Back in 2009, months before the coalition government unleashed sweeping austerity, the then Conservative backbencher Iain Duncan Smith produced a study that would go on to lay the foundations for the rollout of universal credit. Now, nearly two decades later, Duncan Smith and his thinktank, the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), has published State of Dependency: a landmark report promising to expose “the full scale of Britain’s worklessness crisis”. The study paints a picture of mass benefits reliance: it identifies 3,400 local areas where more than half the working-age population are on out-of-work benefits, or “economic opiates”, as the authors call them.
They’ve even provided an interactive map (in the yellow and black colours of a road hazard sign, no less) so members of the public can type in their postcode to see if their neighbourhood is “a welfare hotspot”. This is not just another ugly social policy report from a politically sidelined former minister – it is a gauntlet being thrown down ahead of Britain’s big benefits debate. Next month, the government is expected to release two major reports into the social safety net: the Timms review on personal independence payments (Pip), which pays for some of the extra costs of disability in England and Wales, and the Milburn review into young people who are out of work.
It wouldn’t be overstating the importance of Westminster reviews to say their recommendations could shape the future of our welfare state for decades to come. With almost 1 million young people not in education, employment or training (Neet) and the disability benefits bill rising in cash terms, Andy Burnham will face immense pressure to use the proposals to launch a once-in-a-generation overhaul of the social security system. An overhaul in itself is no bad thing.
Disabled people applying for benefits face a debilitating mess of bureaucracy and barriers, while too many young people have been abandoned, facing greater obstacles and fewer services. The question is, will the overhaul actually improve conditions for the people who rely on it, or buckle to the anti-benefit sentiment that’s been bubbling up for months? That the right is not currently in power won’t stop it from wielding significant influence on what’s to come, in large part thanks to its dominance of Britain’s media ecosystem.
Legacy media are not even hiding their attempts to shape November’s reforms before they are announced, with the Times this week launching a “welfare inquiry” to investigate the impact of the benefits “crisis” on public finances. Some of this is made up of concrete policy proposals, such as the Daily Mail’s pitch to radically means-test Pip. But increasingly much of it is just vibes, a vague sense that this disability problem is getting out of control (or having one is becoming “cool”, as the Telegraph recently put it), and that disabled people – particularly the young – are somehow grifting “perks” while everyone else struggles with rising bills.
The changes in how people consume media since the last major benefits reforms in the early 2010s mean the risks of misinformation and outright bigotry are even greater. Last week, Nigel Farage announced plans for a new video studio in Westminster for the launch of Reform TV on YouTube, with the party’s proposed £50bn benefits cuts presumably being lined up as viral content Keep an eye out too for a revival of the striver v scrounger rhetoric as energy and housing costs are set to lead to the worst living standards in modern times by 2029-30. There are few easier ways to convince workers that the unemployed should go hungry than when they’re cutting back on their own food shop.
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