As they staggered from the train wreck that was the child benefit fiasco last week, Tory spokesmen were handed a new message to enunciate. Stumbling glassy-eyed around the receptions in Birmingham, they recited pretty much word-for-word the new official defence: this measure was admittedly not much of a step towards dismantling the deficit (in the weird times in which we live, a saving of a billion pounds is relative peanuts) but it was intended as a “signal” that the well-off were going to have to bear their share of the burden.
Well, the signal it was supposed to send got blown away in about 20 minutes. In the blizzard of condemnation which made clear that this testament to “fairness” was quite grotesquely unfair to traditional families with a single earner, and to couples who had made the mistake of actually marrying (cohabiting parents will be unaffected, since there is no way of proving that they are connected to one another), an even more unfortunate signal escaped unnoticed.
The Conservatives have been making a real effort over the past year to take back the word “fair” from the Left. Labour has always used the word as synonymous with “equal”: if wealth or achievement was not evenly distributed, then that fact in itself meant that we lived in an unfair society and that this injustice needed to be rectified by government intervention. Many of the speeches at the Conservative Party conference this year (including David Cameron’s) made the case quite explicitly that the proper meaning of the word “fair” involved just rewards for effort and virtuous behaviour, rather than everybody ending up with roughly the same outcome, however much or little they had contributed.
This is, as I am getting tired of saying, what most people believe: that getting something for nothing, while other people are working hard for what they have, is not fair at all. Of course, there must be compassion and protection for those who are truly the victims of disadvantage. But generally speaking, a fair society is one in which you get out of life pretty much what you put in. This is perhaps the single most important argument for the Tories to win if they are to have a hope of changing the country in the way that they must.
But what exactly was the concept of fairness that was being invoked in the farrago over middle-class child benefit? That the affluent (on £44,000 a year – cue hollow laughter from the south-east of England) must expect to lose their benefit payments just as the poor will lose theirs: that if the welfare-dependent classes are to have fewer state handouts, then the prosperous will have to take their share of the cuts, too – because “we are all in this together”.
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