In Brexit Britain, one of the most important contracts between businesses and the public has been broken. Companies increasingly rely on the public to pay their way: to top up wages with benefits and public services, and billions in subsidies and grants and tax reliefs. What goes with that is another broken contract: the one that says work always pays. From Norman Tebbit to Brown to IDS, that idea has been central to employment and welfare policy. It is now dead. As the Institute for Fiscal Studies said last week: “The new poor tend to live in households where there is someone in work.” This is a fact that those at the bottom of the labour market have known for years, but is only now working its way into the minds of policymakers.
Cameron warned of “the slow-motion moral collapse that has taken place in parts of our country these past few generations”. He was right. It’s just that it’s been led by those at the top — the ones at the boardroom tables, their expensive helpers — and their mates and supporters in politics using taxpayer money to wave them on.