Sir Keir Starmer has called the current benefits system unsustainable, indefensible and unfair, and said the government could not “shrug its shoulders and look away”.
Addressing Labour MPs on Monday evening, the prime minister said the current welfare system was “the worst of all worlds”, discouraging people from working while producing a “spiralling bill”.
The comments come as Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall prepares to set out changes to the welfare system and cut the benefits bill in the coming weeks.
Chancellor Rachel Reeves has earmarked several billion pounds in draft spending cuts to welfare and other government departments ahead of the Spring Statement.
There is unease over the plans within the party, with Labour MP Rachael Maskell warning against “draconian cuts” that risk “pushing disabled people into poverty”.
Maskell told the BBC she had picked up “deep, deep concern” among Labour MPs.
Keir Starmer confirms that he’s proud to be a red Tory continuing austerity and targeting poor and disabled scum.Keir Starmer, Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves wear the uniform of the rich and powerful. They have all had clothes bought for them by multi-millionaire Labour donor Lord Alli. CORRECTION: It appears that Rachel Reeves clothing was provided by Juliet Rosenfeld.
DR DYLAN MURPHY challenges the idea that social security places an economic burden on the public
THE current Labour government of red Tories has doubled down recently on its propaganda against those people claiming benefits in the UK.
These reactionary comments range from Starmer’s pledge in the Sun to be ruthless in his cuts to benefits, to Reeves making inflated claims in the same paper that spending on benefits has “spiralled out of control.”
In the same interview with the Sun Reeves bragged that Labour is “introducing the biggest welfare fraud and error package in recent history.”
The implication is clear: those claiming benefits, including those workers on low wages claiming elements of universal credit, are an undeserving burden on the British economy.
In the “golden days” of the Victorian era they at least maintained a distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor. Under Starmer’s Labour all people who claim benefits are clearly in the undeserving poor category and should be made to suffer ever greater poverty all to help “turbo charge” economic growth.
A new government bill would force banks to carry out “mass surveillance” of millions of innocent disabled people and other benefit claimants, MPs have been warned.
The measures in the bill would force banks to examine individuals’ accounts for potential breaches of benefit eligibility rules, and then pass that information to the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP).
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Work and pensions secretary Liz Kendall told MPs on Monday that the measures would force banks to provide data to “help identify incorrect benefit payments people might be getting, including fraudulently, such as if someone has too much in savings, making them ineligible for a benefit, or if they are fraudulently claiming benefits abroad when they should be living in the UK”.
But independent MP Zarah Sultana said the “algorithm-driven financial surveillance” allowed by the bill would lead to errors that would disproportionately affect disabled and older people and “those already struggling to make ends meet”, and create “a two-tier justice system”.
She said: “Even a one per cent error rate in the AI system used by banks could lead to thousands of benefit recipients being wrongly flagged, unfairly investigated and forced into lengthy appeals.”
She said the bill would allow “mass surveillance” and was “deeply unjust” and would “subject millions of innocent people – disabled individuals, carers, jobseekers, pensioners and parents – to unwarranted financial surveillance, treating them as suspects by default, simply because they receive state support”.
It would, she said, turn banks into “agents of the state”.
Another independent MP, John McDonnell, the former Labour shadow chancellor, said the government was seeking powers for a “mass surveillance exercise”.
He said: “The reason why people will feel that it is unfair is that it specifically targets people who are often in desperate need.
“If there was a group of people whose accounts we would want to monitor because there has been a history of fraud, and who have had to pay money back – some have gone to prison – it would be MPs; I was here during the expenses scandal.”
The government is hiding figures that would show how often its civil servants are making life-threatening errors when dealing with the benefit claims of disabled people, just as media reports suggest it is planning sweeping cuts and reforms.
Last Friday, The Times reported that everyone on out-of-work disability benefits could be forced to carry out work-related activity, while hundreds of thousands of disabled people could see their support cut.
The article stressed that no decisions had yet been made, but The Times is known to have highly-placed contacts within both the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) and the Treasury, which is said to be pushing for significant spending cuts.
But just as reports suggest the government is planning major changes that could impose significant safeguarding risks for disabled claimants, and increase pressure on DWP work coaches and jobcentres, DWP has blocked the publication of updated figures that would show the number of potentially fatal errors being made by its staff.
Last month, Disability News Service (DNS) reported on the long-delayed release of figures from last April, which showed how DWP staff were making thousands of potentially fatal errors every month when dealing with the benefit claims of disabled people, particularly in relation to universal credit claims and the department’s fraud and “compliance” work.
Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall speaking to the media outside the Department for Work and Pensions in Westminster, London, December 17, 2024
LABOUR’S repeated attacks on disabled people are cynical, cruel and, in providing an excuse to legislate for ever-greater state intrusion into private citizens’ lives, a threat to all our freedoms.
Liz Kendall chases headlines with the latest gimmick (banning those found guilty of benefit fraud from driving). More sinister is the resurrection of Tory plans to make banks share information from private accounts and powers for the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) to seize funds without a court process.
The state already has ample power both to detect and punish benefit fraud: it can make banks share clients’ financial information if there is suspicion of fraud, while those found guilty can be jailed for up to 10 years (courtesy of Keir Starmer in a previous iteration, as director of public prosecutions egging on the then Conservative-Lib Dem coalition’s war on welfare).
This is not about fighting crime. Nor even about cutting costs: benefit fraud amounts to less than 3 per cent of social security spending, and ministers say the new legislation is aimed at saving £1.5 billion over five years, an almost irrelevant sum given annual spending on social security excluding pensions is over £130bn.
It is about creating a climate of fear.
The approach echoes that toward immigration, where endless scaremongering about “small boats” obscures the rarity of such arrivals compared to immigrants who arrive legally.
