After a glorious week of old friends sharing excellent food and washing it down splendidly, I am home with the view from the very heart both of the Conservative Party and of Reform UK that a General Election this autumn would result in the loss of most of the Labour seats in the South outside London, but still a comfortable overall majority for the Labour Party, as happened in 2005. This blog was founded in 2006, and for its first four years, it pointed out that that was clearly possible, since it had already happened.
Just as you did when I pointed out that a Conservative overall majority in 2010 would have been psephologically impossible, and that the battle between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats in the South made the difference between an overall majority and a hung Parliament every time, oh, how you all laughed. Now, though, Labour, the Conservatives and Reform all presuppose a Southern rout but a national victory for the Labour Party. So much for the supposed illiteracy of the mere suggestion even when it was in fact the case.
Not unrelatedly, for more than 30 years, including 20 on here, I have been pointing out the obvious fact that the real centre ground of British politics was, for want of better terms, economically left-wing and socially conservative, the opposite of the political and media elite. Again, there were gales of derision, as of course there still are towards me personally, an effort that it baffles me that anyone bothered to make. Yet for a decade, everyone has pretended to have thought the thing itself all along. Not they agree with us, though. We remain almost entirely talked about rather than heard from.
Rod Liddle is dead, George Galloway is in exile, the Social Democratic Party has been beaten at Clacton by Count Binface (recalling its humiliation by Screaming Lord Sutch of the Official Monster Raving Loony Party at Bootle in May 1990), and the Workers Party of Britain has contested only the first of the six by-elections in this Parliament. Who speaks for us, who seek to strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty? Well, Paul Knaggs writes:
When UNISON allowed a biological male to stand for a seat reserved for disabled women, it broke trade union law and its own constitution. When seven nurses were harassed in their changing room, it looked the other way. Britain’s largest union has not merely lost its way; it has actively turned on the female members who fund it.
An institution is never truly tested by the glossy rhetoric of its annual conference, nor by the high-sounding platitudes of its press releases. It is tested by its rulebook. We understand instinctively that when a person breaks a solemn promise, that failure becomes the measure of their character. Yet we extend a strange, forgiving leniency to our institutions, whether they are governments, churches, or trade unions. We allow them to wrap themselves in the language of moral righteousness while ignoring the binding contracts they wrote when nobody was striking a pose.
UNISON, a union built on the dues of more than 1.3 million members, three-quarters of whom are women, wrote its constitution with unusual precision. Its drafters knew exactly what they were doing. They mandated that a branch Women’s Officer must be a woman. They stipulated that two of the union’s three top lay officers must be women. They carved out reserved, sex-based seats on the National Executive Council, including one specifically set aside for a disabled woman, to ensure that those with distinct, lived vulnerabilities held power that could not be quietly engineered away. Gender identity was placed elsewhere in the rulebook, under an entirely separate clause. The union’s founders understood the difference between biological sex and subjective identity, and they codified that boundary into law.
Somewhere between the rulebook and the ballot paper, the leadership chose to forget.
In February 2025, UNISON permitted Ellie Waple, a trans woman who is biologically male, to stand as a candidate for that reserved disabled woman’s seat. Two months later, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that “woman” and “sex” in the Equality Act mean biological sex. UNISON allowed the election to proceed regardless that May, with Waple on the ballot. Waple did not win, but the breach of principle was already complete. This month, Stephen Hardy, the Certification Officer and the statutory regulator for trade unions, issued a damning verdict: UNISON had broken both its own rulebook and the trade union law that requires organisations to enforce their own constitutions.
The Ideological Capture of UNISON: A Crisis inside Britain's Trade Unions
Ellie Waple was allowed to run for the female disabled member’s seat on the UNISON national executive committee last year
Waple has argued that the broader threat to women comes from concentrated wealth rather than trans people, and dismissed the Supreme Court ruling as undemocratic. That argument deserves a hearing, and members can weigh its merits for themselves. What it does not do is explain why a rule explicitly created to safeguard disabled women should be set aside for anyone. Yet UNISON’s official response to the regulator’s judgment spoke volumes. The union promised not to appeal, expressed deep concern for the impact on trans, non-binary, and gender-diverse members, and offered total silence regarding the disabled women whose democratic representation had been compromised.
That silence was deliberate. Nobody drafts a public statement without noticing who has been left out of it.
