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Another day, another Parliamentary vote on marriage equality.

I’ve blogged before about the principled reasons why MPs should vote for marriage equality; why it’s consistent with the Christian and conservative principles of universal love and individual freedom that its opponents are supposed to believe in; and why the objections to it are logical nonsense.  This time, I want to talk more about history and politics.

Same-sex marriages were outlawed by the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1973.  I didn’t realise this myself until today – Peter Tatchell discusses it in this Guardian opinion piece.  In 1973, I was one year old; David Cameron was 7.  It was an Act  passed by our parents’ and grandparents’ generation.  That generation is – I believe and hope – the last that will consider being openly homophobic to be politically and socially acceptable.  Today, the fact that, if you are not yourself gay, you may have work colleagues, close friends, relatives or children who are gay is commonplace and unremarkable.  The irrational denial of rights to themselves and to people they know and love is unconscionable to a clear majority of those under 50.  Just since the last Commons vote in February, equal marriage laws have been passed in Brazil, France, Uruguay, New Zealand, Minnesota, Rhode Island and Delaware as well as various smaller jurisdictions around the world.  Not only is marriage equality in the UK inevitable, we are surely not far from a time when the idea of prohibiting same-sex marriage is as abhorrent as a proposal to ban inter-racial marriage would be today.

Any organisation whose core support comes from older demographics will be aware of how limiting that is to their long-term future.  Both the British Conservative Party and the Church of England face a long-term decline in membership due to the mortality of their aging supporters.  The only way any organisation can attract younger members is to appeal to their values, and to include rather than exclude.

The Church of England seems determined to accelerate its own demise.  It appears committed to making homophobia its defining article of faith.  Apparently believing that the ‘gay rights agenda’ is a core aspect of secular Britain’s supposed ‘war’ on faith, the Church has resolved to defend any and all acts of discrimination.  They seem to want being Christian to come with the automatic presumption of homophobia – for “I believe in Jesus Christ, therefore I am against gay marriage” to be the default logic.  How many young Christians – the potential congregants, vicars and Church leaders on whom the Church’s future relies – must be re-considering their support for a church that they perceive to be so unloving and ungenerous?  How many young people who are gay or have gay friends or family will look at the Church of England and conclude that Christianity and homophobia are intrinsically intertwined, and so recoil equally from both?

A similar dilemma faces the Conservatives.  The issue is not that a majority of people in this country now support allowing same-sex marriage – 54% against 37% opposed in a recent YouGov poll, 62% in an ICM poll last December.  It’s not about the relative importance of the issue currently to voters (YouGov’s Peter Kellner points out that it isn’t a very high priority, even to equal marriage supporters).  It’s about the perception of a party’s cultural values to young people.  The arguments against marriage equality being put by Tory backbenchers are so weak it is hard not to characterise them as very thinly disguised bigotry.  Bigotry does not go down well, even among right-wing voters.  (There’s a reason UKIP expends so much effort trying to convince us that it is a “non-racist” party.)  David Cameron knows that the long-term future of the Conservatives is secured by persuading voters – younger voters in particular – that the Tories are no longer the ‘nasty party’.  There is a clear strategic benefit in portraying the party as no longer full of narrow-minded dinosaurs, but a modern party with modern social values.  There’s an obvious advantage to being remembered as the party that advanced civil rights and individual liberty rather than the party that, alone and in the face of certain defeat, chose to block that advance.

Tory opponents of gay marriage accuse David Cameron of trying to destroy the party.  In fact, he’s trying to save it – from itself, as it turns out.  There will be a time, not so long in the future, when the right-wing populist party of the moment will be at pains to tell you that it is a “non-homophobic” party, so as to distinguish itself from the lunatic extremists that might otherwise attract the swivel-eyed attention of the disaffected.  If the equal marriage bill fails now, the next Labour government will pick it up and pass it, over the continued opposition of Tory backbenchers, and Labour will get all the glory while the Tories look out of touch.  In a democracy, political parties are rarely destroyed by holding majority opinions.

