'It’ll be the usual suspects who suffer.' Guy Smallman/Getty Images
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.
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.
The author unconsciously gives the game away when he protests that those “deemed too ill to work will soon find themselves employable by government decree”.
Deemed: judged, regarded.
Work: engaged in a physical or mental activity.
It is an insult to those who genuinely are incapable of engaging in physical or mental activities for the state to judge more than 4 million people are now unable to engage in physical or mental activity.
The numbers are telling. In just 1 year the number of benefit awards has risen by a staggering 9%. There has been no war or epidemic in the last year increasing incapacity. The only explanation is there’s been an increase in the “deeming” of disability over and above the underlying change in actual disability.
What could possibly incentivise those capable of mental or physical activity to apply for higher incapacity benefits…?
What sort of sick empathy is it to deem those who are capable of far more as so incapacitated that they are entirely incapable of any mental or physical capacity?
Reasons like “I have anxiety” and “that’s not the sort of job I want” isn’t an excuse. I’ve entirely had enough of socialism after the last 10 years having seen myself as on the left most of my life. Rise or fall by your own efforts. The list of what you are entitled to and what the world owes you is a blank sheet of paper.
Welfare is not an entitlement. It’s a system for helping only those who absolutely cannot help themselves. Not a buffer for people who can’t be bothered or think themselves above certain jobs. If you were above it it wouldnt be on your radar in the first place.
Whilst it’s laudable that you’ve come to your senses, why does it take yet another example of socialism failing – after every other example has failed – for sense to arrive? Why are many people incapable of understanding the lessons of history, and more importantly, human nature, from the outset?
It’s sheer arrogance. Always the same with the Left, far too arrogant to think they may not be right, until they are personally affected, then suddenly they see the light, but sadly that doesn’t undo the damage their mindless arrogance has supported formerly.
I’m going to say something controversial here, for which I anticipate a plethora of downvotes. But it feels important to me.
I salute the gen Z’s who say “I have anxiety” and “that’s not the sort of job I want”. I salute them for the following reasons.
The times have changed. Priorities have changed. Why should anyone have to do a job they hate? Our grandparents did, and many died young. What a waste of the precious gift of a life, to use it up in meaningless tasks. Yes, you have to earn your keep and pay your bills (although most Gen Z’s can never aspire to own their own house unless they inherit the money to buy one).
Even though I am a healthy baby boomer, I notice that I feel physically unwell these days when I find myself in a situation that is uncongenial. Maybe I’m being a wimp, or maybe the Gen Z’s are articulating a reality that we will all find ourselves in.
The world the Gen Z’s have grown up into is what has emerged from the platform laid down by previous generations. They are questioning the constraints that we took as part of the furniture of our world, just as the 1990s saw a questioning of the infallibility of the medical profession, the church and more.
I don’t know what this means for the state welfare system, but it is my belief that something has shifted and our social structures have yet to catch up.
Grandparents did jobs they didn’t like because they knew it would improve their lot in life. You could tolerate doing an unenjoyable job if you knew it would lead to you owning your own home and your family being much more financially comfortable later in life.
However with house prices now climbing ever further out of reach, there’s little incentive to stick out a job you don’t enjoy. If your financial situation is never going to improve then what’s the point?
Financial logic hasn’t shifted. Your expectations that others must pay has.
They should think about contributing to their society. And that would be learning some work skills and discipline for a while, then devoting some extra time to continuing education to reorientate themselves in the career they prefer. This sickness benefit phenomenon is an indication of the excess individualism of a lost culture.
Of course there is some justification for GenZ to be anxious and want better. What isn’t justified is asking others to pay them to do nothing.
I’m going to say something controversial here, for which I anticipate a plethora of downvotes. But it feels important to me.
I salute the gen Z’s who say “I have anxiety” and “that’s not the sort of job I want”. I salute them for the following reasons.
The times have changed. Priorities have changed. Why should anyone have to do a job they hate? Our grandparents did, and many died young. What a waste of the precious gift of a life, to use it up in meaningless tasks. Yes, you have to earn your keep and pay your bills (although most Gen Z’s can never aspire to own their own house unless they inherit the money to buy one).
Even though I am a healthy baby boomer, I notice that I feel physically unwell these days when I find myself in a situation that is uncongenial. Maybe I’m being a wimp, or maybe the Gen Z’s are articulating a reality that we will all find ourselves in.
The world the Gen Z’s have grown up into is what has emerged from the platform laid down by previous generations. They are questioning the constraints that we took as part of the furniture of our world, just as the 1990s saw a questioning of the infallibility of the medical profession, the church and more.
I don’t know what this means for the state welfare system, but it is my belief that something has shifted and our social structures have yet to catch up.
“Why should anyone have to do a job they hate?”
