It didn’t take long, did it, for the pundits (self included) who identified Sir Keir Starmer as the Labour answer to Margaret Thatcher (strong on defence, tough on welfare) to do a rapid rethink. No sooner did the Work and Pensions Secretary, Liz Kendall, intimate that she’d be freezing Pips – the personal independence payments which aren’t means-tested and which you can claim if you’re employed – as part of a larger reassessment of benefits, than Sir Keir does that very un-Thatcherite manoeuvre, a U-turn. Labour MPs and frontbenchers, including, it seems, Ed Miliband, bolstered by the Manchester Mayor, Andy Burnham, made their way to the PM’s office to kick up about the changes, and Sir Keir buckled. Pips would not squeak after all.
Well, we’ll see tomorrow when Liz Kendall unveils her proposals for cutting the welfare budget whether Labour is serious about welfare reform and specifically about addressing the quite extraordinary increase in claims based on mental health. Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, pointed out the obvious truth that there has been “overdiagnosis” of mental health conditions as a result of which, too many people have been “written off” as unfit for work. That’s obviously true in many cases. Although Wes can’t possibly say this, another way of looking at it is that many people have been diagnosed with mental health problems so that they can obtain benefits.
