 The £20 cut to universal credit will push 290,000 children below the poverty line. That might be why Tory ministers often shirk from defending it. In their place comes Tory grandees who no longer have to hide their reactionary side. This was former Cabinet Minister Edwina Curry on Good Morning Britain. What we have to realise is that we've got something like a million vacancies being advertised in the country. We have record numbers of vacancies. We have whole industries desperate for more people to come into work, from catering in the care industry, food processing. Businesses are actually desperate and pushing up wages. So it doesn't make any kind of sense for us to pay people to stay home. What we really want is for people to get out there and get the jobs. Edwina Curry, not everybody on universal credit doesn't have a job. 40% of those on universal credit are already in work. But the majority of people on universal credit don't have a job. That's where we can start. We're talking about a very large number of people. One of the things the government is doing is helping those people, actually putting more money into supporting and tutoring and mentoring people to get back into work, sometimes to get a job for the first time. That can be difficult. We recognise that. Sometimes to make better choices about how they live and how they spend their money. There's a whole host of opportunities. There's 30 million people out there in the country who are listening to me, as I say, the best benefit is a job. And that's very important. It's wrong for us to be paying people to stay home when the economy needs people. Just a minute, the economy actually needs people to get into work and we need people to get into better jobs and we need to push employers to pay them better and to look after their workforce better. That was Edwina Curry talking all sorts of nonsense. We'll break down why so much of that was incredibly misleading in a moment. First of all, though, let's take a look at Gary Neville's response. Let me just translate what Edwina said for people up and down the country because it's a message that Conservative MPs have been entrenching in our minds for a long time. The first thing that Edwina said was that I'm OK here and we're OK here, which is the first thing that a Conservative person does in a Conservative MP. They look after themselves. The next thing that she said was, you know, go and get a job, get back to work, you lazy sods, get off your backside, stop watching Good Morning Britain and other television programmes and go and get a job. That's what she said. It's the way in which this sort of language sort of appears. It's the way in which this sort of language appears from sort of Conservative ministers for so long. You know, immigrants are all taking our jobs, homeless people are all beggars on the streets. You know, they're basically alienated people. You know, you think people, I trust the population of this country. I work on the theory that people at home aren't sitting there lazy. They really want a good job. They really want to get good pay. They really want the mental health to be sorted. And they're not there sitting and thinking, we'll tell you what I'm going to do. I'm going to take the Chancellor's money and live off their money for the next sort of 10, 15 years and do nothing. So to me, the language is always divisive. It's not helpful. It's something to be fair. We've seen now over 10 years and to be fair, previous Tory governments. It's really dangerous for one team in this country, one group of people, honestly, to remove universal credit payments at this moment in time is brutal. OK, Edwina Curry. Let's be clear, it is brutal. How is Gary Neville making a really, really strong moral case against the cut to universal credit and against Edwina Curry's divisiveness? He saw straight through her. Darlia, he really is one of the country's most effective communicators, isn't he? Gary Neville, he's totally right to contextualise this historically. Like this goes back all the way to Norman Tether talking about, you know, getting on your bike and finding a job in the aftermath of the 1981 riots. This and that was, by the way, at the same time that special branch were actually inspiring on union branch leaders and union leaders during his time as as employment secretary. And it's the sort of this obsession with the idea of the benefits cheat, which has, you know, a seat into our culture all throughout the nineties and the early noughties. And this is always what not just conservatives, but also sort of the neoliberal political class has always trucked in sort of making what are systemic, social and economic issues into personal failures. So, you know, you have I was at an Uber a demo of Uber drivers earlier today and here, you know, you have people who are working obscene and frankly unsafe hours in obscene conditions, working on social hours, unable to, you know, have meaningful time with their friends, with their families, because they're having to work night shifts, dealing with, you know, a lot of drunk passengers, a lot of conflict that arises from that, not even having a place to park up to use the toilet. And I think it's really, you know, it is really important to talk not just about how much people are earning, but also the way that the work that people do is organized. This is also another reason why people are, even though they're in work, are struggling to actually make ends meet and they are having to rely on universal credit because not only is the work not stable enough, not only is the work deeply precarious and doesn't offer important security mechanisms like sick pay and holiday pay, but also because the cost of living is so out of whack with people's wages. You know, I saw a stat the other day that said that if minimum wage was in line with the cost of house prices, the minimum wage would be more than 30 pounds an hour. And, you know, we can barely get the opposition to commit to half of that to 15 pounds an hour. I'm working on a report on insecure work in the UK where even even professions that are considered to be quite middle class, like academia are, you know, incredibly precarious. You have people who are literally having to pay to work when you take away the cost of living and the cost of actually getting themselves to work, the cost of transport, of childcare, of all of these things, they're actually having to pay in order to work. And that's not to mention the the precarity. And so this condition where where profit where businesses are able to make their profits by reducing their labor costs and relying on the fact that