The prime minister knows hitting the six million poorest households will backfire. Voters won’t be fooled for ever
The six million poorest households in the country will lose £20 a week, it was confirmed last week. That universal credit axe is due in October, as the Treasury harvests £6bn a year from those with least. Yet in a speech this week Boris Johnson will promote his “levelling-up” meme, “to boost the country’s most disadvantaged areas”. If he means the north-east of England, that £20 weekly cut will add to the region’s child poverty, which has risen by a third in the past five years.
Selling contradictory policies is the prime minister’s comfort zone, his native habitat. His success thrives on the airy figments of narrative and imagination, of symbols and totems, not in pounds in the pockets of poor people.
