Labour has long prided itself on being the party of compassion. Indeed, ever since Thatcherism, personified in the minds of many by the fictional television character Alan B’Stard – and ever since Theresa May gave her 2002 speech admitting that the Conservatives were the ‘nasty party’ – being compassionate has been a trademark and a selling point of the Labour party.
Labour politicians constantly bleat about how caring they are. Sometimes it seems that the only people they care about are themselves
This is why those who lead it are always reluctant to cut welfare spending, and why those further to the left on its parliamentary backbenches are ideologically hostile to it. To cut spending on the poor and needy would be to cast oneself in the same mould as the nasty, selfish Tories.
This is also why, as reported in the Times yesterday, there will very likely be no overhaul in the benefits system before the next general election. To avoid another confrontation with his backbench MPs, Sir Keir Starmer has vetoed plans for a new attempt to reform the welfare system. The Department for Work and Pensions has been told it will not be given any parliamentary time to change it, meaning any reforms will be unlikely to appear before 2029.
Rather than cement or safeguard Labour’s image as a party that cares, however, this news only serves to solidify an opposite truth: Labour is actually the cruel, callous party, one which cares less for the fate of the poor and vulnerable and more for its public image of conspicuous compassion.
Ever since Labour stopped being an organisation run chiefly by the workers and on behalf of the workers, and became the new de facto Whig party, a patrician outfit staffed by the earnest and well-meaning middle classes – a process that began in the 1980s – it has ceased being a body that champions work but now enables worklessness and indulges the workshy. It became a party that actually believes keeping people out of work is noble and decent. It came to see charity as something worthy, rather than an act that belittles and humiliates, and – in the long term – destroys in spirit the person on the receiving end.
While dispensing munificence may raise the social standing and assuage the conscience of those handing out largesse, such deeds will do little to help the needy in the long-term, specifically and especially those who are actually able of working. Long-term worklessness has a devastating effect on the self-regard of those it affects. Becoming welfare-dependent only deepens this sense of worthlessness.
Labour are not the party of compassion. In helping to keep more people on welfare, and easing their way to a lifetime of dependency, they have become a party of cruelty, condemning millions to a miserable, wasted life.
This is not to tar the whole organisation with the same brush. While Starmer seems once more on the point of capitulating to backbench recalcitrance on welfare reform, having previously done so last July, Alan Milburn, the government work tsar, is currently looking at how changes to benefits could reduce the huge number of people not in employment, education or training, explaining – most crucially – why so many young people now deem themselves mentally unwell and thus incapable of work. His full report with recommendations is due in July. Elsewhere, Stephen Timms, the disability minister, is compiling a report on how best to change personal independence payments. Again, the sensitive issue of mental health is predicted to feature prominently.
One of the biggest, and most obvious, problems regarding the recent exponential rise of youths being diagnosed with a plethora of mental health issues, is the reluctance of too many in positions of power to state the unpalatable truth: that some of these people would prefer not to work, that their vital years of social formation and self-development were disrupted or shattered by lockdowns, or that they have been raised in a society that has taught them to believe that anxiety and stress are abnormal.
Few, especially those on the left, dare to utter these uncomfortable truths. To do so would be to lay oneself open to accusations of callousness and the charge of being ‘uncaring’ – an allegation that spells potential career death to anyone on the left. Far better to carry on blithely and issue nice, bland words about safeguarding the ‘vulnerable’.
There is nothing compassionate in this approach. By indulging the feelings of the depressed and vulnerable, who have convinced themselves they have permanent and clinical mental health problems, they aren’t helping the actually vulnerable. Rather, they are indulging them and perpetuating a tangible sense of misery that entails from a lifetime spent at home on welfare feeling helpless and doing nothing.
Labour politicians constantly bleat about how caring they are. Sometimes it seems that the only people they care about are themselves.
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