This Is It

We told you so. The buyer’s remorse on The Guardian is delicious, from Nesrine Malik:

I reckon it’s time to call it. The threat to freeze personal independence payment (Pip) disability benefits shows that the fears voiced in the run-up to the general election were well founded. Keir Starmer’s government, cratering in the polls, with Reform snapping at its heels, is in serious trouble. Weekend reports suggested the latest cuts are being reconsidered after a backlash from Labour’s own MPs, charities and campaigners. It’s all vintage Labour, swinging between collected callousness and then flustered chaos.

Prior to the election, sceptics were told to keep the faith. Focus on the prize of getting the Tories out. It’s all three-dimensional chess, to whisper to rightwing voters. Starmer’s caution and inconsistency is only pragmatism, which could turn to radicalism in office.

But you don’t hear that much any more. The radicalism not only has not transpired, but something else, something cold and stomach-sinking, has emerged: a government clear in its intent on making savings by targeting the most vulnerable in society – the sick, disabled people, mentally ill people. This isn’t simply a locking in of the austerity state Labour inherited, but an extension of it.

Cuts from those who need it most have been rebranded as “fairness”, in a sort of performative determination to show that this government is not a soft touch, no siree. It is a move that has pushed 1 million older people into skipping meals after their winter fuel benefit was cut. One that has maintained the two-child limit. And one where immigration raids closely resembling those carried out at the height of the Tory crackdowns are the norm. A choice has been made to not launch a more fair and progressive tax system, but to ringfence the rentier class instead – as everyone downstream from asset-rich capital is pummelled. As David Edgerton noted, the “party hates Tories, but it seems to love Tory panaceas”.

And on that, Wes Streeting recently called Labour’s record so far a “painful” watch for the Conservative party, as the government is doing all the things the Tories “only ever talked about”. “What is the point of the Conservative party?” he said the public must be asking. The corollary of that question is: if the government is doing work the Conservatives could only dream of, then what is the point of the Labour party?

Well, the point, it seems, is to be as not-Labour as possible, and that purpose was fashioned in a battle against those on the left of the party, rather than its desire to be the canny custodian of leftwing politics once in power. It is as simple as that. The argument that the party shields its passion for equality and redistributive politics no longer holds when there is no election to fight, and when all the signs and sounds coming from the government strongly suggest a self-congratulatory steeliness. “Pearl clutching” is how one government insider is said to have described some MPs’ concerns about cuts (with echoes of the “shaking off the fleas” comment from another insider in 2023). You could try to divine what is in the party leadership’s soul and still hope against hope that there are some residual values that are being thwarted by poor formulation of solutions. But does it really matter any more? The purpose of a system is what it does, not what it claims to do.

There is another, not mutually exclusive, explanation for the party’s troubles – those in charge are arrogant and just not very good. The “freebies” scandal is a clear example of this exceptionalism and a poor ability to read the room. For a government that came to power in a nation traumatised by Tory corruption, refusing to apologise because actions were technically not illegal does not exactly signal the arrival of an administration that isn’t just as out of touch – cutting benefits while going to concerts and receiving nice clothes. And now, with spectacular timing, it emerges that the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, reportedly accepted free tickets to a Sabrina Carpenter concert earlier this month.

Beyond that, there is in Starmer particularly an almost eerie vacancy – not so much not reading the room as not being in the room at all. He squares up to crises by offering up yet more “sleeves rolled up” platitudes. And yet, despite Labour’s poor performance, the party still seems to benefit from what is a defining feature of English political culture – memory holing, where facts from the past are suppressed, erased or forgotten. The goalposts shift, again and again. Expectations diminish, again and again. Hopes for a renaissance rise, again and again. Maybe another “reset” will turn things around.

Perhaps we can look away from domestic trials and hail in Starmer, finally, a statesman on the global stage who can keep Donald Trump on side while supporting Ukraine. Starmer has “found purpose abroad” that could unlock the purpose he needs at home, too. He could even “use his new foreign policy to kindle radical domestic reform”. This Starmer has been right there, for months, years now, yet still attempts are made to conjure up another Starmer around him. The fact that he is a leader described in a damning book as a passenger by some in his own party – remote and broadly a vehicle for the ambitions of others – was explosive ordnance that just didn’t go off.

