Sicknote crackdown puts clear water between Sunak and Starmer

SIR Keir Starmer keeps referring to his ‘changed Labour Party’, but does anyone believe that the changes are profound and lasting? Look at their grudging and evasive response to Rishi Sunak’s badly needed plans for major welfare reform.

They mumbled that they too were ‘committed’ to social security reform, but would not say which parts of the Prime Minister’s plans they would support. As modern Labour’s chattering class backers tend to regard all welfare benefits of any kind as an invariably good thing, just as they regard taxation as virtuous in itself, it is hard to imagine that they would ever tackle this problem seriously.

So here we see a real and rapidly developing rift between the parties – as one of the most important elections in modern history approaches.

Labour have long sought to pretend that they are uniquely compassionate to the poor, though in fact this country already had an advanced welfare state even before the Second World War. The parsimonious Labour politicians of the 1940s and 1950s would likely be shocked by the levels of spending, and relaxed controls, of the modern system which has developed especially since the 1960s.

When Labour was still a largely working-class party it could not forget that the welfare system was founded upon taxes and contributions made by wageearners. Their money had to be spent with care.

But is that so now?

Since the Covid pandemic, this country’s deeply rooted work discipline (acquired during a long, fierce industrial revolution and two world wars) was severely weakened.

Several cohorts of students and school-leavers were deprived of the normal transitions between study and working life. And new intellectual fashions about mental illness and neurodiversity have created large new classes of people who can now claim that they should be exempted from the stress of work.

As always with such things, there are, of course, genuine cases of people who cannot reasonably be expected to work.

But the sheer size of this new class of claimant – and the cost of paying their claims – suggests that this is now getting out of control.

Take the ‘Personal Independence Payment’ worth up to £700 a month, now claimed by 3.4million people – about half for mental health reasons.

The number of men and women written off as ‘economically inactive’ on longterm sickness benefits has now risen to 2.8million, roughly half of them classified as suffering from depression, anxiety or bad nerves. Again, no doubt, there are many genuine cases involved. But the Government owes it to working taxpayers, who must finance these handouts through taxes on their hardearned income, to examine such claims with care.

This is not cruel or callous. On the contrary, as the Premier has argued, it does people no favours to leave them, solitary and with no future, permanently on benefit. As Mr Sunak says, there is ‘nothing compassionate about leaving a generation of young people to sit alone in the dark before a flickering screen watching as their dreams slip further from reach every passing day’.

Work is good for us, and is often the best cure for what ails us. It is right that we should be generous to those who truly suffer. But it is just as right that we should be strict, firm and fair about ensuring that this generosity is not abused.