Labour’s Ruthless Raid On The Sick

Lucky Apsana Begum, Zarah Sultana and John McDonnell, who still do not have anything to do with this. Darren McGarvey writes:

What do you do if your government is struggling in the polls and you need an easy win? Liz Kendall knows. You target the “welfare scroungers”. If you have a distaste for the feckless, the undeserving poor and the work-shy, then her plan will be right up your benefits street. For, suffering the humiliating consequences of six uninspired months of reheated Blairism, Starmer’s Labour is going to force the sick and disabled into work. The party of the working man is kicking down.

The system is broken, according to our Work and Pensions minister, because of the vast numbers of long-term ill claiming welfare payments. Her quick fix to the deep-rooted problem of chronic illness, disability, and NHS waiting lists longer than all three volumes of Das Kapital, is a gentle shove down your wheelchair ramp, into the nearest zero-hours contract. It’s unoriginal, impersonal, schizophrenic policy. But for Kendall, it’s the greatest shake-up of the benefits system in a decade.

Rather than helping the sick and the mentally unwell into work — by, say, guaranteeing access to quality healthcare, or supporting people those disabilities to find suitable and sustainable employment — Kendall will simply change the definitions of what it means to be sick and mentally unwell. Under her plans, the “Limited Capability for Work or Work-Related Activity” category will be scrapped, meaning thousands of people currently deemed too ill to work will soon find themselves employable by government decree. Never mind the fact that the health system is in crisis, and many can’t access the care they need to get better. Never mind the reality that employers aren’t exactly queuing up to hire workers with complex health conditions. Labour has decided that, rather than fixing these systemic problems, the real issue is that not enough sick people are dragging themselves to Jobcentres for mandatory CV workshops.

“If the DWP were a person, it would be convicted of manslaughter, signed off indefinitely, and committed to a mental institution for life.” It’s hard to decide what’s more ridiculous: the idea that forcing the sick into job searches will somehow heal them, or the sheer bureaucratic madness of trying to implement this policy through the already broken DWP. If the DWP were a person, it would be convicted of manslaughter, signed off indefinitely, and committed to a mental institution for life — before declaring itself fit to work on its own deathbed. This is a department that can’t answer its own phones, subjects legitimate claimants to months of appeals processes, and, in one notable case, flagged over 200,000 people for potential fraud investigations — wrongly. Now they’re about to be trusted to decide whether someone with severe chronic pain or debilitating mental illness is fit to stack shelves for £10 an hour? What could possibly go wrong?

There was a time when the only tools this Stanford experiment had at its disposal to force compliance consisted mainly of sternly worded computer-generated letters and a telephone help-line with a two-hour queue. To Vivaldi. Well, now the DWP means business — and it’s going to feel extremely personal. Of course welfare should be reserved for those who need it, and genuine fraud must be stamped out and deterred. But I question the wisdom and character of anyone who thinks disability benefit is the area of welfare most in need of an aggressive audit. Invariably, the populations government targets with these cost-saving reforms are those who lack the means or the will to fight back — plus they’re easier to harass than wealthy tax dodgers.

According to the DWP, fraud and error cost the taxpayer £9.7 billion last year, with £7.4 billion classified as outright fraud. It’s an interesting term, fraud. It implies that every last penny of those billions has been deliberately scammed. But mistakes are inevitable in an overly complex, inflexible system which bamboozles even university-educated claimants who inadvertently get a detail here or there wrong. Compare that with the £23 billion in benefits that go unclaimed every year, and the story looks very different. This move isn’t just about clawing back public money and cutting the welfare bill; it’s about taking an aggressive posture. A posture designed to appease those whose overriding response to decades of economic mismanagement and stagnation is to demand that the poorest and least fortunate are held responsible. Labour is far less interested in ensuring people get the help they’re entitled to than it is in stoking a moral panic about fraudsters bleeding the system dry.

So, not content with trousering your granny’s heating allowance and psychologically waterboarding the legitimately sick and disabled, Labour is now aiming to turn the DWP into a pound-shop paramilitary force. Sweeping new reforms will give officers the power to enter and search homes, seize property and driving licences, and snoop through bank accounts if they suspect benefit fraud. I wonder how critics of the nanny state — who believe any government intervention sits on a spectrum of tyranny, but who also seem to care little about what happens to those on the margins — will be able to reconcile these conflicting ideas.

Barely a month ago, the entire nation stopped for a whole week to debate the complex ethical dilemmas of assisted dying, the risk of abuse, and of people slipping through the net due to institutional dysfunction and perverse incentives. But these DWP reforms are bound to pass without so much as a whimper from the media, and even less interest from the public. 

The official line is that these powers are about clamping down on organised crime gangs who exploit the benefits system. The reality? It’ll be the usual suspects who suffer — disabled people, single mothers, and those working precarious, underpaid jobs. Much like Kendall’s proposals to scrap the Work Capability Assessment and tighten the screws on mental health claimants, this is just another distraction from Labour’s inability to solve the real problems underpinning welfare dependency.

Labour is pitching all of this as necessary, pragmatic governance, but in reality, the same party that once talked about dignity in welfare is now trying to outflank the Tories from the Right. Hell, even Nigel Farage has softened his tone on welfare, aware his growing electoral coalition now includes, you guessed it, the sick, the disabled, and people on in-work benefits. But Labour, unlike Farage, lacks the conviction to make anything it says sound convincing.

