Catering to anti-welfare narratives just leads to the next stage of what is self-sustaining terminal decline. I looked at the US as a possible future after the introduction of Universal Credit and household claims.

The US started doing that in the 60s, when black families nearly always had fathers. Reading about it, it felt like a vindictive establishment backlash to the civil rights act.

It worked, fatherlessness in young black families became a thing by the 70s.

The US did something decades ago which the UK copied more recently and it will lead the same way: benefit claims per household rather than per individual. This is where 'welfare queens' originate before Reagan used the term.

It destroyed the economic incentive for poor couples to stay together.

Only millions?
The Unpaid Care Debt is £184 billion a year, a fiscal leviathan donated by unpaid carers in terms of labour. This has to be the largest cost-efficiency of all-time.

If 1% of them can no longer do it, that's still £1.84 billion the government has to find.

It's not like this is even the first time your publication has not understood what PIP is, been corrected (on that and many other details about social security), and carries on with the same falsehoods regardless.

WTF would your rag know about facts? All welfare forms since at least 1979 have been based on narratives written by the clueless well-off.

..the government lost the court case in December, so now they're just re-submitting *that* plan in next week's green paper, but doubling the headline expected saving. If you're a disability rights 'moderate', that looks like a radically extreme and targeted punishment against civil life.

www.theguardian.com/politics/liv... That's just last month.

Reeves announced in November that she was wanting £6 billion, after in August confirming she would pursue the last government's (illegal) £3 billion targeting PIP plan.

They have done so because the government, their departments and advisors, have been briefing journalists for months about it. The stories didn't just come out of nowhere; they all include the same messages the government wants them to have. Prep for the announcement, without asking MPs until Friday

As Reeves 'fiscal headroom' under her ridiculous self-imposed rules is now estimated to be at -£1.3 billion, the total amount in percentage terms she can replace unpaid carers if the need arises is: 0%

The government have lost the economic argument, and nobody seems to know it.

They act beholden to the private sector, particularly the largest companies and their investors.

None of them provide per capita the same value as the £163bn of unpaid carers, yet we're supposed to be afraid if some of them move abroad?

Because Starmer doesn't know the price, the true price, of care-giving. Not the value, the price: £163 billion, which is much more than the official social care budgets of all councils, the NHS, prison service and armed forces.

It's not more than corporate welfare, which is never targeted for cuts

He sounds completely insane to me when he frames 'the worst of both words' not as a binary of opposite scenarios, but that of just pretending the people affected don't exist: 'it stops people working, it costs too much'

This is beyond knowing the price of everything and value of nothing.

So when Starmer says "The system is indefensible and needs reform", the reflex is to interpret as literally correct because it's been designed to appeal to the worst people: ignorant and proud, and they aren't happy because they haven't noticed a difference. Millions of others have.

Because the session is over, the claimant doesn't get the chance to argue against the assessor again, they just have to be happy that they won, the DWP gets to re-schedule a new assessment only a few months later.

That's all they do: have the assessor's version of what was said in front of them, go through it filling in a template letter looking for contradictions, and accuse the claimant of lying basically.

..Except to read out a letter that was written before the session (a huge insult to everyone present, and worded just vaguely enough to not directly provoke the judge), which will say that the tribunal has been presented with evidence not disclosed during a claimant's assessment.

You'd think that would be enough. A benefit which automatically targets a 50% denial rate on initial claims, where approvals are now dwarfed by tribunal decisions reversing denials. No one tries for this benefit unless they think they need it, and the DWP rarely sends a representative

So politicians have tried for decades to make this stick, and have heavily loaded how things work to give the justification for their initial decision to buy into it, and their denial of everything they've been told from outside their bubble.