Liz Kendall is fighting to sell “immoral and devastating” disability advantages | Advantages

The explanation derived by the Minister of Social Affairs Liz Kendall on the reform of the disabled benefits and 5 billion GBP to cuts felt like the latest attempt by Labor to answer the question that seems to arise every time it is a thorny problem of social politics and delivers bad news. Namely: How does that differ from life among the Tories?

Kendall tried to emphasize the positive. Work Would fix the chaos of a social security system that had inherited the conservatives, remove perverse benefits and toxic fit-for-work tests and bring in more protection for applicants in need of protection. The principle of universal loan would increasingly increased.

In contrast to one year when Dissed Rishi Sunak The Tories’s own proposals to reduce the increasing disability benefits, and Kendall made sure not to call up cultural war stereotypes. There was no indication that this was “too far” that this was all the guilt of snowflakes and benefits of spirgers or the culture of mental health.

If the reform of a system that everyone knew had not been the extent of the changes made by Labor, they suspect that everything would have gone well. However, overshade everything that Kendall’s confirmation of the bad news: a reduction in expenses for the disability of 5 billion GBP per year until the end of the decade.

This shocking cut was only a single line in Kendall’s speech, which was overcrowded by the serious promises to save disabled applicants from the performance trap. But there will have a big impact: financial for many applicants and political for ministers. We knew it would come, but it was still a shock. Really a Labor government?

Within minutes after sitting from Kendall, activists and backbenchers made their judgment. Scope said Labor had just proposed the “biggest cuts to the disability advantage in a record”, more serious than the ex-goal Chancellor George Osborne, who had tried at the peak of austerity measures.

Kendall’s challenge was to square the circle between the competing ambitions of Labor: to capture social justice and attack on poverty on the one hand and one -sidedly imposed fiscal restrictions on one side. With all the conversation of moral missions and the applicant’s trigger, it was not obvious that it was successful for her.

Disabled charity organizations described the plans as “immoral and devastating”. The charity organization for mental health said they would tighten the crisis of mental health. The children’s mantut group for child poverty said that the reforms were undermined the strategy of Labor’s child poverty. Foodbanks said it would undermine the Labor Manifesto Manifesto to shorten the use of the Lebensbank.

Politically, it felt like a repetition of the corrosive internal work series due to the refusal to reduce the two-child performance limit or the payment of the winter fuel payment. If activists in their criticism of the government had so far been relatively held back – the Labor had to be better than the last one – it was the feeling that Accord dissolved.

For some of the poorest citizens of Britain, this will be the type of brutal reduction for income that has denounced Labor in the opposition in the past 14 years. Although existing applicants are partially protected, according to the Resolution Foundation Thinktank, between 800,000 and 1.2 million people in personal independence payments between 4,200 and 6,300 GBP would lose support per year by 2029-30.

The increase in the standard rate of universal loan of 3 per week was largely welcomed. It is hardly generous because the pandemic raising to universal loans was 20 GBP per week, but at least it was realized that a large part of increasing the claims for disabilities in recent years have come from people who have not been able to survive on the lean general advantages.

However, these increases will be accompanied at 47 GBP per week cuts for the incompetent element of the universal loan for new applicants of 2026. If you are sick and disabled and under 22, you cannot be able to claim capacity performance at all. “Irony,” said Louise Murphy von Resolution, “is that the main beneficiaries [of the plans] are those without health problems or a disability ”.

Not all bad news is. The system reforms – redesign of the way in which people claim performance and take out the services, such as the right to attempt to provide guarantee, to test applicants without testing fear of loss of services – shows that a government understands that bad performance design is not a mistake.

How does that differ from life among the Tories? The shadow welfare secretary Helen Whately was at hand to remind us that bleakness is relative. Why should you only reduce the expenditure by just £ 5 billion, she asked. “The fact is that 5 billion GBP simply does not reduce it.” Things may be bad, but under the last lot they could be much worse.