Herald on Sunday, Sunday National, 9th March 2025.
“We’re the Labour Party. The clue is in the title.”
From time to time, elected representatives of the People’s Party will dip into their party playbook searching for a witty slogan to justify their latest round of benefit cuts.
They almost always end up here – singing the same auld sang about work being the difference between the deserving and the undeserving poor.
Back in January, Sir Keir was bragging to The Sun that he had “the balls to take an axe to Britain’s bloated benefits bill” promising to “be ruthless with cuts if that’s what’s necessary.”
Asked how he would respond if any of his MPs turned out to be “squeamish” about further immiserating already precarious and marginalised people, the PM responded “I love fights”, comparing the Government’s battle to take money off disabled people to the titanic struggle to root Corbynism out of the Labour Party. Who would true valour see, let him come hither.
This weekend, someone in the Labour Government – presumably the Treasury, or Number 10, or Liz Kendall, or one of the little elves and sprites who do her bidding – decided to leak the Starmer government’s social security plans to ITV News.
The headlines already look stark, with cuts totalling £6 billion being in contemplation. The Starmer regime hoping to win political capital by promising yet more crackdowns is the least surprising political development of the year, as is the suggestion that willingness to work is the main moral faultline Labour wishes to draw through Britain’s benefit budget. So far, so unoriginal.
Since the late 1990s, UK governments of successive hues have helped embed the character of the benefits cheat and the underclass of the idle poor in public consciousness. This idee fixe has been used to promote cultures of suspicion and justify the creation of overtly hostile state bureaucracies – armed with sanctions and conditions and surveillance and official humiliation rituals for anyone courageous or desperate enough to seek support from what we laughably describe as our social safety net. The cruelty is the selling point.
But one of the striking features of political debate around benefits in Britain is that it remains stuck in outdated paradigms. You wouldn’t know it from how these issues are represented in much of the press, but one of the most significant social security statistics is that 40% of Universal Credit recipients in the UK are in work, many experiencing in-work poverty. They-re the labouring rather than the workshy poor of public imagination and political rhetoric.
But there’s another newer and nastier strand running through this weekend’s leaks from Liz Kendall-s department, which can-t just be written off as a 2025 replay of New Labour’s policies in the late. ITV reports that Labour is planning 5bn in Treasury clawbacks from disabled people by changing the rules on who qualifies for Personal Independence Payments. PIP is a benefit which is not currently linked to work, which isn’t taxed or means-tested – and which is designed to help support people with the additional living costs associated with their disability. These are often considerable.
As the disability equality charity Scope points out: “PIP exists because life costs more if you are disabled. Those costs won’t disappear if the Government squeezes eligibility. Many disabled people use PIP to get to and from work and to pay for essential equipment like mobility aids. Making it harder to get benefits will just push even more disabled people into poverty, not into jobs.”
ITV reports that Labour are also eyeing real-term cuts by freezing PIP payments next year, allowing inflation to gnaw away disabled people’s purchasing power to support essential services. This is reflected in the mooted reforms to Universal Credit. Kendall wants to raise the basic rate for folk in work or searching for work – while imposing cuts on for those who are judged unfit to enter the labour market.
Kendall told The Guardian that “the Tories would have you believe that everybody on benefits, the sick and disabled, are skivers and scroungers. It’s just not true.” But dig a little into the Work and Pensions Secretary’s rhetoric, and her message is – sure, not everybody is scrounging and skiving, but a lot of folk are and we’re cutting your benefits to put them under pressure.
Because some people are claiming they’re unfit to work speciously – Labour have decided to make people who are truly and authentically unfit for duty worse off, pour encourages les autres. Menacing benefit backsliders into salaried posts is more of a priority to the DWP than the British state properly supporting people with real challenges.
During the last Tory government, “nudge” policies were briefly in vogue. The Cabinet Office even established a faddish Nudge Unit tasked with applying the findings of behavioural psychology to rearrange the population’s incentive structures.
What Kendall is proposing isn’t so much a nudge as a shove – it’s ratcheting up financial incentives for people to remain in the “work search” category of Universal Credit, even if they labour under a health condition or live with a disability.
Alongside the suggestion that many benefit applicants are bogus – or “-“taking the mickey,” to use her phrase – Kendall justifies all this under the guise of a more progressive argument – that too many disabled people currently have no alternatives to state support because they’re inadequately supported to enter the labour market and develop a career because their capabilities have been overlooked and their resilience and potential under-estimated.
She takes this germ of truth to a dark place – essentially suggesting that people with significant physical and mental health problems can be inspired out of a culture of dependency by threats and menaces. The benefit cuts are guaranteed to materialise, but the promised support? You can understand the scepticism.
One of the best things about being in education should be the ability to be s urprised. Almost a decade and a half ago now, I was studying at Glasgow University. I took a course called the Disabling Society. To be honest with you, the class wasn’t my first preference.
As a 20-something-year-old who’d mainly been through a legal education, I hadn’t applied my mind much at all to the phenomenon of disability in modern Britain – but railroaded by the limits of the academic timetable, I turned up in the classroom at best moderately interested in the subject matter not expecting to have my worldviews significantly challenged.
I was wrong. If you are lucky, there are sometimes moments in your education when you feel your perspective on the social world turn on its axis, all the more when the revelation ambushes you unexpectedly. This class felt like one of those turning points.
At the heart of the discussion was what-s called the social model of disability. Consider a simple scenario. A wheelchair user is enrolled in higher education. Their classes are organised in a third-floor venue in an 18th-century building. There is no lift. They cannot attend lectures. Ask yourself, what-s the problem here? This student is clearly missing an education opportunity, but why?
Disability studies scholars point out that historically – the answers to these questions have focused on the physical characteristics of the disabled person themselves rather than the social choices and assumptions embedded in our environments and institutions. You can-t get up the stairs. In this medical model of disability, the problems are understood as personal and physical, embodied in you rather than being structural and social.
Understood this way, the reason our hypothetical disabled student can’t attend their classes is because of the physical limits to their particular mobility, rather than the built environment which reflects an inarticulate but potent assumption that nobody experiencing these kinds of physical constraints will ever be sat in the lecture hall.
The social model of disability demands a shift in focus. Rather than seeing the problem here as individual or medical, it invites us to think about how social choices – in attitudes, physical environments, transport systems, institutional rules – erect the disabling barriers faced by people living with different mental and physical impairments. The social model turns the telescope right the way around, magnifying the way human societies erect disabling barriers.
Another key insight that lecturers like Jo Ferrie, Nicola Burns and Nick Watson gave us was that if we live long enough, disability is in all of our destinies. As the Resolution Foundation pointed out last week, “ill-health and disability are rising across the population – not just among benefits claimants.”
“Many of the drivers of rising spend sit outside of the benefits system – and so too will the solutions.”
Andrew Tickell 