These disability benefit cuts are about to bury Labour

The proposed cuts may produce a dire electoral outcome for the government come 2029.

“Vote against this bill and we will call an election and lose to Reform, or vote for the bill and lose the next election to Reform.”

That is the gambit reportedly being pushed in front of Labour MPs by the whip’s office this week; with Liz Kendall’s disability benefit slashing bill heading towards its second reading on 1 July.

With the brave resignation as a whip by the former shadow disability minister, Vicky Foxcroft, the Parliamentary Labour Party might finally wake up to the implications of what it’s being asked to do.

Like a gangster dangled over the edge of a bridge, coming-to as the river flows below, discovering that Kendall has doused their shoes in cement, Labour MPs have found a terrible realisation setting in. My early career was spent in housing and homelessness. As I read through the details of the bill I found myself making a mental list of the people I helped as an outreach worker for Headway and other organisations, wondering who would lose out under the new rules. People that, in the coming months, will be thrust into the spotlight as the cuts begin to bite.

Graeme was a Tower Hamlets resident who had been set upon by a group of men with baseball bats in his early twenties and suffered extreme concussion. He had become forgetful as a result of his injuries. His flat’s walls were covered with notes to remind him to do basic chores and tasks. Aged only 33, Graeme wore a sanitary pad due to the incontinence that was the legacy of his broken nerves and synapses. He would spend his benefit on trips to Headway with his father, which were his only monthly opportunity to leave the house safely.

Marcello, who had been in a motorcycle accident in his youth and lived in a mouse-infested flat in the Isle of Dogs with his profoundly autistic older brother. He would emit a scream every time he stood up and leaned on a broken spine – a laborious process that took several minutes of rocking back and forth, and culminated in a pain so powerful that it penetrated a prescription of sedative medications longer than my forearm. His benefit was spent on a cleaner and one day, he hoped, cooking lessons.

Valdas, who had been in an industrial accident after moving to the UK, who gleefully showed me the tiny keyboard he had bought with his benefit to teach himself piano. Valdas, who two months after our first meeting, I received a suicidal call from. He was found by two concerned friends and I, laying on his sofa, deep in a trench of mood-disordered despair resulting from his head injury.

I remembered my first job at Washington Galleries, the one that brought me into the labour movement as a teenager. I was processing miners’ claims as part of the Coal Health Compensation Schemes brought in by Tony Blair, learning just how many of the old men in the Shiney Row miners’ cottages were ruined by vibration white finger (VWF) and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). It was a relic of a different era, when Labour still felt some need to show that it felt affinity with working-class life.

These are the people that Labour pretends will be brought back into the workforce quickly enough to justify the paltry 12 weeks’ grace they will be given when the bill is passed. People that will have to cut down to bare essentials and visit food banks in their thousands when this imaginary explosion of jobs in the most economically depressed parts of Britain inevitably doesn’t happen.

My examples are from working in London, but the biggest victims of the policy will be in the parts of the UK already devastated by deindustrialisation and poverty. Places that should find Labour an instinctive ally.

The Red Wall of the north-east and north-west that delivered a victory to Boris Johnson and then to Keir Starmer would see the most hurt.

Easington, the former colliery town in Durham where Billy Elliot was filmed, which has a child poverty rate at around 33 per cent, is the worst per-head loser in England. The community will lose an estimated £24m in income from disability benefits – that is money that will not be spent in shops, public transport or services. What has Labour planned for Easington after this huge slash in funding? Nothing.

The former coal town typifies the abject cruelty of Kendall’s bill. The typical loser will be a man over 40, not yet retired, dealing with a chronic pain condition of the muscles or skeleton, living in a part of Britain that has been ripped to shreds by globalisation.

The word “change” that accompanied a grey photograph of Starmer in the 2024 manifesto has been thoroughly undermined. This is the same subtly sociopathic politics that have typified Britain for a generation – where the “left behind” areas, whose industry built Britain and who were then discarded in favour of London’s finance sector, are seen as a drag on society. They are a problem that politicians wish would just go away.

Kendall’s bill is one of many attempts at holding the pillow down on the patient’s face, hoping to hear the ECG chirp to a flatline.

But Labour is more likely to kill itself, as anyone looking at the claimant numbers in each parliamentary seat will know.

In May, 36 Labour MPs sent a letter of support to Kendall. None of these (mostly) new-to-parliament Oxbridge graduates, consultants, landlords, lobbyists and NGO staff have worked in the kind of role that would leave them with broken knees and painful spines by 50. Many have the kind of majority that almost guarantees this will be their only term in parliament, and so have little to lose themselves.

But even those signatories with larger majorities will see themselves and long-serving party colleagues ejected from the House of Commons should the bill pass.

In May, the journalist Chaminda Jayanetti compared the number of affected personal independence payments (PIP) claimants in each seat to the majority of each parliamentarian. This presumed, of course, that this group voted in its entirety in 2024, and that the longstanding “disability vote gap” of 6.2 per cent was removed – something entirely plausible when so many will feel the cuts so profoundly. The electoral picture generated is dire for Labour.

When he subtracted the affected PIP claimant number from the total number of votes in each constituency, Labour lost more than 50 MPs. Some aforementioned signatories like Danny Beales, Jim Dickson and David Pinto-Duschinsky go. Big names like Wes Streeting and Jess Phillips go, too.

But imagine a scenario in which the PIP claimant takes two family members or friends into the “not-voting Labour” column – family and friends that have seen someone close to them lose out in such a visceral and obvious way. Suddenly it becomes clear that this bill represents the Labour right’s parliamentary sojourners tying themselves to their colleagues and leaping into the abyss.

In this scenario, almost 230 Labour MPs lose their seats: Ed Miliband is gone. The Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson also goes. The bill’s chief proponents in the media, such as Wolverhampton South East’s Pat McFadden and the Swansea MP Torsten Bell (whose think tank Resolution Foundation once railed against the same cuts under the Conservatives), are both also gone.

Of course, in this plausible scenario, Liz Kendall also loses her seat. Perhaps she and her colleagues see this as a price worth paying to cut disability benefit.

Labour MPs need to ask themselves whether they agree, before the horror stories that will inevitably come from this bill start to make headlines.