I am neither an Anglican nor a Tory, so the demise of either institution would not trouble me.  What baffles me is the perversity of their rush to self-destruct.  You expect politicians to be motivated by either moral decency or self-interest.  To have no regard for either is truly baffling.

I’m reminded of a quote from The West Wing (with apologies to anyone unfamiliar with that show).  Josh Lyman is trying to persuade Vice President John Hoynes to support the President on an issue.  ”You’ve had some experience battling Jed Bartlet when he’s right and you’ve had some experience battling him when he’s popular,” Lyman reminds Hoynes.  ”Why in the world would you want to try it when he’s both at the same time?”  Marriage equality is both right and popular.  Why in the world would a party that wants to govern oppose it?

Another day, another Parliamentary vote on marriage equality. I’ve blogged before about the principled reasons why MPs should vote for marriage equality; why it’s consistent with the Christian and conservative...

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“Accusations that this government neither likes nor supports the arts are disingenuous in the extreme,” Britain’s Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, Maria Miller, reportedly wrote in the Evening Standard last November.  She has a funny way of showing it.  The BBC reports that Ms Miller today gave a speech at the British Museum where she describes “British culture” as “the most powerful and compelling product we have available to us” and “British culture and creativity” as “a commodity worth buying into” [emphasis added].  This is typical modern Conservative thinking – a thing only has value if you can put a price on it and sell it.  I think it completely misunderstands the value of culture.

I’m not some wide-eyed purist who thinks that art and culture exist in perfect isolation from economic reality.  Nor would I argue that economic considerations have no place in the creative world.  Artists have to live and pay the bills like everyone else.  The commercial success of a creative work can be an informative proxy for its impact, which often contributes to its cultural importance.  Would Gone with the Wind, say, or Catcher in the Rye be considered as culturally significant as they are if they had proved incapable of finding a paying audience?  Perhaps not.  Then again, plenty of creative works have made lots of money - Fifty Shades of Grey or anything ever produced by One Direction – that I suspect will have no lasting cultural impact at all.

My point is this: cultural value does exist separately and distinctly from economic value, and its value to us – to society and to government – is in danger of being greatly underestimated.

Our culture is what defines us, as a nation and as a society, to others and to ourselves.  Britain (well, England at least) is the land of Shakespeare and Austen, of Dickens and the Brontës, of Elgar and the Beatles, of the Sex Pistols and Danny Boyle, of Monty Python and Doctor Who.  Economically, on the other hand, it is the land of Vodafone shops and Greggs the bakers, of retail parks and payday loans, of overpaid City bankers and underpaid virtually everyone else.  Which of these things shape our perception of ourselves?  Which shape the notion of ‘Britain’ in the minds of those from other nations?  Is our mental image of America shaped more by Hollywood or Wall Street (or, indeed, Hollywood’s portrayal of Wall Street)?  Our influence in the world, our status as a ‘great’ nation – if such things are important to you – are formed as much by our cultural heritage and output as our GDP and balance of trade.

Moreover, cultural value endures in a way that economic value does not.  It is what we remember most, and for longest, about a civilisation.  People still read Homer; no one frets about ancient Athens’ budget deficit.  Shakespeare is important because of what he wrote, not his box office takings.  We watch Casablanca for its portrayal of love and heroism, not its merchandising potential.

My purpose is not to belittle economic value, which is clearly important.  Plenty of economic innovations have been instrumental in our history – from enclosures to the East India Company, from the development of the railways to privatisation.  And you would have to be both very rich and have your head lodged firmly in your intestines to downplay the importance of economic conditions to the lives of every human on the planet.  My purpose is to highlight the parallel importance of cultural value.

I think that Maria Miller is wrong to insist that we must “hammer home the value of culture to our economy”; that “our focus must be on culture’s economic impact.”  To do so is to mistake culture for commerce.  Both are valid and legitimate endeavours, but they are not the same thing.

