RUTH Davidson defended the rape clause yesterday, telling the Scottish Parliament that making the victims of violating, unprotected sexual attacks relive their most hellish nightmare to receive benefits was worth it if it helped reduce the UK’s deficit.
The Scottish Tory leader infuriated MSPs during a heated and emotional debate on the UK Government’s two-child cap on tax credit, and the what has become known as the rape clause exemption.
Davidson was one of four Tories to speak during the debate. Not one of them took an intervention from any other MSP.
In her speech, Davidson said she wanted to put the cap and the rape clause in context.
“We all know that the UK continues to spend more than it can afford borrowing to the tune of £69 billion last year,” she told MSPs.
“It is the view of members on these benches that, in order to restore public finances, we must eliminate that deficit and then reduce the debt mountain that we as a country have allowed to build up over a period of years. Otherwise, future generations will have to pay our debts.”
That Tory argument was roundly defeated in the chamber.
MSPs backed an SNP motion, amended by Labour and the Greens, condemning the policy 91-31.
The most powerful moment of the debate came from Scottish Labour’s Kezia Dugdale who read out a letter sent to her by a constituent who had been raped.
Despite using emergency contraception this constituent, a mum of three, had fallen pregnant with her rapist’s child.
She wrote: “Years on and I have a happy, healthy, child. They are worshipped; not just by me but by my extended family and even better my husband, a brave and loving man.
“My child doesn’t know where they came from and if I have anything to do with it they never will.
“Nobody knows, aside from me, my husband and the mental health nurse who helped me through this living hell.
“Though far from perfect and with challenges of its own, I hope the secrecy will give them the chance to live as close to as normal life as possible.”
She added: “I claimed tax credits from birth to 11-months-old. The hand up I needed when I was at my most vulnerable to allow me to re-stabilise my family.
“Tax credits kept our heads above water, a buffer between us and the food bank, for that I am eternally grateful.
“There is no way I could complete that awful form of shame, no matter what the consequences.
“Looking back, that really could have been the thing that tipped me completely over the edge, the difference between surviving to tell the tale and not.”
Dugdale added: “That is the burden this Tory Government wants to put on victims of rape because it doesn’t want to pay for more than two children in a poor family. It is an absolutely sickening state of affairs.
“It’s not the author of that letter, or any other rape victim, who should feel shame. It is those on the Tory benches here and in Westminster who refuse to act who should feel shame.”
The First Minister said the policy was both “immoral” and “unworkable in practice”, adding: “No woman anywhere should have to prove that she has been raped in order to get tax credits for her child.”
Sturgeon also pre-empted calls from the Tories for the Scottish Government to use its devolved powers over welfare to act.
This “ridiculous and unsustainable” argument meant the UK Government could scrap all Scottish benefits and expect the Scottish Government to cover the cost, the First Minister argued.
Alison Johnston from the Greens said the cap on child tax credit took “no account of the fact that families’ situations change – jobs are lost, family members become unwell and require care, many parents are required to work part-time so that they can also care for an older relative”.
The SNP’s Christina Mckelvie said the cap was “nothing less than malevolent social engineering”.
“That clause is nothing less than a barbaric assault on women who have suffered the life-changing consequences of having had a child as a result of non-consensual sex.”
“I honestly despair. I thought that some of the Tories were decent people,” SNP MSP Sandra White said, “but, if they stand by this proposal, there is no decency left in them.”
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