 The Tories are still desperately trying to justify their planned cut to universal credit. The end of the £20 uplift to the benefit will leave £4.4 million households poorer overnight and it's been universally condemned by anti-poverty charities. Yet Therese Coffey, the minister in charge of the benefit, suggested it shouldn't pose a real problem to anyone. If they were concerned about lower incomes, they could just work extra hours. £20 a week is about two hours extra work every week. We'll be seeing what we can do to help people perhaps secure those extra hours, but ideally also to make sure they're in a place to get better paid jobs as well. And that's where elements of the £650 billion in infrastructure projects, supporting 425,000 jobs, we can want to try and help people get on into those better paid jobs often in construction, but other elements as well that go alongside these big major projects. So what you seem to be saying is what you take £20 a week off you and you have to work longer then? I would say that it's a temporary uplift, recognising the reason it was introduced. That's come to an end, that reason we're seeing record numbers of vacancies, we're seeing elements of employment continuing to go up and I'm confident that we can do the 27,000 work coaches that we have right around the country will be helping people as I say not only get back into work, but to get progressed in work as well. There are two big problems of what Therese Coffey said there. I say problems, I mean, it's completely offensive what she went out and said there. So first of all, for those who can possibly find extra work, it's simply not true. That's because when you're on universal credit every extra hour you work, the fewer benefits you are entitled to it's called the taper. So if you earn an extra tenor, you'll lose up to £7.50 for increased taxation and drops in benefits. It's not the case that you can just work two extra hours and get 20 extra quid. The point was made well by the resolution foundation. They're the experts on universal credit responding to Coffey's claim that an extra two hours could make up for the universal credit cut. They said if only this were true, a universal credit claimant on the national living wage will take home as little as £2.24 from an extra hour's work. A small increase in working hours will be nowhere near enough to cover the £20 a week cut coming their way next month. The other reason Coffey's claim is ill-informed and offensive is because a large proportion of recipients of universal credit are unable to work. How are they supposed to work those extra hours, those extra six hours as the resolution foundation says to get that extra 20 quid because of the taper? This tweet was representative of many responses to Coffey. Tyrone Wilson said, I am registered unfit for work and you are taking that money off me anyway. This cut to universal credit is an appalling policy. It's going to have damaging impacts on so many people across this country. What this clip shows is not only are cabinet ministers willing to cause that damage, they don't even understand the nature of the benefit they're cutting. She's just completely ignorant. She is the most important person in the country when it comes to managing benefits and she doesn't understand how they work. This is a cruel and stupid government which seeks to implement cruel and stupid policies and the way in which you create the political cover to do so is by saying cruel and stupid things. This is completely divorced from the reality of universal credit claimants and also completely divorced from the reality of the kind of economy that we're entering into. One, you have had over a decade of lost wage growth at this point. People's finances, if they were in work, were already particularly tight. It's been the single biggest fall in living standards since the Napoleonic Wars. You have a cost of living crisis, particularly in the area of housing, also transportation. You've also got a really uncertain employment market. The furlough scheme has managed to keep businesses afloat. We don't know what the impact of lost income over the pandemic is likely to be when that goes away completely. Some of the other job retention schemes start off a neto forever. It might be that we're looking at rather than this continuing increase in employment. By the way, we should take a really serious look at what kind of jobs are being created. They're not high-quality, well-paid, secure jobs that are often very insecure, low-paid, temporary forms of work, but we also might be looking at in some sectors an employment crisis where more people are pushed onto the mercy of the benefits system. It's completely economically illiterate. It's also just completely cruel. What have we learned from this pandemic? If not, that you can't improve society at all by punishing some of the most vulnerable people. We've seen that with free school meals, that there was no good trying to use the hunger of children to discipline their parents. It was just cruel. It was just stupid. When it came to establishing furlough, the government had to be bullied into it by Corbyn and Sean McDonnell back in the early months of 2020. Initially, there was a complete denial from the government of that you