That much creative work is intended solely to create economic value is undeniable.  There will never be any shortage of writers or performers who are just in it for the money.  However, if we make it a prerequisite that all creative endeavour must be focused on generating economic value rather than cultural value, we should not be surprised if we produce little or none of the latter.  If, as Ms Miller appears to be suggesting, we commoditise creativity – that is, produce it in large volumes of homogenised lumps, to be produced and consumed as cheaply and efficiently as possible – then we should expect to be left lamenting our declining status in the world.  Future foreign visitors are unlikely ever to make a pilgrimage to Simon Cowell’s birthplace.

Why should we care about our national identity, about our status in the world, about the legacy we leave to posterity?  There’s a negative answer to this, and a positive one.  The negative answer is that it feeds our own sense of self-importance.  For many of us, there is a joy in being associated with greatness, or being part of a ‘great’ nation.  We like to feel that we are part of history, or at least witnesses to it – that the time we lived in was meaningful rather than insignificant.  Once, many years ago and for about twenty seconds, I got to bop with Tracey Emin.  That’s something I’m more likely to tell my grandchildren than where I was when they launched the iPhone 5.

The positive answer is that producing and enjoying things of cultural value makes us better people.  I don’t mean that in the snobbish way.  I’m not talking about believing yourself to be superior because you like certain types of culture, like opera or French poetry.  I just mean that embracing cultural value entails broadening your horizons beyond just material desires.  ”He who dies with the most toys wins” has gone from being an embarrassingly unfunny joke to a mantra of government dogma.  It’s an attitude that belittles us as human beings.  The music you enjoy should be more important to you than the device you play it on.  Have some soul (and stop imagining that soul can be monetised).

So, if Maria Miller really does care about culture, as she claims, I hope she might consider looking at the world through the other end of the telescope.  While we’re hammering home the value of culture to our economy, how about we also ask about the value of our economy to our culture?  If our focus really must be on culture’s economic impact, let it also be in the economy’s cultural impact.

Incidentally, this is not necessarily an argument for or against government funding for the arts or creative industries.  Clearly, a difficulty for any government is that economic value is measurable and we imagine it to be predictable, at least in the short-term.  You can build policy around it.  Cultural value is largely subjective, has no unit of measurement, and is utterly unpredictable.  We have no way of knowing what will be the cultural legacy of our age.  Will Britons 250 years from now be boasting of living in the land of Hilary Mantel, Damien Hirst and Adele?  Or have we got it all wrong, and they’ll be raising a glass every year to mark Simon Cowell’s birthday?  Either way, I’m reasonably confident that they’ll have long forgotten Maria Miller.

“Accusations that this government neither likes nor supports the arts are disingenuous in the extreme,” Britain’s Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, Maria Miller, reportedly wrote in the...

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“Work should pay, that’s the key.”

The Rt Hon Iain Duncan Smith, Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, 2010

I’ve been trying to work out what bothers me most about Iain Duncan Smith’s comments on the ‘workfare’ scheme yesterday.

The Work and Pensions Secretary was on the Andrew Marr Show and was asked about Cait Reilly, the geology graduate who won a partial legal victory over the government after she was told that she would lose some of her benefits if she didn’t do an unpaid stint as a shelf-stacker in Poundland.  Reilly, who was claiming jobseeker’s allowance while doing voluntary work in a museum, suggested, among other things, that working at Poundland was actually taking her away from job-hunting, rather than helping her find work.

Duncan Smith took issue with this.  He dispatched the central argument – about whether or not Reilly was being paid, and what the core purpose of benefits is supposed to be – thus: “I understand she said she wasn’t paid. She was paid jobseeker’s allowance, by the taxpayer, to do this.”  He then attempted to move the debate onto an entirely different, and entirely irrelevant, point:

“I’m sorry, but there is a group of people out there who think they’re too good for this kind of stuff.  Let me remind you that [former Tesco chief executive] Terry Leahy started his life stacking shelves.  The next time somebody goes in – those smart people who say there’s something wrong with this – they go into their supermarket, ask themselves this simple question, when they can’t find the food they want on the shelves, who is more important – them, the geologist, or the person who stacked the shelves?”

Most of the subsequent attention to IDS’s remarks has been to this section of them, which is exactly what he hoped for because he wants to be accepted without further challenge his notion of what benefits are for.  Benefits are no longer there to help people while they are in poverty to house, clothe and feed themselves.  They are now a payment for services rendered.  You’re not entitled to something for nothing.  Oh, unless you’re Poundland, I guess.

