Labour’s love affair with welfare is a disaster for the working class

What does the Labour Party stand for today? I don’t mean Keir Starmer, who famously changes his principles as often as he changes shirts. I mean the party itself, founded to advance the interests of the working class in parliament. Every Englishman and his dog now knows that Labour no longer represents workers. We know it is no longer socialist or keen on state control of the economy. So what is Labour actually for?

We finally got a rare glimpse into what Labour MPs really care about this week, thanks to the noisy threats to block Starmer’s planned reforms to welfare. Over 120 MPs felt moved to sign a wrecking amendment to a government bill, due to be debated next Tuesday. Enough to force the PM and his welfare minister, Liz Kendall, to make major concessions that have essentially neutered the proposed policies. Kendall, facing a ballooning welfare bill, had hoped to save £5 billion by restricting who can access personal independence payments (PIP) and to freeze what’s known as the ‘health element’ of Universal Credit. Now, the government has conceded the higher bar to access PIPs will only apply to new claimants, shaving Kendall’s savings down to just £3 billion.

Still, had the government proceeded with its welfare bill as planned, it would have faced the largest rebellion of this parliament so far. Starmer’s comically large Commons majority could easily have been wiped out.

It’s the breadth of the would-be rebellion that is perhaps most striking. It wasn’t just the usual socialist malcontents. Meg Hillier, the MP behind the killer amendment and chair of the Treasury Select Committee, is certainly no Corbynista. London mayor Sadiq Khan also stuck his oar in. Even some of the so-called Starmtroopers, those bland, technocratic new Labour MPs selected almost solely for their robotic loyalty to Sir Keir, said ¡no pasarán! to the planned welfare cuts. Indeed, it has been striking to hear so many of those rebellious Labour MPs offer some variation of the line ‘I didn’t join Labour to cut welfare’.

What this episode has revealed is that welfarism is the closest thing Labour has to an ideology – to a principle that it will not budge from, to a source of moral authority in fact. We learnt that, no matter how dysfunctional the welfare system gets, a sizeable number of Labour MPs will not countenance reform.

To be clear, there is nothing remotely ‘progressive’ about defending the current state of welfare – and incapacity benefits, in particular. As if it needs to be said, people whose disabilities prevent them from working deserve the best possible quality of life. Arguably, the system ought to be far more generous than it already is to those in genuine need.

The trouble is, as finally seems to be dawning on the political class, the soaring number of claimants bears little relationship with the state of the nation’s health. According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, about four million 16- to 64-year-olds – that is, one in 10 of the working-age population – now claim some sort of disability benefit, compared with 2.8million in 2019. As explained in the Financial Times, recent rises in disability claims are almost entirely an artefact of the system itself. Policies and incentives are the main driver of rising and falling claims. Allowing claims for mental-health issues, enshrined in the 2014 Care Act, has had arguably the largest impact. Currently, 44 per cent of all claimants cite poor mental health as their primary condition.

Kendall’s reforms were born of a fear that the bill for incapacity benefits is becoming unsustainable. Without any changes to the system, the government expects the annual cost to rise £70 billion by 2030, the equivalent of what the state spends on infrastructure, and far in excess of what it spends on defence.

But such penny-pinching is not the real reason why we must challenge the welfare state. What ought to anger us is that disability payments are essentially being used to mask mass unemployment. It is no coincidence that you’ll find vastly higher proportions of claimants in towns and cities that are deindustrialised and left-behind. In Blackpool, one of the most deprived towns in England, one in four people is classified as disabled. Tragically, some of the fastest rises in sickness-benefit claims are among the young – with claims rising by 69 per cent among 25- to 34-year-olds in the past five years. People who ought to be in the prime of their lives are languishing at home on benefits, being put out to pasture, decommissioned.

Yet Labour MPs seem totally unwilling to grapple with this crisis. Instead of being moved by this catastrophic waste of human potential, they have sprung into action to keep the system as it is. Worse, they actually feel virtuous about defending the indefensible.

If welfarism is the hill that Labour wants to die on, then may it soon rest in peace.

Fraser Myers is deputy editor at spiked and host of the spiked podcast. Follow him on X: @FraserMyers.