Ruth Wishart: Busting the economist myth advanced by Tories

Fair dos though, it has found time to ­indulge in its time honoured hobby of ­bashing the poor for committing the ­unpardonable Tory sin of being in poverty.

Exhibit 1 – changing the rules for ­acquiring Universal Credit. You should know at this juncture that these rules are already tightly drawn, and require the ­applicants to come up with everything from their national insurance number to a record of previous employment including contact details for the companies involved.

In addition to the bank or building ­society account details of “a family member or trusted friend”.

You know, the kind of info we all ­absolutely have at our finger tips. If you successfully negotiate this bureaucratic maze, rest assured that your first payments will be late and paltry. The kind of weekly sum equating roughly to less than half the price of Rishi Sunak’s favourite lounging slip ons.

Not content with the stringency of all this, new rules came in this last week ­demanding that job seekers take ­employment outside of their own area of competence within just one month. Or lose some or all of their ­payments. All part of the great national drive to post pandemic recovery.

Alternatively, a naked attempt to shove people into all the extra job ­vacancies caused by no longer being able to ­access ­continental labour forces. Quite how a ­redundant chef is to be magically ­transformed into a long distance lorry ­driver is not quite ­explained. Or why a single parent with caring ­responsibilities should be penalised for not embracing seasonal fruit picking.

Another wheeze they’ve come up with is trying claw back payments made as long as 18 months ago, where they say a Covid ­induced relaxation of the regulations meant that recipients hadn’t given timely enough proof of their identity.

Some claimants have already received debt notices, according to the Child ­Poverty Action Group, some have had claims stopped, and some have found their alleged overpayment taken out of their earnings in instalments.

Compare and contrast with the laissez faire attitude of the treasury and business departments to the serious money they doled out to applicants wanting to access new funding streams.

Also taxpayers money, also, you might jalouse, subject to the same sort of ­stringency for which the Department of Work and Pensions is infamous.

Last week we had the unusual sight of a Conservative cabinet minister standing up in the Lords – from whence come so many ministerial types these happy days – and telling it like it actually is.

Lord Agnew is no rebel without a cause. In fact he himself has benefited from Treasury largesse. He himself has made sizeable donations to the Tory Party. (The twin requirements for swift advancement in the top people’s party.) Lord Agnew, both in sorrow and in ­anger, told his fellow peers that the ­Treasury, from which he was just about to resign, had written off some £4.3 billions fraudulently claimed as Covid loans. ­According to Labour sources a fair whack of this went to wily criminals and ­gangsters. Or, to put it another way, ­people who failed to give timely proof of their identity.

Warming to his theme, the Lord ­Agnew opined that government oversight of these massive sums had been “nothing less than desperately inadequate” and that ­government machinery had been ­rendered dysfunctional by a combination of “arrogance, indolence and ignorance”. Furthermore, quoth he, total fraud loss across government departments is ­estimated at £29 billon a year.

Ponder that sum for a moment. The ­entire block grant for 22/23 for ­everything the Scottish Government funds is £35 ­billion. Whilst the Johnson ­administration, to use his own unlovely terminology, has just spaffed six billion up against the wall. Some £29 billion ­every year, ­according to its newly ­departed fraud tsar. Who found himself unable to stop the fraud.

Or as The Chancellor’s Labour shadow put it: “It should be a source of ­enduring shame to the chancellor that he has so casually written off £4.3bn of ­taxpayers’ money that is now in the hands of ­criminals and gangs.

“Coming on top of billions spent on crony contracts and billions more lost in loan fraud schemes, these levels of waste destroy any claim the Conservatives have to careful stewardship of the public ­finances.”

Ah yes, the crony contracts. Lest we forget. It seems those firms ushered into the VIP lane by ministers and Tory MP’s were 10 times more likely to succeed in pulling down money.

There is a pattern here – just like the loan frauds, many of the successful ­applicants for Covid supplies contracts had very suddenly materialised out of the woodwork as soon as they clocked the pound signs.

Or, to repeat, were unable to give ­timely proof of their identity. Indeed all they ­apparently required was a brass neck, a begging bowl, and a hotline to a Tory pal.

THE chancellor, responding to the news that his team and that of his colleagues at Business, Energy and Strategy had “made schoolboy errors”, said he hoped some of the fraud might be recoverable at some stage. Hopes have rarely been more pious. Or doomed.

Bear in mind too that this coruscating analysis of the latest fraudulent get rich quick boys scheme came from one of their own; a member of the donor tribe, ennobled for services to Conservative coffers.

Others however lined up to find ever more risible excuses for having ­accidentally elected a shameless ­chancer to the top job. “He got ambushed by a cake” might be the most memorable soundbite of the week, but it wasn’t the most implausible.

Johnson, a truly awful Foreign ­Secretary presumably appointed even worse ones when he had the chance to make himself seem less dire. The idea that a lifetime of disgraceful behaviour should be glossed over since the famously indolent one is much exercised by the Ukrainian situation hardly bears examination.

Meanwhile, toadies line up to say that we must raise our eyes above partygate to concentrate on what really, really matters to the voters, like the cost of living crisis.

And who pray, orchestrated that? Who decided to hike folks National Insurance contributions? Who whipped £20 out of the Universal Credit payments? Who thought it defensible to stop free meals for hungry weans during the holidays? Who then gave a contract for same to a ­company who provided a pathetic few bits and bobs instead of nourishment?

This government couldn’t be more out of touch if it was aboard the latest ­mission to Mars. And their ignorance doesn’t stop at Berwick. The Holyrood Tory tribe are happy to deploy the same appalling ­mythology about poverty.

Behold the Tory MSP Rachel ­Hamilton who assured a Holyrood committee the other day that families who used food banks were less well educated about ­cooking and preparing meals.

Happily Jack Monroe, the food writer who penned her first book when forced to use ingenious ways and means to feed her son, including food banks, made it clear after the same claptrap came up on Question Time that it was the hungry poor who were the most innovative. Of necessity.

Then again I don’t image Ms Hamilton has ever had a hungry day in her puff. Isn’t it always those who’ve never gone ­without who pontificate about food use? Isn’t it those who’ve never had a ­moment’s worry about money who concoct rubbish about benefit “fraud”?

They might care to take a look at the beam in the eye of their mates in the treasury who seem to think nothing of mislaying a few billion here and there. Of our money. Daylight robbery!