Back when Radio 4’s Thought for the Day was original and insightful, Lionel Blue was a regular source of rabbinical wisdom and dodgy jokes. He was perhaps one of the most effective religious communicators of his time, making serious points in an humorous and unpretentious way. Sometimes he’d come up with a phrase, a concept, that let you see the world in an entirely new way. One certainly changed how I see politics: his notion of ‘moral long-sightedness’. The ability to see and get worked up about problems thousands of miles away or a hundred years’ hence, while failing to see the scandal under one’s own nose.
It sums up the indifference over welfare. It’s in crisis, with 4,000 claiming sickness benefit every day. Worklessness scares our great cities: in Manchester, 18 per cent are on out-of-work benefits. In Glasgow and Liverpool it’s 20 per cent, in Middlesborough 22 per cent and Blackpool 25 per cent – figures that would be scandalous in a depression but this is in the middle of a worker shortage crisis. The costs surge every year. Britain has somehow succeeded in making the most expensive poverty in the world.
In short, the rise of mental health complaints has sent the welfare system into meltdown with stunning numbers of people being sent to the economic scrap heap deemed unable to do any work. We’re talking 39,000 a month.
The last pre-Budget report proposed a crackdown on conditionality which I regarded too little, too late. But was I being too mean? This is now assessed by the Office for Budget Responsibility – but it takes a few weeks for the DWP chart to come out. The update was released before Christmas and it shows that the disability benefit caseload is expected to rise by an average of 920 a day for the next five years.
The waste of human potential here is the scandal. This is a full-blown crisis that will have to be dealt with by whoever wins the next general election because of the financial cost: so big that it’s measured as a share of GDP rather than in billions. When you consider the transformed nature of work and support for people with disabilities that didn’t exist a generation ago, the below trajectory suggests quite serious social and economic failure. But for as long as no one really talks about it, the problem will be ignored – politically, it’s easier to raise taxes than to attempt welfare reform that can see you accused of being heartless towards the most vulnerable. As the Clinton/Gingrich reforms showed – and the Purnell/Grayling reforms – bipartisan support tends to be needed to address welfare otherwise it’s just too politically dangerous for the government to attempt.
'To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle,' said Orwell – but this only captures half the point. It’s the distraction: the way we can think we’re well-informed while missing a bigger scandal that isn’t yet recognised. For as long as the welfare crisis is not mentioned in the Commons or reported in the newspapers, we’ll keep shovelling people off to live in edge-of-town estates as eager, well-trained immigrants take their place in the workplace. To me, the immigration problem is not the supply but the demand: the problem is the vacuum in the labour market created by heavy taxes and dysfunctional welfare.
And one final point: this is not just a story of the over-50s not going back to work. This is about the young, who are now registering long-term illness on a scale that we have never seen before:
I’m not sure how much bigger this problem needs to become before it is a political talking point. But we are – at great cost – consigning hundreds of thousands to the economic scrapheap because both parties are shirking away from the radical welfare reform that’s necessary. Mel Stride does care, as does Jeremy Hunt, but to fix this properly would mean picking a battle that Rishi Sunak does not have to fight. Not, at least, for as long as no one is talking about the problem.
We’ll continue to highlight this at The Spectator and our data hub will bring regular updates. It is, in my view, the most important topic in politics and if I was guest-editing the Today programme I’d devote all three hours to it. It’s fixable, as the 2010-20 reforms showed. But the conversation needs to come first.
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