For All Their Moral Posturing About Helping Children Labour Are Willingly Bankrupting the Next Generation

In 1972 The Australian philosopher Peter Singer described in a short book a thought-experiment about a drowning child and a pond.

He asked people to imagine they were walking alone and wearing expensive shoes. They pass a pond in which a small child is close to  drowning. He asked would that person walk on by because they didn’t want to ruin their shoes?

Everyone of course says no, they would save the child, and the shoes be damned.

Personally, I’d just take my shoes off, right? But apparently that rather ruins the experiment.

Singer then went on a bit of a philosophical leap, to suggest that actually when it came to global poverty and alleviating that, pretty much everyone chose their expensive shoes (or material wealth etc) over a child that was drowning (or threatened by any form of death) just because the pond (or famine, or war, or whatever) was thousands of miles away. He said this realisation should prompt “effective altruism” in the wealthier world.

It’s a bit specious but he made his point, and to be fair to the man, who is still alive, he gave half his salary to children’s charities operating in the developing world, so that at least he lived his moral philosophy. It’s the kind of story global development charities tell.

However it is Singer’s other thought experiment that interests me more.

In this scenario a child is in a burning building that also contains an extremely valuable Picasso – imagine that painting one of Corbyn’s acolytes had and completely ignored living their moral philosophy by selling and keeping the proceeds.

Here the choice is: you can only save one from the building – the kid or the painting ?

And inevitably and instinctively almost everyone who considers themselves decent chooses to save the child.

Then you are hit with the moral conundrum: what if you save the Picasso, sold it, and with the money help far more children than saving just one?

After I read about this it struck me that moral choices are so often simple and easy until you actually think them through – and after all that’s the point of a thought experiment. The question is if you follow the second option through does it have less moral value?

The Labour party Conference has resonated with messages; some they wanted to send, some I’m not sure they did. Branding Reform UK’s policy on Indefinite Leave to Remain ‘racist’, whether you think they are or not, seldom works as an electoral pitch. They are if anything not very fair. The ‘racism’ label smacks of desperation, especially when Labour are changing the ILR rules themselves.

Labour are the people who would not just save the child in every single scenario Singer outlines but condemn any other decision in either scenario as not just morally bankrupt, but the choice of bad people, who must always be called out. There is no other moral scenario.

Coincidentally this is how they have always viewed Conservatives.

Saving the painting they’d think was inherently Conservative. They’d first assume we’d sell it but not use that to save any children but let’s stick with the scenario not the smear.

The option of saving more children via that sale, wouldn’t occur to them. For Labour it’s about saving by spending in the present that matters to them. It’s the people asking, demanding, now that drives them. The future of the where the money comes from is… for another day.

Taking the painting option I grant you seems at first thoroughly bad, but then how many more do you help?

No, I’m not advocating leaving children in a burning building – it’s a thought experiment for heaven’s sake– but it’s a valid philosophical question.

Scrapping the two child benefit cap – which Labour and Reform support – adding £3.5bn to an already ballooning welfare bill fits that question. Remember this is not about child benefit. That gets paid however many children are had. The cap refers to additional in-work benefits on top, that are currently capped at two children.

Kemi Badenoch has argued the cap is fair as those in receipt of benefits should face the same financial constraint choices as those who live without benefits and every day have to balance their books and make choices accordingly. Especially about how many children they can afford to support.

Bridget Phillipson and Lucy Powell spent the week trying to out class-war each other and made the two child benefit cap the hill they’d fight over. One Starmer’s in-house choice, the other sacked to the out house and back to make trouble. Reeves has said it will go.

Shadow Chancellor, Mel Stride asked the obvious question of Rachel Reeves when he tweeted yesterday:

“Scrapping the two child benefit isn’t just irresponsible – it’s unfair. Rachel Reeves must come clean: where’s the money coming from? Will it be more and more debt, or even higher taxes? The public deserves the truth.”

The figures are staggering.

According to Stride, Labour is spending £100bn a year on debt relief alone. That’s the interest we pay on the borrowing we’ve already done. Double our defence budget.  As Kemi Badenoch says in an interview she has done with ConservativeHome – coming soon:

“it’s like taking out a credit card and attempting to pay off the credit card you already maxed out.” Twice.

This is the Singer scenario playing out in political form.

Labour truly believe they are nicer people than you. Reform, Tory, they aren’t fussed. You are just bad people who are morally flawed – and the public on whose behalf they have self-appointed themselves guardians – are sadly too stupid to see what they see. The public must be protected from you.

This is deep rooted. It’s often forgotten that when Neil Kinnock faced down the Militant tendancy forty years ago in an incredibly famous speech, he ended that speech by saying “we’ve got to win, to deliver them [the British people] from evil“.

Only it’s never been true, and no recent amount of wedging buzz words together from a podium will make it true.

It’s why Labour are struggling. They thought the ‘nice guys’ would be welcomed by civil servants, and any ‘slight sleaze’ forgiven by the public, because it’s ok when they do it. Good people can’t be sleazy. Or racist. Whenever any Labour politician has said something racist – and they have – the circular logic they use is – it can’t have been racist because I’m an anti racist.

So, after Rachel Reeves raised taxes by £40bn in her first, and very much still discussed Budget, the Chancellor challenged the Conservatives, that if they didn’t back her tax rises what public services would they be doing without?

She thought she had us there, and sadly for good reason. The Tories should say sorry for, at best acknowledging in government privately, that the borrowing problem was growing and growing and at worst pretending it might go away. Then they had to pay for Covid, the economic impact of Ukraine, and simply didn’t explain this would have painful consequences and public spending would have to be cut to balance the books.

Knowing he wasn’t going to win, an unshackled Rishi Sunak was right when he predicted during the 2024 election: “you name it they’ll tax it, it’s in their DNA.” And cliché though it is Labour does always run out of other peoples’ money. If ever there was their spurious £22bn black hole – that even the OBR doesn’t recognise – Labour have dug it way way bigger.

It has to be said in going so hard after Labour votes Reform seem hell bent on following the same path.

In the end Reeves and Starmer stopped asking about public services as if we wouldn’t dare, because the Tories have spent a year telling the electorate the truth: you can’t carry on spending and spending with no means to pay for it or you bankrupt an entire generation of our children crushed by a debt crisis the like of which we’ve not seen.

Save the painting. Save all children from debt burden, not as is thrown at the Tories ‘consigning millions of children to poverty’. Scrap the cap is not the answer to child poverty if it means a universal debt crisis for all our children.

Save the painting and create the diametric opposite climate to Labour’s economic doom loop and Reeves lala land announcements of spending she can’t afford. Create the environment for real growth, unshackle business, expand jobs that pay properly, and pay off debt.

Anyone telling you it can be different to this – and there’s a lot – is just lying to you.

You won’t find the sums required to live within our means from cancelling absolutely all DEI, or relentless DOGE, that’s not wrong so much as just dodging the size of the problem.

There’s no longer room for believing this myth that we can have Scandanavian levels of welfare without Labour hiking taxes to the limit and still borrowing.

Sound money and economic competence have always been the Conservatives strongest suit and they must make that case next week, stronger than ever, hard though it is, by reminding people of these facts. Eventually the easier way or the hard way, voters will see it for themselves.

How many children can you save? And have you got the guts to make the toughest choices, for, in the end, the better moral and economic good?