Sweeties after the medicine Chancellor, sweeties after the medicine

To equate backbench MPs with recalcitrant toddlers is to be unfair to recalcitrant toddlers of course. But we do think there’s an error here:

Rachel Reeves insists the government will make another attempt to reform welfare as she prepares to spend £3 billion in her budget to end the two-child benefit cap.

…

The £3 billion giveaway to poorer families will be widely seen as a trade-off for rebellious Labour MPs, who scuppered £5 billion of benefit cuts last summer, dropping their resistance when more reforms are tabled next year. The government’s full child poverty strategy will be published in the days after the budget.

Leave aside whatever we may think about the two child cap, welfare reform more generally and so on (we are, for example, insistent that Britain has no child poverty, we just have mild inequality of household incomes). This is a strategic error.

For the backbench MPs will, as with toddlers, take that lifting of the cap, bank it, then be recalcitrant when the reforms are to be discussed. This is a strategic error, not a policy one, that is.

The way to get the babbies to take their medicine is to make them have that medicine first then they get the sweetie. Reform welfare - however that is to be done - first then lift the cap if that’s the price.

We fear this doesn’t bode well, that those unaware of how to get a babby to take its Calpol are attempting to control those shrieking toddlers on the backbenches.

Tim Worstall