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.
Cutting the benefits bill is a goal of every government. The pressure of state finances meant it was particularly likely that this one would try to do it. Like much of Labour’s platform, ministers are juggling measures that could hit them politically with the hope it delivers results in years to come. This isn’t an easy task, and benefits could be a particularly sharp example as they try to balance the Left and Right of their own party. That’s before getting to the knottiness of a problem that previous governments have targeted, but failed to budge.
John Oxley is a corporate strategist and political commentator. His Substack is Joxley Writes.
Mr_John_Oxley
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Subscribemaking it harder to languish on state support.
Does that mean he’s going to reform the Civil Service?
made me LOL
I’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.
Yes, I’m going to be stealing that too.
Of course he knows his hands will be tied since Rachel from customer services will have seen to it that there will be no jobs for them to go to.
In fact in 12 months there are likely to be far more people languishing on state support only not out of choice
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.
The Tories are the failures on Benefits crackdown, they increased benefits rather than crackdown on them.
They have left a massive mess for a Labour Govt to deal with, what an indictment of the Tory party.
Funny starmer didnt mention this in his manifesto then ?
The problem isn’t really that benefits are too high, as in most cases many would struggle to get by on much less (yeas there are exceptions, but most beneficiaries aren’t living the life of Riley).
It’s the fact that wages are so low and stagnant that for those at the bottom there’s little point in working
Why pray is that
Numerous reasons, immigration being a big one
The main one
with a minimum wage of over £12 that makes the annual minimum wage for a 40 hr week with normal paid holidays over £25, 000 a year.
Problem is the taxes on that are around £4000.
But the killer is housing costs. These are so high that someone on quite modest benefits can be much better off with housing allowances.
So the worker pays for his rent and council tax out of his net £21000. And then pays to get to work – needs a car or similar. The net effect is he gets around £1000 a month for 40 hours net.
The chap on benefits and housing allowance isnt that much worse off .
‘In July’s general election, Labour picked up plenty of votes from the Right’. Is that actually correct? They got 33.7% of the vote on a low turnout. I thought they won by default because many of the ‘Right’ sat on their hands or voted for Reform. It makes me distrust all the rest of the analysis in this article
The specific issue is Sickness benefit rather than Benefits per se. The way the Tories ran the system it encouraged more into sickness benefit than job seekers. That needs a correction both for the health of the nation and for the health of many of the recipients who end up in the classic poverty-trap where they are encouraged to perpetuate a degree of learned helplessness. Improving the pay of the low paid was part of the thinking on encouraging work and reducing the trap, but it alone is not a panacea.
As Article outlines this is a difficult navigation, but can’t be avoided. An interesting trend is that likes of France, Germany, Benelux experienced similar increase in sickness benefit pressure on welfare budgets during and post pandemic. However the trend has corrected back there but not here in the UK. That does suggest this is something we’ve done to discourage work others haven’t to same degree. Won’t labour it here, but v marked difference with what happens in Germany if you lose your job and the support you then get to retrain etc and in the UK. At the moment if you try to retrain but in doing so make yourself unavailable for a low skill job you lose all benefit support. Thus you get trapped. It may be it’s things like that have to be part of a broader review.
Lots of folks who’ve never experienced the poverty trap and probably had quite a few advantages they gloss over can tend towards judgmentally pontificating on this subject. Addressing the real problem though requires some detailed understanding and complexity in solution
No it won’t harm Labour as they won’t actually do anything about cutting benefits.
Lazy people do not vote. The idea that all those on benefits are voting labour is unlikely.