It is essential to the government that we all believe their central narrative on welfare, which is this: everyone claiming benefits is an idle scrounger.  All of them.  Every one.  By definition.  And the only way to change this is to apply the incontrovertible logic that if we’re paying for you, we get to decide what you do.  You owe us.  (It’s a logic that applies only to poor people, of course.  Just because we paid to own some banks doesn’t entitle us to tell them what to do.  Don’t be silly.)

No longer will public money be wasted merely on allowing poor people to eat and keep warm.  Don’t let people like Cait Reilly – who is clearly neither idle nor a scrounger – distract you from the necessity of transforming benefits into a transaction, but only in the sense that indentured servitude is a transaction.  “She was paid jobseeker’s allowance, by the taxpayer, to do this.”  She’s ours and she’ll do what we tell her and she should count herself lucky.

And since Ms Reilly is neither idle nor a scrounger, what story can we set up to make you dislike her so that it becomes OK to bring her into this arrangement?  Ta-dah: she’s a snob!

Except – and this, I’ve discovered, is the thing that bothers me most about what IDS said – it isn’t true.  Yes, obviously the stuff about Ms Reilly being paid to work at Poundland is untrue – continued payment of her benefits may be conditional on completing meaningless ‘work experience’ schemes, but that is not the same as being paid for her labour.  But what about that stuff about shelf-stacking being beneath her?

The really dishonesty – the huge, clunking great leviathan of falseness in all this – is that Iain Duncan Smith himself doesn’t believe a word of it.

When IDS complained that “there is a group of people out there who think they’re too good for this kind of stuff,” is there any conscious, sentient human on the planet who actually thinks that Iain Duncan Smith is NOT one of those people?

Is anyone willing to claim that IDS really, seriously thinks that Terry Leahy’s experience as a shelf stacker is key to his success (rather than, say, his degree in Management Sciences)?  When Leahy was in Ms Reilly’s position, as a new graduate, and applying to Tesco to be a marketing executive, don’t you think he would have considered shelf-stacking beneath him?  Does IDS genuinely believe that shelf-stacking in Poundland constitutes useful work experience, of the sort that might interest potential employers of a geology graduate?

And for how long has IDS been marvelling at the vital importance of shelf-stackers in the nation’s culture and economy?  I enjoyed his almost apocalyptic view of British society without shelf-stackers.  How would we find stuff?  Would we have to go back into the store room?  How would we know what’s on special offer?  Surely the complete breakdown of civilisation could not be far behind.  Thank goodness we have Iain Duncan Smith on hand to show us how grossly we’ve been under-appreciating the shelf-stacking heroes and heroines that walk among us.  He understands.  Whether it’s in his epic ballads on the noble shelf-stacker that he writes during his lonely lunch hours, or the huge long lists of shelf-stackers that he submits, in vain, for consideration for knighthoods or elevation to the House of Lords, only Iain Duncan Smith really gets shelf-stacking and its place in our national story.  He’s probably considered an honorary shelf-stacker in shelf-stacking circles, he loves them so much.  If you listen carefully in the small hours of the morning, from every supermarket in the land, you can hear The Ballad of Duncan Smith being sung, lustily, as the shelves are proudly stacked.

Or maybe not.  Maybe, just maybe, IDS does think shelf-stacking is beneath him.  He would not be alone in this.  A lot of us do including, I would guess, a lot of the people who find themselves stacking shelves.

Iain’s game – apart from deflecting attention away from how he’s turning the welfare system into some sort of medieval feudalism – is to throw back at the left our own anti-elitist vocabulary and thereby unbalance us.  Well, two can play that game.

So, my first question to IDS is: why are you so keen for the oil industry to fail?  The oil industry relies on geologists to find, well, more oil.  You think this is a job of no value – or, at least, of less value than a shelf-stacker.  You said it yourself – the shelf-stacker is “more important” than the geologist.  So, we clearly need to shift our educational and economic resources away from earth sciences and towards retail display, or maybe we should just encourage more geologists to have a sense of duty to society and become shelf-stackers.  Either way, you’re setting up the oil industry to fail.  What kind of Conservative would do that?

