Osborne is pretending white is black on tax credits

Here's Stephen Tall's post, published on The Times's Red Box blog yesterday, on the Tories' plans to cut tax credits - and how the Lib Dems are opposing them.

"We don't support them. We don't support them in the future." So protested an angry George Osborne in April when his deputy at the Treasury, Lib Dem Danny Alexander, claimed the Conservatives had secret plans for welfare cuts, including slashing child tax credits.

This Mr Osborne was, presumably, entirely unrelated to the Chancellor who this week told the Treasury select committee that voters knew full well what the Tories would do: "it was signalled in the general election campaign and, I seem to remember, heavily debated".

But it wasn't just Mr Osborne who refused to notice his own signalling. So, too, did last week's BBC Question Time audience sensation Michelle Dorrell, the Conservative voter who cried "Shame on you" at a government minister as she realised how she'd been duped. Presumably new Conservative MP Heidi Allen, who used her maiden speech in the Commons this week to attack her own government's policy ("To pull ourselves out of debt, we should not be forcing those working families into it"), also failed to get his memo. As must Mr Osborne's boss, David Cameron, who replied simply, "No, I don't want to do that", when asked during the election if the Tories had plans to cut tax credits.

Nick Clegg could be forgiven for reflecting on the rank unfairness of politics. He was vilified for U-turning on a pledge which, with just 9 per cent of MPs, he had no possibility of delivering. Yet the Conservative leader and his heir apparent, with an absolute Commons majority, are brazenly pretending white is black as they proclaim themselves "delighted" and "comfortable" with cuts they concealed from the voters which will see three million families lose an average of £1,000 a year.

For five years within government, the Lib Dems fought against these kinds of regressive Conservative plans. The party has no intention of giving up now it finds itself outside government. Though reduced to a rump in the Commons, the Lib Dems are strong in the House of Lords, with more than a hundred peers. Zahida Manzoor, the party's Work and Pensions spokesperson, has tabled what's known as a 'fatal motion' designed to torpedo the planned cuts. If passed, the Government will have to come up with a revised version of its proposals.

This has prompted vague talk among Conservatives that they may suspend the Lords or flood it with new Tory peers to ensure the cuts are passed. That would, indeed, be a Yes, Minister-esque brave and courageous decision, further undermining the legitimacy of the unelected House in order to force through a measure which penalises working families.

The only question still to be answered is whether the tax credits cuts will be the Tories' poll tax revisited, or their version of Gordon Brown's 10p tax fiasco. Whichever, it obliterates the claim some Conservatives were seeking to make on the title, the Workers' Party. It's the hard-working strivers - "the shift-worker, leaving home in the dark hours of the early morning," as George Osborne once lauded them - who he is about to hit where it hurts.

Under normal conditions, this decision to needlessly inflict such pain on these voters would be political suicide. Except, of course, Labour has elected a leader chronically incapable of posing any kind of threat. The Tories have a wafer-thin majority masquerading as a landslide thanks to the reckless self-indulgence of Labour's decision to abdicate its role as a credible party of government for as long as the Bennite Left is in charge. The gap between Cameron's rhetoric and Conservative reality would be exploited by Her Majesty's Opposition if it were itself in touch with reality. Both Conservative and Labour voters are being badly let down by their parties.