Universal Credit and Working Tax Credits

Kenny MacAskill Excerpts

Wednesday 15th September 2021 Commons Chamber

[Kenny MacAskill (East Lothian) (Alba)]

Our benefits system in the United Kingdom has gone through many changes and iterations since it was first devised in the Beveridge plan back during world war two. It was felt essential, if there was to be a people’s war against fascism and if people were expected to make the necessary sacrifices, that there would be a fairer future—something that should be borne in mind given the challenges we face with coronavirus at the present moment. Even Winston Churchill was prepared to accept that logic. The system came in with supplementary benefit and the national insurance contributions scheme. It was assumed that supplementary benefit would simply catch a few folk who would fall through the gaps in the system: there would be employment and those who fell from employment would have paid in and would be able to take out before they returned to employment.

There have been significant legislative changes, and there have also been changes to our society and our economy, but the fact is that the system is not working. Some of those who are receiving universal credit are unemployed, but, as many speakers have said, nearly half—certainly 40%—of universal credit claimants are in work. They are the working poor. I accept the logic of what many Conservative Members have said—that the route out of poverty is normally through employment. I have always believed that the best way of increasing wages is to create full employment and that would be the solution, but it is certainly not working at the moment. That has proved to be a mirage and that is the challenge.

I am a child of the ’60s who grew up West Lothian and I now represent East Lothian. There is not just a similarity in name but a similarity in heritage—a coal mining heritage. I lived in a prosperous part, but all around there was poverty as the economy and society sought to transform. However, let me be clear: back then I never saw the poverty that I see today. None of it existed. Were there kids who got free school meals in the 1960s? Of course there were, but there was not the hunger and the queues at food banks. Were there people who huddled next to a two-bar electric fire in winter trying to keep warm? Yes, but not people who would have to make a choice between being able to feed their children, feed themselves and heat their home this winter. Yes, there were kids who went to school with holes in their jerseys or, as we said in Scotland, their gutties—you might describe them as black sandshoes—even in winter, but we did not need to have the clothes banks and we did not have kids unable to go to school because they did not have the clothes to put upon their back. That is the society we now have.

Just last week, I saw a satirical website where there was a spoof: the Secretary of State had declared the majority of Paralympians fit for work. It was caustic but witty. Perhaps it may be reviewed and some may find that they are facing more than a doping test in years to come. That may have been fiction, but the fact has been put on the screen. As Ken Loach has stated, our benefits system is institutionalised cruelty. That has been disclosed on the screen in his movie “I, Daniel Blake”, which won a Palme d’Or. It showed the hardship and cruelty that are inflicted by the system that we possess. That was in 2016, although the film was indeed scripted in the years long before.

We are now in 2021. Our society has never been richer. Some have never had more wealth. Inequality has never increased at the pace that it is today. Yet the level of destitution and despair that exists in some parts is shameful—it is something that we have to oppose. On that basis, I have no hesitation in supporting the motion. The uplift needs to be preserved because poverty is being imposed not by some misfortune but by a political choice, and that is unacceptable.