IN MY recent comedy tour, I dedicated a segment of the show to talking about when my third baby was due in April 2017.
The Tories decided that people who depend on the welfare system should be discouraged from having more than two children, by being told that any subsequent offspring born after April 15 that year would not be given any financial support by the government.
Ironically, it was shortly after this that William and Kate announced they were expecting their third child, but I’m pretty sure the state made exceptions for the Windsors.
It was expected that this two-child cap would curb plebeian birth rates and see a rapid uptake in employment by those relying on the welfare system to get by, as after all, they would naturally go and find jobs once they realised there was no point in having more children if they weren’t going to be paid £50 a week to raise them on.
Being reliant on support from child tax credit at the time to feed the kids, I tested the old wives’ tale and ate copious amounts of spicy food in the hope that my baby would arrive before the 15th but alas, despite my efforts, which saw me ending up needing to refrigerate my toilet roll, my son arrived 10 days after the cut-off date. I invested instead in a sharper knife, because the thinner you cut the chicken breast the farther it goes, kids.
Major academic studies have shown that not only did the cap not have the desired effect on employment or birth rates but it has been a “poverty producing” initiative which has caused hardship to tens of thousands of low-income families, my own being one of them.
This has become a topic for much discussion recently, given that last week saw a motion to scrap the Tory policy defeated in the House of Commons with a majority of 260 voting against reform.
Some of you will applaud this, as I understand that many who work hard and pay taxes often balk at the notion of their hard-earned wage being siphoned off by HMRC to pay for ‘layabouts’ and ‘spongers’.
Television shows such as Jeremy Kyle and Benefits Britain were Tory propaganda wrapped up in emotional pornography and served as entertainment to propagate the narrative that a specific type of person avails of the welfare system and that these people are a scourge on society. Like many sweeping assumptions, this is untrue and unfair.
Many hard-working people, including single-parent families, are on universal credit or child tax benefit to subsidise a low income or bridge a deficit caused by only being able to work part-time while raising their children.
The rise in food bank usage by the ‘working poor’ has seen the Trussell Trust deliver 90,375 emergency parcels to families in need over the last year in Northern Ireland alone, including 60,831 for children, with the summer holidays being extremely busy due to ‘holiday hunger’, where the absence of school meals puts more pressure on household coffers.
I can sympathise with this, given that my own children could eat anyone out of house and home and I’ve heard myself yell like my granny on too many occasions that I’m going to force them to drink a worming potion.
It would appear that the British prime minister has got off on the wrong foot when it comes to assuaging the worries of anti-poverty campaigners, having assured them in 2020 that he wanted to scrap the cap in order to “tackle the vast social injustice in our country”.
The thought of a politician not standing by promises they’ve made is unheard of, isn’t it? After all, Sir Keir says it’s just not feasible given the state of the economy at the minute. An economy which happens to be the sixth largest in the world, where more than one in four children grow up in poverty. Ah, now who’s to blame for that one?
Imran Hussain from Action for Children shoots that defence down neatly by stating: “Poverty drives huge costs in schools and the NHS and damages our nation’s skills base, which weakens our economy by many times more than the money saved by this policy.”
Maybe, given time to settle into the new budget, Sir Keir will overturn what is now a Labour two-child benefit cap and we will have to eat our words, which may well be the only thing we can afford to eat before long.
Maybe, given time to settle into the new budget, Sir Keir will overturn what is now a Labour two-child benefit cap and we will have to eat our words, which may well be the only thing we can afford to eat before long