Newspaper Reader on Mrs. Thatcher’s brat, with an Anglican turn!

stephenkmacksd.com/

Mar 09, 2025

Mr. Colvile is/was a child of wealth and priveledge, he is not quite as obnoxious as Jacob Rees-Mogg, but he is close!The first paragraph of Mr. Colvile’s essay offer a mild scolding:

With defence spending rising, growth weakening and headroom shrinking, Rachel Reeves is having to wield the axe. Her chosen target? The welfare bill, which reportedly faces cuts of at least £5 billion. Already, this plan is hugely controversial. And rightly so. Because it falls laughably short of what is needed.

Editor: in seconds Mr. Colvile is at full gallop:

That may sound harsh, or exaggerated. But there is a compelling — and appalling — case that incapacity and disability has become Britain’s biggest growth industry.

Let’s look at the facts. Today, 9.3 million people of working age are economically inactive. Of those, 2.8 million are inactive through illness — up from two million before the pandemic. The proportion of the working-age population who say they have a disability has risen to an extraordinary 23 per cent.

The human impact of this is dreadful. But so is the financial impact. Over the past decade, spending on incapacity and disability benefits has increased by 40 per cent above inflation. By 2029-30, the Office for Budget Responsibility expects this bill to rise even further, from £64.7 billion to £100.7 billion. The overall welfare bill, including pensions, will swell to £378 billion. To put it another way, the rumoured £5 billion cut would represent just one sixteenth of the expected increase.

Editor: Mr. Colvile asks aquestion, while The Reader tries to regaine her equlibrian:

What is going on? To simplify greatly, the non-pensions welfare bill is being driven by the incapacity bill — and the incapacity bill is being driven by the mental health bill.

Editor : In sum Mr. Colvile attacks what is left of Clemet Atlee’s Welfare State and its NHS. The grifters who remaine on the dole. The Growth Rate of Britain was 1% when last I inquired. And that utterly anemic 1% Growth Rate has become the political property of Keir Starmer’s New Labour! After 14 years of Tory incompetence!

Editor: a collection of “Colviles Laws’

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Yet in a recent report on the alarming rise in spending, the House of Lords economic affairs committee stated that it had “received no convincing evidence that the main driver of the rise in these benefits is deteriorating health or high NHS waiting lists”. Similarly, the OBR judges that “only a minority of the recent rise in incapacity benefits onflows reflects a higher number of people initiating claims”.

The Lords and the OBR, in other words, think that the rise has more to do with the nature of the benefits system itself. And they’re almost certainly right.

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A recent freedom of information request from my colleagues at the Centre for Policy Studies think tank showed that in the year to November 2024, just 10 per cent of work assessments and 5 per cent of disability assessments were done face to face.

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And the Times columnist Fraser Nelson, who has campaigned tirelessly on this issue, points out that even if those on disability benefit want to go back to work — as hundreds of thousands do — they risk either cutting their income (or at least believing that they will do so) or jeopardising their disability benefits.

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And, of course, the judges are only too willing to stick their oar in: in January the High Court struck down Tory measures that would have cut £2 billion from the disability benefits bill because the (eight-week) consultation process was “rushed” and “unfair”, and ministers had focused more on cost-cutting than the impact on the vulnerable.

Editor: Here is where Mr. Colvile proves to the reader that he is Mrs. Thatcher’s brat, with an Anglican turn!

There will always be many, many people in this country who need our collective help. But there are many, many more who would best be helped by moving off welfare and into work — not least because active, engaged, fulfilling employment is central to mental and physical wellbeing. Instead, we are not just paying these people off but writing them off, creating a cycle of dependency that afflicts generation after generation.

Newspaper Reader.