For money, for continuity of employment, for the habit of working, that’s why. All the while doing what you can to improve your prospects for the future either in that job or outside of it. The alternative of leeching off people who do work and do have a sense of responsibility is to disgrace yourself more than anything.
I’m going to say something controversial here, for which I anticipate a plethora of downvotes. But it feels important to me.
I salute the gen Z’s who say “I have anxiety” and “that’s not the sort of job I want”. I salute them for the following reasons.
The times have changed. Priorities have changed. Why should anyone have to do a job they hate? Our grandparents did, and many died young. What a waste of the precious gift of a life, to use it up in meaningless tasks. Yes, you have to earn your keep and pay your bills (although most Gen Z’s can never aspire to own their own house unless they inherit the money to buy one).
Even though I am a healthy baby boomer, I notice that I feel physically unwell these days when I find myself in a situation that is uncongenial. Maybe I’m being a wimp, or maybe the Gen Z’s are articulating a reality that we will all find ourselves in.
The world the Gen Z’s have grown up into is what has emerged from the platform laid down by previous generations. They are questioning the constraints that we took as part of the furniture of our world, just as the 1990s saw a questioning of the infallibility of the medical profession, the church and more.
I don’t know what this means for the state welfare system, but it is my belief that something has shifted and our social structures have yet to catch up.
“Why should anyone have to do a job they hate?”
For money, for continuity of employment, for the habit of working, that’s why. All the while doing what you can to improve your prospects for the future either in that job or outside of it. The alternative of leeching off people who do work and do have a sense of responsibility is to disgrace yourself more than anything.
Do you really need to repeat yourself three times?
I heard of one poor chap, THREE MONTHS short of retirement age, being put through hell because he wasn’t trying hard enough to find a job. Think about it: he applied. Closing date for applications a fortnight later. Shortlisting another fortnight. That’s six weeks so far. He gets an interview, and his acceptance letter arrives a week later. He then has to wait a week or more for references to be returned.
EIGHT WEEKS before his first day’s work. He needs a couple of weeks to learn the ropes, and BINGO—he’s reached retirement age and quite rightly quits the job. This, more than anything, illustrated the stupidity of the system.
Some of this makes much sense when considered in the abstract. In the real world, paid work does not simply equal engagement in physical or mental activity. It generally means performing your tasks to a high enough standard that it’s profitable to employ you, taking into account things like your how you collaborate with the rest of your team. We may not have a technical epidemic here in UK, but we do have concerning long term crisis in line with your numbers, for example emergency referrals & clinical diagnoses for certain mental health conditions have been rising by over 10% year on year. Not sure it’s going to be a net benefit even on strict economic grounds to have such people forced into the UK workforce. Social contagion is a thing. All this said, of course you have a valid point, there is a balance to be had between a too discriminating & too generous welfare system.
There is no need for those people to be “profit generating” if they are employed in basic public sector functions. It might even be better to just get half of them digging holes – and the other half filling them in. That might also shift their thinking.
Sort of care in the community
The public sector is exactly where the unfit will end up. Short hours, no targets, generous sick pay. The private sector will not want the burden so the tax payer will keep on footing the bill.
Then people would complain that money was being spent on the public sector and nothing was getting done, even worse than is currently the case
Firstly, without sufficient ‘profit generation’, any group will ‘run out of money’, with the consequences depending on what sort of group it is.
It’s obvious that ‘profit making activities’, like manufacturing, need to make a profit so other, necessary, maintenance activities can be financed, like running hospitals, sports centres and mending roads. All are needed to ensure a fully functioning economy in the future.
While not ‘profit centres’, these maintenance activities are ‘cost reduction’ centres, where capital, such as a trained expert, or a road, can be kept productive, and not discarded due to ‘ill health’. Fortunately, our economic system allows these to run in a similar manner, but, instead of ‘increasing profit’, their aim should be to ‘reducing costs’. And the public can see, with taxes at their highest for over 70 years, that this is not being done.
You don’t analyse why diagnoses and referrals for mental health conditions have been rising. You just accept it as a given and inevitable.
I’ve done a lot of work in state/council houses over the years and there’s a lot of truth in what you say. Whilst there are inevitably people who take the pi$$ (bad back was always a good one) the bulk of them in those houses are simply unemployable. Most are pleasant enough people but they simply wouldn’t be profitable to employ due to a lack of intellectual and mental capabilities, even if those problems are relatively low level.
Indeed. There’s dignity in work and if some can be moved to subsidized or workfare type employment which I think Ian Barton is suggesting, that might be great. But there’s going to be limits to such schemes, reaslistically letting many stay on benefits is likely the best alternative.
I’m going to say something controversial here
But did you really need to say it three times running?
No analysis of why there are so many ‘disabled’ people, when workplaces have never been safer and work has never been physically less demanding.
