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November 25, 2024 - 4:00pm
There are few things more predictable for a new government than a crackdown on benefits. At the weekend, Labour announced its strategy to fix the problem, with promises of slashing the budget by leading thousands back to work, tackling fraud, and making it harder to languish on state support. In an opinion piece in The Mail on Sunday, Keir Starmer vowed to take a “zero-tolerance” approach to benefits cheats. That this is such a perennial government project points to its difficulty, but Labour will perhaps have its own problems squaring this approach with some of its supporters, both in Parliament and in the wider electorate.
Instinctively, many think of cutting benefits as a Tory policy. Certainly, the Conservatives are usually keen to roll them back, and austerity was marked by swingeing cuts and raising the barriers to claiming benefits. Yet the end of their time in government saw a surge in worklessness, especially among older and sicker workers after Covid-19. This has created a dilemma for Starmer’s party. The benefits bill is growing, and that is hard to square without cuts elsewhere, taxes or borrowing. It is a problem Labour needs to solve in order to relieve fiscal pressure.
Yet it is a politically difficult one for them. Public opinion on benefits is often contradictory. Voters believe that they are too easy to claim, but also that most people getting support deserve it. The top-line figure of the bill is unpopular, yet more people think that benefits are too stingy than too high. Even trickier for Labour is the political breakdown of this, with the party’s 2024 supporters largely split between wanting to relax requirements and make them more stringent.
This is a fairly obvious dynamic. In July’s general election, Labour picked up plenty of voters from the Right, who will generally be sceptical of benefits. Equally, there is a strand of Left-leaning, working-class voters who rankle at working hard for an income which seems only marginally above what others receive in handouts. They have to balance this with voters who rely on benefits and those among the Left-liberal middle classes who support an almost uncritically generous welfare state.
Many in these latter groups backed Labour precisely because they thought Starmer would be less harsh on benefits. They object not just to financial cuts but also to the barriers put in the way of benefits. The last government’s use of sanctions and work coaches, for example, seemed cruel and ripe for rolling back. These voters are not likely to be impressed by Labour playing tough on the issue. Neither are the Labour MPs who spent years arguing against hard Tory lines on benefits and those who claim them.
This all points to the tricky electoral situation Labour finds itself in. The party has to fend off the Right, including Reform UK, but must avoid bleeding votes to the Left. This summer saw politics fragment more than ever before, with Labour losing support to Green, Independent, and Left-wing challengers. Tory unpopularity meant this didn’t stop the party from forming a government, but it could be a more significant challenge at the next election. Haemorrhaging votes from the disappointed Left could split Labour in the same way that Reform challenged the Conservatives, and almost everything Starmer does has to be filtered through that lens.
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SubscribeI’m pretty sure that labour’s stance on benefits is not going to harm it any more than they have managed to harm themselves already . . . Massive taxes on businesses, insane employment regulations, borrowing billions to pay their union mates, giving industry some of the highest energy costs in the world, dealing out irrecoverable damage to the agricultural sector, gearing up to wreck the house rental market, national debt soaring, housing market collapsing, economic growth evaporating – did I miss anything? Frankly tweaking benefits looks little more than an amuse-bouche relative to their already stupendous cornucopia of calamity.
stupendous cornucopia of calamity.
Sorry, I have to steal this for use elsewhere.
making it harder to languish on state support.
Does that mean he’s going to reform the Civil Service?
made me LOL
If Keir Starmer proposes to “get Britain working”, then what does he think that Britain does now? And who will administer these schemes of his and Liz Kendall’s? BlackRock? Our rulers’ corporate paymasters crave the bonded labour that they intend to supply.
As to the sick and disabled, unlike the Health Secretary and the Justice Secretary, Starmer and Kendall both support killing by the NHS on the authority of a judge, so we can all see where their thinking leads. Moreover, Wes Streeting agrees with them about NHS privatisation, so another payday is coming. Companies do not not make political donations. They make investments, on which they expect a return.
A petition is not going to bring about another General Election, but what if it did? How would one vote against all of this? If one meaningfully could not, then what would be the point?
Note to author: on the current evidence anything Keir Starmer does damages Labour. Doing nothing at all for a while might be the best advice.
There are so many false statements and assumptions in the first half of this article that I just gave up on it.
The YouGov survey questions about people’s views on benefits are deliberately skewed to get the answers wanted. There is nothing “contradictory” about the public’s attitude to benefits. Or benefit fraud.
Austerity, swingeing cuts, cruel, … buzzword bingo card completed here.
In any case, Labour has been the party of benefit claimants (and almost anyone else dependent on the state – except pensioners) for a long time now. Which is fair enough – everyone deserves to be represented in Parliament. They can bleat on all they like about “working people”, but no amount of triangulation or obfuscation/word salad is going to fool anyone. And no one’s listening to their poodle media any more.
Labour’s real problem is that it doesn’t actually have broad and solid support. It won by default with an unstable coalition of support that cannot last reality checking.