Betrayed Reform Voters SLAM Robert Jenrick On Air

On Sunday, Reform UK's Treasury spokesperson Robert Jenrick penned an article for the Telegraph proclaiming that the welfare state was neglecting young people and briefing a set of brutal cuts to the welfare state. He started by admonishing the rise of those claiming disability welfare. Some 6.9 million people are now entitled to receive disability benefits, 2.5 million more than 20 years ago. More than 20,000 join the personal independence payment case load each month and 2/3 of those who began claiming in 2017 were still claiming it 5 years later. By 2031, health and disability benefits will cost 110 billion pounds a year, 3,600 pounds for every family in the country. This is not an epidemic of broken backs and lost limbs. Since 2002, the share of working age people claiming for mental health and behavioral conditions has tripled. This is not generosity, it is suicidal empathy. It's not the first time the right wing have invoked the concept of suicidal empathy. A canard that has breached containment from the hard right in the US to pervade through UK political discourse. Its invocation suggests that the country is so keen to show empathy for those with mental health concerns that is causing the entire country to collapse. It implies that somehow the vulnerable and those that care for them are to blame for the social malaise of modern Britain. But the claims that this is down to the rise in PIP claims is difficult to justify when 66% of PIP appeals are successful and people stay on the health element of universal credit long term. Suggesting that these are not people on the take but those with genuine concerns that the welfare state is there to help. Also, there's no such thing as claiming for mental health. PIP claims are based upon the ability to perform certain tasks. It is not awarded based on condition. Jenrick then went on to lay out the kind of savings that Reform UK would be proposing. On Monday, Reform will publish making welfare work, a 50-page plan for the most comprehensive redesign of the welfare system's machinery in a generation. The scale is enormous. The coalition's welfare savings under Ian Duncan Smith, then regarded as the outer limit of political possibility, totaled 20.5 billion. The conservatives today proposed 23 billion. Our changes, which go far beyond disability benefits, are more than double that. 22 billion pounds of our reforms will take the form of changes to the disability program alone. Reminder for those at home that Ian Duncan Smith reforms to welfare that Reform UK wants to eclipse in scale by a factor of two were part of an austerity program that studies suggest cause up to 330,000 excess deaths. The initial reporting by the Telegraph on Sunday reported that Reform UK were planning 50 billion of welfare cuts in total, including scrapping PIP and LCWRA altogether, and instead instructing the legal local authorities to provide non-cash services and support through local disability accounts, removing or modifying the benefits for almost 3 million people. And what's interesting here is that the biggest thing that I think is probably one of the only good things you can say about things like PIP and its predecessor, disability living allowances, what they provided in terms of cash payments were the way of providing the disabled to be able to claim those things even if maybe they weren't large enough in scale or in terms of their generosity, it gave them independence through cash payments to be able to decide for themselves what they should use their disability welfare for and how would best help them on an individual case because no disability is the same. But by taking away cash payments and then just saying, "Look, here's the burden that we can place upon local authorities and then go through all of the different bureaucracy that that would entail," essentially again furthers the idea that the people say people are a burden, they can't look after themselves, they can't be given independence, they must be treated as a burden upon local authorities and be dolled out support just as the state would require them to have rather than them choosing what support is best for them. Again, which is going to tie the disab- the disabled up in levels of continual paperwork and bureaucracy and also remove the sense of independence that they've been allowed to gain over the last however many years in which that we've come to better understand the individual needs of each disabled person. Now, on Monday, Jenrick unveiled their welfare reforms in a press conference. However, there was one substantial change in rhetoric from the briefings at the weekend. >> If unable to return to work, will go through a single rigorous disability needs assessment, replacing today's many overlapping assessments. Cash support above standard universal credit rates will be reserved for severe cases. And those who need additional help beyond living costs, will receive it in kind through disability support accounts. And the most vulnerable will continue to be supported through personal