Martin Bonner 🦋 @argentas.bsky.social

Disabled by @marksandspencer yet again ‼️Now I can no longer shop independently because the chiller cabinet doors pull toward you & these ridiculous racks at the base get caught on wheels & prevent you getting close enough to reach handles let alone food inside 🧵

My monologue from today’s The Times at One with Andrew Neil on @TimesRadio Keir Starmer’s government has become the master of maximum pain for minimum gain. That’s what it achieved with the winter fuel allowance — squandering shedloads of political capital for very modest savings — and it’s now repeating the exercise with its half-hearted attempts at welfare reform.  The case for radical welfare reform is strong. But it was never made by Labour in opposition, which did no policy work on it.  It turned to it in power to save money and meet Rachel Reeves’s fiscal rules rather roll out an over-arching grand strategy. As a result it’s in a mess.  Welfare reform was meant to save £5 billion by the end of the decade, a modest enough target given total welfare spending is in the hundreds of billions.  But even that pittance has gone. To buy off Labour rebels, on whom welfare reform was sprung, half the savings are already gone. Add in the cost of the U-turn over the winter fuel allowance and just about all the £5 billion saving has been wiped out.  So Chancellor Reeves will have to find £5 billion from elsewhere to make her sums add up which makes tax rises — already on the cards — in her autumn Budget, if she’s still at the Treasury, pretty much a dead cert.  So widespread unpopularity in the country and a massive rebellion in its own ranks — and for what? No savings. And, more important, no chance now of serious welfare reform.  We currently spend £330 billion a year on welfare, including state pensions. That’s 10% of our GDP and a quarter of total government spending. Within that total we devote £75 billion to sickness and disability related benefits — categories that are rising fast as several thousand new recipients join up every day.  By 2030 total welfare spending is projected to be around £380 billion — a nominal rise of £50 billion, with sickness and disability related benefits accounting for almost £100 billion of that.  Labour promised the fastest growing economy in the G7. Instead it is building on a grim inheritance from the Tories: the biggest proportion of those of working age ‘on the sick’ or on disability allowance in the G7.  After this week’s demeaning retreat, Labour is unlikely to do much about this between now and the end of the decade.  On the basis that ‘only Nixon could go to China’ so it was thought Labour was best placed to pursue sensible welfare reform. That is now off the agenda.  To be sure there are powerful forces pushing up welfare spending — an ageing population, that expensive triple lock on pensions, that voracious rise in health and disability benefits for those of working age.   But we are no longer generating the wealth to anything like the degree required to pay for the inexorable rise in welfare spending.  Indeed there is a populist cry across the political spectrum for the sort of policies — a wealth tax, more regulation, more state intervention, more state investment — that are proven wealth destroyers.  A country hooked on welfare — and dead set economic policies that will not create the wealth to pay for it.  If ever there was a definition of a country in economic decline that’s it. A decline Labour will not reverse —  and to which the parties in opposition also have precious few answers.