UNISON’s failure with the Darlington nurses follows the same script. Seven nurses at Darlington Memorial Hospital asked for nothing more than the right to change their clothes without a biological male present in their changing room. Their union did not back them. They were reported instead to the Nursing and Midwifery Council, a body with the power to strip them of their livelihoods. When an employment tribunal ruled in January that County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust had subjected the nurses to unlawful harassment, UNISON was nowhere to be seen. Before the judgment, its then president, Steve North, attacked the health secretary for pandering to bigotry, for the offence of agreeing to meet the nurses.
After the judgment, UNISON issued a note stating the ruling was long and its own policies remained unchanged.
When a trade union views the basic statutory rights of working class women as an inconvenience to be managed rather than a principle to be defended, it has abandoned its founding purpose.
The Leadership’s Ideology
This failure is ideological. At UNISON’s national conference this June, Andrea Egan openly rejected the highest court in the land, telling delegates that the Supreme Court ruling was wrong and that the union would continue to fight against what she termed unworkable legislation. She cited her personal background as the proud auntie of a trans nephew to justify her stance. A general secretary’s family life is her own private business. But using personal conviction to redirect the collective power of a 1.3-million-strong membership against the union’s own rulebook, and against the statutory rights of the women who fund it, is an abuse of the trust the union was built on.
Egan has since launched a formal campaign against the EHRC guidance, openly lobbying MPs and declaring that UNISON will fight to change the law on legal gender recognition. Her claimed mandate rests on just 600 members writing to the union, yet she presents this as justification for challenging a legal settlement reached unanimously by the Supreme Court. The Court stripped trans people of no existing rights: gender reassignment remains a protected characteristic under the Equality Act. What it restored was something women had been denied for years, legal clarity that sex means biological sex. A union that mobilises to rewrite the law once women’s rights are finally clarified, while failing to defend female members when those rights are breached, has ceased to behave like a trade union and started behaving like an ideological campaign group.
This drift did not begin with the current leadership. Four years ago, at the National Delegate Conference in Brighton, delegates were asked to prioritise a motion framing concerns about single-sex spaces as far-right bigotry. The same pattern repeats, this month, across the whole movement. Stephen Flaherty’s solicitor has written to Paul Nowak, the TUC’s general secretary, asking him to lead a review of sex-based rules across every affiliated union rather than leave the matter to be fought seat by seat, complaint by complaint. The TUC’s reply amounted to a shrug: unions are sovereign bodies, responsible for their own rules, and the ruling would be given careful consideration. Meanwhile the Royal College of Nursing faces its own tribunal, brought by nurse Sandie Peggie, who alleges the union abandoned her after she stood up for single-sex changing facilities. Across the board, the leadership of the trade union movement has aligned itself against the very workforce it exists to represent.
During her campaign for election Andrea Egan was asked how she would react if a similar case came to Unison, Egan told Politics Home: “I haven’t followed that case.
“But what were the real issues within that? I have trans friends, trans women friends; my nephew is a trans man. I wouldn’t have an issue. I’d want to understand. Because the argument can then develop to anybody saying… ‘Well, I don’t want you there because you’ve got blonde hair’ or ‘I don’t want them there because they’ve got blue eyes’,” Egan says.
“We have members come to the union with all kinds of issues, and some of them are unreasonable, but you’ve got to unpick them.”
Asked if she would not be comfortable with the union representing someone like Peggie, Egan told the magazine: “I wouldn’t”.
There is a profound, uncomfortable truth here for anyone who considers themselves on the left. The British labour movement isn’t losing ground because employers have won the argument over wages, housing or workplace safety. Its own leading institutions have simply stopped making that argument at all. Solidarity, collective bargaining, and material conditions have been traded away for the vocabulary of institutional branding and moral posturing. A movement founded to redistribute power downward to the working class now spends its energy policing the language of its own members.
You cannot protect what you cannot define. Reem Alsalem, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, warned the UN Human Rights Council that erasing the category of biological sex in favour of subjective identity leaves women’s specific vulnerabilities completely unprotected. When mothers are rebranded as birthing parents and women as menstruators, the institutions designed to shield them lose their capacity to act.
Trade unions exist for one single purpose: to give working people collective leverage against power. That leverage was built over generations on a solemn guarantee that the union stands with the member against the employer, without fear, favor, or ideological purity tests. A union that refuses to defend its female members, that ignores its own constitution to accommodate fashionable doctrine, and that treats the law of the land as a mere inconvenience has not simply lost its way.
