In his exchanges with Lord Peter Mandelson, Work and Pensions Secretary Pat McFadden gave a quote about Labour MPs’ attitude to bringing the benefits bill down that will be used to smack his party about the chops until the general election.
“Every meeting I have is ‘who can we tax in order to pay benefits to others’. They’re asking the wrong questions,” McFadden wrote of his colleagues in an exchange with the now disgraced former peer. The release of the WhatsApp messages provoked predictable outrage on the left of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP), even though the messages were around the same time a leaked memo showed former deputy prime minister Angela Rayner had called for tax rises on the wealthy.
But the context doesn’t matter for the welfare rebels who saw their then response to the Government trying to retrofit £5bn of savings by cutting payments to disabled people as nothing other than a moral objection to penalising the vulnerable. No wonder Labour left-winger John McDonnell called for McFadden to consider resigning, even though any outrage was muted in other parts of the party.
There are two interconnected strands to the ballooning welfare bill. One is the structural problems facing young people classed as Neets (Not in Education, Employment, or Training), whose problems were eloquently set out in Alan Milburn’s interim report last week. He warned that without urgent action, the number could continue rising from one in eight young people who are classified as Neet to one in six within five years, or 1.25 million young people.
