What is it with all those Labour MPs? Can’t they see how ridiculous and unsupportable it is that the number of people claiming Personal Independence Payments (PIPs) has nearly doubled in the last five years? Nearly four million people, up from just two million in 2019, are now receiving this government support because of long-term conditions, including asthma and anxiety.
That’s nearly one in 10 working-age adults receiving up to £187 per week. Even this hopeless Labour government clearly has no choice except to tackle this, with plans it says will save the exchequer £5 billion a year by 2030. Alright, that’s not much when you consider that by that stage the government will be forking out total health and disability benefits of more than £100 billion.
But at least it’s a start. Yet even that hopelessly inadequate saving has a vast number of Labour MPs up in arms, screeching in horror and threatening to rebel. More than 100 of them have registered their intense displeasure at what their own leadership is doing, and are threatening to vote down the Government’s bill next week.
Not surprisingly, they reckon they might get their way and force the Government to back down. They’ve seen the shameless flip-flop on winter-fuel payments, and know that if they apply enough pressure, the leadership might once again fold. Keir Starmer and his ministers are not exactly known for consistency.
And what does it tell us about the wretched state of our country that these MPs might succeed in forcing another U-turn? The British state is ballooning in front of our eyes, with expenditure, taxes and borrowing at or near post-war highs, feeding off each other, while enticing millions into state dependency.
Like the world’s fattest man in the Monty Python film The Meaning of Life, the state is so absurdly bloated and disgusting that it’s on the verge of exploding. Yet, Labour MPs don’t just want to give him ‘one wafer-thin mint’ but several helpings of burgers and chips, with tubfuls of fatty mayo on the side.
They have no desire at all to cut what the state does, and how much it spends. In fact, the opposite. They are only too happy for it to grow still further, squeezing ever more tax out of the shrinking number of people who are actually out there working.
Never mind that more and more are now being dragged into the higher rate of tax (more than 7 million of us will be in 2027, up from just 2.9 million at the turn of the century). Never mind that the wealthy, responsible for a huge chunk of the government’s tax receipts, are fleeing the country like rats from a sinking ship. And never mind that increasing numbers of those aged over 50 are retiring early because work no longer pays. None of that matters according to these MPs.
Yet, these are the very people who Starmer and co rely on to get their votes through – people for whom it’s always about rights and never about responsibility, who fail to understand that government largesse can only come from hard-working taxpayers, and who are blind to the ever-smaller number of earners paying for an ever larger number of receivers.
My betting is that the Government will make enough concessions to buy off the rebels next week. But it won’t be nearly enough to turn things around. Sooner or later, there will have to be a reckoning. It’s just a question of who sees it first: the money markets or the voters.