Second question: why do you want so much waste in British universities?  You think it’s a good thing for someone with a geology degree – which takes a lot of both the student’s and the state’s money to acquire – to do a job that doesn’t require a geology degree.  No, you do.  You just said how awful it was of anyone to think otherwise.  Since the geology degree is not required to do the nonetheless “more important” work of shelf-stacking, all that money – including public money – has been wasted.  What kind of Conservative thinks waste in public education is a good thing?

Third and final question: why don’t you believe in markets any more?  Have you become a Marxist?  If you were a Conservative you would believe in the market as the perfect mechanism for determining the value of things.  How does the market value shelf-stackers versus geologists?  Well, according to the Fair Pay Network, a supermarket shelf-stacker in London can expect about £6.30 an hour, just a little above the current minimum wage for over-21s of £6.19 per hour.  Asked what job they wanted to give to someone to do for nothing, Poundland chose shelf-stacking, so that gives you an idea of the value they place on it.  Prospects.ac.uk, “the UK’s official graduate careers website” says that the starting salary for a new graduate in engineering geology is about £25,000, which (assuming that’s a full-time salary) equates to an hourly rate of £12.96 – roughly double the shelf-stacker.  So, we have to conclude that Iain Duncan Smith thinks the market has got it wrong because the market clearly values the geologist much more highly than the shelf-stacker, and IDS is very clear that this is the wrong way round.  Coming from a government minister, this smacks of socialist interventionism and state interference in wages.  Is IDS about to defect to the SWP?

So, I welcome your conversion to left-wingery, Mr Duncan Smith, and I happen to think you’re right about some things.  We shouldn’t look down at shelf stacking – and certainly not at shelf stackers.  Paid employment – even of a menial sort – is better than unemployment.  And shelf stacking is, actually, quite important and would therefore appear to be under-valued in the market.  So how is it reasonable to not pay someone to do it?

“Work should pay, that’s the key.” The Rt Hon Iain Duncan Smith, Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, 2010 I’ve been trying to work out what bothers me most...

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You know who gets to determine the value, worth or meaning of my marriage?  Me and my wife.  That’s all.  No one else.

Every couple is different, every marriage is different and so the meaning of every marriage is different.  The government, the church, society, they can all have a go at expressing what the institution of marriage means to them, but they don’t get to tell me or any other married person what our marriages mean to us.

And what my marriage means to me is unaffected by what your marriage means to you.  You cannot devalue it, nor can you add value to it.  It is what it is.

I cannot believe that, in 2013, we still have to argue and fight for discrimination to end.  I cannot believe that a proposal to remove one aspect of discrimination – by equalising marriage rights for same-sex couples – can be considered contentious by decent, intelligent, modern adult humans.

Later today, MPs have a chance to extend individual liberty, to grant rights to people who have been denied them, to make this country just a little fairer, more equal, and happier.  How rare is that kind of opportunity?  And how much rarer to be able to do so at no cost, with no harm to anyone?  This is not a case of one person’s rights conflicting with another’s.  If you are not gay, you lose nothing.  You suffer no loss, harm or damage.  Your freedoms are not curtailed, your choices not limited.  Your wealth, health and happiness are untouched.  Someone wins, but no one loses.  How mean do you have to be to object to that?

I have seen many heart-felt and sincere arguments against marriage equality.  I have yet to see a single rational argument.  A lot of people seem to think that marriage is a centuries-old tradition that is tinkered with at our peril.  This strikes me as both logically and historically false.  Centuries ago, you would have married who your parents told you to marry, and it would have been essentially a financial transaction.  In the Middle Ages, boys could marry at 14 and girls at 12.  Is that the kind of marriage tradition that Archbishops and Tory MPs are talking about?  Marriage has changed often over the centuries.  In any case, when has ‘we can’t change because we’ve always done it this way’ been considered a valid argument by any grown-up?

