Labour is cutting disability benefits to balance Rachel Reeves' budget, while handing billions in tax breaks to the rich. I explain why this is morally bankrupt, and why Labour's 70 MPs who backed down have failed the poorest.
This is the audio version:
This is the transcript:
Labour is revising its plans for disability benefits, and it's about time it did.
120 or more of its own MPs objected to the plans that Keir Starmer and Liz Kendall had to cut personal independence payments for some of the most vulnerable people in the UK, and I was angry about that, but I'm as angry, that up to 70 of those MPs who previously objected are now accepting the revised package that Starmer, Reeves, and Kendall are putting forward. Let's talk about this.
Personal Independence Payments are a benefit paid to people who need support with the extra cost of living that having a disability creates for them. For example, they might need an adapted car so that they can literally move around.
They might need help with such basic things as personal hygiene and washing, which nobody else can do for them unless they can hire somebody to come in and help them with such tasks.
These things are fundamental, not just to personal dignity, but to the ability of these people to integrate into society. And yet Labour's plans are to change the way in which PIP works so that whilst those who've currently got PIP payments will keep them, anybody who falls out of the current Personal Independence Payment regime, because, for example, they move off this scheme for any reason, and all of those who come into it in the future, will face many more hurdles to claiming this benefit.
Labour's aim is still to cut billions. Precisely how many billions we don't know, but up to £3 billion is thought to be likely, out of the payments being made to people with disabilities, some of the most vulnerable people in our society. And the only reason for having this objective is to make sure that Rachel Reeves' budget balances. There is literally no other purpose. These people are being sacrificed, and I use the word carefully, to the demands of the Treasury, that budgets are balanced.
As a consequence, in the future, very large numbers of disabled people are going to struggle.
Those young people who are now at school, but who might need personal independence payments when they become adults, are very likely going to be denied them.
There's an obvious bias in the new system against people who have depression and anxiety, and a lot of young people do, for very good reasons.
There is going to be bias against people who have non-consistent disabilities, i.e., they're good one day and they're not good on the second day. Those people are going to find it harder to claim.
And those people who have slow degenerative conditions like Parkinson's disease, for example, will find it very much harder to make claims in the future.
This is callous.
This is unnecessary.
This is delayed austerity.
Neil Kinnock once said before he was even the leader of the Labour Party, " Don't be young, don't be old, don't get sick." He said that about the Tories because he thought there was a threat from that party, but now he should be saying it about Labour because those people are now under threat from Labour.
And at the same time, I'm really angry because nobody in Labour is asking relevant questions.
Not one of them is asking, " Why do we need to penalise some of the most vulnerable people in the UK when the wealthiest are still getting vast quantities of state benefits a year?"
The total cost of pension tax reliefs in the UK is each year £70 billion of tax foregone. In other words, because people put money aside into their pension schemes, they get in combination through income tax reliefs, national insurance reliefs, corporation tax reliefs for their employers, and the tax relief that is available within a pension fund, reliefs totalling £70 billion a year.
40% of those reliefs, or roughly £28 billion, go to the wealthiest people in the UK, the 10% of wealthiest households. And another 20% of the reliefs go to the next 20%. So more than 60% of those reliefs, or more than £40 billion in total, go to our best-off households.
And on top of that, those households are the main beneficiaries of £9 billion of tax relief given a year for non-taxable income generated from individual savings accounts.
In other words, we're giving away £80 billion a year in these reliefs, and nearly £50 billion of that is going to our wealthiest households. Just cut out the higher rate relief on pensions, and I reckon you could save up to £14 billion a year, more than enough to easily cover all the payments of benefits that would be necessary to meet the needs of all the people who are currently being prejudiced, harmed, and actually abused by the benefits system while they're trying to get personal independence payments.
But why is no Labour MP asking about why this is the case?
Why aren't they asking why the wealthy are benefiting when the poor are being penalised?
There is no justice in this.
This is just a system that perpetuates injustice. That's what it's about.
The system has a deliberate bias against the poor in it, and Labour aren't questioning that, and I believe they should be.
They're scrutinising every penny they're paying to help the sick and the disabled, but they aren't looking in any way at the money that is literally being bunged towards the wealthy who are already secure in their wealth, and that is wrong.