independence payments. Reformed and enhanced as PIP health security allowances. >> It appears that at least rhetorically, Reform UK have realized that eliminating an entirely disability welfare scheme such as PIP wholesale isn't popular, preferring to change tone and imply that PIP will continue in some altered form for a mythical cohort of the most vulnerable that they have yet to define. And this was confirmed by Jenrick during the Q&A. >> In terms of people who are currently claiming, uh, for example, PIP, well, what we're saying today is that PIP will continue, but it's going to be reformed. We're going to create a new version of it. And we're going to ask those people who have mild conditions, principally mental health conditions, to be reassessed. I think that's common sense. >> Because we see the vast increase that we've had in recent times of those conditions. For other people, we're proposing today will actually be better. We'll provide more security cuz instead of being reassessed on a rolling 3-year basis, these are people with serious disabilities, we're going to give them the peace of mind that I think they deserve. And we're going to say that they're not going to be reassessed for the next 3 years, and then they'll be reassessed in the normal way thereafter. So, for the people who really need the benefits the most, this is actually a significantly enhanced position with greater security. >> Now, I don't buy this for 1 minute, but what we're definitely seeing here is the invocation of the deserving poor versus the undeserving poor, the the people who are trying versus the skivers. When in reality, if you're going to try and get 22 billion pounds of welfare cuts purely on the disabled alone, the idea that you'll leave everybody who deserves it untouched and only attack who are undeserving is total nonsense. It's totally unworkable. No amount of math will be able to make that up. Cuz again, the of course the problem here is is that he doesn't understand what he's saying here. The idea that they know there are lower level mental health concerns that are being taken up by PIP. It that doesn't exist because people are judged, as I said previously, based upon their ability to perform certain tasks. You're not judged based upon your individual condition. It's how your condition affects you and how it how you struggle with such a condition and what actually you'd need to be able to mitigate that condition through cash payments, which is how PIP works. And this is a three-card trick that every single welfare reformer tries to do. When DLA was replaced with PIP and when PIP will be replaced by whatever crazy mad system reform wants to replace it with. The way in which they justify is always, "Well, the previous system let so many people who don't deserve it through the cracks and allow them to claim fortunately, but we will protect everyone who does need it." What happened when we replaced DLA with PIP? When Ian Duncan Smith got his hands on the welfare system, huge numbers of people who need it ended up not getting access to welfare. Remember ATOS miracles? Remember the obscene stories that we saw about people being declared fit for work or having been declared as if they weren't actually disabled when clearly that they were when they had been in remission from cancer and recovering, for example. These are many, many cases that we saw. It is always the case that people are over-egged in terms of the amount of people who are are undeserving of these welfare benefits, especially when it comes to fraud, when it is close to 0.2% according to the DWP's figures, which actually aren't claiming in the veracity in which they should be. So, I don't buy any of these arguments from Robert Jenrick for a moment. But, when it comes to PIP and them saying we're actually not getting rid of it, they're only reforming it, why the partial U-turn? Well, this next clip might be why. >> Most of your target seats are in areas where people with high proportion of people on welfare, Fraser Nelson did some analysis yesterday showing that your top 20 target seats >> just have 20 target seats. >> Your top >> [laughter] >> 20 target seats are >> break the news to the times. We've got a lot more target seats than that. >> I said top. Top 20 target seats are PIP hotspots. People listening this morning who might be feeling frightened hearing that that kind of vital lifeline could be cut. What's your message to them? And do you think that might be a difficult message for you to sell at the next general election? >> Well, let me be very clear, if I haven't been so already, we are going to protect the most vulnerable in society. Nothing that we talk about today is about pensioners. In fact, part of the motivation to use it to continue to provide the support that pensioners need, it's by doing tough things like this that we can continue to sustainably pay for the triple lock, for example, for pensioners. We're ensuring that children who are currently claiming, or their families are claiming on their behalf, disability benefit, will be protected. And we're saying that those