Labour's benefits reforms are absolutely necessary and long overdue
One overcast Saturday morning in 2002, I was holding an advice surgery for constituents in Castlemilk, the poverty-stricken housing estate in the south-east corner of my Glasgow Cathcart constituency.
It was a relatively quiet session, but a visit by two young men has remained in my memory ever since. They were about sixteen, had just left school and one of them (his mate was only there to offer moral support) wanted to know how to claim out-of-work benefits.
The boy was explicitly looking for long-term financial support that would excuse him from the task of ever having to seek work or full-time education. When I asked him what physical ailment prevented him from getting a job, he replied with a knowing smirk towards his friend: 'Bad back.'
I didn't ask if any of his own family members were claiming what was then known as Incapacity Benefit; I didn't have to. There were few families in the area, then or now, whose income didn't rely at least in part on the largesse of the state, despite the fact many members were of working age.
Even before I became an MP, I had toured my local constituency Labour Party branches urging members to support the Blair Government's efforts to reform the system.
I probably used many of the clichés and blithe assumptions that Labour MPs use today to defend their support of the Work and Pensions Secretary, Liz Kendall, and her plans to institute genuinely radical reform: that Labour is the party of work, not of benefits.
The clue in the name! Many people on out-of-work benefits want to work; they just need more support to do so.
Neither of these statements is strictly true. Yes, Labour was founded to represent the working classes in Parliament. It's also true that one of its founders, Keir Hardie, had little time for those who chose worklessness over employment.
But culturally, today's party is dominated by middle class activists to whom the prospect of a Labour Government forcing benefit claimants into work is anathema. And while the claim that 'many' might prefer work to benefits is in some degree true, it is far too small a degree to make much difference to the economic necessity of reform.
And that is the fundamental challenge that Kendall and the Government face: if Britain is to be transformed in a way that will radically reduce the numbers claiming out-of-work benefits, it will need to disappoint – nay, enrage – many of its supporters.
It will need to annoy a large proportion of the people within the party itself, and also a considerable number of (well-paid and productively employed) media commentators and other stakeholders.
There is, of course, an economic case for reducing the cost to the state's finances. And this is especially crucial now because the excuses people come up with are getting more absurd.
In previous decades the preferred excuse of my young constituent and many others for claiming benefits was 'a bad back'. This is a conveniently unevidenced malady. But today more psychological – and therefore even less provable – ailments have become more popular among those hoping to leave the burden of honest labour behind them for a life of watching daytime TV.
The numbers claiming to suffer from stress, depression and even PTSD (which, oddly, affects many who have not served in the Armed Forces) has swelled the claimant numbers.
Britain simply can't afford to continue to fund a situation in which a large proportion of the population is allowed to claim benefits rather than earn a living and pay taxes. This is a truth that can either be faced now, when there remains some opportunity to address it, or in the future, when the rot will have gone too far to stop the country from sliding into national decline and bankruptcy.
Which is where the moral case for Kendall's mission comes in. Labour's Left-wing has been most vocal in its opposition to reform, which is only to be expected: what is the point of being on the Left at all if you don't seize every available opportunity to broadcast your morally superior concerns for poor people that callous Right-wingers, even in your own party, don't care about?
But there is no moral case for living off the hard-earned taxes of those who actually have a job. And there is nothing noble about allowing those who suffer from a range of mental illnesses to remain at home when you know that having a job and working side-by-side with colleagues will do far more to improve their mental health than the status quo ever could.
These are hard truths that previous Governments, including the Labour Government I served, managed to avoid. Electoral considerations always prevailed over the optimistic rhetoric of ministers. This meant that reform was downgraded to a mere tinkering at the edges of the benefits system.
Kendall's appointment as Work and Pensions Secretary was one of Keir Starmer's most astute decisions. She is ambitious and supremely capable. But more importantly she understands what is at stake if she fails. She is far from the heartless caricature that her opponents in the Labour Party describe. In fact she could well be the saviour of countless working class communities that have been scarred by generations of political failure.
But that success depends on difficult short-term decisions that will be drastically unpopular and which will have some painful consequences for some people. It would be easy for the Government to abandon this project for the sake of electoral advantage and popularity. That would be more than a mistake: it would be a betrayal of the very people the Labour Party claims to represent.
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