While those with disabilities wait in trepidation to hear what Liz Kendall’s green paper will do, the whole country waits to glean the nature of this Labour government. Is it really going to reach down among the poorest and weakest to take £5bn to plug the deficit? Why take from them, not from those with the broadest shoulders, or from an even spread across all citizens?
Distraught Labour MPs echo Ed Balls’s words: “It’s not a Labour thing to do.” The number of rebels matters less than the incomprehensible message sent out about what Labour is. Party focus groups suggest voters think claimants swing the lead, but polls suggests otherwise: 27% say support is too mean, 26% that it is about right and just 26% that disability benefits are too generous. Wait for the hardship cases to swing fickle attitudes.
The benefit system does need reform and new priorities. After an era of exceptional brutality under the Tories, with jobcentre managers target-driven to throw people off the books on any excuse, often tricking the helpless, the system relaxed as the pandemic and the years that followed saw claimant numbers soar. Basic universal credit (UC) for unemployment, shockingly low at a sub-survivable £393.45 a month, is enough to drive anyone into a depressed state and allow them to qualify for disability benefit, which would lift them above starvation.
It will be good news if Kendall raises that basic UC rate. That the government has retreated from freezing personal independence payments (Pip) is also welcome: cuts would have fallen on all, including the most severe cases. However, eligibility may be toughened. How nauseating to hear George Osborne gloat on his podcast: “I didn’t freeze Pip. I thought it would not be regarded as very fair.” This is the man who impoverished hundreds of thousands of children by stripping £5,500 from families.
It’s been rightly said that too many are written off, as people are parked for years, living on the edge, unable to take risks. The right to try jobs without forfeiting a return to benefits is a good plan. Very welcome will be £1bn for work coaches with time for personal support for people who have lost their nerve about working. Learn from Labour’s new deal for employment in 1997, which proved well-funded back-to-work programmes succeed. And, yes, benefit priorities do need reform, if that means shifting the emphasis towards children and the million young people not in work or training (Neets) before triple-locked pensioners.
“Too many are overdiagnosed with mental illness,” Wes Streeting says. Is that a threat to cut payments or a promise of genuine help? We wait to hear if £5bn really is to be cut, and if that’s immediate or gradually by 2029. Should savings be scored only as people are successfully helped back to work, or will an axe fall regardless?
There are lessons to be taken from recent history: Harriet Harman, social security secretary, sat white-faced on the frontbench in 1997, deserted by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, who strong-armed her into cutting single-parent benefits as pledged in the manifesto to mirror Tory plans. (Harman, as scapegoat, was fired soon after.) Labour MPs trouped in to vote, as hangdog as Rodin’s The Burghers of Calais that stands outside parliament: 47 MPs rebelled and, it was reported, some wept.
That harsh act stayed scorched in the memory of disillusioned Labour people, never expunged despite what came after: the money was soon restored many times over in new working family tax credits, child tax credits, childcare and child benefit. But Labour often failed to herald its best policies, or fix them into public imagination: generosity scared it as a message. Sticking to pre-election tough pledges caused public spending to fall steeply in its first two years after 1997. But as Harman says now, hindsight is a fine thing: what could the party risk after four lost elections? As now, it feared that losing fiscal credibility would cause a Liz Truss-type market crash. Similarly, this government seems unclear on what symbols it wants to imprint.
Put it bluntly. In this most unequal country, where over decades wealth and income as a share of GDP have been shifting from employees to owners, from wages to capital, why would a Labour government reach for £5bn from a group – disabled people – who, the Resolution Foundation reports, live in households with 44% less income than the median? To be disabled at working age is almost always to be poor, living in a poor district. (In Wokingham only 4% of working-age people claim a health-related benefit; in Blackpool, the figure is 19%.)
This is only a starter. More cuts are on the way, the cabinet was warned last week, with every department told to model cuts of 10% or more, with the overall sum revealed next week in Rachel Reeves’s spring statement. If so, the fate of already-stricken public services looks frightening. Or did Keir Starmer mean it when he said, yet again, last week: “No return to austerity. We are not going down that route”? No new tax, no borrowing, no austerity – all three pledges can’t be kept. But the US’s abandonment of Europe changes everything. A call to rearm rescinds all former fiscal rules in every European country. For Britain, with alarming debt already, taxing is the way, not cutting spending. Britain still taxes and spends less than our neighbours.
Times are far harder than in 1997. But Reeves is a Keynesian – read her book praising Keynesian economists who would all tell her cutting is no solution to near-stagnant growth.
If spending cuts will be as deep as predicted, that demands a strong act of faith from Labour supporters that things will eventually get better. But remember this: every Labour government always improves the living standards of those with least, lifts more children out of poverty, revives the NHS, schools and local councils. In this dark economic moment, it takes trust to believe Starmer and Reeves too will, in the end, do as Labour always does.
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Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
