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This is an ingenious slogan. For a start it's a loud dog whistle to Mail and Sun readers who every day hear about "benefits queens" who earn tens of thousands of pounds having never worked. It reinforces the completely false idea that people who are out of work are out of work because they're feckless, and the largely false idea that you can have a decent quality of life living on benefits alone."Making work pay" also sounds like a positive thing – like giving workers more money – when in fact the plan is "to make work pay", i.e. if you don't work you're now going to be much poorer. It implies to people of all classes that the Conservatives are serving hard workers – people like you and me – whether we work in Tesco or an investment bank, even though nothing could be further from the truth.So that's why the slogan works. But how are they getting on with making work actually pay?Well, new figures released today from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation found that the majority of people in poverty in Britain – 55 percent – are in work. In fact, since the Tories took power in 2010, in-work poverty has risen by 1.1 million. Overall, the report suggested 7.4 million people, including 2.6 million children, are living in poverty in the UK. In other words, work isn't paying very much at all."This goes to the heart of the country we are trying to build. One based on the principle of something for something, not something for nothing, where those who put in get out, where hard work is rewarded – where we make work pay."
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