The price of maintaining the illusion that the penny will finally drop, that leaders will come good, is high – and is never paid by the failures who flee the scene then reappear with lucrative columns, podcasts and consultancies. It is paid by the citizens who inherit the consequences of political failure, and cannot escape them. Today, with Reform waiting in the wings, the price of not raising the alarm on a Labour party that will not change course will be nothing short of catastrophic.

I am reminded of a saying I first heard on the radio after Trump’s 2016 presidential victory, and which has since become a slogan among young activists: “You get to die of old age, but I’ll die of climate change.” The worst that can happen to Labour is that it succumbs to electoral defeat, while the worst for everyone else is having to battle with an extreme rightwing movement that, with the implosion of the Tory party, is a historically new, poisonous and advancing force.

There is unlikely to be a continuation of the cycle, where Labour hands over to Tories and we begin again, hoping that this time the status quo can be managed with whatever new cast of characters, with the illusion of salvation on the horizon. Brexit, “growth”, “securonomics” – the tricks are running out. The cycle was always a spiral. After this there is only the abyss. This is it.

To Zoe Williams:

The fashionable thing is to decry the government’s “messaging”. Last week, it was signalling a plan to slash disability benefits. Jo White, the MP for Bassetlaw, was bemoaning the fact that people’s “aspirations are so low”. By the weekend, the health secretary, Wes Streeting, was blaming the numbers of disabled people on an overdiagnosis of mental health conditions. Keir Starmer, however, was rumoured to be considering a U-turn on the cuts – apparently he hadn’t been expecting so much opposition from the cabinet and backbenchers. Why not, one might ask? They are, after all, members of the Labour party. Surely they would be uncomfortable with a plan that sounded exactly, to the letter, as if it had come from the Conservatives?

Fine, it doesn’t look like the most expert job of managing the optics. But it has also left as many as 10 million people sleepless with worry, because the world this government describes bears no relation to the reality they are living in. As of last October, there were 3.6 million personal independence payment (Pip) claimants. Eligibility is stringent. The idea – last floated by Tony Blair, whose transformation into know-nothing golf-club pontificator is still startling after all this time – that we are “medicalising the ups and downs of life”, handing out diagnoses and sickness benefits to people who just feel a bit sad, is fanciful. According to the 2021 census, there are 5.8 million unpaid carers in the UK, 1.2 million of those living in poverty, 400,000 in deep poverty. A report by the Social Metrics Commission found that, of the 14.9 million people living in poverty in the UK in 2021-22, 8.6 million were in families that included a disabled person.

In any one of those families, there will probably be a carer who would love to work, but can’t get the support. They can’t find a job that will work around medical appointments, or school holidays, or the shambolic special educational needs and disabilities provision of many local authorities, or they can’t get a place at a day centre, or get respite, or there simply aren’t enough hours in the day.

Carers UK estimated last year that if every unpaid carer in the country decided to cease caring tomorrow and joined the “productive” economy instead, that would cost the state £184bn a year. In other words, the cost of disability is already being shouldered mainly by disabled people and their loved ones. The state owes these families an enormous debt of gratitude as a baseline. On top of that, it owes them better services, so that those who want to work can do so; it owes them better services anyway, if it wants to count itself modern and humane; and it owes them the basic decency of recognition.

What the government delivers instead is a narrative that sounds bland, but is actually gaslighting on a large scale. It describes a country in which poverty is caused by low aspiration and disability is a choice, by people who simply aren’t robust enough to be well. This country doesn’t exist. It describes a world that can’t afford for people to be chronically ill or disabled, when the opposite is true: we cannot wish away those things.

In offering patchy, unsympathetic, parsimonious support, the state only traps more people in poverty, deprivation which it then performatively ignores. If you are reliant on Pip, it is truly terrifying to witness, but it should terrify all of us, because a government that can front out this kind of denial is one that is not listening, not curious, not realistic and not humane.

To Polly Toynbee herself, still desperate to hope:

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.

Oh, some of us believe that only too profoundly.