It has decided its own members are the enemy, surrendered to ideological capture, and abandoned the very reason for its existence.
Inflation rose to 2.9 per cent in the year to July, the Office for National Statistics confirmed this morning, up from 2.6 per cent in June and the first increase in the headline rate since March. Within the hour the explanation had already hardened into official language. Blame Iran. Blame the closure of shipping lanes through the Strait of Hormuz, a war nobody in Whitehall started and, we are assured, nobody in Whitehall can do very much about.
It is a comforting story, and comforting stories about the cost of living tend to share one feature. They never mention a boardroom.
The figures themselves rather undercut the alibi. Core inflation, which strips out energy, food, alcohol and tobacco, held steady at 2.6 per cent in July, exactly where it stood in June. Services inflation, generally the truest gauge of homegrown price pressure, actually eased, down from 3.6 to 3.4 per cent. The wider economy shows no sign of overheating; what moved the headline figure was narrower and far more specific, housing and household services, driven almost entirely by gas, up 14.7 per cent on the year, its steepest annual rise since October 2022, after Ofgem’s price cap rose by 13 per cent on the first of July.
The chancellor, John Healey, reached for the language ministers always reach for when a bill they did not set lands on a doorstep they did not build. The government had cut VAT on electricity and capped bus fares at £2, he said, to “give breathing space to those feeling the strain.” Working class households will find that breathing space comes to 86 pence a week, since the VAT cut does not touch gas, which is where the rise is coming from. James Smith of the Resolution Foundation was more candid about where the strain originates, noting that the new bout of inflation was “driven by events in the Middle East that are largely beyond the government’s control.” Both men are describing the same war. Neither is describing where the money from it goes.
Here is where it goes. Analysis published this month by the End Fuel Poverty Coalition found that UK profits posted so far in 2026 by a handful of energy firms, among them BP, Shell, Centrica, Equinor and Chevron, already exceed £6 billion, working out at more than £200 for every household in the country. Their combined global profits for the year now stand above £95 billion. Shell alone posted adjusted earnings of £7.3 billion for the second quarter, its best result in four years and more than double what it made over the same three months last year. Equinor, which supplies more of Britain’s gas than any other single company, booked £8.58 billion in adjusted operating income over the same period. Simon Francis, the coalition’s coordinator, put it plainly: firms are “price shock profiteers doing very well out of the Iran conflict.”
This publication reported the first instalment of that figure on 11 August, when UK operations alone had banked £3 billion in the opening three months of the war, or £102 for every household. A second quarter of results has since landed, and the running total has doubled.
None of this is an accident of markets left well alone. Britain prices every unit of electricity at the cost of the most expensive generator running at any given moment, which is almost always gas. A wind farm that cost the same to run in June as it did in January is paid the war price anyway, the instant a missile closes a shipping lane on the other side of the world. It is a policy choice, not a fact of nature, made by people who could unmake it, and it is the mechanism by which a war four thousand miles away becomes, with almost no friction at all, a very good quarter in Aberdeen and Stavanger.
Ofgem announces the next price cap on 26 August. The same coalition that totted up the £6 billion warns it is likely to rise again. Somewhere between now and that announcement sits the real answer to July’s inflation figures, and it is not a war in the Gulf. It is a market built to convert other people’s emergencies into somebody else’s income, running exactly as designed, while the chancellor calls it breathing space and the shareholders call it a very good quarter.
The war explains why the price of gas went up. It does not explain who was allowed to keep the difference.
The Illusion of Competence: What a Phony Text Message Reveals About the British State
There is a quiet, devastating comedy to the way modern power undoes itself. We are routinely assured by the high priests of the state that our national security apparatus is an impenetrable vault, guarded by billions of pounds, world-class intelligence networks, and the stern vigilance of senior ministers. Yet, it takes only a phantom on a smartphone to breach the highest office in the land.
Prime Minister Andy Burnham recently found himself engaged in a text exchange with an impostor pretending to be Susie Wiles, White House Chief of Staff to US President Donald Trump. Downing Street, falling back on the predictable liturgy of bureaucratic embarrassment, refused to comment on the breach first reported by Politico, retreating into the classic refrain: “We do not comment on national security matters.” The irony is they will text them.
Sources claim that only a few messages of no real significance were exchanged before Burnham grew suspicious and alerted the appropriate authorities, who confirmed no state secrets were compromised. The British Embassy in Washington raised the incident directly with the White House, suspecting a repeat of the breach targeting Wiles’ personal device last year, when an FBI investigation was launched after an impersonator harvested her contacts to target US senators, governors, and executives alongside broader cyber-espionage attempts by Iranian-linked units.