Hasn’t the big increase come in people with mental health conditions rather than physical disability, though? While I’m reasonably sympathetic to their plight, I don’t understand why they can get as much in benefits as people with severe physical disabilities, whose cost of living is often considerably more than a non-disabled person’s.
This is not a party political issue. Nor a tribal/class one. Nor something that’s going to be fixed by emotive diatribes like this article.
The welfare system is both broken and failing many of its recipients. This is all well known and understood – and certainly by those it is failing.
It simply cannot be correct that work-preventing illness has massively increased over the past few years. Nor that people can self-certify themselves as too sick to work.
I don’t blame those claiming the benefits here. They have to play the cards they’ve been dealt. They deserve better – even more so than the taxpayers underwriting the current mess.
I am just reading “The Road to 1945” by Paul Addison. This is the story of the growth of Socialism during the war years. The Labour Party used the emergency of war to insist that the working man would not be willing to contribute to the war effort unless the union leaders were in the War Cabinet, helping to make all the decisions. Then, through the war the Conservative leaders (but not Churchill) began to see that the unions had a point. Labour won the general election of 1945 and brought in the social changes, like the NHS.
In 1939, the leaders of the country wore top hats and suits when they went to work. They ate meat, when the poor could not afford it. They had cars and sometimes chauffeurs. They usually ate out in top restaurants. At the beginning of the war, many children were evacuated from poor families in the cities to live in middle class country homes and when they arrived they were often described as verminous, not understanding about general sanitation, never washing, disease-ridden, totally lacking in education, wild, petty-thieving, etc. The difference between the rich and poor was so obvious that when everybody was thrown together in wartime, it was clear. Something had to be done.
Today, poor is described as earning less than a certain percentage of the median wage. So if Elon Musk moved into Wales as a taxpayer (obviously not a real example because he wouldn’t come to Wales and he wouldn’t pay tax) the number of poor people would rise. This is stupid. Today, the poor are not lacking in basic education, unless by choice, have places to live if they want them, have cars and televisions and computers and the latest mobile phones – maybe even foreign holidays. Today the true ‘poor’ are probably those who rely on the old-age-pension.
As an aside, I often see unemployed people (and pensioners) walking their dogs. There are long queues outside our local vets. How much does it cost to keep a big dog? I certainly couldn’t afford one.
To treat all of the poor people who have mental problems, we would need about 1 million new trained psychiatrists. Watch the NHS cope with that one!!
Try a Springer Spaniel, cheap to feed BUT needs 5 miles a day, EVERY day and lives for about 13.5 years.*
Some can even do CPR when required!
*That’s just under 25,000 miles.
Seems to be the case that anyone with any sort of mental issue should not be expected to work. I just do not believe that more than 4 million people fall into this category. Apart from the fact that many are self assessed I know it is possible to have a mental issue and still work effectively. I have suffered from depression for years and while this led to three instances of sickness absences of 6 weeks or so with counselling tools and medication I was able to work and produce good results. It is a crime to leave millions to rot in a state of semi-poverty while employers need workers.
Granted, there has to be a reset which has the aim to encourage and support people to make positive contributions. I agree, the increased numbers of people affected by mental health conditions cannot be ignored. How this is tackled in a fair manner is no easy task. We are ultimately heading towards a bumpy ride where interest groups will have to battle out to protect their level of support. I would however find it incredibly hard to believe that a labour government (no fan of) would abruptly scrap the Limited Capability for Work category which would lead so many into extreme poverty.
Have you ever been suicidal? Or woken up each morning wishing you had not? Please do not compare your experience to that of others.
If the author’s point is that any reform will be botched by the British state, then I’m in full agreement. But, as other posters have more eloquently explained, we can’t just keep throwing money at rapidly growing cohort of people “deemed incapable of work”. It’s demented.
How many pensioners have frozen to death so far this winter?
I believe that changing the rules of the welfare state is the equivalent of moving the deck chairs on the RMS Titanic.
Remember? The welfare state was going to solve poverty. I believe that every welfare-state program Makes Things Worse.
If you read about the UK rape gangs, you find that nearly all the raped girls had no father in the home.
So, experts and politicians and social scientists and Scots rappers: how do we get fathers back into the homes of the lower orders?
They don’t see the problem.
Good government jobs for social workers. And they will vote the right way.
Just have to sacrifice some people that need a hand up. But that’s something they are willing to risk.
My grandfathers dad did a runner and abandoned his family to move in with a new bird at the other end of the country. Have a read of Angela’s Ashes and many blokes moved to England, never to return.
It’s not a new phenomenon
It seems to me that a key element is to revisit the Victorian ‘poor’ definition:
Those who could work, those who choose not to work, those who cannot work
Do we know how many who are fit to work if their circumstances changed? How many choose not to work and claim benefits? How many cannot work? Unless you have a reasonable grasp of the numbers you don’t even know the size of the problem you are trying to fix.
