There is a scene in The Simpsons in which the villainous Mr Burns enlists a team of monkeys to reproduce a Charles Dickens novel on the cheap. Hunched over a row of typewriters, the simians cannot get the job done without a range of bumbling typos.
I thought of this as I watched Mel Stride, the work and pensions secretary, on Monday set out so-called cost-saving changes to the flagship disability benefit, personal independence payment (Pip), in what he described as “probably the most fundamental reforms in a generation”.
At a time when the NHS is crumbling, councils are going bankrupt and infrastructure is on its knees, listening to the Conservative party pledge to fix the social security system feels like the equivalent of trusting a monkey to win the Nobel prize for literature.
The plans, which will be consulted on over the coming months, centre on two main ideas. First, there’s a suggestion that some people with mental health conditions should not necessarily receive regular benefits and could receive treatment instead, from talking therapies and social care packages to respite care.
Second, there is a desire to “move away from a fixed cash benefit system”. Reports suggest this could mean disabled people having to provide receipts for the extra costs associated with their disability in order to claim back money from the state, or being awarded vouchers instead of cash. This is social policy if it was run by Groupon: use code TORYWIPEOUT24 for 25% off an oxygen cylinder.
It is not simply that such ideas are unethical or demeaning – they are also completely unworkable. Forcing even a small fraction of the up to three million disabled people who receive Pip to send in their receipts for “approval” each time they need to buy specialist food or pay for a taxi would leave civil servants wading through tens of millions of invoices a month. If you believe that the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is capable of administering that level of bureaucracy, consider that Pip is already facing mammoth backlogs and “unforgivable” assessment errors. Relying on the DWP to sort out the paperwork for your new wheelchair would be like relying on your flaky friend to book the group holiday. Sorry, but no one is going anywhere.
Besides, a receipts system fundamentally misunderstands how poverty and illness affect people’s lives. Those who require disability benefits don’t typically have the spare cash to spend and wait for the state to pay them back – that is why they need benefits in the first place. Contrary to what wealthy ministers may think, expecting a cancer patient to file a receipt for money on the electricity meter is not the same as putting a bottle of chablis on expenses at a work dinner.
I would personally be happy to send in my receipts to show what I spend my disability benefits on, if the government returns the favour and shows me its receipts for what it spends my taxes on. We can stop such humiliation as soon as it proves it won’t waste public funds on dodgy PPE from its mates or failed Rwanda deportations. It’s not that I think they are swinging the lead, of course, but that some politicians just give a bad name to the rest of them.
Like the receipts idea, the proposal to give disabled people vouchers instead of cash is designed to perpetuate the longstanding myth that benefits claimants cannot be trusted with taxpayers’ cash, as if they are naughty schoolchildren who need supervising with their pocket money. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: instead of “really” needing help, the implication is that hordes of disabled people are faking it and spending their bloated benefits on widescreen TVs and crates of booze.
Indeed, Stride has spent the past 24 hours misleading the major broadcasters to that end: from suggesting “work is the answer” for some mental health problems (Pip is not an out-of-work benefit) to claiming the benefit is worth “thousands of pounds a month” (the highest rate of Pip is £798 a month, with most claimants getting significantly less).
And yet trying to find facts or sense in any of this is the ultimate fool’s errand. As I wrote last week, when the government launched a crackdown against “sicknote” workers, the point is not actually to address rising unemployment or a population getting ever sicker, but to make the correct noises ahead of the election – all while trying to create a trap for Labour and push the agenda further to the right. Or to put it another way: the only jobs Conservative ministers are genuinely interested in is trying to keep their own.
Whenever the government announces a new benefits clampdown, I find out not simply because of the headlines, but because I receive messages from disabled readers who are feeling suicidal. Behind every toxic policy are real human beings, human beings who are already suffering in poverty and pain, and have been demonised year after year by those with privilege and power.
In the coming months, the dying days of this Tory government will see ministers continue to scapegoat those with the least so as to save their own skins. Watch the words of Rishi Sunak during this period, but also whether Keir Starmer challenges them. There are millions of people in this country who need not only their material conditions raised but their hopes too, and that will require a new government willing to offer more than the same old nastiness and division. Personally, I will pop the champagne when the Tories are finally kicked out of office – and I might use my Pip to pay for it.
Frances Ryan is a Guardian columnist