IF the Labour party is anything, it is the party of the workers. There is even a clue in its name.
Why, then, is the Government’s white paper on welfare reform so feeble when it comes to tackling idlers who are happy to live off the efforts of others?
This was not what we were led to expect.
On Sunday, Keir Starmer wrote: “Don’t get me wrong. We will crack down hard on anyone who tries to game the system. There will be a zero-tolerance approach to these criminals.”
Fine words indeed, except that when the Prime Minister and Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall unveiled their plans for welfare reform yesterday, the stick had been put away and all they were offering were a few small and mangy carrots.
Job centres are going to be renamed as the National Jobs and Careers Service. Big deal.
There will be a few more NHS nurses in areas with high rates of people on sickness benefits.
There will be a few apprenticeships at Premier League football clubs and at Channel 4 — all very worthy, but which are hardly going to make a dent in the exploding problem of Britain’s workshy culture.
In November 2018, there were 3.65million people on out-of-work benefits — either unemployment benefit, sickness benefits or the then fairly new Universal Credit.
Six years later that has mushroomed to 5.79million.
Unlike in the 1970s and 1980s, when rapid industrialisation deprived many working-class communities of their main employer, the rise in worklessness has not been caused by a lack of jobs.
All over the country employers have been screaming out for workers, yet many tell the same story — either no one replies to their job adverts or, if they do and are offered a job, they do not actually turn up to start work.
Neither is the rise much to do with “long Covid”. The sharp rise in people on out-of-work benefits actually began 18 months before the pandemic.
It happened around the same time that Universal Credit started to take over from other benefits.
As Starmer correctly identified at the weekend, it has come as a result of people gaming the system.
It has become far too easy to pretend that you are unfit to work, and so be signed off on benefits without any requirement to look for work.
Job centres are going to be renamed the National Jobs and Careers Service. Big deal
There are, of course, people who genuinely cannot work, either through illness or learning disability.
But does anyone really think the nation’s health has deteriorated so sharply in the past six years?
On Sunday, Liz Kendall admitted that the bill for sickness benefits has been inflated by people turning up at Work Capability Assessments (WCAs) with self-diagnosed mental conditions as opposed to properly diagnosed ones.
There is plenty to suggest that feelings like stress, which were once considered to be a normal part of working life, are being medicalised and used to excuse people from ever having to work again.
Yet what has happened to her promises to reform WCAs? By yesterday they had melted into nothing.
Instead, the Prime Minister told us that the Government wanted to look into the problem but did not want to rush it. In other words, reforms have been kicked into touch.
It should not really come as a surprise. The Labour Party long ago stopped representing ordinary working people, and instead became a pressure group for aggrieved “victims”.
Its knee-jerk reaction is always to jump to the support of any benefit claimant — as Starmer did when Boris Johnson’s government removed the temporary £20-a-week bonus it had added to benefit payments during Covid lockdowns.
He accused ministers of “turning on the poorest in society”.
It was a big surprise at the weekend when he suddenly seemed to recognise that actually not everyone claiming benefits has a genuine reason for doing so. He has since merely returned to type.
But the exploding welfare bill for sickness — which is forecast by the Department of Work and Pensions to top £100billion this year — isn’t just about scroungers. Some of it is outright fraud.
In May, five members of a Bulgarian gang were jailed for defrauding the taxpayer of £54million of welfare payments, some of it for claimants who turned out not actually to exist.
When you are paying benefits to people without actually requiring them to turn up in person at a benefits office, it just creates opportunities for fraudsters
How does Labour intend to address this issue? It can’t say.
The white paper does, however, propose to move more of the benefits system online — which is surely part of the problem.
When you are paying benefits to people without actually requiring them to turn up in person at a benefits office, it just creates opportunities for fraudsters.
Chancellor Rachel Reeves was out and about this week defending her tax rises and claiming that she will boost growth, while businesses complained that their rising National Insurance bill will stop them investing.
Whatever she says, the economy is going to struggle to grow so long as it has to carry a large deadweight of the idle and corrupt.
