the brilliantly leaping gazelle

So the budget happened and depending upon who you were, you were either one a winner or a loser. The biggest losers were of course, the taxpayers. Not the taxpayers of 2026, but the taxpayers of 2045 and beyond. Because whilst I’m no economics expert – rather like Protean if if her CV is anything to go by – I do know enough to recognise an act of short-term political expediency so craven it should be called John when I see one.

And thats exactly what abolishing the two child benefit cap (TCBC) is. The only other similarity blatantly act of a government bribing the public with no regard for any longer term consequences I can think of was when Milk Snatcher allowed people to buy their own council homes.

But as with letting people buy their own council homes, the problems that abolishing the TCBC will create – and it’s guaranteed to – will be be someone else’s problem.  Or more accurately problems, because that one problem will create many more. But before I get in to all of that, permit me to quickly refresh your memory as to what the TCBC actually was.

Basically, introduced in April 2017 the cap prevented parents who were already claiming benefits for two children, from claiming benefits for any subsequent children born after that date. It wasn’t suddenly announced in the March of that year, but instead as part of the 2015 budget, with the implications made abundantly clear and with advance warning given. So as I see it, it wasn’t really the government that was pushing children into poverty. If parents on benefits conceived a third child after July 2016 and chose not to abort it or put it up for adoption, then they were causing not just that child, but all three of the children to be pushed into poverty.

I’m not sure what makes me madder, the fact that they’ve abolished it, or the fact that no-one else seems bothered by it. In the short term, abolishing the TCBC is estimated to cost about £3.5 billions annually. However, the interest we pay on our national debt – not the debt, the interest – was about £9.7 billions in September. The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) had estimated that in 2025-26, the interest would be £112 billions. Not really a shock when you realise that the government has borrowed £99.8 billions since April. 

Bad as the short term is, the longer term is going to be much, much worse. In an interview on BBC 5 Live earlier this year, Protean said ‘And, in the end, a child should not be penalised because their parents don’t have very much money. Now in many cases you might have a mum and dad who were both in work, but perhaps one of them has developed a chronic illness. Perhaps one of them has passed away.”

Really? Is that what we’re going with? Economic policy informed by Julie London and a giant onion? Doubtless there are genuine cases of tragedy, suffering and hardships that unfortunately happen, but to all of the ‘1.6 million children – equivalent to one in nine of all UK children – were affected by the policy last year.’?That was one of the favourite statistics the media loved to use when advocating scrapping the TCBC. Because poverty is only caused by the government, not by a combination of the various forms of capitalism we both bemoan and benefit from. Zero-hour contracts and the gig economy allow Amazon deliveries, Deliveroo and Uber to happen. 

She went on, “There are plenty of reasons why people make decisions to have three, four children, but then find themselves in difficult times … lots and lots of different reasons why families change shape and size over time. And I don’t think that it’s right that a child is penalised because they are in a bigger family through no fault of their own.”

Which is true, right up until the point that you realise that if the child is not to be penalised, then someone has to be.  Protean has effectively sown the seeds of our economic ruination, seeds that will be fertilised, born, and from that moment on, place unsustainable burdens on the state.

There’s the birth. The health visitors, the check-ups and the vaccinations. That costs the NHS. Then nursery, and school. Oh the state’ll pay for that. On a low income or no income? There’s a state benefit for that. Housing costs a bit steep? There’s a state benefit for that. Unable, unwilling or uninterested in working? There’s a state benefit for that. And they will have children have children, because whoever not; the state has always paid for them, so where’s the harm?

The harm comes when working people realise their tax is being spent on paying for others not to work.The harm is that we have an ageing population and according to the OBR, whereas today 18% of the population is over the age of 65, by 2065 they predict it will be 26%. It gets worse, because whilst 26% of people will be over 65, an additional 15% of them will be under 16. 

All of which means that nearly half of all the UK’s population will not paying tax, but will still expecting the state to provide for them. And the half that are paying tax, some of them will be working in the kind of low-wage job that requires government bailouts – working tax credits, housing benefit and the like – to avoid even more government help.

Which in turn creates an even bigger problem.  We can only borrow if people are willing to lend to us. So if the big three global credit ratings agencies – Moody’s, S+P and Fitch downgrade our ratings even further, the interest on those loans will be even higher. And the national debt will increase. 

The truly worrying thing in all of this was that this is that all known now but that narrow self-interest, political expediency and electoral success mattered more than any long term implications. But by then it won’t matter to Stymied or to Protean. There’ll be as dead as some of our public services.

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I’ve decided to call the Chancellor Protean because she never seems to look the same in photo’s. Sometimes the similarities or the differences are more noticeable than others. It’s nothing to do with her being a woman, although that is what a misogynist would claim, and everything to do with her never looking the same in photo’s. Just so you know.  

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