Jeremy Corbyn MP [Simon Lamrock]

FORUM

“ROTTEN and indefensible.”

That’s how I described the Tories’ Welfare Bill when it was first introduced in 2015.

A brutal assault on the poorest in our society, the legislation reduced the household welfare cap, cut Employment and Support Allowance and slashed housing benefits.

Perhaps the most callous component of the Welfare Bill was its impoverishment of children.

Abolishing legally binding child poverty targets, the Tories announced they would limit support to the first two children – otherwise known as the “two-child limit”.

Iain Duncan Smith said the policy would incentivise unemployed parents into jobs.

Instead it pushed parents further and further into poverty.

Why?

Because struggling families now found it even harder to find employment, primarily because they could not afford skills training or access affordable childcare.

More than half of parents who were hit by the policy were already in work; the policy entrapped them in a vicious cycle, forcing them to work longer hours to make up for the loss of support, which forced them to find more childcare, which forced them to work longer hours to pay for it.

Cruel and ineffective in equal measure, the policy helps explain how more than one in four children can grow up in poverty in the sixth largest economy in the world.

I’ve seen the damage this policy has caused to parents and children here in Islington, where almost half of children are living in poverty, after housing costs.

Our community is home to many large families – where is the morality in saying that the third, fourth or fifth child is less important than the first or second?

Out of 232 Labour MPs, 48 of us rebelled to vote against the Welfare Bill (and the two-child limit it imposed).

Alongside me were some familiar faces who had refused to toe the line before, from military action in Iraq to tuition fees, the renewal of Trident to the introduction of ID cards, and the Immigration Bill to the Overseas Operations Bill.

Receiving an instruction to abstain from the party whip, we made our position clear: the Welfare Bill was a heinous policy that would plunge thousands into destitution.

As it turned out, the majority of Labour Party members agreed.

Coinciding with the 2015 Labour leadership election, the bill put clear water between myself and the other candidates: Yvette Cooper, Liz Kendall and Andy Burnham.

As the only candidate to oppose the Welfare Bill, I wanted to give party members the chance to vote against the wider economic ideology that underpinned it.

An ideology that had been normalised on both sides of the aisle. An ideology that we had a moral and political obligation to resist: austerity.

After five years of a coalition government, the grotesque failure of austerity had been carved into working-class communities up and down the country.

Unless, of course, the aim was to demonise the poorest in our society, decimate our public services and transfer even more wealth to the 1 per cent. By these metrics, austerity will always be a success.

Between 2015 and 2019 we turned Labour into a proud anti-austerity party. We did not do so by diktat.

We did so by empowering a democratic movement that shaped our transformative programme of public investment, wealth redistribution, and social justice. Challenging political orthodoxy is not always easy.

Watching your children go to bed hungry, however, is much harder. It is struggling parents who have to make the real tough choices, not the politicians who demonise them from the despatch box.

We’re told that lifting 250,000 children out of poverty isn’t a priority.

If so, what is?

How are the electorate meant to make sense of an opposition that, on one hand, insists the Tories has destroyed this country, yet on the other, agrees with their method of destruction?

Austerity will always be a war against the poorest in our society, no matter who wages it.

We have fought back against this cruel ideology before. And we will do so again. Resistance comes in multiple forms: protesting on the streets, organising in our workplaces, mobilising in our communities and, yes, defending our place in parliament.

Ultimately, when faced with a choice between a politics of incompetence and a politics of pessimism, the people of Islington North will look elsewhere for a vision worth voting for.

We have the resources to fund inflation-busting uplifts in pay, pensions and benefits. We have the means to freeze rents and launch a massive council house-building programme.

We have the power to bring energy, water, rail and mail back into public hands. We have public support for ending the corporate takeover of our NHS. And we have the capacity to create a humane immigration system that welcomes refugees in a more peaceful and sustainable world.

There’s nothing fiscally responsible about plunging millions of people into poverty.

Instead let’s build a society in which every child can develop their creative imagination, a society that invests in the future, a society built on hope, not despair.

Jeremy Corbyn is the MP for Islington North