Bell Ends Labour Indecision on Welfare Reform With Pro-Cuts Interview – Guido Fawkes

Bell Ends Labour Indecision on Welfare Reform With Pro-Cuts Interview

Newly appointed Treasury minister Torsten Bell ended up on Newsnight last night to talk about Liz Kendall’s benefit cuts and restrictions. The former Resolution Foundation chief was forced to say he would not be able to live on £70 a week but backed the changes towards a “sustainable benefits system” because “more people will be working”:

“I sat in the chamber today and heard people say ‘I’m worried about this aspect of the change’ but there’s not enough focus on the disaster that is happening in our country today. We are seeing much faster growth in claims for disability benefits than we are seeing actual levels of disability particularly for young people.“

This is of course an excellent point by Bell – rising claims of mental health issues are behind much of the ballooned benefits bill. When the last government tried to tackle this issue, though, Bell said “in practice DWP will find it very hard (impossible probably) to totally separate out physical/mental health/disabilities” and that restrictions “would end up affecting people with physical disabilities too.” When Suella Braverman proposed reducing the benefits bill in general back in 2022 he even said he was “terrified“:

“Terrified by how swiftly we’ve gone from ‘we reluctantly have to cut benefits to pay for our essential tax cuts’ to ‘we actively want to cut benefits to punish the work-shy. We’ve got amongst the highest employment rates on record”

Guido, for one, welcomes Torsten’s volte face here to a sounder mode of dealing with the cost of benefits. He even argued with John McDonnell who accused Bell of lying for claiming the option was to keep the Tory system or go for Starmer’s cuts. That sound you can hear is portraits of Bell being taken off the walls at the Resolution Foundation…

Labour’s backbench unrest will rumble for some time with the impact assessment of the cuts set to be released next week with the Spring Forecast and a vote of MPs in May. Starmer may be in for trouble yet…