people that that is then the loss of labor costs is then subsidized by things like universal credit by the state. That is not the outcome of poor choices being made by working class people. It's not a result of financial mismanagement amongst working class people. It's a combination of poor labor laws, a broken union movement that has been actively broken by the Conservative Party. It's an outcome of atrocious public services, meaning that people are having to resort to privatized healthcare, privatized social care, privatized childcare, which is incredibly expensive. And, you know, the fact that the universal credit is the last straw for so many people. And so instead of actually looking at how our economy is wired in such a way that people don't have access to sustainable work rather than looking at that and the fact that people are working more and more than ever before for less and less. And as a result, the state is having to subsidize the holes that are created by that. Edwina Kari would rather talk about, you know, the bad financial decisions and the laziness and the reticence to work amongst working class people and that they should be plummeted into poverty by an insufficient universal credit in order to teach them a lesson about work ethic. It's the oldest trick in the book. And I was really glad to see Gary Neville putting that into its historical context. It's the same thing that has been said to working class people for decades. I'm glad that you brought up that stat, darling, because you said you saw it somewhere. That was put out by Navarra Media yesterday. So the the the the exact my mind is a is a sieve. The exact stat was that if you average house prices have risen by risen 43 times since the early 70s, if average wages had risen at the same rate, then average the average hourly wage right now would be £30. So when people say, oh, inflation is terrible. Actually, they mean, you know, they're fine when when when houses go up in prices. It's it's just if our wages go up that they they're suddenly really worried. We showed you Gary Neville's I think really strong moral argument against universal credit. I want to go through a couple more points that I find particularly interesting. And that are false in what Edwina Curry said. So the main part of her argument is that while 40 percent of people on universal credit are in work, the majority are unemployed. So she says for that 60 percent, so for the 60 percent of people who are on universal credit and don't have jobs, the solution to the cut is to get a job. Now, let's put to one side whether that's possible. There are, of course, lots of communities with few jobs, lots of people on universal credit who are disabled, for whom it's very difficult to get a job, for whom not many jobs are suitable. But let's assume that all of these people can get jobs, which is magical thinking, by the way, but let's assume it for the sake of argument. Would they be high paid jobs? Probably not. Right. So people who are unemployed, people who are on universal credit tend to be people with access to social networks and the kind of skill set that isn't going to get them a very highly paid job. So they're going to be on low paid jobs. They will therefore be likely to still be entitled to universal credit. So they'll be the same as the 40 percent of people who are currently on universal credit and in work. So they'll still lose 20 quid a week. So Edwina Currie is like, if you're worried about the 20 quid a week loss, go get a low paid job. Even if you go get that low paid job, you'll still be 20 quid a week poorer because of this cut. The second point Currie makes is that we should aim for high wages instead of subsidizing low wages. Great. But she seems to believe that if the state cuts people's benefits, bosses will offer their workers more to make up the difference. So your boss will say, oh, are you struggling this month? I can see that that 20 pound a week has gone from your income. I'll give you an extra 20 pounds. That's not how bosses work. That's not how bosses decide to pay people. They don't pay people based on what they need. They pay people based on whatever they can get away with paying them. And when we realize this, we realize that lower benefits mean bosses can get away with paying their workers less, low benefits, low wages, not the other way around. And we can take an example to show why. So say I live in a country with high unemployment benefits somewhere like Denmark. If my Danish boss is being a dick or refusing to increase my pay, I can quit and I can have a decent standard of living while I look for a new job, a strong welfare state, high benefits, that gives me a work of power. I can demand things from my boss and they are quite likely to accede to some of my demands. I'll be given that you do have an alternative. Maybe I will have to increase your wages. Now imagine I live in a country with low unemployment benefits, say the UK, if in this context, my English boss is being a dick or refusing to pay me properly. I would still be free to quit, but I'd have to live off 70 pound a week while an advisor bullies me to apply for multiple minimum wage jobs every day. In that situation is the boss who has the power because my alternative to doing whatever they want is terrible. Right. So that's why low benefits mean low rights in the workplace. And the examples I chose there weren't an accident. Denmark and Britain are the countries in Western Europe where workers have the highest and lowest amounts of power, respectively. This graph is from the new statesman. So this shows you the rate of unemployment benefits in European countries as a percentage of previous earnings. You can see at the top is Denmark and Sweden. If we go back to the previous example, if in those countries your boss is being a dick, you have the option of quitting and living for a while while you're looking for a new job on either 90% or 80% of your prior income. In Britain, right at the bottom, incredibly low rates. If your boss is being an asshole to you now, if they're trying to cut your wage or not offering you a fair wage, you could quit just like you could in Scandinavia, but you'd risk living on 18% of your prior income or after this universal credit cut, 14%. So with that as your alternative, if your boss offers you low pay, you don't have much choice but to suck it up. And that's why Boris Johnson, if you're serious about making Britain a high wage, high productivity economy, like our European neighbours, you should raise benefits, not cut them, which makes me question whether you really are that interested in levelling up after all.