It’s not unusual in politics to become a lightning rod for public disgruntlement, but rarely have I been greeted with such sustained and spittle-flecked abuse as that which turned my mobile red-hot on Friday.
My ‘crime’, as my abusers saw it, was to suggest in an article in the Daily Mail the self-evident truth that many disability benefit claimants would be better off in work.
I likened a lifetime on handouts to a ‘golden ticket’ and said: ‘We are being taken for absolute fools.’
These are hardly sentiments that haven’t been expressed across dinner tables all over the country.
This is an area, after all, in which I can claim some expertise. A little under two years ago, I fell suddenly ill and was rushed to my local hospital in Kent, where I was diagnosed with sepsis. I was placed in an induced coma for 16 days, and my wife Kati was told that I had just a 5 per cent chance of survival and that she should prepare herself for my death.
As my condition worsened, my kidneys and liver began failing and my arms and legs turned black. When I emerged from the coma, I was forced to face the ultimate good news/bad news scenario: I was alive, but to stay that way I needed a quadruple amputation – with my limbs chopped off below the knees and elbows.
To cut a long and painful story short, I learned to walk on my prosthetic legs and operate my new bionic hands. While I had to give up my job as a Conservative MP to recuperate, today I commute to work and hold three positions – as a member of the House of Lords, director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation and a day a week as a chartered accountant.
And I said as much last week: ‘I have got four [prosthetic limbs] and I go to work every single day of the week… If I can do it, for heaven’s sake, Britain, get off your backsides.’
Cue the keyboard warriors. Suddenly, I was ‘callous’ and ‘evil’, and one charmless observer typed that I’d been a ‘c***’ when I was an MP, and now I was just a ‘disabled c***’.
One of the more level-headed respondents said: ‘It’s all right for you, you’re in the House of Lords.’
Former MP Craig Mackinlay was placed in a 16-day coma – and lost all four limbs – after falling ill with sepsis in 2023
Others pointed out that had I been a bricklayer or mechanic like them, I wouldn’t have been able to return to work. It is a fair comment, but Britain is hardly short of office jobs, nor people earning a living from their sofa.
After three decades in politics, it’s plain to me that when you take away something people have come to regard as an entitlement, there is hell to pay. And yet here’s a peculiar thing: according to official figures, the number of incapacity benefits claimants in England has risen 40 per cent since 2018, while the number of people with long-term health problems has fallen.
This suggests that something has gone seriously wrong with the assessment system.
Anecdotally, I hear that where once personal independence payments (PIPs) and other benefits were restricted to people with serious physical or mental disabilities that made them unable to work, claims are now nodded through for everything from ADHD and depression to obesity.
It’s true, the previous Conservative government played its part in this unchecked growth in welfare dependency. The Covid pandemic wreaked havoc on the system, bringing an end to face-to-face consultations in favour of the phone-based, box-ticking exercise it has now become. Indeed, a doctor friend of mine resigned from his job carrying out assessments for PIP applicants because his bosses complained he was judging too many claimants as being perfectly able to work.
As an MP who served on the work and pensions select committee, I have absolutely no problem with the state paying benefits to improve the lives of genuinely disabled people. Yet any government with an eye on the ballooning welfare budget – which has risen from £36 billion to £52 billion over the past five years and is now projected to top £66 billion by 2030 – has got to get a grip.
Unfortunately, the government of the day is Labour, with all the political ineptitude it brings. Keir Starmer, Rachel Reeves and the Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall have made a horlicks of selling their £5 billion welfare cut to the Commons.
They could have pointed out that Britain has a serious and longstanding productivity problem and that taxing productive workers and businesses to subsidisethe non-productive is sustainable only to a point. They could also have argued that it was not for government to breed a stay-at-home culture of worklessness, but to harness the collective power of the labour force to all our benefit.
For now, the Prime Minister’s last-minute fudge will leave us with the worst of all worlds: no reform to the system, much reduced savings for taxpayers and no gain in health, wealth and happiness
They could even have told the truth that through social contact, job satisfaction and a sense of self-worth, working is beneficial to our physical and mental health – far more so than living on state handouts and a new motability car every three years. Yet the moral case for reform wasn’t made with any conviction, as the proposed cut was clearly a Treasury diktat to balance Reeves’s figures.
Moreover, the old Labour Left is, I suspect, more comfortable with an expansion of state handouts – whether they are deserved or not – than it would publicly admit, because it brings the country closer to their cherished utopia of everyone receiving a universal basic income.
The result is that Britain will miss the opportunity to end the mission creep of the benefits system, which has gone from being a safety net for the neediest within our society to a chancer’s bill of rights.
For Sir Keir, the issue has become kryptonite, so he’s unlikely to revisit it after the Commons vote next week. And with huge parliamentary majorities so seldom, it could be decades before meaningful reform is enacted.
For now, the Prime Minister’s last-minute fudge will leave us with the worst of all worlds: no reform to the system, much reduced savings for taxpayers and no gain in health, wealth and happiness for those who could – and should – return to work, including around a million of our young people.
The only winners are those who’ve made a career out of gaming the system, who justify their deceit with self-pity and a sense of entitlement.
To them, I offer advice from my own experience of disability.
They would feel an awful lot better about themselves if they do as I did, take stock, look at the possibilities, get off their backsides – and get a job.
Lord Mackinlay of Richborough is a former MP for South Thanet
