“Broken Britain” has become the favourite narrative of the right in recent months. The playbook goes like this: politicians and pundits alike exploit genuine concerns about squeezed services and living standards to propagate a sense of division and despair. Meanwhile, the parts of the state that actually need radical change are then either ignored or misrepresented, if only because their worst impact tends to be felt by the very marginalised communities the hard right scapegoats.
Few areas demonstrate this more than the disability benefits system. Reading the damning Timms report – the government’s landmark review into the personal independence payment (Pip) in England and Wales – last week, I was struck by the gulf between reality and rhetoric. The disability benefits system is “not fit for purpose” and “dehumanising” for claimants, the report found, yet scroll through a news site or switch on talk radio and there’s tumbleweed when it comes to substantive ideas to reform it, especially from figures typically eager to declare the nation’s institutions at risk of imminent collapse.
