The welfare bill is pretty much dead. Its core provisions withdrawn at the 11th hour, abandoned until after a coming review, and the planned Treasury savings now extra costs. A series of humiliating climb-downs amounted to what one backbencher described as “turd polishing”. Our Prime Minister is now treading water, facing an uncertain future. After not even a year in office.
We were promised “a 1945 moment”. This isn’t it. The welfare fiasco tells a broader story, of the failures of nearly half a century of political economy that decimated industrial Britain, and the inability of all politicians to go beyond managed decline and build a new economic model. Starmer is just the latest bit-part player.
The year 1945 is Year Zero in the Labour imaginary: the foundation of the modern, social-democratic nation-state, before which life was nasty, brutish and short. Its mythic status has only grown as the pillars of the post-war settlement have eroded. The nationalised utilities are now owned by foreign governments and hedge funds. The NHS buckles under the pressures of demographics, PFI bills, and squeezed capital spending. The state-owned industrial behemoths have been replaced by strip-lit private office blocks. And the trade unions’ tacit alliance with the government — cosy meetings and “beer and sandwiches” at No. 10 — has been replaced by a default pose of mutual hostility.
“It’s small wonder, then, that a disability benefits raid would provoke a very modern Labour rebellion.”
But what remains of Clement Attlee’s dream? The British state, withered, maintains a vast, bureaucratic infrastructure for redistributive cash transfers; a complex sorting-house for the conversion of tax revenues into welfare benefits. Indeed, the two phenomena are interlinked. Full employment is no longer a primary aim of public policy. Instead, the manufacturing industries and broad armies of manual labour have declined in inverse proportion to the number of people reliant on incapacity payments. It’s no coincidence that the places most dependent on DWP largesse are synonymous with economic decline: Port Talbot, Inverclyde and Hartlepool all make the top 10.
The promise of Blairism was to make peace with the Thatcherite model, a Faustian pact with the City and with growth driven by household debt and consumer credit. But welfare would be strengthened. New Labour’s Third Way would function by allowing the neoliberal revolution to continue unabated — privatisations, deregulation, globalisation, marketisation — while Gordon Brown’s fiscal transfers would expand the pool of winners from the social contract.
Pit closures towards the end of the last century were immediately followed by localised spikes in unemployment in the former coalfield. Those lingering for too long in the dole queues were quietly shifted to incapacity benefits, disguising the true picture of joblessness. And this journey from unemployment to disability is now a long-established pathway. It was the unspoken deal for the downwardly mobile citizens of deindustrialised Britain: mass redundancies would be clumsily compensated for with a more-or-less permanent welfare offer, from salt of the earth and the dignity of labour, to Benefits Street. We’ve medicalised and pathologised the effects of structural and economic shifts, of deindustrialisation, and the rise of a service economy geared exclusively towards the skillsets of urbanised graduates.
It’s small wonder, then, that a disability benefits raid would provoke a very modern Labour rebellion among the PLP. Blairism only worked when buoyed by strong global growth, and Starmer doesn’t have that. Having abandoned any project for the creation of a new model, or for reforming capitalism (let alone transcending it), welfarism and cash transfers remain one of social democracy’s only remaining raison d’etres. For the contemporary Labour MP, think less class fighter, more social worker. Most of them, for all their professional-managerial, corporate and third sector backgrounds, think of themselves as the stalwart defenders, if not of your normie, average worker, then certainly as an advocate for the very poor, the near-destitute, and, crucially, the benefit-dependent. To remove income from such people reeks of the dark days of Osbornite ascendancy, of the language of “shirkers and strivers”
But there’s a problem. The past half decade has seen an explosion in incapacity claims driven, in large part, by mental ill health. The average age of claimants is trending downward, as the young increasingly report anxiety, depression, ADHD and other mental disorders. The extent to which this represents a health phenomenon or a cultural shift is a matter of interpretation. The British stiff upper lip came with its own destructive tendencies. But in the new, Americanised world, any and all pushback on an individuals’ subjectivity, “their truth”, is frowned upon. The result is a very modern “epidemic”, driven, in essence, by diagnostic self-ID involving a set of self-reported symptoms, and a growing cohort of jobless young adults, coming with a large price tag. While underlying population health has barely shifted, the pre-pandemic peak of £16 billion annual government spending on incapacity benefit is projected to balloon to £100 billion by the end of the decade. Something has to give.
And yet the Government chose the bluntest of instruments to try to reduce the welfare bill by a mere £5 billion. Instead of reassessing the more spurious claims, or initiating a jobs and training guarantee, benefits would be cut for a broad range of recipients, including physically disabled people, in wheelchairs, incapable of work. This wasn’t welfare reform, it was a Treasury and OBR grab. It wasn’t a Bill for creating secure, well-paid work through investment-led growth, but for punitive measures targeted against people who cannot wash and bath themselves unaided, and all to satisfy the tea-leaf fiscal and growth predictions of a faceless public body.
But the row signals something bigger than welfare inequities. It is the beginning of the end of the nonentity of Starmerism. As a result of No. 10’s blank intellectual hinterland, we see an administration at the mercy of events, without a clear project, without a domestic vision, and unable to meet the ubiquitous challenges facing contemporary Britain. Nothing works and nothing is possible. Starmer promised “Change”, but the public is giving up on the possibility of deliverance, on the ability of the state to actually do things. The country is becoming ungovernable. In these conditions, instead of signalling a desire for change, the next election will only result in a cry of hopeless rage. Starmer has nothing in his locker that will alter the dynamic. He knows it, hence his retreat to the international stage, where the bone-dry language of diplomacy suits his neutral tones. There, at the summits, this apolitical Prime Minister can appear above the fray of mere politics.
The only consistent hallmark of his project is the bifurcation between its analysis of our malaise, and the solutions it proposes. Failed welfare reform efforts are only the latest example: a hollowed-out industrial base, stagnant real wages and a culture of chronic economic inactivity is met by a set of puny cuts to personal independence payments. Now these tweaks to the minutiae are undeliverable. National renewal is unthinkable. Backbenchers have eyes on their slender majorities — they’ve seen Starmer flip-flopping, disavowing his own past 12 months in The Observer, and they know he has no plan. They are now emboldened, smelling blood, perhaps Morgan McSweeney’s, or perhaps Rachel Reeves’s.
Tony Benn used to talk about weathervane politicians, but our current Prime Minister is more akin to a plastic bag blowing in the wind. The void at the top allows factional actors to transpose any number of worldviews onto the blank canvas of Downing Street’s vision. There’s Blue Labour Starmer, progressive Starmer, and technocratic Starmer, who bristles at the mention of any superfluous “isms”. We once had Corbynite Starmer.
After the welfare vote, we have zombie Starmer, in office but not in power. Reforming welfare treats the symptom, not the cause. It’s palliative care, relatively straightforward compared with the real task of building a new economic paradigm that provides secure, well-paid employment across the country. That would be a real 1945 moment — but it would require a solid ideological grounding, bound up in intensely political struggles, contested notions of the common good, and a new political economy. Starmerism can’t even do tinkering. Its time is up.
