Labour has split on the eve of a major benefits announcement, with vocal opposition to what many see as a betrayal of the party’s core values.

When the party was formed in 1900, it had a clear mission to give working-class people – not just workers but those who were looking for work, sick or disabled, along with the elderly and children who would otherwise be deprived – better living conditions.

This did not just mean fair wages and a list of rights for workers but policies for healthcare, education, and social security.

Today (Tuesday, March 18, 2025), Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall is preparing to rip the security right out of the social contract the government has with UK citizens, with a series of policy announcements in which she will deprive genuinely sick and disabled people of the dedicated benefits that help them live and throw them into a jobs market that doesn’t have any work for them.

This is wrong on principle, as Labour peer Baroness Chakrabarti pointed out. As the BBC reports it, she said such a move “is not a Labour thing to do”.

“It’s not even a human thing to do. It’s not a Tory thing to do, it’s not a Labour thing to do – to cut from people who are in trouble.”

This Writer would dispute her claim that “it’s not a Tory thing to do” – we have plenty of evidence of Tory cuts leading to many thousands of deaths. But her heart is in the right place on this.

Labour MP Rachael Maskell, while parroting the line that “where we can help people into work that’s absolutely the right thing to do” (her idea of help may be different from Kendall’s), made the point that it has to be “more about carrots than sticks”, and warned that previous reforms have had a “huge” negative impact on mental health.

Changing the eligibility criteria and making it “even more difficult” could mean those people who do need more support “could well lose out”, she says.

She says she recognisees the UK is operating in an environment of economic volatility, but adds: “Building resilience in the economy is important, but we don’t do that by taking money out of the poorest people in our communities.”

On the other hand, look at the doubletalk response from Cabinet Office Minister Pat McFadden,  who tried to frame this as a matter of helping people who need support – by taking it away.

“We’re concerned about the human cost… in terms of people on long-term sickness benefits,” he said. “We want to reform the system to make sure help is there for those who need it, and also support is there for people who could do some work with a bit of extra support.”

Oh, he makes it sound so caring!

But the fact is that his government will be actively depriving these people of money, in a bid to prod them into jobs – and never mind whether they are actually capable of doing them. In fact, there is even a contingency plan for people to back out if a job is too much for them – the “Right to Try”, as it is being called.

Perhaps some long-sighted policy wonk is already preparing a link with the Assisted Dying Bill that is currently going through Parliament. They could call it “Try or Die” – which would be a much more accurate description of Kendall’s policies, as they have been presented to us so far.

McFadden pressed on with his false claim that the current Labour Party actually cares about working people:

He asks if the UK is comfortable seeing more and more people on long-term benefits, some of whom he says are not working or being reassessed for many years.

“I don’t think we should be comfortable about that,” he says.

“Support for getting into work will be a really important part of what we announce later today.”

The point he was avoiding is very clear: people need those long-term benefits because of prevailing conditions in the UK as a whole.

The answer is not to penalise them for being victims of the system, and be under no illusions – that is what he is supporting. Instead, it is to change the system so people do not develop the long-term physical or mental illnesses that have put them on benefits.

Apparently that is too much like hard work for the Labour Party.

Ironically, McFadden trotted out the now-cliché line that “we are the party of work, we always want to see people in work,” that we all now know to be a dis-interpretation of the party’s founding principle.

There seems to be little acknowledgement of the real reason for the planned cuts – that Keir Starmer needs the money for his war plan in Ukraine.

All McFadden would say was, “We’re concerned about the financial cost… Money is part of it. The bill is growing hugely.”

Asked why the money can’t be found elsewhere, he said there are always going to be people who say the money can be found elsewhere, adding that the UK has a progressive tax system and the top one per cent pay almost a third of income tax. “I don’t think you can, in the end, tax and borrow your way out of the need to reform the state,” he said.

But that is not the argument here, and his framing of the figures is deceitful.

Rather than saying the top one per cent pay almost a third of income tax, he should have been made to admit that this is still a tiny proportion of their overall wealth.

It is the poorest in society who pay the largest proportion of their money in taxes – around 37 per cent of their income, according to some – and bear in mind that these are people who do not pay Income Tax itself, because they don’t earn enough.

In contrast, numbers for the rich are not readily available, but it is acknowledged that they pay a much smaller proportion of their wealth in taxes – considerably less than the tax burden on the poorest.

And how about this for doubletalking skulduggery? He said: “We have a duty to make those changes. It was the word on our manifesto.”

But weren’t we all led to believe it would be change for the better, rather than for the worse?

It seems a large number of Labour MPs will go home today with the same question weighing heavily on their minds.

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