By Bruce Grove

The decision reported to have been taken by last weekend’s National Policy Forum that an incoming Labour government would keep the Tory’s two-child limit on Universal Credit payments is a moral outrage.  To explain why I feel so passionately about this, let me start with a little family history.

My Nan was born the youngest of nine children, in the Northern industrial mill town of Preston.  The local economy of the time – dominated by cotton manufacturing – was struggling even before the Great Depression of the 1930s hit.  The size of my Nan’s family wasn’t particularly remarkable at the time, at least in Preston.  Economic imperatives meant that – in the absence of anything like an adequate welfare state – adults wanted further children to send out to work as factory hands directly after their inadequate period of schooling, in order to ensure the family had a degree of security in the event that the main earners got sick or grew old.  

Ethnic, cultural and religious factors played a role too.  Preston had long been a stronghold of Roman Catholicism in England (even the name comes from “priest town”) and, not surprisingly, attracted a significant proportion of the Irish diaspora into the North West, especially following the Great Famine from the mid-1840s.  The Catholic prohibition on contraception obviously led to disproportionately larger families than in Protestant households which embraced “birth control” and “family planning”.

My Nan’s mother passed away shortly after giving birth to her ninth child (following complications in childbirth), leaving her Dad responsible for bringing up nine kids.   Miraculously, he managed to retain full-time employment throughout the Depression of the 1930s and, with enormous help from the extended family, managed to take care of his children and didn’t require any support from the state, which is just as well as there was little to be had.  My Granddad’s father, by contrast, had long periods of unemployment throughout the 1930s after having been blacklisted for his trade union activities.  The whole family could easily have ended up in the workhouse.  

Large families of my grandparents’ generations are seen less frequently these days, at least in British and Irish Catholic communities, where the grip of papal teaching on contraception has slackened.   Even Pope Francis has highlighted that we don’t have a duty to “breed like rabbits”. Nevertheless, it remains true that some ethnic and religious communities are disproportionately likely to have large families – not just Catholics (Poles, Italians, South Indians, Africans…) but also many Muslim communities – such as Bengalis or Somalis. 

The two-child limit is therefore inherently discriminatory and of questionable legality.  

What’s more, it is punitive to women – especially single mothers – who have given birth in circumstances not entirely of their own choosing.   It’s not clear whether my Nan’s mother wanted to have a ninth child.  I’ve no reason to believe that she didn’t.  But we know that many women – married or otherwise – faced pressure, coercion and even rape within marriage.  It was never talked about.   The post-natal depression she apparently suffered might have been mixed up with anxiety and stress over the expectation of regular childbearing and caring responsibilities.  Or worse.

Still today, women who have already had two children might find themselves coerced into having further children.   Scandalously, while there is an exemption for women who give birth as a result of rape, the responsibility for proving this lies with the woman who wishes to claim Universal Credit for the further child.  The degree of trauma and shame this ;rape clause’ would trigger can scarcely be imagined.   The two-child limit is therefore also inherently discriminatory against women.

Of course Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves justify keeping the limit on the grounds that Labour won’t appear electorally credible, and therefore won’t win power, if it makes “unfunded pledges” in its manifesto.   Voters know that money has to come from somewhere.   The leadership is understandably nervous about being seen as reverting to an indiscriminate policy of “tax and spend”.   OK, I get that.  But there are taxes and taxes. It’s right to avoid raising taxes on millions of low and moderate income earners against the background of a cost of living crisis.  I agree totally.  

But other options exist.  The best way to avoid unfunded commitments is to fund them, by developing new policies which raise revenue from those most able to afford it.   Ending ‘non-dom’ tax status for foreign millionaires to escape paying their taxes in the UK is a good start, but it’s not enough.   Labour must be much more ambitious.  Why not introduce a wealth tax, or tax unearned income from areas like rising in land values?   This is not revolutionary Marxism.  It was a policy put forward by David Lloyd George’s Liberal government in 1906.    Or why not go further and introduce a tax on financial speculation, to ensure that the  billions made in the casino economy go towards reducing inequality and investing in public services?

Ultimately, no child who enters into this world has any say whatsoever in the number of siblings they have, nor over the level of wealth or poverty into which they are born.   Therefore to punish them for this accident of birth is a moral outrage.   The Child Poverty Action Group suggests that the impact of Starmer’s policy of keeping the limit will keep 250,000 children in poverty. 

The idea that the lives of poor children must be sacrificed on the altar of ‘fiscal responsibility’ to appease the gods of the financial markets would have been seen by previous generations as gravely sinful, if not evil itself.  Yet today prominent members of “Christians on the Left” sitting around the Shadow Cabinet table manage, in a feat of moral and political gymnastics, to justify the policy as somehow necessary and responsible.   It now passes as the ‘common sense’ of people who see themselves as moderate social democrats.  

Such is the catastrophic legacy of neoliberalism on ‘progressive’ politics.  Instead, we must organise in the run up to Annual Conference to defend real Labour values, and force the leadership to backtrack on this catastrophic error.

Image: Cost of living protest in London – 12 February 2022. Author: Alisdare Hickson, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.