Tory votes bought with human misery

Either figure ought to keep Duncan Smith awake at night, you might have thought. In a government with any decency, the fact that the number of children in poverty increased from 3.6 million to 4.1 million might have caused a ministerial resignation. If wasted potential is a political failure, IDS should have retreated to his big house on his father-in-law's estate long ago.

Instead, the minister could be seen pumping his fist among the exultant mob at his party's Birmingham conference. David Cameron had just promised - or appeared to promise - that the threshold for the 40% income tax rate will rise to £50,000 a year if the Tories are re-elected. For IDS, this was what mattered, and he didn't care who knew it. The promise is worth at least £1300 a year to the minister personally.

In July, in another survey confirming what most of us knew, the Institute for Fiscal Studies asserted that 23.2% of Britons are in absolute poverty. The think tank, generally "respected" outside a referendum campaign, found that 300,000 more children had been thrown into poverty in the space of a single year. It uncovered a general decline in pay over all age groups between 2008 and 2013, but reported a 13% fall in earnings for 22 to 30-year-olds. Those would be young parents, in other words.

Where poverty is concerned, as Tories never fail to tell you, all sorts of statistics can be applied. IDS has quibbled endlessly over definitions, but sophistry will only get a cunning Conservative so far. The basic measurement, one that has endured for decades, is 60% of median income after housing costs. Fall below that and there is nothing "relative" about your poverty. Fall below that and you need all the help you can get.

In 1979, just as Britain was preparing to mistake Thatcherite snake oil for a miracle cure, poverty claimed 13.7% of the population. Today, says the IFS, we are close to seeing one person in four below the line. There have been a few hopeful moments in 35 years, mostly thanks to the benefits system and the minimum wage, but the trend has been relentless. One-quarter of the population is now denied a decent life as a matter of political choice.

Governments do have a choice where poverty is concerned. They can ignore it, do something about it, or make it worse. Cameron, IDS and Osborne have taken the last option, and done so with relish. They have made the decision - all the while shouting that they have no such intention - simply to improve the lot of the already prosperous whose votes they aim to secure. Headlines can be written artfully; the numbers, the cash sums, don't lie.

You can start with the banking crash. In 2010, one million Britons had no bank account. Many more made do with a Post Office card account, if that counts as banking. The poor do not, as a rule, deal in stocks, shares or credit default swaps. In other words, the systematic crookedness of global finance had nothing to do with the worst off until Osborne decided they should pay for the mess.

His "deficit-reduction plan", still an abject failure after four years, has rested on a nine-to-one split between departmental spending cuts and tax increases. Of the cuts, half have come from what Osborne likes to call welfare. Meanwhile, he has reduced income tax rate for the very highest earners. Last week, he further announced that he means to cut inheritance tax on the pension pots these individuals can bequeath, unearned, to their heirs.

That's nice, no doubt. But while doling out cash to what are sometimes called "natural" Conservatives, Osborne deemed a two-year freeze in working-age benefits unavoidable. The poor Chancellor had no other choice in his quest to save £25 billion than to impose real-terms cuts on 10 million households through child benefit, tax credits, Jobseeker's Allowance, housing benefit and income support. So benefits already calculated as the minimum required for body and soul will wither. In Birmingham, Osborne's Tory audience was delighted.

Cameron followed this up with a promise worth £7.2bn (if you trust the Treasury) to taxpayers. He made great play of raising the threshold for those on the minimum wage, but did nothing to explain why he allows poverty wages. Nor did the Prime Minister bother to excuse the fact that the vast bulk of his largesse will go to those who already have most. An IDS will gain a great deal more than the money, if any, returned to those with least.

On Monday, Osborne had argued that the country is strapped for cash and must find £25bn. By Wednesday, Cameron had raised that figure to over £32bn while his aides, insouciant in the face of a feeble Labour Party vowing to "bear down on welfare", told journalists that the difference would be found through more cuts. The implied transaction was utterly plain, entirely brutal: they will take from the worst off to buy the votes of the better off.

The old Tory deceits over scroungers are forgotten now. Half of those 10 million households contain people in work. They form part of the great employment success story of which Osborne likes to boast. But his Treasury doesn't benefit from their labours because the jobs pay wages which are criminally low, so low that survival is a grim challenge even with state aid. Now the Chancellor means to cut the lifelines. As "an incentive".

For Tories, this is how the world should work. You labour, if you can labour, for them. If there is wealth in society it belongs, as of right, to them. They no longer pretend to care about the votes of the one in four. What might those losers do, after all?

Pile up support for Labour in places that are already no-go areas for Tories? Vote SNP in a country that decided it would be better together in the caring, sharing UK? Labour is so politically bankrupt it has already bowed to Osborne's scheme for a benefits cap. Thanks to the referendum, an Edinburgh government will only shift funds around at the margins, even if - still a big if - those "additional powers" amount to anything.

One in four, insulted and dismissed. That's quite a tribute to democracy and the British state.

Osborne and his tribe no longer indulge Victorian conceits of the deserving and undeserving poor. In the shadowlands of his dismal, grasping mind, poverty itself is a judgment. If there's money to be had that hasn't been stolen by international finance, tax-dodging corporations and parasitic employers, his kind want it. Since when did the poor ever argue?