Mr Starmer, your plan for the benefits bill is same nonsense the Tories would have come up with

Keir Starmer said he’d be as bold as Clem Attlee. In an interview with Big Issue in the days before July’s general election he made that pledge. He also said there’d be no return to austerity; there’d be “a decade of national renewal instead, with ambitious investment and reform”. 

One of Attlee’s first moves as PM was to roll out the National Insurance Act, a means of collecting contributions from those of working age to fund “unemployment benefit, sickness benefit, maternity benefit, retirement pension, widows’ benefit, guardian’s allowance and death grant”.  

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It was an incredible step, coming, in 1946, as the country teetered on the edge of postwar bankruptcy. It was part of a wider implementation of the Beveridge Report. We all know how radical that was, establishing the NHS and changing the shape of the future. It signalled an intention to help rather than judge or press down on those left behind. It was about changing hearts and minds and making the nation see that it is the right thing to do to support those who, for a time, need that support.  

Last week, Starmer’s government announced that in a bid to lower the disability benefits bill next year, they’d look to send job coaches into psychiatric wards to ready patients for work. While there is clear benefit in helping the economically inactive enjoy the social and financial boosts of work, I’m not sure this is what Beveridge had in mind when he struck out for full employment. It doesn’t make sense.  

I spent a lot of time recently around psychiatric wards as a family member was in one for an extended period. These are places for people with complex needs. Indeed, many of those in the hospitals have jobs and careers, they just need help finding their way back to them. And that help must come from the remarkable nurses and doctors who put so much of themselves into some of the most challenging environments.  

Rather than job coaches at that sharp end, a focus on core staff would be much more beneficial – to the patients AND staff. The idea that there is either a massive savings benefit or indeed a recovery benefit for people who, in their own distressed reality, will see a stranger come in and tell them they need to think about work, is ludicrous.  

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It also, quietly, plays into a wider belief that many in need of disability benefits are on the make and could be working. Liz Kendall, the work and pensions secretary, raised the threat of withdrawing benefits from some people because the benefit system can “disincentivise work”. Worse still is the subtext that mental ill-health is not REALLY that serious.  

(I know you’re going through a major psychotic episode and a long period of treatment and convalescence involving heavy duty medication is needed, but really a good talking to and a career pathway will sort things out, by jiminy!) 

It’s so disappointingly small-scale and puny. It’s a closed mentality rather than a big change thinking. It is the opposite of ambitious and it echoes the last lot who were in charge. 

Rather than nipping round the edges, the Starmer government should declare an ending to the dance. To create work and drive people from benefits, they must invest in essential infrastructure programmes. Not a few pieces, but on a monumental scale. Announce substantial borrowing to invest. The wellbeing of the nation will benefit. Then, they can use job coaches who specialise in helping the excluded (Big Issue Recruit, for example) to find sustainable work. Growth, that great economists’ shibboleth, will follow. 

And do not be afraid of taxing the wealthiest. Do not buy the narrative that a few billionaires will run away when the nation insists they pay the same tax rate as the average earner. Then tax receipts can be reinvested in job creation for the many, rather than waxing the super-yachts of the few.  

Perhaps Rachel Reeves will stand up and say all this on 30 October. Perhaps Keir Starmer has the Attlee boldness in his pocket and he’s getting ready to roll. 

We’ll see. 

Paul McNamee is editor of the Big Issue. Read more of his columns here. Follow him on Twitter.

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