‘It’ll be the usual suspects who suffer.’

DARREN MCGARVEY

What do you do if your government is struggling in the polls and you need an easy win?  Liz Kendall knows. You target the “welfare scroungers”. If you have a distaste for the feckless, the undeserving poor and the work-shy, then her plan will be right up your benefits street. For, suffering the humiliating consequences of six uninspired months of reheated Blairism, Starmer’s Labour is going to force the sick and disabled into work. The party of the working man is kicking down.

The system is broken, according to our Work and Pensions minister, because of the vast numbers of long-term ill claiming welfare payments. Her quick fix to the deep-rooted problem of chronic illness, disability, and NHS waiting lists longer than all three volumes of Das Kapital, is a gentle shove down your wheelchair ramp, into the nearest zero-hours contract. It’s unoriginal, impersonal, schizophrenic policy. But for Kendall, it’s the greatest shake-up of the benefits system in a decade.

Rather than helping the sick and the mentally unwell into work — by, say, guaranteeing access to quality healthcare, or supporting people those disabilities to find suitable and sustainable employment — Kendall will simply change the definitions of what it means to be sick and mentally unwell. Under her plans, the “Limited Capability for Work or Work-Related Activity” category will be scrapped, meaning thousands of people currently deemed too ill to work will soon find themselves employable by government decree. Never mind the fact that the health system is in crisis, and many can’t access the care they need to get better. Never mind the reality that employers aren’t exactly queuing up to hire workers with complex health conditions. Labour has decided that, rather than fixing these systemic problems, the real issue is that not enough sick people are dragging themselves to Jobcentres for mandatory CV workshops.

It’s hard to decide what’s more ridiculous: the idea that forcing the sick into job searches will somehow heal them, or the sheer bureaucratic madness of trying to implement this policy through the already broken DWP. If the DWP were a person, it would be convicted of manslaughter, signed off indefinitely, and committed to a mental institution for life — before declaring itself fit to work on its own deathbed. This is a department that can’t answer its own phones, subjects legitimate claimants to months of appeals processes, and, in one notable case, flagged over 200,000 people for potential fraud investigations — wrongly. Now they’re about to be trusted to decide whether someone with severe chronic pain or debilitating mental illness is fit to stack shelves for £10 an hour? What could possibly go wrong?

There was a time when the only tools this Stanford experiment had at its disposal to force compliance consisted mainly of sternly worded computer-generated letters and a telephone help-line with a two-hour queue. To Vivaldi. Well, now the DWP means business — and it’s going to feel extremely personal. Of course welfare should be reserved for those who need it, and genuine fraud must be stamped out and deterred. But I question the wisdom and character of anyone who thinks disability benefit is the area of welfare most in need of an aggressive audit. Invariably, the populations government targets with these cost-saving reforms are those who lack the means or the will to fight back — plus they’re easier to harass than wealthy tax dodgers.

According to the DWP, fraud and error cost the taxpayer £9.7 billion last year, with £7.4 billion classified as outright fraud. It’s an interesting term, fraud. It implies that every last penny of those billions has been deliberately scammed. But mistakes are inevitable in an overly complex, inflexible system which bamboozles even university-educated claimants who inadvertently get a detail here or there wrong. Compare that with the £23 billion in benefits that go unclaimed every year, and the story looks very different. This move isn’t just about clawing back public money and cutting the welfare bill; it’s about taking an aggressive posture. A posture designed to appease those whose overriding response to decades of economic mismanagement and stagnation is to demand that the poorest and least fortunate are held responsible. Labour is far less interested in ensuring people get the help they’re entitled to than it is in stoking a moral panic about fraudsters bleeding the system dry.

So, not content with trousering your granny’s heating allowance and psychologically waterboarding the legitimately sick and disabled, Labour is now aiming to turn the DWP into a pound-shop paramilitary force. Sweeping new reforms will give officers the power to enter and search homes, seize property and driving licences, and snoop through bank accounts if they suspect benefit fraud. I wonder how critics of the nanny state — who believe any government intervention sits on a spectrum of tyranny, but who also seem to care little about what happens to those on the margins — will be able to reconcile these conflicting ideas.

Barely a month ago, the entire nation stopped for a whole week to debate the complex ethical dilemmas of assisted dying, the risk of abuse, and of people slipping through the net due to institutional dysfunction and perverse incentives. But these DWP reforms are bound to pass without so much as a whimper from the media, and even less interest from the public.

The official line is that these powers are about clamping down on organised crime gangs who exploit the benefits system. The reality? It’ll be the usual suspects who suffer — disabled people, single mothers, and those working precarious, underpaid jobs. Much like Kendall’s proposals to scrap the Work Capability Assessment and tighten the screws on mental health claimants, this is just another distraction from Labour’s inability to solve the real problems underpinning welfare dependency.

Labour is pitching all of this as necessary, pragmatic governance, but in reality, the same party that once talked about dignity in welfare is now trying to outflank the Tories from the Right. Hell, even Nigel Farage has softened his tone on welfare, aware his growing electoral coalition now includes, you guessed it, the sick, the disabled, and people on in-work benefits. But Labour, unlike Farage, lacks the conviction to make anything it says sound convincing.

None of this is to say that there aren’t problems with how incentives to work are structured, or that the system isn’t open to abuse. Every system is — just ask the many companies and high-net-worth individuals who shuffle money offshore to avoid paying tax. The difference is that we don’t see the same level of state aggression directed towards them. There are no dawn raids on corporate offices or intrusive, humiliating checks on the affluent who have creative accountants.

Yet, like a low-rent FBI, the department that can’t even answer its phones will have the power to raid homes, crawl over your bank statements and tell you if you’re sick or not. Presumably there are no waiting lists for this service. Well we can’t say we weren’t told. After all, a different Labour leader warned us years ago that we shouldn’t get sick.