IDS is right: Labour DID bribe voters. Because giving the electorate what they want is DEMOCRACY

In 1866 – a year before the Second Reform Act extended the vote to one in three men – there were fevered debates in Parliament about how enfranchising ordinary people could threaten the wealthy elite’s own privileged position.

Tory statesman Lord Salisbury complained that it would encourage the working classes to pass “laws with respect to taxation and property especially favourable to them, and therefore dangerous to all other classes”.

He was right. Given a voice, those at the bottom of the social order would want to take influence and wealth from those at the top and redistribute it throughout society.

Or, put in the simplest possible terms, they would use their votes to help them buy the things they needed, such as pensions and healthcare, but couldn’t otherwise afford.

Yes, that’s democracy – and someone should tell Iain Duncan Smith before he gets more angry about the idea of working class people being listened to, or “bribed”, with state support to enable them to live off their poverty wages.

Indeed, it is worth pointing out that the only reason we have any kind of democracy – even the deliberately hamstrung Westminster variety - is because the elite that Mr Duncan Smith represents, although determined to entrench their wealth back in the Victorian era, also feared that continuing to deny people the vote would result in a bloody revolution and they’d lose everything.

And, for over a century, Lord Salisbury’s worries that as the suffrage grew, the vote in the hands of working class people would make society more equal proved prescient.

First, in the early 20th century, a great reformist Liberal government introduced old-age pensions, unemployment insurance and finally enshrined in law the elected House of Commons’ dominance of the aristocrats’ House of Lords.

Then in 1945, a generation after universal suffrage was introduced and following the pain of the Great Depression and Second World War, a radical Labour government built the welfare state, including the National Health Service, and introduced full-employment and put vital organs of the economy into public ownership.

Over the next three decades, prosperity grew like at no time before or since and, crucially, it was shared more equally than ever.

It was paid for by progressive taxation, including large levies on the richest, with the top rate of income tax staying at 90% during the 1950s and 1960s under both Labour and Conservative administrations.

Governments of all stripes could no longer ignore the demands of the working classes, there was a consensus about state investment in the economy and, while reactionary forces did their best to limit progress, the tide of social democracy seemed unstoppable.

That was until the elite, having agitated long enough and having become more effective in their opposition by financing institutions such as think-tanks to buy greater influence, were able to launch a counter revolution under Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

She set about slashing taxes, privatising, cutting public services and smashing working class power in by defenestrating trade unions and selling off the cheap and secure council housing that enabled them to form strong, unified communities and gave them a base from which to be active.

Now, 36 years on – with her free market fundamentalism still largely unchallenged, income inequality ballooning and the current crop of Tories determined to shift political gravity ever more in favour of the richest and against the poorest – we have the deeply sad scenario where Tory statesmen once again openly deride the idea of the working class people’s interests being represented.

Never mind the hypocrisy in what Mr Duncan Smith said when he accused Labour of using the benefits system to bribe voters – as if the Tory promise to sell off Britain’s remaining social housing stock to tenants for a song wasn’t just such a tactic, or for that matter the vow to raise the individual inheritance tax threshold to £1million.

Never mind the duplicity of helping to brand sections of society as scroungers when the state is busily supporting corporations and rich individuals via bailouts, sales of public assets and using taxpayers’ money to fund private contracts and private profits.

What is most pernicious about the statement by the Work and Pensions Secretary, as he prepares to take a great axe to the tax credits millions of workers rely on and provides little hope that they might be able to make up the difference, is the suggestion that such people should not even be listened to, that helping the poorest with their just demands for a sustainable income is a “bribe”.

No, it is not a simply a bribe. It is democracy.

And, one day, however hard he and others might try now to ratchet the majority of people back to the Victorian era, the tide of progress will eventually wash over them once again.