The real issue is not welfare fraud but an huge increase in welfare dependency. Post Covid a significant proportion of the normally working population have found out they can survive on State Welfare payments and avoid the inconvenience of regular work at no significant detriment to their lifestyle . Further, our overworked and hence increasingly elusive GPs are keen to avoid hassle and so are happy to endorse the dubious claims of physical unfitness or mental stress which their customers increasingly make. I am not sure how to stop this vicious circle but I believe the answer is in the hands of the GPs. It seems to me that they usually do what they are paid more money to do. So, give them some achievable targets and pay them to solve the problem. I feel sure they will sort matters out. It could be a very worthwhile vestment.
Worth thinking about how leftist media, including the BBC, would be reacting if the tories did the same.
All of their histrionics about ‘hurting the poor’ is for show. Never let them take the moral high-ground on any issue, because it’s all fake.
With its employer NIC changes causing, or about to cause, tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of job losses, where does Labour think(if that’s not an oxymoron) these people are going to get jobs?
In one breath Labour are supposed to be on the side of the sick, the downtrodden, the poor and unfortunate who come from the working class strata of society. In another they are accused of favouring their core voter in the CS, NHS and the rail unions with inflationary pay rises. Yet another sees them causing harm to pensioners, the mentally unwell and gender confused.
Their recent policies seem to set them against all strata. Unemployment adds to the poor mix, inflation devalues the pay rises and general discretionary spending, hardship engenders mental health and other problems.
An outsider could suspect they are talking themselves out of a job. It’s what Sunak was doing pre July ’24.
‘From each according to their ability’. Is the author saying that all these millions have no ability? None at all? All the encouragement those ‘too anxious to work’ need is to be assigned to a job within their capabilities. Roadside litter picking. What could be better therapy? Fresh air, gentle exercise, like-minded company or solitude, measurable achievement, and a real contribution to society.
Glad someone with fire in their heart has written about this. Prior to Two Tiers rise, I was active in the Labour party. On the left many of us called her Liz Tory. Didn’t realise that would turn out to be a complement!
Life’s not easy. The core group of people who have genuine problems are now swamped by the easy-riders. There’s no solution apart from make it tough for all. The core group suffer, but there’s no way round it. The financial costs and the corrosive social effects of letting easy-riders get away with it are not sustainable. It’s not the government’s fault, or ours. The fault lies with the scroungers.
Can’t seem to post properly.
This article is a parody, right?
‘The author is a Scottish hip-hop artist and social commentator’.Say no more!
I do wonder whether a universal basic income isn’t a possible solution to this. Seeing as something like half the country are already net takers at the tax trough, it’s probably less relatively expensive than you’d think, and with that, do away with all benefits. You’d save the costs of assessing and distributing them, people who couldn’t work would still have an income, and those that actually could but for whom it just isn’t worth it would return to the workforce.
Of course, you’d really have to do something about immigration then.
Its impossible to go from a means tested benefit system to a universal one, because by definition if you have have a pot of money available to pay out as benefits if you spread it over everyone rather than just those at the bottom, each former means tested claimant is going to get less than they used to, because they are sharing with everyone else. And if no one is to lose out then everyone else has to be given the same benefits as those claiming today get. Which even allowing for some of it being taxed back again would be many times the current benefits bill.
And of course there’s the whole housing benefit and sick benefit systems to be taken into account – if you fold all of them into one universal payment you find that the person who is a bit depressed gets the same as a quadriplegic. And the person renting a house in London gets the same as person renting one in Darlington. But if you don’t fold those benefits into the universal system then there’s still a massive incentive to get yourself on those lists, just as there is now.
There just is no way to get from where we are, to a UBI. It cannot be done, outside a tyrannical dictatorship.
To get more people into work and off benefits just scrap income tax below a certain threshold – say £30k
I read that this is a WEF policy: to keep the untermensch fed and housed and quiet!
The British government is not attacking the disabled and people ill with horrible conditions. It is looking at the millions who have not returned to work since the 2020-21 lockdown citing anxiety (20somethings, generally), or so called ‘long COVID’ (those a decade or less from retirement).
To my mind, Liz Kendall has always been Labour’s great hope since the mid-2010s. In fact, I think she is their only hope left now. Though I wish to see her party gone, I wish her all the luck anyway- she just might save her country.
In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread – Genesis 3:19
There are large number of people that scam and lie and avoid working because they just don’t want to, and then they squeeze the British taxpayer ever tighter. If the UK really wants to see some economic growth reducing welfare has to be one of the steps, along with their thousands of steaming piles of regulations. It’s simple if you are taking from society but not contributing then someone else is working to support you while you do nothing, and you have become an exploiter of your fellow man.
There is a place for charity and taking care of the less fortunate but having met many people that are on “disability”, it would be good to remove many of them.