Defenders of the administration will naturally argue that this was a minor hitch, a transient nuisance in the chaotic churn of international politics. However, to dismiss this as an isolated digital mishap is to miss the deeper structural rot. This was not an anomaly; it is a pattern of systemic carelessness.
Burnham Hoax Shows Britain’s Ruling Class Can’t Be Trusted: They’re too flattered by a text
It’s not the first time a name on a text opened a security flaw. In 2024, the Foreign Office was forced to publicly admit that former Foreign Secretary David Cameron had exchanged text messages with a hoaxer pretending to be former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko. Officials rushed to publish details of the exchange out of fear the messages would be manipulated and weaponised. Go back to 2015, and Downing Street was forced to launch an urgent review of security procedures after a bogus caller was put straight through to Cameron, then prime minister, claiming to be Robert Hannigan, the director of GCHQ. In 2022, then-Defence Secretary Ben Wallace and Home Secretary Priti Patel were targeted via Microsoft Teams calls by an impostor posing as Ukraine’s Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal. In that instance, a Ministry of Defence source acknowledged the call was sophisticated enough to have been routed through another government department, lending it immediate credibility before suspicion was raised.
When the machinery of state repeatedly succumbs to basic impersonation, the issue is no longer individual negligence. It is an institutional culture that prioritises the frictionless speed of informal communication over the disciplined protocols of public accountability.
For years, government officials have systematically dismantled traditional safeguards in favour of governing by informal text threads on WhatsApp, like the infamous Covid VIP lane and Wes Streeting’s disappearing messages.
Decision-making has been migrated from recorded, minute-backed cabinet committees into unmonitored messaging apps. The state has deliberately traded democratic transparency and procedural security for executive convenience. The result is a governance architecture so porous that an unknown actor can slide into a Prime Minister’s inbox simply by adopting the right name on a contact screen.
This informalisation of power serves a double purpose. It allows ministers to bypass civil service oversight, shield key discussions from Freedom of Information requests, and consolidate decisions within an insular inner circle. Yet, the very mechanism designed to evade public scrutiny is what leaves the state vulnerable to external manipulation.
The public interest concern extends far beyond a momentary lapse in protocol. When foreign policy and high-level statecraft are conducted through backchannels, the public is left entirely in the dark, unable to hold leaders accountable for what is promised or conceded in private. The immediate risk may be bad actors exploiting these vulnerabilities, but the enduring threat is a political class that views governing as a series of casual text messages.
If Downing Street wishes to restore public confidence, it must abandon the farce of off-the-record digital diplomacy. Reining in unchecked executive power requires bringing every official communication back into the clear light of democratic oversight and formal civil service record-keeping. Security is not achieved through secrecy after the fact, but through rigorous, transparent procedure before the damage is done.
A state that manages its highest affairs through the casual informality of text messages will eventually find its authority treated with the exact same carelessness.
Back to the Poorhouse
Robert Jenrick did something rare for a politician promising to save £50 billion. He told the truth about the cost. Writing in the Sunday Telegraph to launch Reform UK’s welfare overhaul, the party’s Treasury spokesman conceded that the plan would not be painless. The number attached to that admission is 2.89 million: the Britons who, under Reform’s proposals, would see their disability and sickness payments modified or taken away entirely. The party’s full policy document, Making Welfare Work, was published today. It runs to fifty pages, and it is considerably more radical, and in places more revealing, than the weekend’s headlines suggested.
That figure deserves to sit with the reader for a moment, because it is not an abstraction from a spreadsheet. It is 2.89 million people, most of them already living with less than most, who would wake up to find the state deciding they are not disabled enough to matter. And the £50 billion itself is not a day-one number. Reform’s own costing table shows net savings of £17.5 billion in the first year, climbing past £50 billion only by 2030 and reaching £63 billion four years after that. The headline figure is where the plan ends up, not where it starts.
