Westminster is unsettled, but then when isn’t it? Rachel Reeves, in her latest turn as the iron-fisted steward of fiscal discipline, has announced a £6bn raid on sickness and disability benefits. It is, we are told, a necessary correction: too many people are ‘economically inactive’, a phrase that, like ‘collateral damage’ or ‘friendly fire’, obscures the brutality of its meaning. The new Labour government, having campaigned on the promise of stability, now finds itself improvising a morality play about the deserving and undeserving poor.
The cabinet is not pleased. Angela Rayner, Yvette Cooper, and Shabana Mahmood have all registered their discontent. Reeves, for her part, insists that this is the only way forward. ‘Difficult decisions’ must be made, though, as ever, they are never difficult for those making them. Sixteen disability and poverty charities, including Scope and Mencap, have written to the chancellor in protest, warning of the ‘catastrophic’ consequences. But then, charity letters rarely alter the course of government policy.
Keir Starmer has attempted to frame the cuts as an act of salvation rather than punishment. Those languishing on benefits, he argues, have been ‘wasted’ by the system and need to be put to use. The language is instructive. The unemployed are not people, merely surplus material. Labour, having dispensed with the moralising rhetoric of the right, instead treats economic inactivity as a technical failure. The system must be corrected, recalibrated, disciplined into efficiency.
Why do they always try to bury bad news on a Friday? The weekend, it seems, is meant to blunt the impact. A government announcement is made, headlines are generated, and by Monday, they hope, we will have moved on. But we will not have forgotten once the weekend is over. The consequences of this decision will linger, not only in Westminster’s memory but in the lives of those who will wake up next week and the week after still facing the reality of lost income, increased precarity, and the quiet, grinding terror of knowing that the state has turned its back on them. The government may want a brief reprieve from scrutiny, but those affected have no such luxury.
And what is this relentless obsession with ‘economic activity’ if not a symptom of a deeper pathology? The idea that life must be justified through productivity is one of capitalism’s cruellest impositions. As I argued recently in The Tyranny of Work, we are still haunted by the Protestant work ethic, by the idea that to be human is to labour, that idleness is a kind of sin. Even illness and disability must be subjected to the cold logic of productivity: can you still work? If not, can you be made to? If not, then what use are you? Reeves, Starmer, and their allies would never frame it in such crude terms, but the calculus is clear.
In an announcement seemingly designed for an audience of startled health policy wonks, Starmer has declared the abolition of NHS England. The logic remains opaque. A government that decries the instability of Tory rule now proposes to dismantle the very bureaucracy that holds the system together. Unison, the largest healthcare trade union, has called the plan ‘shambolic’. Perhaps the government sees it differently. The NHS, like the unemployed, is to be restructured, reformed, made more ‘productive’.
For all the talk of a Labour government, it is striking how little of Labour’s historical inheritance is recognisable. Starmer, it seems, has no intention of breaking with the post-Thatcherite consensus, only managing it more efficiently. Austerity is rebranded as responsibility; public service cuts are presented as necessary reforms. ‘Difficult decisions’ abound, though the difficulty is always someone else’s to bear. History does not repeat, but it does return, wearing a slightly different mask.
Hold on, stop the presses.
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