Those 70 Labour MPs who backed down have sold out. There's no other way to describe them. And I hope their constituents remember that. They're selling out on their ethics for a basic political calculation about saving their skin, and that to me is utterly unacceptable.
Ethics are paramount to me.
Doing and delivering justice is what I'm interested in.
A decent society has a bias to the poor. That's the real test of moral leadership that anybody should be judged against, and on this criterion, Labour is not delivering moral leadership. We are seeing them deliver leadership that focuses only on their needs for survival and not on the needs of the people in this country, whom they should be in office to support.
So, why are we giving tax breaks to the wealthy?
Why are we penalising the poorest?
Why have we got our political priorities wrong?
Isn't it time we put them right.
And isn't it time that we had politicians who actually knew the difference between right and wrong and did the right thing?
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£3 billion – to the general public it’s a huge figure.
To those who understand government finance a bit, it’s a drop in the ocean.
Battle lines being drawn with the disabled as cannon fodder.
Those 70 “rebels” need to listen to their constituents again.
About a third of one percent of total state spending.
Reducing PIP by tightening eligibility is like switching off the smoke alarm while the house burns. Fix the structural drivers of illness and exclusion, improve the assessment process itself, and the caseload will shrink because people are healthier, not poorer.
“It is difficult to get a person to say or do something when their salary, status and promotion prospects are seen to depend upon their not doing so.” ( From Sinclair Lewis)
Agreed – this post – and John Crace’s commons sketch in the Guardian I saw this morning perfectly sums up the moral vacuum in Labour – or the ‘Continuity Tory Party’ as we should call it.
But New Labour did this as well you know, they kept to Tory PSBR levels in the late 1990’s and in 2003 decided that working people were not worthy of final salary pensions whilst gifting private pension provision huge tax breaks. That’s why I have not voted I think since 1997. The Establishment wants rid of the last vestiges of Atlee’s progressive post war government (which is why the Boundary Commission made sure he only had one term, as according to John Bew, Atlee got most of the popular vote – was it in ’51 and lost under FPTP?).
What was really galling this morning was seeing Charlie being looked after and how a small fleet of helicopters would ferry him and his fellow scroungers around the country as the royal train is being retired. So Charlie will float above us like the big city grandees in London and New York – how apt.
Not very ‘right on’ is it though, getting rid of the royal train, a greener alternative – which has become ‘too expensive’ apparently . Well it would be too expensive wouldn’t if you know how Great British Rentier Railways works!!! Hardly any sidings (all sold off to supermarkets), hardly any railway workshops.
Has this country ever seemed so………….ill? So badly managed? Devoid of anything sensible?
Not in my memory…
There was a boundary review after the war-they had not been reviewed since the 1930s and plural voting and the University seats were abolished.
Atlee got 13.2 million votes in 1950 but lost 78 seats. It gave him only a small majority.
The 1951 election saw the total Labour vote increase to 13.98 million while Churchill’s total was 13.7 million but he had 321 seats compared to Atlee’s 295.
FPTP was the reason, of course.
The LINO MPs sold out as I expected them to do. They’re craven as they’ve shown this last year.
Incidentally, this will not happen in the ‘UK’. The Scottish SNP government has said they’re not going along with this abuse of the sick and disabled – yet another mitigation of an English government’s vile actions towards their own people who they should be protecting and caring for.
They’re trying to outdo Thatcherite policies; they’re succeeding in that. May they rot in hell.
It’s all very laudable that the Scottish Government is standing firm in its support for the sick and disabled. There is a sting in the tail however: the reduction in government expenditure in England feeds into the block grant payments to the devolved nations, causing budgetary constraints in Scotland, N Ireland and Wales. In short, the devolution agreements were designed to fail.
Correct, Ken.
Yes, I know.
It’s sickening that our government has to keep doing that. It can’t, and shouldn’t, have to happen.
It’s also not sustainable particularly with regard to the NHS when the English NHS is sold to US healthcare. Mitigating that will be impossible.
“Power over the vulnerable is weakness disguised as strength.” (From Elkhart Tolle)
It’s the emotive language and framing used by Reeves, Starmer and Kendall which appears to many as deliberately offensive. But crafted for a particular audience to be sure.