Personal Independence Payment and the health element of Universal Credit would both be scrapped for working-age adults and replaced with a Health Security Allowance, a single flat payment worth £429.80 a month at current rates, reserved for a defined list of severe conditions: terminal illness, profound physical or learning disability, severe autism with high support needs, major neurological disease, serious brain injury, and comparably severe or unstable cases. Anxiety, depression and ADHD are not excluded outright, but the paper marks them for what it calls enhanced scrutiny, meaning a higher evidential bar than other conditions face. Everyone else moves onto council-run Disability Support Accounts, paying not cash but vouchers for equipment, adaptations, transport and personal care. One consequence buried in the small print: only Health Security Allowance recipients keep access to a Motability vehicle. Everyone shifted onto the lower tier loses it.
Here the argument requires precision, because precision is exactly what Reform’s public framing avoids. PIP was never an out-of-work benefit. It exists to cover the additional cost of living with a disability: the wheelchair that wears out, the adapted car, the carer who helps someone get dressed in the morning. You can work full time and still claim it, because disability does not stop costing money the moment you find a job. Jenrick’s language, describing the current system as “suicidal empathy” and insisting that “dumping our young people onto welfare isn’t compassion; it’s neglect,” conjures an image of mass idleness that the benefit itself was never designed to address.
It would be dishonest, in the spirit of the fairness this publication insists on, to pretend Reform’s plan contains nothing worth taking seriously. The employer insurance mandate, requiring firms with more than five staff to buy Return to Work Cover for the first two years of an employee’s sickness absence, borrows from a genuine Dutch model built on the idea that employers who bear the cost of long-term illness have a reason to prevent it. Reform’s own paper cites Dutch evidence of a 40 per cent fall in disability applications after a similar reform, though that figure comes from the party’s own citation rather than independent verification. What the paper also shows, and does not advertise, is that the mandate nets to precisely nothing for the Treasury: the cost imposed on employers and the compensating cut to employer National Insurance, set at 0.2 percentage points, are identical, pound for pound, in every year of the costing table. It is a cost shifted from the state onto business, not a saving in itself. Even Labour’s own review of PIP, led by disability minister Sir Stephen Timms, concluded in an interim report last month that the benefit was “not fit for purpose.” Reform did not invent the case that the system needs reform. It borrowed it, then answered it with a sledgehammer.
The trouble begins where the mandate meets human nature. Give an employer financial liability for a worker’s future illness, and some will respond not by investing in adjustments but by ‘quietly avoiding anyone who looks like a risk‘ before they are hired at all. The disabled graduate, the cancer survivor, the older worker with a bad back: all become liabilities on a balance sheet before they have said a word in an interview. The Dutch system Reform borrows the idea from operates inside a labour market with stronger job protections and a different welfare architecture. Transplanting the insurance mechanism into Britain’s insecure, gig-driven economy without those protections is not reform. It is an experiment conducted on people who have no way to opt out.
The Return of Compulsory Labour
The most radical section of the paper has had almost no coverage. Anyone who has claimed Universal Credit under “Seeking Work” conditions for more than twelve months, more than 330,000 people on Reform’s own count, would be required to work twenty hours a week in a placement assigned by their local council: street cleaning, park maintenance, library shelving, school crossing patrol, even electoral canvassing. The placement is explicitly not employment for the purposes of employment law, so no minimum wage and no employment rights attach to it, only an additional £30 a week on top of existing benefit. Failure to attend, poor performance or what the paper calls on-the-job misconduct triggers what it describes as the full, non-time-limited revocation of benefits: not a temporary sanction, but the permanent loss of support.
Reform’s paper is unusually candid about why this has failed twice before. It names the 2013 Supreme Court case that struck down Iain Duncan Smith’s Mandatory Work Activity scheme for giving ministers too much discretion, and acknowledges that every previous version of compulsory work for benefits, John Major’s Project Work, Tony Blair’s New Deal, the Coalition’s own scheme, ran into the same wall. Its solution is not to fix the legal design. It is to remove the wall. Reform states plainly that it will leave the European Convention on Human Rights and repeal the Human Rights Act specifically to prevent the courts from doing to this scheme what they did to the last one, and would legislate within its first hundred days to make participation a legal duty for councils, who face the loss of central funding if they refuse to comply. Whatever view one takes of workfare as policy, withdrawing from the human rights framework in order to insulate a single welfare programme from judicial challenge is a constitutional decision of the first order, and it arrives in this paper as a footnote to a spreadsheet.
It is also, on Reform’s own figures, a strikingly small contributor to the £50 billion target. The scheme’s net fiscal impact starts at £48 million in its first year and does not reach £1 billion until the 2030s, a rounding error against the totals claimed elsewhere in the same document. The reward for reopening one of the most contested legal battles in modern British welfare policy is, by the party’s own arithmetic, marginal.
