What has just happened, and where are we now? Three long weeks ago, the government began to announce all those cuts to disability and sickness benefits – aimed, they said, at saving £5bn by the end of this decade. Then, only hours before Rachel Reeves’s emergency financial “update”, the seemingly omnipotent Office for Budget Responsibility said that the clawbacks would total significantly less, which prompted the Treasury to not only halve the money paid to new claimants of the incapacity benefit element of universal credit, but freeze its current levels until 2030. Cruelty had followed cruelty: by last Thursday, when it became clear that a record 4.5 million children in the UK are living in poverty, Oxfam was calling these moves “morally repugnant”.
In some quarters, pundits and politicians have moved on from the controversy all this has caused, and are busy speculating about whether the chancellor will soon have to put up taxes. But at the heart of our politics, there is now an inescapable certainty, which will flare up spectacularly when some of the cuts to benefits are put to a parliamentary vote: the fact that Reeves, Keir Starmer and their colleagues are set on immiserating millions of disabled people.
