Keir Starmer must change course from this performative cruelty towards the sick and disabled.
When your pen hovered over the ballot paper on July the 4th last year, did you consider for one second whether you were backing a party intent on making life unbearably hard for people with disabilities or mental health problems? No one voted for the cruel welfare cuts announced by Liz Kendall on Tuesday, and no one has to. Why are they happening, and what do they say about our political system?
They’re happening because Labour is simply all over the place. They’ve boxed themselves in to the nasty party corner by ruling out tax increases in terms of income, National Insurance, VAT, corporations and wealth. They are refusing to borrow more or change their arbitrary fiscal rules. This leaves them with only one option – cuts.
Focus groups and polls will tell them cutting benefits is popular. It’s a signal to slivers of swing voters and the financial markets that they’re being tough, that Labour can be trusted with money. But it’s more than that, as Rosa Luxembourg said of the Leninists, they’re making virtue of what they perceive to be a necessity. They’re elevating the concept of ‘labour’ to some rarified level of existence.
Of course, the notion of the dignity of labour matters. Our sense of self, self-worth, socialisation and development owe much to the work we do. But work doesn’t have to be paid labour and very often isn’t, witness the millions who care for others for nothing but love. And yes, there was dignity in craft, making and producing but in the modern era of ‘bullshit’ jobs where is the dignity in precarious, badly paid and under regarded work. Four decades of rampant neoliberalism, designed explicitly to destroy the power and dignity of labour, has left many with either no work or jobs that are exhausting, demoralising and frustrating.
So, if you are one of the 620,000 forecast to lose on average £675 a month, in the biggest benefits cut since 2010, then in material terms it’s bad enough. How much less do you need to eat, how much colder do you need to be? But the cruelty isn’t just material but mental. It’s the cruelty of a party and a state that’s supposed to be on your side and there for you when you need them. It’s the cruelty of being blamed for the poverty that you are forced to live in and all the warped assumptions about skiving and shirking when it takes unimaginable amounts of mental and physical endurance just to get survive the day.
When health secretary Wes Streeting claims that mental health issues being over diagnosed, where is his evidence? When there is little if any evidence that cuts in benefits acts as an incentive to get people into work. What they need is patient dedicated support which works holistically to look into physical and mental health, housing and care support and more.
Too often we build systems designed around believing the worst in people, not the best. The presumption is the majority cheat and game the system. And of course, there will be a few that do. But surely being Labour and being progressive means a belief in the best in people and the idea that we shape institutions and systems that brings out the best in them. Almost everyone wants to work and contribute if they can, whether that is paid labour or other ways in which they support their family and community. Let’s start from that fundamental belief and build a system of real social security that is both humane and efficient.
Denigrating people who need welfare, or civil servants who are doing their best undermines the confidence and belief in the country and its people. It is divisive as it pitches one block of people against another. Morally its awful and politically it’s stupid. Already this year Labour has made enemies of the environment lobby with airport expansion, the aid and development lobby with its cuts and now the disability lobby. I wonder who is next?
The electoral calculation of the Labour right-wing machine will be what it always is, you have to vote for the least bad option. But they’re now testing this theory to destruction. Anecdotally we all hear again and again Labour voting stalwarts say they won’t vote for the party again. A third who voted Labour last July are now backing Liberal Democrats or the Greens. Increasingly, when the idea of a progressive alliance is mooted to beat the looming regressive alliance between Reform and the Tories, as they look to unite the right, the response is that Labour is no longer progressive. People are fed up holding their nose. The Runcorn by-election and the locals in May will give us a better sense of whether the old politics of the lesser of two evils still holds, when you’re still left with evil.
The whips will crack the whip, the parliamentary Labour Party fodder will accept their place in the line of fire of these cruel cannons, and even if many of them revolt, there will be enough Conservative and Reform MPs to get the measures through. Meanwhile the country trudges on, surviving as best it can despite the Labour Party and not because of it.
Back to the general election, when no one was voting for these cruel cuts, Labour said in its manifesto that “trust in politics has been shattered”. Nothing can be shattered twice, but the shards of glass can be ground into faces of the poorest, the most vulnerable the most in need. A small wealth tax on the very richest people in our country could have avoided all this pain. Politicians make their political choices. But no one voted for this, and no one has to.
This article first appeared in the Byline Times on the 19th of March 2025.