It is remarkable that the proposal to grant marriage equality is being pushed through by a Conservative prime minister.  Those of us for whom ‘Conservative’ is a four-letter word should not let our cynicism or our dislike of David Cameron blind us to the significance of what he is doing.  He is doing the right thing.  He is doing it in the face of career-threatening opposition from within his own party, the depths of whose ugliness he has sadly also exposed.  I don’t propose that we forget or forgive the damage he is doing to the nation’s economy and its public services, but for this alone we should applaud him.  As should any self-respecting, philosophically consistent conservative.  Conservativism is supposed to be about smaller government, with less regulation and fewer restrictions.  It is supposed to be about individualism and personal freedom.  If you believe that marriage is beneficial and should be encouraged, then you should want it more widely adopted.  True conservatives should be proud of what their eponymous party is doing.  Instead, many are letting their prejudice override their reason.

The church seems to rest much of its argument on the view that the primary purpose of marriage is to start a family – the “potential for procreation” as they put it.  They use that clumsy phrase because they are trying to evade the obvious logic that, if only those marriages that seek to produce offspring are morally legitimate, then the church must refuse to marry heterosexual couples who don’t want children.  The “potential for procreation” is still there, right?  They could change their minds, couldn’t they?  Of course, the church cannot escape the unpleasant logic of their position.  To apply consistently the rationale that marriage should only be permitted where there is the potential for procreation, the church morally has no choice but to refuse to marry any couple where one partner is infertile.  That would get people’s attention, wouldn’t it?  Imagine the front pages when it is discovered that a respectable, upstanding and deeply in love heterosexual couple have been turned away by their local vicar because of a medical condition or injury that has left them incapable of having children.  It’s not a morally sustainable position.

The only institution being undermined by the church’s stance on equal marriage is the church.  For one thing, their view is un-Christian.  As an atheist, you may consider me an implausible judge of such things, but I went to school long enough ago to have had God drummed into me and to have formed a pretty clear idea of Christian values.  Whatever you may think of the behaviour of the church, Christ’s core philosophy was sound: that humans should be motivated, in their relations with each other, by love, humility, kindness and generosity; that we should pursue each other’s happiness; that all people are entitled to be treated this way.  The Jesus I was taught at school had no time for discrimination.

By taking such an intolerant position, the church’s leaders do a disservice to the many Christians who do not share those views.  The church has done much to equate “Christian” with “homophobe”, to make discrimination against gay people an inseparable aspect of Christian faith.  They should have a higher opinion of their followers.  And they should take heed of their falling attendance numbers.  The more socially unacceptable it becomes to be associated with institutional discrimination, the harder the church will find it to recruit new members.  The church has put itself on the wrong side of history.  It is rapidly becoming outdated and irrelevant and has only itself to blame.

There is also no logic to the church’s complaint that allowing gay marriage – indeed, allowing equal treatment of gay people in any context – is an act of discrimination against Christians.  In fact, the reverse is true.  A state of discrimination is currently in operation, but it works – in the church’s view – in favour of the church.  Here in the secular world, we cannot legally discriminate against people on the basis of their sexual orientation.  The church largely retains that right, most obviously in its hiring and promotion practices but also in its discretion to withhold access to its services for reasons of its own devising.  What the equality agenda seeks to do is remove that discrimination – between the church and secular society – so that the church is placed on an equal footing with the rest of the modern world.  To say that this curtails your rights is to assert the right to be homophobic.  It is to claim the right to deny equal treatment, equal respect, equal dignity to someone for no better reason than you think you are entitled to judge who they love, date, sleep with, co-habit with.  Once you’ve established your right to be prejudiced against gay people, it’s no great leap to claim your right to be openly, institutionally, functionally racist, sexist, anti-semitic, take your pick.  What a vile world that would be.

But all this misses the point or, rather, the points.  First, yes, the institution of marriage is going to be redefined, but only by being extended.  Other people get the right to marry, but you don’t give it up in the process.  And secondly, your marriage isn’t being redefined at all.  Only you and your spouse can define your marriage.

