I listened to Liz Kendall‘s statement to the House of Commons on welfare reform, and in particular on Personal Independence Payments.
It was incredibly hard to work out what she was saying. Her whole statement was a total word salad, which might have made sense to someone who was a complete insider in the Social Security system but not to anyone else.
What I do know is that she is planning to save £5 billion a year on the benefits bill by 2029, all to make sure that Rachel Reeves can comply with the decidedly ropey economic forecast that the Office for Budget Responsibility has obviously put on her desk, all of which will prove to be wrong well before 2029 arrives. Never before in human history have so many people been destined to suffer for the sake of a dodgy spreadsheet.
I also know there will be more reassessments for those claiming PIP and other benefits.
I am also aware, because she said it, that some of the thresholds for being able to claim PIP will increase, but I am unable to interpret what that means in practice based on the information that she supplied.
And it appears that all people under 22 will be required to be in some form of training or education or work to claim - which is absurd, as many cannot be so. It looks like they will be hit hardest.
As an exercise in government, this was truly appalling. It did not communicate, and that is the first task that any minister has.
There was no explanation for the cause of the increase in claims for benefits.
There was no discussion as to why people are sicker now than they have ever been.
The claim that benefit claims are rising solely because work is difficult to access is not supported by evidence, and nor was there any discussion of where the supposed jobs that these people are going to secure might come from even on the agenda.
What I do know is that if I was claiming benefits, I would not know where I stood now as a consequence of this announcement. All I know is that they will be subject to more of the harassment the people are put through when seeking to claim benefits because they need them. That is about it.
I would add that none of this was helped by the fact that Liz Kendall shouted her whole speech from beginning to end. What is she so angry about?
I can say what I am angry about. That is that we have a Labour government that does not care. It clearly does not.
This will be what people remember about Labour. They sacrificed the care, well-being, independence and lives of people simply so that Rachel Reeves could say that her books balanced. A party that thinks that that is their priority is not worthy of being in government.
Update at 16.00:
I was not alone in not working out what this meant. The government did not intend that we should, as this from Steven Swinford of The Times confirms. This is scandalous, and callous:
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I so share your anger. 🙁
“I can say what I am angry about. That is that we have a Labour government that does not care. It clearly does not.”
I beg to differ; we don’t have a Labour government. I don’t know who they are; perhaps they have been taken over by aliens. But I do know they are not Labour.
I can think of no precedent. They are more right wing than David Cameron and George Osborne. How is that even possible? They have no likeness at all to either the Conservatives or Labour pre 1979.
Please can we have a left wing party. Please, before we see violence on the streets. 🙁
Agreed
It is noted that the Paris Commune was founded on this day in 1871.
Her venting of anger might be because its taken ten years for her to finally be in a position to inflict yet more pain on the shirkers and skivers, or the deserving sick, she seems to dislike so much.
She did come last when she challenged Corbyn for the leadership with 4.5%. We’ve had Tory government since. Some people just hold a grudge.
Well said, Seems Labour will be loosing votes . They just list mine. This is disgraceful, so much distress. How much angry shouting by Liz is causing yet more distress, not only people will be pushed into poverty they will loose when they are reassessed. Their carers will loose carers allowance which will also affect their council tax. There are no jobs, there are no employers willing to take on disabled people and support if any is not available from day one.
Disabled people have more costs than non disabled so that is discrimination and cruelty. PIP is hard to get 4 point in one category so many will fail .
Where is the UN
Where is the humanity
Where is the help
Where is the empathy
Humans are better than this
Protest, please, wherever you can
I’m up for marching through Scotland.
Anyone else?
I have noticed a shortage of speak your weight machines in the country. This is immensley sad for those hard of hearing. However, having watched this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsJxEMNvQzA
it would seem that the current gov has redeployed many speak your weight machines into the House of Commons where they pretend to be ministers and pretend to have concerns about poor people, disabled people, etc. When oh when will the Uk be governed by humans not poorly programmed speak your weight machines. As for the Kendall machine – a seaside resort is missing you & Starmer has a walk on part as the chief dalek in the next Dr Who – please please accept & let the country be governed by humans.
