Replying to a recent suggestion I made by letter concerning the failure of the Self-Employed Income Support Scheme to offer help to the recently self-employed – as well as the lack of support offered to a great many people in other economically vulnerable categories – a treasury minister wrote that ‘to minimise the risk of fraud, the scheme is designed around information already known to [HMRC]…’ and later in the same letter ‘unfortunately HMRC would not be able to distinguish genuine self-employed individuals from fake applications by fraudulent operators…’

Whatever you think of the logic of this argument, the response missed my key point that the various strategies devised by the treasury to soften the blow of the lockdown did little or nothing to help the least resilient and most affected, in favour of compensating the better off. I made this point in my response to his letter.

However, the topsy-turvy approach to social inequality demonstrated by the government’s handling of the pandemic’s economic effects and poorly justified by this letter are a symptom of the deeper, more troubling malaise hinted at by the minister’s reply. By appealing to fraud as the justification for not adequately supporting the self-employed – or any specific group – through the consequences of the lockdown policy, the government indicate a wholesale lack of trust in the population it was elected to serve.

This is truly disturbing. If the government doesn’t trust the people, it will not care for the people, as demonstrated by its response to this question. And if the government has no trust in the people, why should anyone be surprised that the people lose trust in the government? – especially when its own representatives and acolytes seem to go out of their way with Putinesque levels of disregard for truth or the consequences of breaking that trust? If there is no trust between people and government, what do words like ‘mandate’ and ‘democracy’ mean? Perhaps we can use another Greek word to describe that kind of government – the original meaning of ‘tyranny’ no less.

Of course this is not the first government to undermine trust. However, this government is led by people who do not engender trust and who are therefore quick to project that incapacity onto the population with whose well-being they are unfortunately entrusted. We can only hope that sufficient numbers of their own backbenchers realise the corrosive peril of that culture sooner rather than later and act to change it in whatever way is within their power.

Simon Watkins

Quaker, Airton