Origins of a tasteless metaphor

Polly Toynbee has apologised for using the phrase “final solution” to describe the coalition’s welfare benefits cuts. But she stood by the use of “social cleansing” to describe the possible movement, as a result of housing benefit changes, of claimants from expensive parts of cities to the banlieues on the outskirts.

I first noticed this phrase in a quotation from an unnamed Liberal Democrat minister by Rachel Sylvester in The Times (pay wall) on Tuesday:

“This is something the Treasury is going to have to move on,” says a Lib Dem frontbencher. “We can’t support social cleansing.”

So I was surprised when Nick Clegg took such exception to it, promoting it to a front-page story, when Chris Bryant, the Labour shadow constitutional reform minister, deployed it in Deputy Prime Minister’s Questions that day. Bryant was unrepentant on BBC Question Time last night.

Where did the phrase come from? Let us go back. It was used by Jon Cruddas, the left-wing David-Miliband-supporting MP, in The Observer last Sunday. Before that it was used, in quotation marks but not attributed to anyone, by Seamus Milne in The Guardian on 7 October. And by Karen Buck, a normally sensible Labour MP, quoted in the Evening Standard on 5 July.

But the earliest use of the phrase in relation to the coalition’s welfare cuts was by Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour MP for Islington North (above), in the House of Commons on 29 June, a week after George Osborne’s “emergency” Budget in which the first tranche of housing benefit cuts were announced.

He is the proud winner of today’s Godwin’s Law Award.

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