There is a second, quieter mechanism buried deep in the appendices. Reform proposes a commission to revise how the Consumer Price Index is calculated for the purpose of uprating working-age benefits, targeting a reduction in measured inflation of 0.6 percentage points a year. The paper is explicit that this compounds: benefits roughly 0.6 per cent lower than they would otherwise have been in year one, 1.2 per cent lower in year two, and onward from there. No vote is required to cut a benefit by a fixed percentage each April. Adjusting the ruler by which it is measured achieves the same result more quietly, and for longer.
British Welfare for British Citizens
Disability was not the only front in Jenrick’s £50 billion package. At a press conference in London this morning, Reform confirmed it would strip almost all welfare from foreign nationals, including European Union citizens holding settled status under the post-Brexit Withdrawal Agreement. Universal Credit, Housing Benefit, Pension Credit, Jobseeker’s Allowance, Child Benefit, free childcare and disability benefits would all close to non-British claimants, with exemptions held back only for contributory state pensions, the War Widows Pension and Armed Forces compensation. The rules would apply retroactively to existing claimants, not only new ones. Anyone who has lived and worked in the country for 25 years would keep their state pension but lose everything else, and would instead be invited to apply for citizenship. In a household where only one partner is British, that partner alone would remain eligible for support, yet their non-citizen spouse’s income and savings would still count against the household’s eligibility threshold, a household penalised twice over.
Reform’s own figures put more than 1.3 million foreign nationals on Universal Credit as of February 2026, up from around 900,000 in 2022, and the paper claims £55 billion has been paid to foreign citizens through Universal Credit or its equivalent since April 2022. Restricting eligibility to British citizens is projected to save around £21 billion a year by 2030, the fifth year of the scheme, of which £13 billion comes from Universal Credit alone.
There is a catch buried in Reform’s own maths, and to its credit the party has not tried to hide it. Stripping benefits from EU nationals in Britain means tearing up the social security provisions of the Withdrawal Agreement, the same treaty that currently protects British pensioners and claimants living across the EU. Reform’s paper sets aside a £500 million contingency for the cost of Britons abroad losing their equivalent rights and returning home to claim welfare, and states outright that this figure assumes only 10 per cent, roughly 130,000, of the 1.3 million British citizens living in the EU would do so. Set against the party’s own estimate that around 1.05 million people in Britain would be affected by the reverse policy, that is an eight-to-one asymmetry, built into Reform’s own model rather than alleged by its critics. It is a bet that Britain, which EU nationals have moved to in far greater numbers than Britons have moved the other way, has considerably more to claw back than to lose.
The response from Westminster has followed predictable lines, though not without substance. A Labour spokeswoman called the £50 billion figure “fantasy economics,” built, she said, on stripping support from disabled people. Rachael Maskell, the York Central MP who led the rebellion against her own government’s PIP cuts last year, said the plan shows Reform “do not want disabled people to play a full role in our society.” The Conservatives’ Helen Whately dismissed it as a “half-baked” attempt to distract from Farage’s donation controversy. Whately’s charge is politically self-serving, since her own party spent years tightening the same system without ever proposing to abolish PIP outright. But it points to something real: even the architects of a decade of austerity understood that the cost of disability is not the same as the cost of unemployment, and that confusing the two produces bad policy dressed up as courage.
Reform UK Welfare Reforms Are a Return to the Poorhouse
There is a political irony here sharp enough to draw blood. Research published by the anti-poverty charity Trussell found that nearly six in ten Labour constituencies most at risk of falling to Reform sit in the top third of areas in England and Wales for reliance on health-related benefits. Trussell’s policy director, Helen Barnard, has warned that cutting disability benefits “will simply push more people to the doors of food banks.” These are the former mining towns, the deindustrialised coastal seats, the places where chronic illness is not an anomaly but the afterlife of the industries that broke the bodies working in them. Reform’s target voter and Reform’s target casualty are, disturbingly often, the same person.
It would be wrong to say the paper contains nothing but punishment. It commits an extra £1.85 billion a year to cognitive behavioural therapy, physiotherapy and employment support, genuine investment rather than pure withdrawal. The fraud and error figures it cites are real: the Office for Budget Responsibility puts the Universal Credit fraud and error rate at 8.5 per cent, and the paper points to a real 2024 case in which five people were convicted of nearly £54 million in fraudulent claims. Expanding counter-fraud enforcement to 9,000 officers is the least contestable part of the entire package, and probably the part likeliest to survive contact with a different government.
