Labour's disability cuts: Immorality, justified by lies, motivated by economic stupidity

Labour's propaganda narratives about their vindictive cuts to PIP disability benefits are utterly dishonest, and their motivation is downright economic stupidity

Darren Jones is Rachel Reeves deputy at the Treasury who has been tipped for a big promotion by Labour insiders in Keir Starmer’s rumoured reshuffle.

This morning he was sent out to do the morning media round, in which he had to pretend that the UK-US trade agreement is a good thing when it leaves us in a worse position than we were in last year, and answer questions about Labour’s cruel and economically illiterate disability benefit cuts.

In response to a question about the growing backbench rebellion against Rachel Reeves proposed disability benefits cuts, Jones deceptively waffled about getting disabled people back into work.

Personal Independence Payments are not a work-related benefit.

They exist to help disabled people with disability related costs like specialised equipment and care costs, whether they work or not.

40% of people in receipt of PIP are already in work, while another 40% are pensioners.

Making it even more difficult to claim PIP isn’t going to make it easier for disabled people to find work at all. In fact, removing their support is going to make it harder for disabled people who already work to keep their jobs, and harder for disabled people seeking work to find it.

Of the working age people in receipt of PIP, the most likely to lose their disability benefits under Reeves reforms will be people suffering severe back pain (79%), arthritis (77%), other musculoskeletal diseases (71%), chronic pain (68%), and cardiovascular disease (62%).

It’s clear that Reeves is mainly going after people who are suffering age related ailments, many of whom will have spent their entire lives working and paying into the social security system, and most of whom are either still in work, or retired.

Labour’s repeated efforts to justify these cuts by painting disabled people as workshy scroungers who need to be impoverished into seeking work are utterly duplicitous, when the actual intended consequence of these disability cuts is to "save money" by withdrawing disability support from pensioners, and from mainly older workers suffering age-related conditions.

This conflation of Labour’s vindictive economic attack on disabled people’s support and "getting people into work" is deliberate, and it’s been parroted countless times, by countless Labour politicians, all of whom know perfectly well that it’s actually got nothing to do with work, and everything to do with Rachel Reeves intention to balance the books on the backs of the vulnerable by slashing £4.5 billion per year in disability support.

Even when we get down to the true intentions, it’s still economically illiterate stupidity of the highest order, which illustrates that Rachel Reeves and her minions like Darren Jones simply don’t understand how the economy actually works.

If the government slashes disability support by £4.5 billion per year, they’re simply removing £4.5 billion per year from economic circulation.

This £4.5 billion per year isn’t a dead loss that can be chalked up as "money saved", it’s actually one of the most beneficial forms of public spending in terms of getting money circulating around the economy.

Disabled people don’t just burn their PIP payments in a pit, they spend it in the economy, generating economic activity, jobs, and tax returns.

Every time the money is re-spent in the economy as it circulates, it generates more tax returns, until it’s exhausted, or finds itself squirreled away into savings or tax haven boltholes by the rich.

Government policies that distribute money to the poor and ordinary create more economic activity than government policies that lavish handouts and tax breaks on the mega-rich.

Then you have to wonder how many of these disabled people are going to end up relying on the NHS for emergency care as a result of their carers and specialised equipment being cancelled. It’s impossible to know the downstream costs on the NHS, because Labour haven’t even bothered to do an impact assessment.

How many disabled people who would’ve continued working through the pain would quit their jobs if their access to specialised equipment and care were to be cut off? It’s impossible to know, because Labour haven’t bothered to do an impact assessment on this either.

It’s economically illiterate to look at disability benefits in terms of their cost only, without adding their positive economic impact, and the consequential costs of scrapping them, onto the other side of the balance sheet.

Watching Reeves inept attempts to balance the books is like watching some preening knobhead patting himself on the back for saving £50 per week by not putting fuel in his car, only to find that he can no longer get to work.

Reeves’ £4.5 billion PIP cuts amounts to an average of around £7 million per year withdrawn from the local economy of each parliamentary constituency. Obviously the effects will be worse in poorer constituencies where health conditions are more prevalent, and in constituencies with older populations.

Are the British public really so callous that they want to see disability support withdrawn in a way that most harshly impacts those with age-related conditions like arthritis, ankylosing spondylitis, sciatica, rheumatism, chronic pain, and hearth disease, aimed principally at pensioners and disabled people who are still in work?

And even if they do want these types of people to suffer economic hardship on top of their health conditions, are they really so keen on other people’s suffering that they want the spending power of their own local communities reduced?

The most infuriating thing about this is that the Tories gave us a painful 14 year long demonstration of how myopic austerity book-balancing exercises ended up delivering an unprecedented period of economic stagnation and falling living standards, yet Reeves seems to think that "more of the same" will do the trick this time around, and Starmer keeps insisting that this continuation of Tory economic idiocy somehow constitutes "change".

It’s not just that cutting disability support to people with chronic conditions is morally wrong, it’s the fact that Starmer’s ministers are systematically lying that these reforms are aimed at getting people into work when they’re not, and the fact that their real intention of "saving money" relies on a bone-headed and economically illiterate refusal to consider the other side of the balance sheet.

It’s immorality, justified by lies, motivated by economic stupidity.