Reform welfare or become a failed state: that is Britain's only remaining choice

Telegraph

8 hours ago

Whitney Ainscough boasts that she makes £500,000 a year through her social media posts. Those posts essentially tell people what to say to exploit the welfare rules. The mother of three from Rotherham walks her subscribers through the buzz words and correct answers to give in order to be awarded benefits.
In one post, she revelled in the fact that she was herself being given £1,151.90 a week by taxpayers. 'Why would I get a job?' she asked. 'I get your monthly wage in a week – so why would I put myself out and get a job? I mean, I'm living my f***ing best life!'
Ms Ainscough is one of an army of online 'sickfluencers': people who make a living out of coaching others on how to qualify for benefits. In his recent Channel 4 documentary, Fraser Nelson met a consultant who charged £750 for a three-hour session on how to qualify for the maximum allocation on incapacity or disability payments.
That is an hourly rate not far off some London KCs. Yet, such are the perverse incentives created by our benefits system that, for many would-be claimants, it is a reasonable up-front investment.
If you have paid taxes throughout your working life, you may be shaking with anger as you read. The realisation that middle-men – or, more often, middle-women – are getting rich by steering people towards undeserved payments is infuriating.
But sickfluencers are the by-products of our rotten system, not its authors. If we don't keep the kitchen clean, we can hardly blame the bacteria. As Charlie Munger liked to say, 'Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome'.
Like the Channel people traffickers, sickfluencers are facilitators. They service a demand created by perverse incentives. In the one case, a benefits system which, according to the Centre for Social Justice, will soon let people earn £2,500 more than the minimum wage; in the other, an asylum system where judges seek always and everywhere to overturn deportation orders.
We blame the people traffickers because we don't like to dwell on the fact that the migrants who pay them are criminals. We think of ourselves as compassionate, and so don't enjoy asking why genuine refugees would be desperate to leave France.
In the same way, blaming sickfluencers allows us not to insult claimants – some of whom are indubitably disabled, and all of whom vote.
Why, then, did I begin the column with Ms Ainscough? You, after all, are a reader of the nation's leading quality newspaper. His Majesty's Telegraph is not a sensationalist tabloid. Should I not be persuading you with facts and figures rather than making your blood boil with stories of a benefits claimant who holidays in Cyprus and films her posts from behind the wheel of what looks like a Range Rover?
Maybe. But here's the problem. The numbers don't stir people to the pitch of emotion which, on their merits, they should. Perhaps they are simply too large. I always found, as an MEP, that telling people that the EU was wasting £10 billion on this or that project would elicit a resigned shrug, whereas telling them that I could pay my wife £14,000 a month prompted purple, choking fury. We can all imagine what we would do with £14,000.
If people truly understood what the figures implied, there would be no more immediate issue in politics. Those Labour MPs who voted down the mildest attempt to slow the increase in incapacity benefits would, instead of complimenting themselves on their big-heartedness, be fending angry mobs from their constituency surgeries.
Consider, one more time, some of the statistics.
Around 3,000 people a day are signed off as too sick to work. The total number of claimants is forecast by the government to go from 3.3 million to 4.1 million by the end of this parliament.
According to the NHS Confederation, in 2021-22, 63,392 people went straight from university onto long-term sickness benefits.
The fastest rise is among 25- to 34-year-olds, an incredible increase of 69 per cent in five years. (Incredible in every sense: such a sudden and cataclysmic explosion in disability would surely be visible on the streets.)
In Birmingham, one in four working-age adults is inactive. One. In. Four. Even at the height of the Great Depression, the proportion in our second city never rose so high. Then, mass worklessness was treated as the most important challenge facing the nation; now, we barely notice.
Behind each of those numbers is someone trapped in the system, scared to find a job and paradoxically lose income, possibly bringing up children in a household severed from the rhythms of a working day.
If the waste of human potential does not bother you, consider the viability of the British state. The total cost of benefits has risen from £244 billion a year on the eve of the pandemic to £303 billion (adjusting for inflation). No other country has seen anything like it. In Europe, as in the Anglosphere, claims fell when lockdown ended.
If we look, not simply at benefits, but at state salaries, too, there are as many people claiming money from the government as supplying it: 28 million in each category. But that does not mean that the sums are in balance. To meet its obligations, the government is borrowing £150 billion a year. At the same time, it is spending £55 billion a year on disability and incapacity benefits – a sum that will rise to £70 billion by the end of this parliament.
What went wrong? The baleful one-word answer, as so often, is 'lockdown'. The pandemic brutally exposed the inadequacies of the British state, its poor analysis, its safetyism, its authoritarian tendencies. But the government turned out to be good at one thing, namely giving money to people.
A lot of workers who had never before been in contact with the benefits system learnt how easy it was to make claims. Some began to see work as a lifestyle choice.
At the same time, face-to-face benefits interviews were replaced by telephone assessments, where claimants find it much easier to lie. This was supposed to be a temporary measure but, across the civil service, officials have continued to work from home and, five years on, over 70 per cent of benefits assessments are being made remotely.
Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome. The surge in long-term benefits under Gordon Brown was tackled after 2010 by a combination of benefits caps and tax cuts. When work paid more, more people worked.
This time, though, taxes and unemployment are rising, creating very different incentives. Meanwhile, as predicted in this column, figures now confirm that the economy shrank in the last quarter. In the dry language of the Office for Budget Responsibility, the government 'cannot afford the array of promises that it has made to the public'.
Is anyone proposing to do anything about it? Actually, yes. Kemi Badenoch made a thoughtful and serious speech on Thursday explaining how she planned to cut the bills, including bringing the legal definition of disability into line with what most of us understand by the word, and ending claims by foreign nationals, which currently cost a billion pounds a month.
The rise of Reform means that the Conservatives have little option but to position themselves as the only party that stands for fiscal responsibility, enterprise and limited government. Although that position may attract less than 50 per cent of the electorate, it attracts more than the 18 per cent that the Tories are currently polling.
In any case, it is the right thing to do. Labour's inability to slow, let alone halt, the rise in bills is dooming Britain to a full-scale budgetary and currency crisis. The Conservatives need to provide the diagnosis now so that, when the crash happens, the electorate is ready to gulp down its medicine.