THERE is now overwhelming evidence that the government is reimposing austerity measures. This is true in relation to income tax, public spending after next year, higher energy bills, bus fares and other prices determined by government.

But perhaps one of the most misunderstood aspects of austerity has been the planned cuts to the welfare bill.

Yet Keir Starmer, Liz Kendall and a host of other ministers have done their best to dispel any complacency on this issue. People who are on welfare, for whatever reason, are in the government’s firing line.

Their attack has two prongs. The first is that there is a blanket assertion that the welfare bill is “too high” and the second is that they will crack down on benefit fraud. Deliberately or otherwise, it is clear that these two issues are closely connected.

Promising “radical reforms to get Britain working,” in a recent article, Starmer went on to say, “In the coming months, Mail on Sunday readers will see even more sweeping changes. Because make no mistake, we will get to grips with the bulging benefits bill blighting our society.”

Apart from a puerile devotion to alliteration from one of Starmer’s junior advisers, what we learnt from this is that the government’s attack on welfare, in general, is completely divorced from reality.

Britain has among the lowest state pensions in the whole of Western Europe, with now the highest eligible retirement ages, too. Ministers and right-wing commentators are fond of pointing out how many people of working age are not currently in work.

They are not counting those who, after years of debilitating manual work, simply can no longer carry on in work. There are also those who want to enjoy their retirement and have left work at what would have been their previous retirement age, even though they have to take a financial hit to do so.

In this country, we also have among the worst provisions for statutory maternity leave and paternity leave, both in terms of entitlement and pay. We also have some of the lowest temporary sick pay payments and welfare payments for long-term sickness.

Yet it is this provision (among others) which seems to have agitated ministers and pundits so much. This amounts to little more than victim-blaming.

Rather scarily, they all seem to reproduce the same chart, which shows the number of people on long-term sickness benefits rising from 2 million prior to the beginning of the pandemic to 2.6 million now. The chart always begins just below the 2 million level for extra emphasis.

But this means the excess number of people claiming long-term sickness benefit is only 600,000, or just 2 per cent of the workforce. For many people on employment and support allowance (ESA) who suffer long-term sickness, they are expected to live on £90 per week. I know I could not. I would like to see those who complain so vociferously about a “bulging benefits bill” try.

The extremely low level of ESA means that the total cost of funding the excess number of long-term sickness benefits since the pandemic amounts to £2.7 billion. This is a bit less than has been pledged annually to fight the war in Ukraine indefinitely.

Given how badly people were treated during the depths of the pandemic, it is a wonder that the number of additional long-term sick people is only 600,000. Wages were slashed for those on payrolls, and next to nothing was provided for those who were not.

Worse, the whole pandemic was completely mishandled so that “lockdowns” that were full of holes kept people off work longer, and orders for premature returns to work were repeatedly issued.

It is a great pity that Starmer not only sided with Boris Johnson on these issues but went further, demanding a “no ifs, no buts” return to schools and work before Covid-19 had properly subsided. As a result, the Labour leadership is equally culpable for the inevitable growth in the numbers of long-term sick people. This includes physical as well as mental sickness.

Of course, wherever possible, people should be helped back into work. But that means significantly more investment in the NHS than has been promised, to a level that will dramatically reduce waiting lists and be sustained over the life of this parliament. The government has explicitly failed to deliver on each of these.

But it also means investing in skills, further education, and a proper apprenticeship system. Yet skills were hardly mentioned in the Budget, and £300 million extra provided is a paltry amount.

The government’s stick to get people into work is clearly much larger than any carrot. The same approach can be seen in relation to youth unemployment. Kendall was explicit. Young people who do not take up the jobs they are offered will lose their benefits.

Disabled people, as usual, bear the brunt of austerity, and the Tory changes to the implementation of the work capability assessments are being kept. This cruel measure is explicitly aimed at reducing the number of people eligible for benefits and reducing the welfare bill.

Finally, it seems that ministers could not resist the well-worn path of “clamping down on benefit fraudsters” (copyright Margaret Thacher). Either ministers do not know or do not care that the level of welfare fraud is a tiny fraction of tax fraud or that the cost of recovering it makes it uneconomic.

Starmer told Mail on Sunday readers, in a jumble of metaphors, that Tory policy was divisive, “performative politics at its worst. Meaningless rhetoric to grab headlines, and desperate throws of the dice to cover the cracks.” The same criticism could be levelled at these policies.

The truth is that this government does not have a plan for growth, confirmed by its own forecasts in the Budget. Instead, it is repeating the experiment of austerity in order to control the deterioration in government finances. Expecting a different outcome to the last 14 years meets Einstein’s definition of madness.

Forcing people into work is a punitive outcome for those involved. For many, it will simply be inappropriate.

It is also a threat to the labour movement. Unscrupulous employers will take advantage of anyone starved into work. General pay and conditions will be harder to maintain, let alone improve. They should be resisted by the labour movement as a whole.

Diane Abbott is Labour MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington. Follow her on X @HackneyAbbott.