Cameron shouldn’t be allowed to break his tax credit promise. Here’s the solution

Imagine that David Cameron had announced at the general election debates exactly how he was going to save billions in welfare. “Ladies and gentlemen, I promise you that we will reclaim £4.4bn from this country’s working poor. We will slash working tax credit and children’s tax credit till the pips of Britain’s impoverished-employed squeak. I stand here today to give you the undertaking that 3.3 million poor people will be on average £1,300 worse off.”

Had he done this, it’s almost certain that the Conservative party would not have won the general election. There are many in this country who have been relatively unaffected by austerity and welfare cuts, but it’s not the British way to wilfully champion unfairness – as shown by the revolt in the Lords this week over tax credit cuts.

Cameron and his cabinet are fully aware of our basic decency. So the prime minister took a different tack when asked about tax credit cuts on a general election special Question Time in April. First, he pointed out that child tax credit had increased by £450, and when David Dimbleby asked him whether it was going to fall, he replied: “It’s not going to fall.”

There you go. Unambiguous. And yet barely a month after the Conservatives won the election, they announced that they were considering meeting their pledge to cut £12bn of welfare by … slashing tax credits.

Now this is hardly the first time election promises have been broken. In fact, according to Labour’s Yvette Cooper this is only one of nine election promises that Cameron has already broken (from cancelling rail electricification plans to shelving the pledge to give public officials three days off work to take part in volunteering). The Liberal Democrats famously reneged on their promise not to increase tuition fees when they went into coalition with the Tories, and a decade before that Labour had promised in its 2001 manifesto not to introduce top-up tuition fees for university students. In his 1988 election campaign George HW Bush famously said: “Read my lips: no new taxes”, before brazenly introducing new taxes. In 2000, George W Bush maintained the dynastic tradition of broken promises, stating: “If we don’t stop extending our troops all around the world in nation-building missions, then we’re going to have a serious problem coming down the road. And I’m going to prevent that.” Cue Iraq.

Why are we so tolerant of political lies? The astonishing thing is that after the Lords vote on tax credits this week, the outrage was not about Cameron’s lying, but whether it had been constitutional to block financial measures approved by the House of Commons. The fact that Cameron and his cabinet had told bare-faced porkies over tax credits was taken as a given.

And it wasn’t just Cameron who was guilty of deceit. After George Osborne insisted that cuts to tax credits had been “signalled” before the election, the BBC replayed a clip from World at One on 29 April, one week before the election, in which Martha Kearney asked Michael Gove whether the Conservatives would cut tax credits. “No,” he replied, “we are going to freeze them for two years; we are not going to cut them.”

Cameron and Gove were not being economical with the truth. They were deceiving the public in order to win an election; lying about a policy that would have done for the Tories.

Ah, that’s politics, we blithely say. But it shouldn’t be politics. And it needn’t be politics. Politicians should not be able to cheat their way to power. The simplest solution would be to introduce a right of veto: opposition parties should be able to reject a proposal that contradicts the government’s election pledges.

If a political party then insists on going ahead with a policy at odds with pre-election promises, they should have a right to, but they should also know there is a price to be paid. There is currently much discussion about the prospect of MPs who regularly defy their party whip facing reselection. But what about parties who defy themselves – and the public who voted them in? Surely, if a government insists on breaking promises that got them elected in the first place, it should face the ultimate sanction: the automatic triggering of a general election.

Yes, prime minister, of course you can say one thing and do the other, but if you do, the public gets the chance to say whether it still considers you fit for office. This might be an expensive and time-consuming solution to political mendacity, but imagine how much more transparent politics would be if the liars’ charter were introduced to parliament.

Original Article
Source: theguardian.com/
Author:  Simon Hattenstone