people who really need this are always going to be protected under a reform government. We're not abolishing PIP, people are obviously familiar with that, but we are reforming it and ensuring that it works better. And in particular, looking at the minority of people who, for whatever reason, have been able to claim it, particularly for mental health conditions, which I think most people in the country now agree with us is not sensible, is not sustainable. That is the issue that we're really looking at. >> Now, reform is running into the same problem that Labour did last year. Everyone believes they are part of the deserving poor and that everyone else is part of the undeserving poor. Triangulating around popular polling support for welfare reform reaches a hard reality when the country actually has to contend with what welfare cuts might entail. There is no Goldilocks zone where welfare can be dissected entirely down to those who genuinely deserve it and filtering out all the chances. As then the system's allowed genuine claimants to fall through the cracks. And it's not just theoretical. Reform voters have reacted to the weekend's briefings with horror. This is what happened when a PIP claimant interrogated Jenrick on Talk TV. >> You know when you go out canvassing and you meet people that you have to convince. You're going to have to convince our next caller. George is on Dundee. George is through to Robert Jenrick. >> Hi yeah. Hi yeah. How you doing? >> Hi. How are you? >> Good. Um I was a former supporter, but after thinking about what you said yesterday, the last 24 hours, you've kind of lost a couple of votes in our household. Uh I'll tell you the reason why. I take it you've never claimed benefits, right? We have been through My wife claims a couple of PIP in Scotland and she's been through hell three times trying to reclaim it. Um part of the problem was your conservative government last time who tried to reform these uh benefits. People fall through the net and every politician I hear just says the people who will need help will receive help. Bull. Absolute and utter bull cuz you guys don't know enough about the system and how it works. Tens of thousands are then cut off and have to reclaim. It is an absolute farce of a system. So, I'm sorry. I'm not prepared to take that risk for my wife. So, you will not be getting my vote then. >> Robert? >> Well, if I give you some reassurance, what we're proposing is to to keep the current system of PIP. So, your wife shouldn't be losing that, but we are going to reform it so that we get those people who frankly shouldn't be on it >> tennis elbow >> it and back into the workplace, which does not mean I don't want to pry into your wife's condition unless you want to share it with us, but it does not sound as if she's one of those people who's taking advantage >> Now, the caller is absolutely right. Jenrick knows naff all about PIP, or the welfare system, or how it works. Especially when PIP is an income supplement, not income replacement. So, trying to imply that cutting access to PIP would get people back into the workplace but that is the opposite of reality. A sizable number of PIP claimants are in work. They are in fact less likely to stay in work without their income supplement that allows them to make the reasonable adjustments to their life that are necessary to keep them there. Luckily, however, for Robert Jenrick, a belligerent Jeremy Kyle stepped in to save his skin from smart arse scrutiny. >> Surely, you would accept that people are taking advantage, wouldn't you? >> I would say not as many as you'd think under the current rules. What they should do is have set onus set >> Hold on a second. Are you telling me that there are 2 million people See, this is where I This is just my opinion, mate, and I respect you ringing because that's the whole point of a democracy. The system was set up to help people like your wife. It was not set up, mate, to give people with tennis elbow the ability to sit on their arse and do nothing or have 6 months off because they've gone online on a computer and ticked a box and they've got anxiety. And it strikes me, whatever the political party I've done this with the Tories, I've done it with Reform, I've done it with the Liberal Democrats. Whenever anybody talks about Truthful answer as a man here, right? Changing the system, the genuine which is what I said 25 minutes ago, the genuine claimants get really fearful and they think, "Oh my god, it's going to be taken away." But what you don't say to yourself is there There hundreds of thousands of people milking this system that are making it more difficult for your wife to get the money that all the people know she should get, pal. >> Well, that's where you're completely wrong. And again, you have no experience of this. You don't know if my wife's a malingerer or not. You've no idea. I've not said what she's had, right? Secondly, the people that are claiming for mental health are doing so under the current rules. What any political party should do and none of this can you get out of your bed on a