None of this is to say that there aren’t problems with how incentives to work are structured, or that the system isn’t open to abuse. Every system is — just ask the many companies and high-net-worth individuals who shuffle money offshore to avoid paying tax. The difference is that we don’t see the same level of state aggression directed towards them. There are no dawn raids on corporate offices or intrusive, humiliating checks on the affluent who have creative accountants.

Yet, like a low-rent FBI, the department that can’t even answer its phones will have the power to raid homes, crawl over your bank statements and tell you if you’re sick or not. Presumably there are no waiting lists for this service. Well we can’t say we weren’t told. After all, a different Labour leader warned us years ago that we shouldn’t get sick.

And even in The Guardian, Frances Ryan writes:

When Rachel Reeves pledged last week that a third runway at Heathrow would put money in the pockets of “working people”, the chancellor gave a bigger hint about the government’s plans than the headlines suggested. The phrase didn’t just claim that the economic benefit of big-money infrastructure projects would somehow trickle down to workers struggling to pay the rent. It implied that anyone who didn’t do their duty for the labour market – say, people too disabled or ill to work, family carers and jobseekers – should expect very little from Labour.

Such sentiments could be dismissed as empty rhetoric, of course, but by all accounts are actually a preview. In the autumn budget, Reeves committed to keeping the £3bn of disability benefit “savings” the outgoing Conservative government planned. It is now expected that a package of spending cuts will be finalised in the next fortnight, in what the Times describes as a “radical overhaul of welfare” that could see hundreds of thousands of disabled and chronically ill people lose their benefits.

Under one option reportedly being considered, the universal credit “limited capability for work or work-related activity” category would be abolished, which would require often severely disabled or ill people to make preparations for work. That could see claimants lose about £5,000 a year.

At the same time, personal independence payments (Pip) – which pays for some of the extra costs of disability and is unrelated to whether someone is in work – is said to be being lined up for an “overhaul”, with those with conditions such as depression and anxiety, the fastest-growing reasons for disability benefits, likely to be targeted. Options being looked at include one-off rather than monthly payments for some, or means testing. Vouchers for specific equipment or aids instead of cash – as planned by Rishi Sunak last year – have reportedly been ruled out. No change for either benefit has been confirmed.

If any of this feels familiar, it’s because it is – and not just that it was only a decade ago that the coalition government was “reforming” the system. Since the election last July, Labour ministers have been dripfeeding rumoured benefit crackdowns to the rightwing press, from specific plans to remove fraudsters’ driving licences to vague pledges to get hordes of people off out-of-work sickness benefits.

The point of these constant briefings may seem baffling, but there are two likely explanations: testing the waters before announcing firm policy; and/or communicating a message. For the latter, just look at the seemingly innocuous lines in the Times story: ministers have told business leaders that changes to Pip eligibility “will be the first priority” in spending cuts in March, as Reeves is “desperate” to reassure City bosses that “welfare savings” will cool the need for a tax-raising emergency budget.

It is not simply that such things invite uncomfortable questions about the influence of the rich on governance, but that they signal very clearly who matters to Labour – and who doesn’t. That is not necessarily an accident. Back in January, Reeves weakened changes to non-dom status after hearing “concerns” from business leaders. In contrast, concerns from disabled people – as well as multiple thinktanks and charities – about the proposed disability benefit cuts over the past six months have, funnily enough, not had the same effect. Disabled voters are apparently expendable. Wealthy potential donors less so.

Politics, at its core, is a matter of priorities: where public money will be spent, where it won’t, and how it will be raised. That a Labour government is seemingly willing to sacrifice poor and disabled people’s benefits in order to protect the wealthy and healthy from paying a bit more tax is the kind of dystopian deal that feels at best perverse and, at worst, a betrayal.

None of this is to say that Britain having an increasingly sick population is not a crisis that must be addressed. But it is to say that arbitrary cost-cutting is not the same as genuine reform, or that complex public policy should be dictated by the Treasury. I can’t help but wonder how many of those currently crowing to get disabled people “off benefits” will speak out against failings in the Access to Work scheme that are causing disabled people to lose their jobs. Wanting to get disabled people off the “welfare bill” is not the same as wanting to help them work.

In some ways, austerity under Keir Starmer and Reeves looks different than the last time we were here: unlike under David Cameron and George Osborne, there is no ideological drive to shrink the state nor an explicit nasty impulse to punish “skivers” – more a couple of management execs looking to balance the books. And yet even this bean-counting is flawed. Recent research for anti-poverty charity Z2K found the economic value of disability benefits far outweighs the cost: while there is a £28bn annual bill for administering the benefits, they give a potential £42bn economic boost due to how they improve wellbeing.

Besides, that Labour ministers’ motivations are (perhaps) distinct from the Tories is hardly much comfort to the disabled people reading yet another story musing how their only income could be taken away. If their disability benefits are cut when Labour wins an election, as well as when the Conservatives do, what exactly is the difference?

Much of this goes far beyond whether the red team or the blue team is in office. It is about the systems that normalise impoverishing and isolating disabled people while protecting the assets and power of the privileged. It is about the attitudes towards disability and poverty that make those with the least seem the right group to lose the most, and the dehumanisation that says their suffering doesn’t really matter.

As more potential benefit cuts are inevitably briefed in the coming days, it is worth remembering there are human beings behind every speculation. What to politicians and pundits is an abstract game is to others the fear of whether they will be able to eat regular meals or charge their electric wheelchair next year. That’s the thing about leaks. Drip-drip long enough and someone will eventually drown.