Discrimination is wrong.  I can’t believe, in 2013, that this has to be spelled out.  It is wrong because it makes the lives of those discriminated against miserable, it divides and diminishes our society, it makes us meaner, more paranoid, less open to new ideas and perspectives, less happy.  It is wrong because it prevents people from living up to their full potential and so it prevents society from achieving its full potential.  It degrades and belittles us, culturally, politically and economically.  It is self-defeating, petty-minded and unpatriotic.  We should not permit it, anywhere.

Only those same-sex couples hoping to get married can explain what marriage means to them.  It will be different for each couple.  We don’t get to define their marriage, they do.  They don’t get to define your marriage, you do.  Some people win.  No one loses.  How mean do you have to be to vote against that?

You know who gets to determine the value, worth or meaning of my marriage?  Me and my wife.  That’s all.  No one else. Every couple is different, every marriage is...

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There’s something I’ve noticed whenever I hear or read Iain Duncan Smith talk about his plan to cap the increase in benefits at 1% – a measure which just won a key vote in the House of Commons this evening.  IDS slips easily between discussing people claiming benefits fraudulently (‘criminals’), those claiming excessively (‘scroungers’), those claiming even if they could be working (‘idlers’) and any of the above who have the temerity to claim from overseas (‘foreigners’ – even though some could be UK citizens living abroad).  He will tell you about his desire to move people from welfare to work, and about the cost of various aspects of the current system but, in doing so, he will carelessly elide all these different issues to make you think they’re all just subtly different aspects of a single problem.  He might, for example, illustrate an argument about people earning more from benefits than others do from working with an estimate of the cost of benefit fraud.  Or he might bandy about the total cost of the welfare system to emphasise his views on a culture of entitlement.  Cost, impact, abuse, unfairness – it all gets blurred into one hazy issue where the distinctions between quite separate problems become hard to identify.

What you won’t hear him talk about is the importance of an effective benefits system to those that need it.  The people who claim because they have no other way of keeping body and soul alive.  The ones who would love a job, or a better paid job, if they could get one, but they don’t have the skills, or the experience, or there are too few jobs available near where they live because have you noticed we’re in the middle of this huge recession?  IDS doesn’t talk much about how the system works for those for whom it was designed to work.

As far as I can tell, IDS talks like this for two reasons.

The first is that he doesn’t give a shit about poor people.  I can’t think of any other explanation.  He’s not interested in the effectiveness of benefits in helping those with no or very low incomes pay for luxuries like food and housing because he thinks poor people have only themselves to blame for their poverty.  His is the classic conservative view which is that we’ve all had the same opportunities and if you just pull your socks up and work hard, you will get the rewards that come to you.  Which is brilliant logic until you think about it for a millisecond or two and realise that we haven’t, in fact, all had the same opportunities.  In fact, the main difference between someone who works hard and is poor and someone who works hard and is rich is usually the quality of opportunities they’ve had – most commonly starting with wealthy parents and good schooling.

The second reason IDS talks the way he does is, of course, because of the political value in portraying poor people – rather than poverty itself – as the problem.  The natural compassion for the needy and vulnerable that we all have as, you know, human beings, needs to be smothered somehow if we are to swallow his act of political meanness.  By blurring the distinction between the poor and the parasitical, IDS has been very effective in winning the support of the British public.

There are serious criticisms to be made of the welfare system that deserve attention.  Plenty may argue that other issues deserve a higher priority but I don’t think you’ll find anyone actually defending benefit fraud.  Any kind of ‘culture of dependency or entitlement,’ if it exists, would be cause for concern.  And, yes, it is a bit bonkers that someone can earn more on benefits than in work – although, to my mind, that says more about the paucity of the wages than the generosity of the benefits.

But these are specific problems to which an indiscriminate solution – a real-terms, across-the-board cut in benefits – is being applied.  How will cutting benefits tackle fraud?  How will it help create jobs or curb cost-of-living inflation?  How will it lift the wages of the most low-paid jobs?  It won’t.

