The coming benefit cuts will create more negativity for Labour. Why don’t they get that?

Martin Shipton

In 2016 the Ken Loach-directed film I, Daniel Blake won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival.

It was a compelling piece of social criticism typical of Loach, and of a type we see too little of: as TS Eliot wrote, “Human kind cannot bear very much reality”.

Far from the escapist fantasies beloved of many cinema goers, Loach’s film exposed the cruelty of benefit cuts, especially as they affected people who were unable to work.

Its release seems a long time ago. Jeremy Cotbyn was the Labour leader at the time and Theresa May was the Tory Prime Minister.

Barbarity

Corbyn told May in the House of Commons that she should watch the film, as he questioned her about the fairness of the welfare system. He named an ex-serviceman who had died without food after welfare sanctions, and said it was time to end the “institutional barbarity against, often, very vulnerable people.”

May defended work capability assessment with sanctions, and told Corbyn the Labour Party was “drifting away from the views of Labour voters”.

Today Corbyn’s successor as Labour leader, Keir Starmer, is adopting the same approach as Theresa May did in 2016 – leading the charge to cut benefits, with an announcement expected on Tuesday.

Starmer’s modus operandi may be subtly different – he suggests to the disabled that he’s doing them a favour by cutting their benefits and giving them the chance to work – but the outcome is the same. If they don’t sort themselves out, a fair proportion of them will be facing penury.

May’s answer to Corbyn was instructive. The implication was that the majority of Labour’s own voters saw disabled benefit claimants as scroungers who were cheating the system. In fact Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall fed into the “scroungers” narrative in January when she said some claiming sickness and disability benefits were “taking the mickey”.

By choosing to stress such a point, and in particular by failing to produce figures indicating the (limited) extent of fraud, she was in effect inviting people to exaggerate the level of abuse.

If, as May suggested, Labour voters had little sympathy with disabled or sick benefit claimants, it’s because of the relentless claimant-bashing that has gone on for many years in the pages of right-wing tabloids and more recently on social media. In that respect it’s similar to the bile spewed out over decades against the EU that made the Brexit vote possible.

Yet what is the truth about Britain’s disabled? Are they really able to live the life of Riley on the back of undeserved state handouts?

Myth

Comparisons with other advanced countries in fact demonstrate that the value of welfare payments generally in the UK are anything but generous.

The BBC economics correspondent Andy Verity has drawn on official statistics to explode the right-wing myth.

He writes: “Are we a ‘high welfare’ country where we pay people too much not to work, meaning the government could save billions by slashing welfare, no harm done? Erm – not exactly. Of 34 advanced economies, we’re third from the bottom.

“As highlighted by the think tank founded by John Maynard Keynes and others – the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) – the poorest regions of the UK are now worse off than the poorest in countries such as Malta or Slovenia.

“The amount we spend on welfare (benefits, state pensions etc) is not high compared to many other countries and shrank sharply as a share of the economy in the austerity decade 2010-2019 – in spite of an ageing population.

“While the amount spent on universal credit etc rose at the start of the pandemic, Rishi Sunak’s decision when it was over to withdraw the £20 a week booster hit six million of the UK’s poorest families hard. The payment hasn’t kept up with the price of essentials like food.

“As NIESR’s analysis shows, many benefit recipients will be left with a shortfall, forcing them to beg or borrow from friends or relatives to obtain the basics. This is one big reason for the rapid growth of food banks under austerity.

“The freezing of housing benefit combined with rapidly rising private rents means that it simply isn’t enough to house someone in the vast majority of homes.

“The New Economics Foundation – a progressive think tank – has published analysis suggesting that the government has been downplaying the effect of its proposals to cut the additional payments received by people unable to work due to disabilities or poor health.

“It says halving the gap would result in cutting an extra £3bn in payments to ill and disabled people – taking £146 a month from each person – and with planned cuts to personal independence payments, it could reduce support for ill and disabled people by between £7.5bn and £9bn.

“We know that since the pandemic, there’s been a huge rise in long-term illness, including mental illness. Another big factor is Long Covid. To many recipients, cuts on that scale could feel a lot like they’re being punished for the misfortune of getting sick.”

Election campaign

The imposition of the scale of cuts that are apparently being contemplated is not a good position from which to launch an election campaign. We’re a year away from the next Senedd election, but many local authorities in England will be staging elections in May.

A poll for Electoral Calculus is suggesting that Reform is on course to win control of eight councils including Doncaster – whose local MPs include Labour Cabinet Ministers Ed Miliband and John Healey – and County Durham, where I used to live and work.

Although Durham County Council was a Labour stronghold for many years, the party was sent into opposition at the last election in 2021, and the authority is currently run by a Liberal Democrat and Independent coalition.

The county has many similarities with the south Wales Valleys, and seems ripe for a Reform UK takeover.

County Durham, like our Valleys, is a classic “left behind” post-industrial area. There’s considerable irony in the fact that, as Labour adopts right-wing policies and is perceived to abandon the disadvantaged, whose interests the party was formed to represent, many who see themselves as abandoned are turning to an even more right-wing party which will secretly regard them with contempt.

The negative rhetoric of Reform and others like them can only be defeated by politicians who offer tangible improvements to people’s lives, political honesty and a credible but inspiring narrative.

The clock is ticking.