The system is broken but Labour are not fixing it – they are kicking away a few more crutches to make it worse, says columnist Kevin Maguire
THE United Kingdom’s threadbare benefits system, a welfare safety net about as sturdy as a cobweb, is well and truly broken. The grotesque Tory two-child benefit cap pushes 540,000 youngsters in larger families below the breadline.
Half of kids living in poverty are in households where at least one parent works because of the scandals of low wages and mean top-ups. Too few council houses, poor standards and weak enforcement let private landlords milk a £30billion housing benefit subsidy by sticking over-charged families in mouldy, damp and neglected properties.
Charities have to step in and save people who have been abandoned by the state, with a record 3.1 million emergency food parcels distributed by the heroic Trussell Trust. Axing the Winter Fuel Allowance deprived pensioners, including those with tiny occupational pensions, of £300 to cover gas and electricity rises.
Betrayed Waspi women were denied compensation for cancelled pensions – led up the garden path by Labour in opposition then abandoned once they got into power. And only last week, a report concluded Britain’s social security net is one of the weakest in the rich world.
People who are losing their jobs for the first time discover financial help after signing on falls a long way below what they need or expect. So the system is broken. The government is right about that.
But it is broken in ways Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Chancellor Rachel Reeves and Work & Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall are not fixing. Instead, the bean counters are determined to kick away a few more crutches to make it worse.
No wonder Mr Starmer’s welfare “worst of all worlds” verdict is boomeranging, as even docile newbie Labour MPs revolt, forcing a partial climbdown by Kendall.
Keeping the worst aspects, some of them listed above, while targeting the sick and disabled is the worst of all worlds – if not in the way the PM wanted us to believe.
Deciding whether to lift the punishing two-child cap was kicked into an anti-poverty review due this summer. Why not do the same with other floated changes to entitlement and payments?
Hasty, callous cuts might gain short-term cheers from the British Right but they’ll jeer soon enough, complaining they were not deep enough. And the very people Labour was elected to represent will melt away.
Balancing the Budget books on the backs of the sick and disabled would deservedly end badly.