And, if the bill is indiscriminate in its purpose and design, it is highly discriminatory in its impact.  The Department for Work and Pensions’ (DWP) own impact assessment on the bill voted on this evening notes that (according to The Guardian):

“The average change for those households in lower deciles is higher than those in higher deciles. This is because they currently receive a higher level of benefit payments and so they are impacted more from the same percentage change in benefit. Those in higher deciles who are affected may only receive Child Benefit.

Lone parents are the family type who are most likely to be affected and also have the highest average change (-£5 per week). This is because they have a lower employment rate than average and also often qualify for in-work support.

Women are more likely to be affected than men. Some 33% of women are affected, compared to 29% of men.

Households with a member who is disabled are more likely to be affected than non-disabled households. That’s because, although the 1% cap does not cover disability benefits, people with a disability are more likely to be receive the benefits that are covered by the bill.”

The poor will be made poorer; the poorest, poorer still.

Of course, this bill isn’t really anything to do with poverty, employment, fraud or discrimination.  It’s purely a cost-cutting measure.

We have to do everything we can to reduce the deficit, the government argues (with validity).  With the DWP accounting for some 23.3% of all government spending in 2010 – the biggest single chunk of public expenditure when this government came to power – something in benefits had to give.  At least, it does if you can’t be bothered to find some way to avoid it.  You know, by making high earner and corporate tax avoidance a higher priority than benefit fraud.  Or ditching other big ticket spending items, like a nuclear weapons system we’ll never use and is designed to deter a largely hypothetical enemy.  That sort of thing.  No, obviously, if you can make the poorest pay then that’s clearly the best solution because they won’t do awkward things like threaten to leave the country because, ha ha, they can’t afford to go anywhere, the poor sods.

The absolute necessity to do absolutely everything humanly possible to cut the deficit somehow didn’t stop the government reducing the top rate of income tax (payable only by those earning £150,000 pa or more) from 50% to 45%.  The 50% rate, brought in during the dying days of the Labour government, was reckoned by HMRC to be bringing in “only” about £1 billion in revenue (less than expected because it encouraged the super-rich to fiddle their taxes in ways that are only accessible to them and completely legal and so absolutely acceptable and untroubling).  Today’s benefit rise cap will, according to DWP, save the government £1.1 billion.  Basically, those on the lowest incomes and in greatest need are subsidising a tax cut for those on the highest incomes.  Despite failing to bring the deficit or government debt under control, this government has managed the singular feat of redistributing wealth upwards.

Am I really bringing out the old saw about making the rich pay more?  Yes I am.  Even though I know that the biggest earners in the UK do, in fact, already account for a large proportion of tax revenues – in September 2012 Channel 4′s Fact Check found that, in 2009-10, the top 1% of earners in the UK earned 13.9% of declared pre-tax income and paid 26.5% of the nation’s income tax.  So, what moral argument can be made for making the rich pay even more?  I’ll make three.

First, because they can.  A 1% difference in income means a lot more to someone on £150 a week than it does to someone on £1,500 a week.

Second, because I think that the co-existence of extreme wealth alongside poverty is morally obscene.  Despite everything we’re going through, we are one of the most advanced, wealthy nations on the planet.  It doesn’t seem unreasonable to expect that, as an absolute bare minimum, people should not go cold or hungry.  The money exists to prevent that from happening – it just needs distributing right.

Finally, the rich should pay more because it is in their long-term interests to do so.  Even the most talented, dedicated captain of industry did not get rich on his or her own.  Lesser mortals worked for them, making their products for other lesser mortals, in even greater number, to buy them.  The wealthy won’t get any wealthier in an impoverished economy in which productivity and consumer spending are down.  Moreover, a society in which the poorest are even further marginalised, villified and maligned is one that can expect greater poverty, higher rates of crime and an increased likelihood of social disorder.  Those things are not good for business.

If the welfare system is sick, then we should fix it – but modern medical practice is to favour a scalpel over a bludgeon.  People in need are not a problem to solve – they are people.  If it’s money you want, the best place to look is those that have it.

There’s something I’ve noticed whenever I hear or read Iain Duncan Smith talk about his plan to cap the increase in benefits at 1% – a measure which just won...