Tuesday? Can you lift your arm above head height on a Wednesday? You get that. It should be set illnesses. If you're an amputee, you get that. If you're blind, you get that. If you've got motor neuron disease, you get that. It's simple. >> Robert. >> Well, I just say that it this is not by and large about physical disabilities at all. It is about these cases of relatively mild conditions. I'll give you a few stats. At the moment, 214 people are signing on for disability benefits every single day for mild anxiety. I just don't think that's right. And I and I don't think it's right for those individuals either because I'm sure in most cases, sitting at home, you know, watching telly, doom scrolling on your phone is much worse for somebody who has mild anxiety than being out and about getting a proper job. >> And again, I just want to take this mild anxiety claim to task one more time for those at the back. No one is claiming PIP for mild anxiety. To be able to claim PIP, you have to demonstrate to the DWP that you have significant amounts of problems doing daily tasks, whether it's mobility or daily living. There are two different sections for this, right? When it comes to the daily living component, you have to prove to the state you find it very difficult to do so many different things that be normal for everybody else, right? If you are able to cross that threshold and show that your condition is debilitating enough that you can't do those things, then you qualify for PIP. If you can't demonstrate that, then you don't. And I will reiterate, 66% of PIP claims are granted on appeal having previously been denied. This is the what the case is when people have not just mild anxiety, but lots of cases anxiety disorders. There is a different by being anxious and having an anxiety disorder. Those two things are totally different. The fact again that Robert Jenrick is trying to pedal this nonsense, this lie, this this fabrication that mild anxiety is somehow part of the things you can claim PIP for. Well, again, you're not even assessed on your condition. You're assessed on how your condition affects you. And on top of this, people who are claiming for anxiety or having an anxiety disorder can also be claiming for other disabilities at the same time. These things are all noted down. If you suffer from a myriad different conditions, I would be willing to bet that lots of people with physical disabilities also have a lot of anxiety around those things, too. As long as you are above the threshold, you score enough points in terms of how it affects your daily living, then you can claim. If you can claim it and you are suffering what is, as far as I can see, significant impacts on your daily life, your condition is not mild. I want to make that explicitly clear. And also want to say I disagree with the caller, too. I think the way the system works in far as how it judges who is supposed to be eligible is good. I just wish the assessment criteria was a little less humiliating. And clearly, it is very difficult given how many appeals they had and how successful those appeals are. Now, Jenrick wasn't the only one to have to face their own electorate. This is what Reform Councillor Layla Cunningham faced when guest hosting LBC. >> I do not agree with getting rid of PIP. I have a I am a cancer patient. I work part-time. Metastatic breast cancer, PALB2 gene carrier. Under this new protection vote, I'm out of a job. I'm out of my home. I'm 57 years old. I'm a palliative got a palliative care care husband. 15 different disabilities. He worked Great Ormond Street Hospital. Government kicked out 10 years ago. Get rid of his PIP. No trips to hospital. He's got liver failure. He's blind. He's epileptic. I can't even get a council property despite having the over allotted points. How the heck you think I'm supposed to vote for Reform? >> I'm so sorry. >> what's Reform going to do for me? Nothing. >> Elizabeth, I hear you. I hear you and we we genuinely care about the people in vulnerable positions like you. It's why we got into politics and and it's not about cutting benefits from people who actually need it. It's about telling those who could work that they should work to protect exactly the benefits for the vulnerable that need it. And I'm so sorry that you're dealing with cancer. Um it it's a very tough time and and you're in Haringey. I'll come and see you, Elizabeth. I'd love to. >> I'm sorry, Layla. You got into politics to protect the vulnerable and the disabled. I call Like not only did you yet again claim that you needed to slash PIP PIP to get people into work when quite literally speaking to someone who just told you they claim PIP whilst working. The fact people like this can't even scrape the mental wherewithal together to Google how does PIP work before hosting a high-profile discussion program. But to claim about the disabled to claim to care about sorry to claim to to claim to care about the disabled whilst both the party you belong to and the rest of the right-wing media in this country haven't been engaged in multiple year-long campaign of