if children are like pets.
It is hardly worth going through the reasons why claimants might not have control over their circumstances and thus claim for three or more children - change (or more likely, loss) of job, the birth of multiple children at one time, etc., etc. - so I will focus on the concept of retroactivity.
The problem about children, and I say this having had none of my own, is that once you've got them, you can't undo that. They still require feeding, clothing and everything else, and in dramatically reducing the income available to do these things, you increase poverty and deprivation. Alright, it might not be a huge amount of money per household, but at a time when the financial resilience of households is fairly fragile, differences at the margins matter.
And whilst it is legitimate to question what responsibility the State has to provide support and to what extent, to withdraw that support when those impacted are unable to do anything to change their situation is questionable in terms of ethics. To do so, when you are already intending to punish larger poor families by means of the benefits cap smacks of being punitive.
Yes, you could decide that, in future, you might withdraw or reduce benefits for those who go on to have third, fourth or more children, although I would be sceptical given the potential circumstances that I outlined earlier. But you might also wonder whether or not such action is wise given the falling birth rate and the need to have young people to look after the rest of us as we get older. There are those, after all, who believe that migration from abroad will be needed to make up for our low birth rate. And you are proposing to create a disincentive to have children?
It is, unfortunately, typical of the Conservative Party that it increasingly appears to see itself as a remedy for the outrage of the ill-informed and the narrow-minded, on migration, on the welfare state or Europe or English nationalism, and so much else. Seldom, sadly, are these ideas thought through in terms of either viability of their likely consequences, and it becomes clearer by the day that not only were the Liberal Democrats a brake on the more ludicrous or unpleasant tendencies of the Conservative Party, but that they were the engine for most of the Coalition's good ideas.
Yes, it was the right of the British public to punish the Liberal Democrats if that was what they thought was best - that's how democracy works, as I understand it - but there must be more than a few people who might now be wondering if that was such a great idea...
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