This hard-working mother shows us why changes to tax credits are fair

This is the moment a mother-of-4 confronted Tory minister Amber Rudd on the BBC’s Question Time last week, and she turned away in shame.




I literally thought my iPhone was going to explode on Friday, so frequently was it shaking and bleeping to alert me of yet another tweet in a discussion that lasted 2 days, with left-wingers who, I must say, conducted themselves with impeccable courtesy and the utmost decency – rare indeed. We were locked in to a discussion about tax credits, so-called Tory cuts and who was accurately describing the situation, all prompted by this woman’s now-famous very public breakdown. What has been abundantly clear to me is that the lefties are, quite simply, lapping up every minute. “That was a big moment last night,” crowed one of my Twitter sparring partners. Really? One voter? But of course, thousands of people are a statistic but one desperate, miserable and fearful woman shaming a Tory minister in to silence is a lasting, arresting image. In that respect, this gentleman was right: Thursday night was a big moment that may prove iconic. Meanwhile, the Guardian’s Owen Jones was busy declaring that this was Labour’s chance, advocating a love-bombing of disaffected Tory voters like this lady. Most immediately vexing was the sneering, contemptable tone, as he warned lefties not to argue that this woman brought it on herself, but rather that she was to be pitied and smothered in a red blanket of love. Pass me the sick bucket!
More disturbing and enduringly disgraceful, however, has been the undertone of delight and satisfaction: the sense that, sad as the woman’s plight was, her feelings and welfare matter far less than the political dagger that she struck right in to the Tory heart of stone. She is there to be used, exploited and preyed upon, as are many others, for more emotionally-charged, headline-grabbing moments that give them an easy platform to sound the caring champions of working people.

The blunt reality is that this lady is a product of the fearmongering, relentlessly negative political left, so consumed with hatred for the Tories that their capacity to love-bomb anyone but Jeremy Corbyn is totally snuffed out. They, backed by politically-motivated think tanks, have completely dismissed everything that has been done to ensure that people don’t lose out, even as we address the ridiculous tax credits system that goes something like this: you earn money, get taxed on it, and get some of that tax recycled back to you. Totally irrelevant to them is the introduction of a living wage, the taking of the lowest earners out of tax altogether, and the fact that by vastly increasing free childcare, a family’s money will go much, much further. That’s right: a family’s money can go further, and they’ll have more of it, because by 2020 a typical family on tax credits will be £2,480 better off per year than they are now. Tory policy actually will achieve something quite remarkable: more of something that does more.
And when you listen to the woman, you would be forgiven for assuming that she knows for a fact that she is going to lose money, and that it’s all a fait accompli. Letters aren’t even expected to arrive until December. Little wonder really, given that the failure to actually do anything more than look at a single policy in isolation has led to the highly doubtful claim that families will be £1,300 worse off each year. The Institute for Fiscal Studies began by declaring it “arithmetically impossible” that families won’t be worse off, but in an apparent climb-down, the BBC’s Norman Smith reported them on 4 October as saying: “We stand by our claim that most people will be worse off from cuts to tax credits.”
How interesting. What was “arithmetically impossible,” it seems, suddenly is not. Partially impossible doesn’t exist. Underneath the defiant bluster, that’s a big change in position. Perhaps the treasury isn’t the one making it all up after all, eh? And then there is something else even more interesting. For the left, she was emotional gold dust, but actually looking at her as a human being and not an object for political exploitation, some rather interesting facts turn up. The Mail and Telegraph have done exactly that.
First, she’s a floating voter. She has announced that the Tories have lost her vote to Jeremy Corbyn. No party can win an election without winning over floating voters, of course: they are actually king makers. However, the nature of the floating voter means that both parties will pick up and lose floating voters at the next election, and that the ones they are currently gaining/losing may have switched preferences again after 4 long years.
Second, her name is Michelle Dorrell. She is a divorced mother-of-4 who runs a salon business from her home, which makes no profit and leaves her reliant on £400 per week in tax credits and benefits. Yet she is unlikely to lose anything whatsoever, because her business doesn’t make a profit, and because the changes affect claimants after April 2017. This means she is unaffected by having 4 children after the 2-child limit comes in to effect – a very fair limit, because it’s simply not good enough that people can have as large a family as they want, regardless of whether they can afford it or not. And who’s saying she won’t lose out? The Institute of Fiscal Studies, who would have considered her an arithmetical impossibility.

The truth about tax credits is that it was a bad system that grew out of control, growing from £6bn a year to £30bn. It involved taking tax and recycling it back, whilst allowing employers to pay low wages. Not only that, but the very same hard-working families to allegedly benefit from tax credits, were those who suddenly saw their taxes hiked when Gordon Brown scrapped the 10p basic tax rate. How sharply this shafting of the poorest in society contrasts with this Tory government’s approach: taking people out of tax, allowing them to keep more of the money they earn. How hollow, empty and duplicitous the moral lectures from the political left now seem. Owen Jones, who has ignored my polite request for comment on the Daily Mail article, thinks this is Labour’s chance, but Labour had its chance and we saw exactly what it did to hard-working families. Okay, it’s adopting a new policy each week at the moment, so perhaps its disingenuous politicians have repented of their past sins, but they shouldn’t dare lecture the Tories now left to sort it all out. As for Amber Rudd, perhaps she turned away because she wasn’t in possession of the facts in relation to Ms Dorrell, as she berated the unsuspecting Energy Secretary. In reality, the case of Michelle Dorrell shows just how fair-minded Conservative tax credit reforms are. Perhaps, however, Rudd didn’t turn away in shame at all; perhaps she did it because she had the decency to realise that it would have been wrong to pick a fight with some-one so visibly upset. But Ms Dorrell’s outburst was, I’m afraid, the product of the left’s failure to show those in most hardship the same compassion that Rudd did. Well done Amber, and well done to your government!