manufactured consent for the mistrust of the disabled is quite frankly despicable. The UK has an incredibly strict and humiliating disability welfare system. It's only saving grace is that PIP affords cash payments to allow the disabled some degree of autonomy and Reform wants to take that away, too. And Faiza Shaheen, what did you make of those clips? >> Yeah, it's it's always interesting, isn't it, when you see Reform kind of cornered on these things? When they talk about their kind of natural comfort zone, i.e. immigration, you know, they can kind of really write the rules and set the paradigms and set the narrative. But once we take them away from that comfort zone and away from their ability to just kind of relapse into that, we see a different side to them and we see a side to them where I think like they are really kind of struggling a bit. Completely agree with what you said um with regards to the actual quite high threshold that there is for access to PIP and the idea that you can't just claim it off the back of, you know, mild mild anxiety. But I thought it was also really interesting that, you know, Robert Jenrick said, you know, lots of people have got mild anxiety and that just can't be right. But he's got zero curiosity as to why lots of people might actually have quite a lot of mild anxiety regardless of whether or not that allows them to to access PIP or not, which is that there is a kind of whole infrastructure in the way of living now which has been dismantled, you know, by his politics. This is his politics in action and he is dealing with the consequences of that, which is what we're seeing now, you know, this meat crisis is another kind of outgrowth, I think, in in in many ways of that as well. And then we're going to talk about young people in a minute, too. So, there's this just this kind of zero curiosity from Robert Jenrick, you know, "It just can't be right." Yeah, he needs to look in the mirror, I think, actually. He needs to have a look at some of your policies. Reform is now in a bit of a real contradiction. Yeah, can they really build a base of voters out of enough people who essentially are not going to be reliant on various different types of of welfare, right? Me and you were talking earlier about this idea of a shrinking middle class, which I think is is definitely happening. I spent several week uh weeks ago a a bit of time in Johannesburg in South Africa, for example, where there's this very stark class distinction where there there's virtually no middle class. You know, there you're either very poor or you're well off, but that there's kind of no no middle ground, no middle class, which is kind of a snapshot of of where really we could get to, right? There was a study done a couple of years ago in 2024 from the Financial uh Fairness Trust that said that, you know, middle classes earning up to 60k a year were struggling materially. So, you've got this kind of shrinking base of people in in this country. And and if Reformer are trying to appeal to those people, well, those people increasingly they don't exist, you know? So, they need a a bit of a material lens, I think, really on on on their politics to understand their voters actually a bit better rather than being, I think, kind of lazy and just trotting out the same old well-worn conservative Tory party ideas about, you know, welfare and expecting that to work. You know, they are in effect perhaps going to be a victim of their own policies. Many of these people are in effect rampant neoliberals, however much they want to dress themselves up as being for the working man. They may well find themselves to be a victim of those same those same policies and that same ideology, you know, when it comes to the ballot box. >> Well, that's the thing, right? Is that lots of people who are proposing this, like Robert Jenrick, is a Tory castoff is a party full of Tory castoffs, right? And you made a very salient point there that they don't understand who their own electorate is. They're still working a lot of these ex-Tories on the premise that they are speaking to the electorate that voted for them during the George Osborne period, right? The aspirational middle class, obviously the homeowners who clearly still part of more of the older generations who tend to vote for both the Tories and Reform. But in terms of the areas of the country, it's not the London commuter belt. It's not the more kind of affluent areas of kind of rural Yorkshire that these places that are voting for Reform. No, it's post-industrial, poorer, more I mean, lots of whiter areas, lots of more more working-class areas of this country. And there's a lot of correlation here, high instance of people who claim PIP in these constituencies. It was mentioned in the question to Robert Jenrick at their press conference. And what that ends up meaning is that they've totally misaligned where this policy is supposed to go. And they've immediately disabused huge numbers of their voters in terms of not really then these ex-Labour voters in lots of cases or non-voters who've been brought into the fold by Reform