Universal Credit and Working Tax Credits

Kim Johnson Excerpts

Wednesday 15th September 2021 Commons Chamber

[Kim Johnson (Liverpool, Riverside) (Lab)]

This cut to universal credit is perhaps one of the most callous and cruel policies this Government have proposed, and we have a long list to choose from. After more than a decade of brutal austerity measures and chronic Tory mismanagement, absolute poverty and child poverty were soaring even before the devastating impact of the pandemic. In my Liverpool, Riverside constituency, where child poverty, relative poverty and absolute poverty already soar above the national average, it amounts to more than 3,200 families and nearly 6,000 children.

This draconian Tory Government are dangerously out of touch with the reality of millions. They have no comprehension of the reality of poverty, of missing meals and going cold. They claim that the need for fiscal responsibility overrides the need for just and fair policies, as if the two are mutually exclusive and as if economic prosperity cannot exist without inequality and poverty. The cut of £1,000 from the pockets of those most in need is the ugly face of that ideology of class warfare—let us call it what it is.

As a black, working-class woman born and raised in Liverpool, I know full well the impact of this class warfare. Thatcher’s policies of managed decline in the 1980s threaten to pale by comparison with the cruelty of this Tory Government. The bare, honest truth is that this cut is not fiscally competent. Hitting workers’ spending power with cuts to universal credit, a rise in national insurance contributions, a public sector pay freeze and a personal income tax freeze is not the economic competence that the Tories claim. It is the opposite.

Instead of taking money out of the pockets of those most in need, the Government must wake up to the reality facing millions of families who will be pushed into Dickensian levels of poverty and misery. I call on Members on both sides of the House to cancel this cut.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

Before I call the Front Benchers, I should say that they have agreed to cut down their contributions to allow everybody to get in.