Imagine, those same quotes about the cost of disability living allowance benefits being used about the ‘unsustainable ‘ cost of retaining tax incentives for the already wealthy when they contribute to pensions or invest in ISAs. …..The current system is ‘actively incentivising’ people away from work (retire early) and represented ‘an affront to the values of our country’. The current system is ‘the worst of all worlds’ producing a ‘spiralling bill’. ‘………’It’s indefensible and it’s unfair, people feel it in their bones’.
If this gets through – and I fear it will – the way its been done – the swiftness, the tunnel vision, lack of foresenic detail, ignoring all the relevant studies, voices and organisations that raise alarm… We are going to be in a very, very dark place.
If it does go through – can it be challenged? I am not knowledgable enough to know if a legal challenge could be brought againat the gov over this?
I fear it will be beyond challenge – parliament will have spoken.
Parliament will have spoken, but if it can be shown in a test case to be a breach of the law disallowing discrimination against people with disabilities, as this PIP cut (not reform) certainly appears to be, then can the courts force a change because different groups are going to be treated differently?
I know they did in a previous case where different groups moving from old benefits to Universal Credit were treated differently, but perhaps primary legislation can’t be changed:
https://www.disabilityrightsuk.org/news/2020/january/dwp-loses-severe-disability-premium-case
1) Yes it can be challenged in that way, but good luck with that.
2) Noted. But, as I say, good luck
Wouldn’t it be nice if it was not needed?
I’ve followed disability issues over 30 years because I’m in that position myself. I’ve usually found that when the DWP make unreasonable decisions, the courts invariably overrule them. So that gives me hope. Many people have variable conditions, as I do, and courts have also ruled many times on this, treating such conditions as a permanent disability, which it is if you think about it. I don’t know what the new proposals are, but I’m fairly sure the courts will hold any changes to the highest scrutiny and restore common sense to the treatment of the disabled. Finally, I’m not surprised that Starmer is soiling himself with this nonsense. He isn’t who he purported to be when he stood for party leader. I hope he gets what he deserves. His P45.
Much to agree with
I’ve been listening to the 2nd reading debate on Liz Kendall’s Small Ugly Bill to Balance the Budget by Bashing the Disabled.
As well as obvious (to anyone with a brain and a conscience) criticisms of the Treasury-dominated sloppy drafting of the bill and the many injustices and hypocrisies in the Bill, several speakers (including Rachel Maskell, and Clive Lewis) moved on to examine alternative choices available to a Chancellor anxious to reduce spending or increase taxation, including weird tax reliefs that have no rationale to benefit society, unequal taxation of capital gain cf. income.
As I write Steven Timms has just announced a concession re clause 5 of the bill about the timing of his review versus changes to eligibility arrangements timed for Nov 2026. But the “promise” doesn’t change the bill NOW, it changes the bill when it reaches 3rd reading/committee stage. It will confuse MPs voting on the 2nd reading amendments, probably confusing enough of them to get the bill through tonight.
A forensic cruel confusing omnishambles, reminiscent of Theresa May’s minority administration. Yet Starmer has 400+ MPs!
Yes, it would be nice. It looks as if the govt has just dropped the 4-point PIP requirement, which was the shoddiest part of some real back-of-the-envelope legislative planning. Not to mention its fundamental cruelty, of course.
So who knows what happens if the 4-pointer isn’t in the bill? May well pass, I suppose, especially if the govt really does stick to its promise to ‘co-produce’ the Timms review with disability rights groups, but who trusts this govt now?
No one, I hope.
Victories like this are what the word “Pyrrhic” was invented for.
Steve Timms promised in the final gov’t speech that Clause 5 would be withdrawn before 3rd reading – ie: the Bill would no longer be about PIP at all, just UC. That’s the majority of it gone.
There will be no legislation on PIP till AFTER the autumn 2026 Timms review.
Timms could NOT say whether the new Nov 2026 legislation would be primary (can be amended by MPs), or delegated (take it or leave it).
The current totally emasculated “Even Smaller Ugly Bill” is however a money bill so can’t be amended in the Lords.
Next drama – what the new “Very Very Small Ugly Bill” will look like on Wednesday.(committee stage on floor of house, thus excluding representations from disabled groups).
Thanks
I want to point out:-
If the government reduces payment to the poor this money will not go into the economy, reducing GDP and the tax take will be reduced.
If the government gives money to the rich they will save it and this will not increase GDP.
This is a double increase to the government debt.
I have a video coming on this.