NO CHILDREN allowed. Occasionally the mask slips and the truth becomes clear. We had already been told that the Tories planned to limit child benefit to the first two children because it would save money. Then Iain Duncan Smith let the cat out of the bag. He said that it would promote “behavioural change.” 

This element within the Tory DNA — the belief that the poor are over-dependent on benefits and should have their breeding excesses curtailed — has quite a history. 

Keith Joseph made a pitch for the Tory leadership in 1974 with this appeal: “A high and rising proportion of children are being born to mothers least fitted to bring children into the world … Some are of low intelligence, most of low educational attainment ...The balance of our human stock is threatened.”

The message hasn’t changed in the last 40 years — control the lower orders, suppress their breeding, check their spending and moralise against their lifestyles. 

The same message was driven home by Baroness Jenkin, wife of Tory MP Bernard Jenkin, who opined last month: “Poor people don’t know how to cook,” and regaled us with the story that she had had a large bowl of porridge which cost 4p. Astonishingly she was presenting the Church of England report on foodbanks which found that 4 million people in Britain and Northern Ireland are currently going hungry. 

So we are back to the stereotype that poverty is caused by fecklessness, not by rates of pay so low that families cannot survive on them. It may come as a shock to Lady Jenkin to discover that there are now more people in poverty within working families than in workless families.

This Tory prejudice again has a long history. It underpinned the Poor Law for three centuries until it was challenged by Beatrice Webb and others in 1908, and was only finally overthrown by the national insurance and income support laws of the Attlee government in the 1940s. 

Now within the Cameron government this deeply embedded Tory instinct to vilify the poor as a degenerate class which needs to be punished has come to the fore again with a vengeance. 

Unprecedented cuts in public-sector pay and in benefits, combined with “sanctioning” (depriving claimants of their income for weeks on end and sometimes months for even the most trivial infringements), have been constantly spun on the canard of “shirkers/scroungers versus strivers/hard-working families.”

But this time Osborne may have overplayed his hand. A sceptical public, already anxious about the claim that further deep cuts will still be necessary, is gradually learning the truth about the bedroom tax (with some 500,000 people liable to face eviction, a third of them disabled) and the huge DWP bureaucratic delays before benefits due are paid out (over 300,000 currently being forced to wait nine weeks before IDS’s personal independence payments are actually paid). 

This is not just about money or reducing the deficit — it’s the class prejudice oozing out of the Tory psyche as their last throw before the election.

This article appeared at www.leftfutures.org