🙂
One other thing. Most MPs don’t give a stuff. If they did, they would have been in the chamber. But the video shows it is barely @ 25 – 30%.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsJxEMNvQzA
This tells you all you need to know about large numbers of LINO MPs and the tories (well we know they don’t care). They don’t care about their constitutents, they don’t care.
LINO shaping up to lose every single by election between now and 2029.
Agreed
They just do not care
I was very politically active from 2011 onwards for the Equality Trust. I used to go to meetings with the constituency MPs of my region and present the evidence about the astronomical high inequality we were experiencing and all its costs.
I started off quite nervous because I was thinking “oh I’m meeting this really important person and I really need to know my stuff”. After a few meetings I started coming away thinking “I knew more than they did” and “I’m sorry but they weren’t very impressive at all”. In fact to be honest the only MP that I met who seemed quite clever was a Tory…
Sad, but sometimes true.
The best brain I have met in an MP is John Redwood – but totally misguided
Caroline Lucas was quite good
Fundamentally, if it is reducing the benefits bill by £5bn/year then it is reducing the amounts available by a non-trivial amount. In protecting various groups, that means it is concentrated on significant cuts to a few.
While the proposed under 22’s restriction was a surprise that’s been widely noted, the savings will likely be in 2 areas – the replacement for Universal Credit with Limited Capacity for Work Related Activity being about £200/month less (although apparently protecting pre-April 2026 recipients with a top-up), and removing the £72.65-£108.55 daily living element from many with a range of more modest needs.
What those without disabilities (or a child or partner with a disability) don’t generally fully understand is the range of additional expenses incurred.
With respect to the increase in younger adults on disability benefits, in particular for mental health, perhaps more thought needs to be given to how to address that rather than effectively condemning young people as ‘soft’. It took about 4 years for my daughter to get diagnosed with FND, through cycle after of cycle of referrals at no doubt significantly more expense than getting adequate evaluation early on. This allowed the condition to worsen as no adequate support was provided.
Others with mental health issues similarly struggle to get the support they need, with the result that their conditions worsen and ultimately cost society more. For example, someone with depression may be pointed to self-refer to a CBT-based group that provides support. When someone has struggled to work up the energy to seek help, effectively giving them a leaflet and closing the door does little to ensure that they get the support they need. If CBT is not suitable (e.g. because the cause is still present in the person’s life), then I’ve known someone get signed off from that course of treatment without any other treatment being identified or pursued. They were simply left to get on with it. The result, perhaps not unsurprisingly, included paramedics and police attending a mental health crisis and a further increase in the cost of care and reduction in likely ability to fund themselves.
What a true Labour government should be looking at is not demonising the disabled. It should be looking at providing adequate preventative and supportive mental health treatment promptly to reduce NHS costs and disability claims. Timely, effective care costs less in the long run. Austerity has worsened outcomes, saving money in the short term but creating more problems over time. More austerity cannot be the solution.
Much to agree with
Yet again, austerity is unbelievably expensive. No wonder the Government is short of money… it is all wasted on preventable crises.
CBT implies that a person can unmake their depression by changing their thoughts. That may work for some but I know from personal experience that depression has a physical root cause – usually located in the heart. I discovered this through Classical Chinese medicine. And interestingly Western medical science can tell that a person is depressed by observing the performance of their heart.
the sum saved £6? billion.That is a quarter of one percent of GDP.
That must be on the margin of accurate counting.
Seems a trivial sum to trade for the government’s credibility with the public. The City might might see it differently.
It is ludicrous
Justice, we find, means standing with the lowest neighbour, rejecting the worship of wealth or power, and creating structures supportive of all.
I feel so sad that once again our most vulnerable in society suffer the most.
A disgrace that everyone of our MPs were not present today. Let’s ask them why? and what is more important than compassion for our neighbour?
If your MP was not, ask them why?
It’s all flipping Toryspeak
Go for the ‘benefit scroungers’ but not the source of most benefit spending
Promote home economics (balancing the household income) instead of macroeconomics
Kowtow to dictators and undemocratic regimes
Does anyone actually still believe that Starmer is Labour?
No
Starmer has clearly been brought in to do a job and that job is to prepare for war with Russia.
Britain *already* spends the fifth or sixth highest amount in the world on defence (and the 4th highest per capita)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_highest_military_expenditures
If a third world country spent what we spend on its military and produced a force as unfit for purpose as ours, what would we say was going on there?
