The fashionable thing is to decry the government’s “messaging”. Last week, it was signalling a plan to slash disability benefits. Jo White, the MP for Bassetlaw, was bemoaning the fact that people’s “aspirations are so low”. By the weekend, the health secretary, Wes Streeting, was blaming the numbers of disabled people on an overdiagnosis of mental health conditions. Keir Starmer, however, was rumoured to be considering a U-turn on the cuts – apparently he hadn’t been expecting so much opposition from the cabinet and backbenchers. Why not, one might ask? They are, after all, members of the Labour party. Surely they would be uncomfortable with a plan that sounded exactly, to the letter, as if it had come from the Conservatives?
Fine, it doesn’t look like the most expert job of managing the optics. But it has also left as many as 10 million people sleepless with worry, because the world this government describes bears no relation to the reality they are living in. As of last October, there were 3.6 million personal independence payment (Pip) claimants. Eligibility is stringent. The idea – last floated by Tony Blair, whose transformation into know-nothing golf-club pontificator is still startling after all this time – that we are “medicalising the ups and downs of life”, handing out diagnoses and sickness benefits to people who just feel a bit sad, is fanciful. According to the 2021 census, there are 5.8 million unpaid carers in the UK, 1.2 million of those living in poverty, 400,000 in deep poverty. A report by the Social Metrics Commission found that, of the 14.9 million people living in poverty in the UK in 2021-22, 8.6 million were in families that included a disabled person.