speaking for a very specific electorate of people who are concerned with immigration, but less so concerned on cost of living, the economy, and stuff like that. That's what a lot of the polling shows, whereas conservative voters rank the economy as higher than like migration and probably even they probably conservatives have welfare similar or probably higher than than Reform do in terms of their policy perspectives. I was also going to note Andy Burnham's response to this, too. On the you know, on the on the proviso that we understand that some of these people can be ex-Labour voters, ex-Labour constituencies, post-industrial like northern towns and in the in the country. Like Alex, can you roll the clip of Andy Burnham's response, please? >> Some rules you look at and just think, how can that be fair? One of them is the 9:30 a.m. restriction on disabled people's bus passes. Need to get to work, college, a hospital appointment? Well, you better hope it's after 9:30. It makes no sense, and I'm changing it. From April, disabled people will be able to use their bus passes for free at any time on any day. Scrapping the 9:30 a.m. restriction is something I did as mayor of Greater Manchester, >> [music] >> as well as bringing in a £2 cap on bus fares. Now, I'm doing both nationally, so more people can make full use [music] of Britain's most popular form of public transport, and you can get where you need to be for less. >> So, whilst of course the Labour Party have talked all about disability reform, we'll talk about that in just a second. At the very least, Andy Burnham's, you know, he's clearly noticed that there's going to be a lot of negative backlash to reforms announcement on PIPs, and he is immediately gone and said, "Okay, well, look, well, we're going to jump into the media and he's a thing I'm doing for the disabled, right?" Do you think he's there's a notes like the the change in strategy from the Burnham administration? >> Yeah, I mean, definitely, right? There's there's a deftness to this, and and I know some people want to say it's it's just coms. The coms are a lot better. Yeah, for sure, but the the policy strategy, not just the way in which the policies have been communicated, but the the policies themselves, and the policy strategy is I think is remarkably better. You know, Keir Starmer, if you think about it, in many ways, I think he paid a a big price for himself, you know, career-wise, um in terms of really not taking his base seriously, and really not understanding who Labour voters were. He completely took them for granted, you know, and that was kind of a real, you know, a >> [laughter] >> a kind of real fatal mistake, I think, for the kind of Keir Starmer-Morgan McSweeney project, right? Um so, I think Andy Burnham's Andy Burnham, pardon me, is being very smart and very deft, I think, in this announcement. You know, that that's not to say that I think there won't still be really big decisions to come on welfare. I'm going to be, you know, watching that first budget like a hawk because it's going to be really interesting and really important to see about how they get that balance right. They have talked about the idea of the welfare bill overall coming down. So, I don't know if there's going to be some difficult decisions to be made along along the way, but but for now I think that he does seem to be kind of lasering in with these small, you know, cumulatively it's big or it feels big, right? But in terms of the individual policies, they're small, right? And I think that's quite a smart strategy to kind of keep feeding in those gaps and and just doing these very small concessions towards cost of living, which is on everybody's mind, and doing so in a way that serves and shores up his voter base. >> 100% it is clear that there is an attempt to make sure that he carries favor now to be able to generate some level of public support, public benefit of the doubt, and public buy-in to him as prime minister before then launching into the bad stuff later, which is again the biggest mistake that Keir Starmer made. Just when in when it's a government go, "Everything sucks. You're going to get poorer and there's nothing that you can do until things get better." later, which immediately soured all public relations towards him. And now we see the difference. Keir Starmer least popular prime minister ever, Andy Burnham plus 19 in the approval stakes, which is higher than we've seen for any mainstream politician in decades as far as I can see. And again, I think you're right. I'm pretty certain that we'll end up seeing those swinging cuts happen eventually once the the public kind of benefit of the doubt has kind of been been set. But until then, it's clear that, you know, immediately as soon as you hear a former announce a policy that you know affects people in Labour's former heartland voter base, and you go, "Look, I'm going to support the people that reformer clearly trying to tell not to vote for them anymore." Which again, despite me disagreeing with the broad scale of Labour's welfare policy, it's certainly good strategy.