What do you do if you’re a right-wing Conservative government governing a country where child poverty was soaring even before the coronavirus crisis, you're faced with an unemployment rate likely to triple even in the best case scenario, and people are now looking at you for greater help?
Offering people a voucher for up to £10 off a Nando’s* (* Monday-Wednesdays in August only), as Chancellor Rishi Sunak did in his summer statement today, is hardly likely to assuage the sense of unmet and growing need. So what else can you do?
One tactic, it seems, is to dig out the oldest anti-poor trope in the book – that the poor are only poor, because they’re feckless. And thus that if you give them more cash, or even more vouchers without “safeguards”, 'they’ll only spend it on booze'.