I very much doubt that was the reason he was brought in
There may have been a plan, but that was not in it, I am sure
What would you say it is?
To deliver hardcore neoliberalism. To beat the left.
It brings to mind my experiences with the DWP; they excel at using confusing language that lacks clarity. They intentionally communicate in a manner that allows them to maintain control, making it difficult for you to contest their statements. I suspect they and Liz Kendall will continue to do so during all these changes, about which we have no clear understanding. We will need to rely on disability and social support organisations to interpret them for us.
I am sure you are right
I didn’t watch or listen to her speech but did follow live reports on the Guardian’s Politics Live.
So it’s good to know I was not the only one who found it totally incomprehensible, even to Richard who – while not an insider – must be more informed than I am about the UK Social Security System.It will leave many recipients hugely stressed for an unknown length of time. And all for what? Disgusting.
And you were right – no response from my Labour MP. Admittedly, that may be because I am non-resident in UK and/or that I said I had not voted for him despite always having voted Labour in the past. But unlike many in LINO, I still care about the well-being of my fellow citizens and the general state of the land of my birth.
We now know the lack of information was deliberate, which is staggering.
If Liz Kendal had the slightest empathy, she would have realised that she had an audience of vulnerable, anxious welfare claimants, already struggling and feeling threatened and undervalued.
She would not then have harangued and hectored them, because that is what she did today, with her delivery, let alone with the vacuous and dishonest content.
Nowhere did she address the question of what might be causing rising levels of unemployment and/or physical and mental health, especially for young people, unless, like Helen Whateley she felt that the welfare payments themselves were causing the ill health?
Did she not notice that we have just come through a Covid pandemic, with long lasting and severe effects on both mental and physical health?
I fear that for some people listening today, Liz Kendal’s tirade will have seemed directly threatening, vindictive and aggressive. I hope that they don’t do anything desperate.
John McDonnell pointed out the truth that all this vitriolic dishonesty targeting the poor was to “save” £5bn on total government spending, without troubling the wealthy for more taxes. Of course it was really to save Rachel Reeves’s fiscal rules and allow the Chancellor to carry on obsessing about growth, while doing everything possible to destroy the UK economy.
What a despicable performance!
Agreed
She showed what she’s all about the other week when she said some sickness and disability claimants are “taking the mickey”.
Those words are ALL that some people will here. It already appeals to their prejudices after decades of media programming. The vast majority of fit and able people have no idea how the sickness and disability benefit system works unless they know someone who’s been through it.
In the 1950s, Nye Bevan asked “How can wealth persuade poverty to use its political freedom to keep wealth in power? Here lies the whole art of Conservative politics in the 20th century.”
Well the answer is the relentless promotion of resentment and mistrust. In a country with a couple of million people sick or disabled all it needs is 0.1% of claims to be fraudulent and bingo you’ve got stories you can post in the media each week to slowly undermine trust in the system. It’s about getting people to think that there is some other group of people out there on “welfare” who is “taking” from them and getting them to forget that they or someone they know might need the system one day.
The fight for a proper social safety net is now on and when it’s won, those newspapers and TV programmes who pushed this agenda need to be made to account for themselves.
Disenfranchisement is key to their campaign
That is also working
Callous doesn’t even begin to cover describing what this so called government is doing with PIP. It won’t encourage more people into work. It will encourage less to do so and will probably cause many to have to give up work because they cannot afford the additional costs without the support that PIP provides. PIP is not an out of work benefit and yet this government seems to be using it as a reason why people who get it do not work.
Also, I’m drawing the following conclusions in how this government thinks – mental ill-health/disabilities are not important and neither is the health of young people. Maybe they should try to find out what is actually going on and deal with the actual causes rather than just peddle the myth that people are soft or lazy or gaming the system. Maybe they should ensure people can get treated better and earlier. And maybe, just maybe, try and improve things for everyone.
As a society, we should be proud that we provide a safety net that will ensure that people are looked after and have a decent and diginified life should they need support due to ill health (be that mental or physical), neurodivergency, losing your job or anything else that requires support. Yet, for some in the government, the media and the public at large, it has become a national sport to demonise, villify and belittle those in receipt of that safety net and portray them as scroungers and skivers rather than people that just need support and, dare I say it, compassion and understanding.
Craig