Warfare Not Welfare

Some political events cut closer to home than others.

The sight of Labour going after the sick and the disabled should be particularly difficult to stomach for centrist dads who were Starmer fanboys.

This wasn’t a sudden shift. Labour politicians like Wes Streeting have been laying the groundwork for some time.

The targeting of mental illness is one favourite tactic. Depression is widely “over-diagnosed,” they argue, a drain on resources and sick pay.

They bring up the most extreme cases to deflect criticism. Every shocking welfare outrage – made-up illnesses, made-up kids, you name it – is used as cover to attack all benefit claimants, especially the most vulnerable.

The fantasy of a life of luxury on benefits remains strong. It grips so many people because it fits with their feeling that the country is falling apart and that they’re being ripped off.

They are being ripped off, just not by disabled and sick people.

When I was unemployed, I went through the universal credit process. This was back in 2016 under Iain Duncan Smith’s regime. Initially, my application was rejected twice before being accepted.

Once accepted, I had to wait several weeks to get the money and I had no income in the meantime. There was the option of claiming an upfront payment and then repaying it: having it docked from the rest of my benefits, in other words.

Although I was living in a cheap, dank room at the time, I had just £21 a week to live on after my rent was paid. The housing benefit was only £350 a month. I knew I had to call up the DWP office in Glasgow to fix this.

I wasn’t one of the people who would have been targeted by the current cuts. But I was someone who had to survive under the pressure of the Tory welfare reforms and austerity measures.

Now we may be in a worse state of affairs and the impact hasn’t been felt yet.

Blood Sacrifice

Once I chased up the DWP office, I began receiving over £700 a month. It wasn’t a lot, but it was much better than before. I could actually survive on a strict budget. I was out of work for 10 months or so, taking less than £8,000 in benefits during that time.

Many other people would have accepted the £21 a week and fallen into dire poverty. This is why there have been many horror stories of malnutrition, even starvation and other early deaths, as a result of Tory welfare policy.

When Chancellor Rachel Reeves “unveiled” over £6.4 billion in welfare cuts last week. This wasn’t exactly a magic act. It was a George Osborne tribute act without the joys of a pasty tax.

The reasons driving the spring budget are obvious. It’s warfare, not welfare. Prime Minister Keir Starmer is desperate to appease the Trump Administration. He has committed the country to £13.4 billion in military spending in 2027/28.

This is just the start of beefing up the UK’s war capacity. The US is retreating from Europe, just as Russia seeks to carve up Ukraine. We’re all set to pay the price for this imperialist carve-up, especially the poor.

Calling this the return of austerity is misleading because austerity never stopped for a lot of the British population. The austerity programme eased up after the 2017 election and was finally paused during the COVID-19 pandemic.

But it was soon restarted, quietly, by Rishi Sunak when he was Chancellor under Boris Johnson. Limits on spending were reintroduced and taxes raised to recoup the huge amount of public money being splurged during the pandemic.

The impact of this clawback intensified following the financial shock of Liz Truss’s mini-budget. But this time, austerity was finally hitting middle-class Tory voters. Tax hikes, the cost-of-living crisis, and interest rates proved a deadly combination.

The Conservative Party’s electoral coalition, which had held together for over a decade, started to fragment. There was little chance of Rishi Sunak turning this situation around unless he broke with neoliberal orthodoxy.

Now, Labour is presiding over the same fiscal strategy. Yes, Labour inherited the mess left over from 14 years of Tory misrule, but Labour voters expected so much more than spending cuts and tax hikes.

What’s amazing about this is how small the sums being recouped are. As economist James Meadway has pointed out, the Labour government isn’t saving much money from these welfare cuts. This is all about short-term credibility.

Just like the child benefit freeze, the Labour government sees cutting benefits to the disabled and the sick as a kind of blood sacrifice. It demonstrates how far they will go to keep the financial markets happy.

Welfare Queens

Somehow, the myth of luxury welfare continues to persist. This is despite billions in cuts to benefits and even hundreds of thousands of “excess deaths” during the Tory austerity programme.

A popular post on X, formerly Twitter, by GB News presenter Tom Harwood claimed someone unknown somewhere is taking home £55,000 in benefits. The original source is an anonymous Reddit post from a self-declared doctor.

The Redditor claimed that his patient – who has autism and complex PTSD – gets £55,000 in benefits a year. According to the self-declared doctor, this is apparently universal credit, plus personal independence payment and housing benefit.

Unlike Tom Harwood, I actually know people living on benefits. Unlike Tom Harwood, I didn’t go to a private school, which now charges over £8,600 a term. I’ve lived on benefits and I can tell you it’s no life of luxury.

One family I know consists of a disabled parent and one child claiming about £25,000 a year in benefits. This is around £10,000 in rent, plus universal credit and PIP. So the disabled mum and her young child have £15,000 to live on. That’s £7,500 each.

The totals sound generous until you look at the cost of living and the exorbitant rents people are paying to private landlords. In short, the anti-welfare narrative conceals another story.

Let’s assume this post is truthful for the sake of argument. Is it even possible?

The highest available rate of PIP is £184 a week or £736 a month. The highest rate of universal credit available in London is £1,400 per month for an individual and £2,100 per month for a couple or a lone parent.

The highest rate of housing benefit available in London is £2,100 per month, covering over £25,000 in rent a year. But this is for a four-bedroom property. If you have any spare rooms, you will lose benefits in line with the infamous bedroom tax.

So, yes, it’s technically possible for a London couple living in a four-bedroom house to claim around £59,000 a year in benefits. But whether it’s common is another matter.

Let’s break it down further. The figure of £59,000 sounds like a lot. Actually, once you take away rent – at least £25,000 in this scenario – it amounts to £34,000 for the household or £17,000 per adult.

The chances of this happening are far lower than what right-wingers want to believe. The couple could only get the full housing benefit if they have children. And even then, the odds are low.

Fleshing out the Reddit story, the family in question would be receiving £30,000 for its five members, £6,000 a year for each person.

Rooms in London can easily go for £1,000 or more before bills. So the idea that the housing benefit would cover the entire rent is extremely questionable in this fantasy scenario.

This is assuming the benefits office is competent and willing to pay out this money in the first place. Anyone who has ever been unemployed will know this is far from guaranteed.

The incentive structure of the welfare bureaucracy is not to hand out huge sums of public money with no strings attached. On the contrary, the bureaucracy will try to put you on a tiny stipend because HM Treasury demands cost savings.

Inflation and the housing crisis are the real problem driving up the welfare bill. In a country where most working-class people live in social housing and rent controls keep private housing affordable, the housing benefit bill would be far lower.

But that country is not the UK in 2025.

Like the welfare queen in American discourse, the benefit scrounger is a staple of British tabloid culture. The only people who are hated more than the undeserving poor are paedophiles and terrorists.

It’s infinity scapegoats.

Labour is set to unleash a new level of hellish welfare cuts. And the most vulnerable people in the country are up against it.

This system degrades more than it raises anyone up, but Labour wants to make it even worse.