The problem with having principles is that they’re very expensive. This is proving an enormous headache for Starmer’s government, which is still trying to slash disability benefits in plain sight rather than raise taxes, only to be forced into another embarrassing U-turn by hundreds of its own backbenchers. These rebel MPs kicked up a fuss on the basis that they didn’t run for office to push hundreds of thousands of disabled people into poverty.
Most of these MPs ran for office on the basis of not being Tories. The party leadership apparently believed that it could legislate like Tories and get away with it, but to get away with that sort of flagrant regressive policy, you have to be – well, a Tory.
Underpinning it all is the conviction that there is something shameful about poverty
That’s the downside of liberalism as a lifestyle choice. You can’t just show up with unbrushed hair and a swindler’s grin and expect a round of applause. You have to do vulgar things like telling the truth and being accountable to the public. There’s nothing inherently embarrassing about changing your mind on the basis of new information – unless the new information is that you haven’t a clue what you stand for, and you’re out of step with the party and the public.
Party insiders are still arguing that Reeves messed up here by not making the moral case for kicking people off benefits. Presumably the reason she didn’t make one is because there isn’t one – at least not one that the public will believe. The implications, however, are unavoidable: if disability claims are rising, if the benefits bill is ballooning, it must be because poor people are cheating the system.
The problem with this implication is that it’s wrong – not morally, but factually. An enormous proportion of British people who receive benefits – including disability benefits – are in work, and welfare has long been used to spackle over the fractures in our healthcare and our job market, and to subsidise our broken housing system. And no matter how costly a crutch this might be, you can’t cure anyone by kicking it away. It was, in fact, New Labour who really leaned into this practice, just as it was Labour who kicked off a generation of punitive welfare reforms on its way out the door in 2010.
There is an ugly, parsimonious impulse to the Labour party when in power, just as there is with any centre-left party trying to line up its historical claims to fairness with its twofold terror of both the markets and the voting public. The parts of the Labour party which pride themselves on their electability have always had a puritan streak, and that tendency has been polished by years in opposition fighting off nonsensical accusations of spendthriftery from Tory governments running the economy on deranged goblin mode.
This economic dysphoria is unwarranted, given that the Conservative party will not be trusted to run the economy for a very long time, for the same reason I cannot be trusted to consume Absinthe in a goth club: because of the incident.
Fourteen years of swindling, scandal and chaos seem to have marinated the legacy of Labour politicians in the sense that they have become the party of modesty and discipline. This conviction plays into the social darwinism that is particular to the centre-left in power: that welfare must come with deterrents and that requiring state support is a sign of moral weakness. This is a hangover from centuries spent trying to sleep at night inside the racket of a machine that grinds out human misery. Underpinning it all is the conviction that there is something shameful about poverty.
That sort of shame runs livid under the skin of the British class system. It’s why every effort to actually help those who have been shut out and worn down by the system still has to be buttoned up in appeals of restraint and moral instruction. Labour has long been suspicious of pleasure, of anything that could possibly be seen as self-indulgent – setting itself against the excesses and depravity of the Tory old guard. As principles go, that one’s cheap, but like most cheap things, it breaks down just when you need it most.
Unfortunately, after gambling away the social democratic settlement, the Tories also gambled away the excuses. Nobody believes that taking away money from sick, poor and disabled people is an acceptable way to pay off the debts the last lot ran up. That’s a song the British electorate has been hearing for too long, and we are sick of it.
Nor can Reeves plausibly tell the public that we’re all in this together, even though she, at least, seems to be shouldering her share of the national misery – unlike, for example, Osborne, who delivered this line while clearly having a fabulous time holding the country upside down to see what shook out of the pockets of the working poor. Reeves has the decency not to look pleased with herself – just as what remains of the Conservative party has had the decency not to show up for these debates.
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