would need in order to preserve people's health support of their incomes. We've also seen the really reckless decision to keep statutory sick pay very, very low. I think that we should look at Therese Coffey with a degree of disdain. I don't think she's a particularly able, capable, or intelligent minister, but it is a product of an ideology which believes that the best thing the state can do is act malevolently towards the people who are most in need of its care. I want to look in a bit more detail at the consequences of this cut because it is incredible the number of people who are going to be significantly affected by this and the degree to which they will be. The Resolution Foundation say that one million households will lose 10% of their disposable income overnight, 10%. That's enormous for an overnight cut. Huge numbers of households will be hit everywhere. This chart again from the Resolution Foundation shows a proportion of non-pensioner households who will be over £1,000 worse off per year once that cut comes into effect. In the northeast it's a quarter of households. In London, Northern Ireland, and the West Midlands it's 22%. As you can see from this chart, it's above 14% everywhere. It seems to be striking potentially lots of people who might have won the Conservatives the past, the last general election. There are also people saying that they should call this the red wall tax. Labour should be hammering that home. Why are the Tories so confident they can get away with this? I think that sometimes when we talk about the politics of the new Tory coalition, we sometimes talk in terms of geography when we need to also be talking about age and asset ownership. When you think about those swing voters who were really responsible for delivering the Boris Johnson landslide in 2019, they're not necessarily working age people within red wall seats. The vast majority of them are older. They own their own home. It's something like 55% if I'm remembering the statistic correctly, of Tory voters own their own home outright. So we're talking about people who are in a very different economic position to people who are within the employment market. The main thing which is responsible for their economic security isn't what's in their wage packet, it's in the value of their house and that continuing to go up. So you've got some divergent economic interests here. And I think that the calculation is a very cynical one, which is you can push policies which are essentially an attack on working and working age people. So slashing the £20 uplift in universal credit or adding a 1.25% increase in national insurance contributions, which are disproportionately going to affect working age people because they're not those who the Tories are really looking to shore up their electoral base. And that's why they tend to do well in towns where home ownership is 50% and over. It's also why they've tended to do much better in places with aging populations. Now, whether or not they're able to get away with it, well, it depends how much this politicizes and is able to coalesce a political subjectivity, a worldview, a movement of working age people. Some of the most vicious attacks of austerity were on people who were either minoritized in some way, like disabled people, or generally disempowered and disenfranchised when it came to political power. So people who are unemployed, people who are out of work. But it was able to politicize huge swathes of the country, people who worked in the public sector, people who worked for the local council. And that kind of ended up being one of the bedrocks of Corbinism. That was a pretty well represented demographic, was those public sector workers whose sense of civic duty and fairness was affronted by the imposition of austerity. But also they'd seen firsthand their ability to deliver services being severely impinged and restricted by austerity. So that was something which I think was responsible for that wave, which put Jeremy Corbyn in the position of Labour leader and very nearly delivered the keys to number 10 in 2017. Now, it might be that these policies when looked at altogether, the National Insurance Contributions Policy and also the slashing of this 20 pound uplift has a similarly politicizing effect. But it's only powerful if you've got either an individual or an organization which can make something of it. Now, I think at this particular point in time with this particular leadership, that's not going to be the Labour Party. The problem is is that Keir Starmer, I don't think has a theory of change. I don't even think he really has a theory of how society works. He's just got like a few kind of rhetorical gestures and sound bites and kind of soothing noises that he makes towards retirees every so often. But he doesn't really have an idea of fundamentally what's wrong with society or how it is he wants to fix it. So I don't think that he's going to be in a particularly strong position to capitalize on it. We don't also have that kind of mobilization which you saw in extra parliamentary movements between 2010 and 2015. Only time will tell if those kinds of organizations will begin to generate themselves. But so this could be damaging. I don't think it will be right now, but it certainly could be.