There is a silence in the document worth noting too. Reform gives welfare fraud an entire section, a named court case and 9,000 new enforcement officers, a real problem, but a modest one next to a much larger one the paper never mentions. HM Revenue and Customs’ own figures, published this June, put the total UK tax gap, the difference between what is legally owed and what is actually collected, at £59.2 billion for 2024/25, close to the entire £50 billion Reform hopes to save from welfare by 2030.
Analysis of HMRC’s own data by tax justice campaigners shows the amount going uncollected from the wealthiest two per cent of taxpayers has grown sharply over the same period. Making Welfare Work does not contain the words tax avoidance, tax evasion or tax gap once in fifty pages. A paper built on the principle that everyone should pay their fair share finds room to describe, in exhaustive detail, how the sick, the disabled and the foreign-born must prove theirs. It finds none at all for how the wealthy might be asked to prove theirs.
It also undercuts its own rhetoric in one telling place. Its foreword insists that British people have not become 77 per cent sicker in the eight years since 2018, the precise rate at which the incapacity benefits caseload has grown, and treats that gap as proof the system is broken. Yet a few pages later, in its own account of how the caseload grew, the paper explains that judges have progressively widened the legal test for PIP eligibility, allowing the physical symptoms of psychological conditions to count toward mobility awards and loosening what counts as an “intermittent” condition. That is a story about case law and assessment criteria evolving over a decade, not a story about the nation’s health collapsing. The paper’s own evidence undermines the very headline it uses to justify the policy built on top of it.
Even the reinstated two-child benefit cap, saving a projected £2.9 billion a year, comes with a destination already attached: the paper states the funds are pre-committed to Reform’s Save Our Pubs policy. Money withheld from larger low-income families is earmarked, in the same document, for the subsidy of licensed premises. It is the kind of detail a party writes down without noticing how it reads.
There is also an unresolved fracture built into the plan by the constitution it operates within. PIP is devolved to Scotland, so Holyrood could simply decline to adopt Reform’s version of it. But the paper is explicit that if Scotland does not follow suit, Scottish claimants would receive a lower Health Security Allowance than claimants in England and Wales, to avoid duplicating Scotland’s own devolved disability payment, and would not be eligible for a Disability Support Account at all. Scottish claimants lose either way: less generous devolved support if Holyrood holds the line, or a UK-wide Reform government’s version of it if it doesn’t.
This is where the plan reveals its true ancestry, and it is older than any of the parties now arguing over it. The nineteenth century Poor Law rested on a doctrine its architects called “less eligibility”: support for the destitute had to be worse than the meanest paid work, tested where necessary by requiring labour in exchange for relief, so that nobody would choose it over a wage. The workhouse and the parish chapel gates were where that doctrine met the people it governed, sorting the “deserving” poor from the rest by the harshness of what was offered them. Reform’s plan does not merely evoke that history. In the Welfare to Work scheme it is, in mechanism, the same test: unpaid or nearly unpaid labour, administered locally, withdrawn from anyone who does not comply, and now, uniquely, defended in advance by withdrawing from the very human rights framework that stopped the last three attempts at it. The architecture has changed from stone to spreadsheet. The instinct underneath it has not moved an inch since 1834.
Britain’s disability benefits bill is large because Britain’s ill health is widespread, a legacy of deindustrialisation, insecure work, an overstretched NHS and decades of underinvestment in social care, alongside the genuine expansion of legal eligibility that Reform’s own paper documents. None of that is the fault of the people claiming PIP. Savings that push people out of work and into poverty do not vanish from the public accounts. They resurface as NHS demand, as homelessness, as family breakdown, paid for in currencies that never appear on a Treasury spreadsheet but are borne all the same, and borne hardest by the people least able to afford them.
A welfare state that abandons the majority of disabled people to councils, insurers and compulsory labour, and narrows the circle of who counts as British enough to be helped, is not a welfare state in any sense the term has held since Beveridge. It is a return to the parish relief system it was built to replace, the same message delivered in more technical language: you are on your own, unless you are sick enough, or British enough, to count.
The workhouse never went away. It has simply learned to speak in the language of savings and incentives, and this week it found the paperwork to make compulsory labour legal again. It is waiting at the chapel gates for the next Chancellor brave enough to call cruelty by its proper name.
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