There's one thing George Osborne said in his Conference speech this week which looks odd. It's this:

We simply can't subsidise incomes with ever-higher welfare and tax credit bills the country can't afford.

However, recipients of tax credits are part of the country too. The IFS estimates that the 8.4 million of these will on average lose £750 per year because of Osborne's cuts. For a lot of the country, it is not tax credits which are unaffordable, but the cuts in them.

What's going on here? Part of the answer is that Osborne is perpetuating an error which the Tories - and indeed journalists - have been committing for years: he is equating the government's finances with the nation's. Mr Cameron did just this when he justified the cuts to tax credits by speaking of a "need to get on top of our national finance."

Of course, any fool can see that this is wrong: the country and the government are not the same thing. For a large part of the country, tax credits improve their finances.

There's a related error - what I've called the cost bias. The cost of tax credits is NOT the £29.5bn which the government spends on them. This is a transfer. Instead, the costs are the deadweight costs associated with them: for example, the cost of administering a complex system (which is one reason why I prefer a basic income), or the disincentive effects they create - for example, the higher taxes levied on other people to pay tax credits. The latter are, however, moot (pdf): a big purpose of tax credits is to raise in-work income and so incentivize work. Whether tax credits are therefore a cost at all is thus questionable*.

I fear, though, that what we're seeing here isn't just a neutral intellectual error. In defining the country and the nation to exclude the low paid, the Tories can create the illusion that the interests of the worst-off are not part of the national interest. This is an old trick of the ruling class. Here's C.B. Macpherson describing 17th century attitudes:

The Puritan doctrine of the poor, treating poverty as a mark of moral shortcoming, added moral obloquy to the political disregard in which the poor had always been held...Objects of solicitude or pity or scorn and sometimes of fear, the poor were not full members of a moral community...But while the poor were, in this view, less than full members, they were certainly subject to the jurisdictions of the political community. They were in but not of civil society. (The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, p226-27)

Jeremy Hunt's claim that tax credit recipients lack self-respect and dignity echoes this.

In this way, Osborne's rhetoric serves to create an illusion that the interests of the poor are antagonistic to the "national interest". You didn't think Theresa May's concern about a "cohesive society" was sincere, did you?

* Not least because of the question: cost relative to what?