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With credit to commenter NickJanczak9665, who first raised the alarm.

When Keir Starmer announced plans to slash disability benefits — potentially stripping up to 1.3 million people of their lifeline — most of us saw cruelty.

But some saw a pattern.

One viewer of our recent video on the cuts, NickJanczak9665, put it bluntly:

“Is Starmer rolling out The Shock Doctrine? I’ve just read the book by Naomi Klein and it sounds like it’s straight out of the Neo-liberal/Milton Friedman playbook.”

They’re right.

This isn’t just about savings, nor efficiency, nor “reform.”

This is a textbook case of what author Naomi Klein called The Shock Doctrine — the calculated use of crisis to force through deeply unpopular policies that benefit the powerful while devastating the vulnerable.

And in this case, it’s being done under the banner of a Labour government.

📘 What is The Shock Doctrine?

In her groundbreaking 2007 book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Naomi Klein revealed a grim truth:

Governments and corporate elites often exploit crises — wars, economic collapse, natural disasters — as opportunities to roll out hardline free-market policies before the public can resist.

The method:

• Induce or seize on shock (economic, social, psychological)

• Use it to dismantle public protections

• Privatise and profit from the wreckage

The result: concentrated wealth and power. Broken societies. Mass suffering.

🚨 Starmer’s cuts fit the model

Let’s apply that to Starmer’s plan:

• The crisis: Britain’s economy is still reeling from years of austerity, the pandemic, and a deep cost-of-living crisis. Public services are crumbling. Voters are exhausted.

• The narrative: “The system isn’t working.” “People should work if they can.” “Taxpayers deserve better.”

• The solution: Cut £4.8 billion from disability and sickness support — even though it risks killing people, pushes hundreds of thousands of people into poverty, and will likely cost more than it saves.

Just as Klein warned: the policy doesn’t solve the crisis — it exploits it.

🤐 Where are the media?

This is where shock doctrine needs silence to thrive.

Not one major broadcaster has challenged Starmer on the fatal consequences of his plan.

They echo the framing: reform, welfare dependency, incentives to work.

But let’s be honest: when you remove essential disability support from people you know cannot survive without it — you’re not reforming.

You’re killing.

🩻 “The system isn’t working” — so let’s break it more?

Starmer admits PIP is paid whether someone works or not.

It exists because living with a disability costs more — not because it keeps people out of work.

So why take it away?

Because — in the words of Milton Friedman, patron saint of neoliberalism — “only a crisis… produces real change.”

Starmer is creating a funding shortfall on purpose, knowing full well that disabled people pushed off PIP won’t get jobs in a shrinking labour market that already discriminates against them.

This will drive more people to rely on emergency NHS care, homelessness services, and local authority social care — costing more than any savings made.

That’s not policy failure.

That’s the plan.

📣 Naomi Klein, if you’re reading this…

Your voice would be welcome.

The patterns are clear, the outcomes are predictable, and the stakes could not be higher.

Between 2011 and 2019, welfare policies of previous – Conservative – governments were linked to 100,000 excess deaths among sick and disabled people in the UK.

Labour’s proposed cuts could bring us a second round.

History will record it as deliberate.

Starmer isn’t resisting neoliberalism.

He’s enacting its next chapter.

📢 Share this article, tag Naomi Klein, and demand accountability

If you recognise the strategy, name it.

If you care about justice, stop it.

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