There was never a moral case for taking Personal Independence Payments away from recipients of it. If the main motivation of the ‘reform’ was to help disabled people into work, why deliberately cut the number of people receiving PIP when it is a benefit which is unrelated to work? The 4 point threshold was bound to take PIP off of people in work and undermine their ability to work.
Why the government imagined that a proposal which according to their own analysis would push 250,000 extra people into relative poverty, and the loss of Carers Allowance for 150,000, would be well received, is a mystery. For the Prime Minister and the clique around him Labour MPs are nothing more than voting fodder. They are there to take their instructions from on high.
This autocratic method, already tested and honed in the Labour Party, came unstuck because, even though most Labour MPs were hand-picked as supporters of the Great Leader, they chaffed at being treated in this way. They were under extreme pressure from their constituents, people on PIP or other ill-health benefits, their relatives, Disability and other campaigns.
It became clear that the government would be forced to execute some sort of retreat, but it was always going to be one designed to split the ‘rebels’ sufficiently to get the bill through. It is a shoddy partial retreat which will produce a two tier system in which new claimants who fall ill will be subject to a policy which won’t give them enough to live on, or to afford to work.
That the Prime Minister, who has alienated vast swathes of Labour’s electoral support, could also alienate so many of his own supporters in Parliament, shows that he thinks he is the CEO of the Labour Party and the government, rather than the leader of a democratic Party. This shambles underlines the fact that you cannot run a political party, still less a government with decisions made by a small clique of people who are tone deaf, far removed from the concerns of millions of people.
Despite the retreat the mere fact that the government decided that it was ‘necessary’ to take money off of disabled people in order to stick to the ‘fiscal rules’, will not be forgotten. Nor will the fact that, apparently, we can’t afford to fund support for disabled people but we can afford to buy, what is it, a dozen stealth bombers? As for the decision to increase defence spending to 5%, the government has no mandate for that in the Labour Party or elsewhere. Isn’t that what the Chancellor has railed against, an ‘un-costed programme’?
It would be nice to think that the Bill would be voted down next Tuesday, but it will most likely be passed. If it is there will be consequences. It will leave a very bad taste in the mouth.
If you want to help disabled people into work then the first thing to do is to tackle employers who are not willing to make the ‘reasonable adjustments’ for them to work. Not ‘incentivise’ claimants by giving them less money to live on.
Martin Wicks
Martin Wicks 