Tax credit cuts: Time is running out for MPs to prevent this disaster from happening

It takes a master politician to unite the whole of the left of British politics, with The Sun, The Spectator magazine, a sizable proportion of the new intake of Tory MPs, as well as the Bow Group and the Adam Smith Institute. So credit where it's due to the Chancellor, who has pulled off that seemingly impossible feat with his plans to cut tax credits.

In the face of such opposition, an operator as savvy and ambitious as George Osbourne surely knows that he needs to change course. The week ahead is the opportunity for him to do just that. As the Labour Party will use every parliamentary vehicle possible to oppose his attempts to take an average of £1,300 from the pockets of around 3 million working people.

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On 26 October, the House of Lords will vote on these cuts, in the face of attempts to bully them in to silence. The Tories have claimed there are no grounds for a challenge to the tax credits cuts from Peers, as they have a clear public mandate for the changes. This argument is nonsense.

Not only was there no mention of the policy in the Tory manifesto, the Prime Minister denied it in a pre-election debate, while Michael Gove categorically stated tax credits would not be cut. One of their own MPs, Stephen McPartland, even admitted he hadn’t known the Tories were planning the cuts before the election. If the Tories’ own MPs didn’t know this was coming, there was no chance voters could have guessed.

The truth is, the Tory leadership misled people about these plans, because they knew it would be electorally disastrous.

Crucially for George Osborne and his leadership ambitions, the Welfare Reform and Work Bill comes before the Commons on 27 October. So the Labour Party has tabled a new amendment to the Bill that would reverse the cuts to tax credits, provided MPs are brave enough put aside party divides and vote in the interests of low and medium paid families.

This is the third chance for Tory MPs to show the courage of their convictions, following extraordinary scenes in the Commons this week, where they lined up to take issue with the Government's plans. The most eloquent contribution came from new South Cambridgeshire MP, Heidi Allen. In a wide ranging criticism of the cuts, she said: “I believe that the pace of these reforms is too hard and too fast… too many people will be adversely affected. Something must give.”

There is even talk of a growing spilt at the top of government, with Iain Duncan Smith and the Prime Minister’s teams dripping words of doubt about the Chancellor’s handing of this toxic problem.

Part of the reason for the fallout is that the Government’s central claim - that the impact of the changes will be offset by increased pay - has been blown out of the water. We know just 26 per cent of the losses working people experience will be compensated for by the increase in the minimum wage to £7.20 next year.

The Resolution Foundation have also found that even if the government increased the minimum wage to £9.35 this April and brought forward raising the income tax threshold to £12,500, families would still lose hundreds of pounds a year. While crucially, under 25s, people earning under £12,500 and hundreds of thousands of self-employed people, wouldn’t benefit at all.

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It's not too late for MPs to avert this disaster, but time is running out. That is why this vote will be a watershed moment. The time has come for Conservative MPs who have spoken out to do something meaningful.

Should their tribal loyalties be tested, they needn't think of it as voting with Labour. Instead they can consider it as voting with the nursery nurses, cleaners and bus drivers who stand to lose such huge sums of money.

Frankly, if they fail to vote to stop the tax credits cuts, their words of concern will ring hollow, leaving people to conclude that they are putting party loyalty ahead of the finances of low and middle paid families.