Poor Show Swinney

“People almost invariably arrive at their beliefs not on the basis of proof but on the basis of what they find attractive.” – Blaise Pascal

This blog post previously appeared in Common Weal’s weekly newsletter. Sign up for the newsletter here.

If you’d like to support my work for Common Weal or support me and this blog directly, see my donation policy page here.

John Swinney claims to support the elimination of child poverty from Scotland, but he has admitted that he also believes – without actual evidence – that social security payments discourage poor people from working.

John Swinney’s only tangible policy on which he was elected as leader of the SNP and then First Minister of Scotland was a promise to eliminate child poverty. Note that he didn’t promise to reduce poverty or even to move faster than previous reduction targets (that he is so far failing to meet). He didn’t even, as his predecessor did, celebrate that child poverty in Scotland was merely a little lower than in England. He promised to eliminate child poverty. He has yet to explain “how”.

At the weekend, Swinney appeared to close down one of the tools that the Government has been using effectively to bring down child payment. The Scottish Child Payment is offered to adults who look after one or more children (the payment is on a per child basis – without the two-child limit seen in England) and who qualify for certain social security payments such as Universal Credit (if you think you might qualify you can check here). Frankly, the payment was brought in at a time and in a manner that stretches the devolved Scottish budget to its limits without the introduction of new taxes (such as our Land Tax) to pay for it but its impact on child poverty has been significant. The Scottish Government claims that the payment has contributed – along with their other poverty reduction policies – to lifting 100,000 children out of poverty.

Last weekend, Swinney announced that he was not considering further increases to the payment. Not, as might actually be reasonably defensible, on the grounds of budget constraints but because he believed that the payment was now high enough that a further increase would “reduce the incentive to actually enter the labour market.”

In other words, he believes that increasing the child payment to £40 per week – something that the IPPR believes would lift another 20,000 children out of poverty – would discourage poor people from working.

This is, in short, complete crap. It is a claim that is not backed up by any data. In fact, if you have read my UBI article from the other week, you’d know that it is a claim that is completely countered by the facts. Giving people enough money to live on regardless of their life circumstances does not discourage people from working. In the most recent long-running study it was found that the total number of hours worked by UBI recipients did not change compared to their peers in the control group but that may did take the opportunity of the financial safety net to take a chance on a better paid, more worthwhile or more enjoyable job. Where studies have noticed UBI recipients dropping out of work it is almost universally not because “poor people are lazy and want to sit on the sofa” but because people use their safety net to study, to reduce hours as they run up to retirement or – pertinent to this article – to spend more time looking after their children.

With his comments, John Swinney is repeating the Conservative prejudice that the poor only work because it is marginally preferable to starvation and so any attempt to increase the number of workers in the economy can only be done by ramping up the costs of not working.

What Swinney is essentially saying is that while we shouldn’t have child poverty in Scotland, just bringing people to a penny over the poverty line would be enough for him, regardless of what that means for the people involved.

Cutting off the possibility of increases to social security because of self-imposed fiscal limits or rules (self-imposed even in this case not just because of slavish adherence to the philosophy of the 2018 Sustainable Growth Commission but due to a refusal to look at alternative mechanisms within devolution to increase revenue – see, again, our Land Tax) would be bad enough, but Swinney is making his case based on poverty being somehow the consequences of a lifestyle choice or moral failing. The poor, he apparently thinks, deserve their poverty unless they prove they are willing to not be poor.

This is a far cry from just a few years ago when there was a demonstrable majority across the Scottish Parliament for a guaranteed minimum income for all or a true Universal Basic Income (which probably explains the lack of push to bring in those policies).

The 2016 Holyrood elections are looming to the point of candidates being selected and manifestos being written. Swinney is obviously concerned enough about the rise of the far right to hold a summit about it (ineffectual as it was) but he surely must realise that the means of defeating the far right does not lie in gaming the political system to lock them out (see Germany), or in adopting their policies to try become them (see the UK) but in offering a real, credible alternative to Centrist Austerity and policy failure that leads to those populists gaining a base.

Instead of poor showmanship, Swinney could be providing leadership and actually taking action to meeting the goals he has set himself. The Scottish Government already has a poor track record of cancelling “inconvenient” government targets like climate emissions or reductions in car miles. Let’s not see the target of eliminating child poverty in one of the world’s richest nations become another one.