At face value, the government’s approach to “get Britain working” marks a pointed departure from the toxic anti-welfare rhetoric of recent decades.
Both Keir Starmer and his work and pensions secretary, Liz Kendall, have been at pains to distance themselves from on-off moral panics about “scroungers” that stretch back to the 1970s.
This narrative has resurfaced periodically in the decades since. We saw it in the secretary of state for social security Peter Lilley’s tirade against “something for nothing society” in 1992. And we saw it in the prime minister David Cameron’s declaration, 20 years later, that “we’re for the workers, they’re [Labour] for the shirkers”.
