Cracking down on the undeserving under-threes

In his now notorious Newsnight interview a couple of nights ago, Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt explained that people were in no way being penalised for having large families, but were instead simply being asked to take "responsibility" for their own "choices", as opposed to expecting the state to finance those choices. Of course by definition the majority of people in large families - and who are thus directly affected by the new cap on household benefits - are children. So let's recap on how Hunt's logic applies to them :

1) Children choose to be born.

2) Children choose to be born into large rather than small families.

3) Children choose to be born into welfare-dependent households.

4) Children choose to have a single parent who earns £44,000 (thus disqualifying them from child benefit) rather than two parents who earn £87,000 between them.

5) Children must take full responsibility for all of these free choices, rather than expecting the taxpayer to finance them.

Well, I'm sure I speak for us all when I say - take a bow, Mr Hunt. And you too, Nick "Conscience of the Coalition" Clegg, for making it all possible. The decent, hard-working, law-abiding majority in this country have been bled dry by these wastrel toddlers for far too long. They neither work nor want.

Child benefit : is Clegg the new Macavity?

Liberal Democrat blogger Caron rightly expresses her irritation that the cut in child benefit was announced at the Conservative party conference, rather than to parliament. But it begs the obvious question - what did the Tories actually have to gain from doing it this way? Surely you save your conference speech 'rabbits out of the hat' for things that are actually going to be popular with the electorate? Apart from anything else, it conveniently lets the Liberal Democrats off the hook. Since the coalition was formed, the Tories have gone out of their way to ensure that the Lib Dems were fully locked into the cuts narrative, with it being left to David Laws (remember him?) to itemise the early 'savings' with ill-disguised relish. But tonight, the only questions seemingly being asked are how this Tory cut will play with the Tory-leaning electorate, and how the Tory rank-and-file feel about it.

A cynic might almost suspect that this was a deal cooked up between Clegg and Cameron - you can have your cut, but this time you can take the (initial) heat for it yourself. If so, there are of course only so many times that trick can be pulled before Clegg starts to take on an old mantle of Gordon Brown's - as this government's "Macavity".

*

Iain Martin on Newsnight : "the Tories have forgotten where the middle is".

Now, there are a great many reasons why abandoning universal child benefit may be extremely unwise, but one of them is not that a £45,000+ salary for an individual somehow represents a "middle income". Memo to all politicians - please feel free to "forget" things that aren't actually true. Regardless of the best efforts of right-wing hacks to "remind" you of them later on.