THERE’S a sense of deja-vu about today’s politics.

Over on the red team we have a 1990s tribute act Labour Party. And in Manchester the blues are reprising the austerity themes of the Cameron-Osborne government a decade ago.

Chancellor Jeremy Hunt now adds Osborne-style “striver and shirker” rhetoric to his previous demands for spending “restraint.” Tax cuts, he hints to the party faithful, will be funded by another assault on social security. 

Britain’s social security system is among the harshest in the developed world. A new study shows unemployment benefits are set to fall to their lowest in recorded history by 2030. From being worth an average 20.1 per cent of the median wage in 1971, they will be worth just 11.2 per cent of it by 2030.

According to Hunt, too many people are on these benefits. He wants more benefit sanctions. The Tories have pushed the narrative that too many people are on long-term sick for the best part of a year; now, what he terms a “carrot and stick” approach will see attacks on the welfare state combined with claims to stand up for workers.

Classic divide and rule. The left should respond on three fronts. 

One, benefit sanctions were among the cruellest and most unjust policies of the Cameron years. 

The Tory-Lib Dem coalition was a watershed for Britain: under it, for the first time in generations, there were British people who starved to death because they couldn’t afford to eat. Mark Wood, Stephen Smith, Errol Graham: extremely vulnerable people who died from hunger after the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) stopped their benefits.

The “fit for work” scheme was a scam, with judgements on people’s health made by officials unqualified to make them and whistleblowers revealing that they were incentivised to sanction people. It was also a crime: in 2015 the DWP admitted that thousands of people had died shortly after being found fit for work.

Cameron’s cuts helped turn the Covid pandemic into a catastrophe for Britain, with among the highest death tolls worldwide. That’s partly down to funding cuts undermining the NHS, but it was also linked to a punitive benefits system that acts as an obstacle to people getting the support they need if they cannot work.

Two, the Tory claim to support “workers not shirkers” is a lie.

We all pay for a social safety net through tax and National Insurance: we have a right to expect it will be there for us when we need it. Poor social security hurts people in work, allowing employers to drive down pay and cut corners on safety. 

And a Tory Party that wanted to reward workers would be addressing union concerns about pay restoration after 15 years of real-terms cuts, not holding pay below inflation and trying to outlaw effective strikes.

The bid to force more people into work follows claims by business leaders that a surge in early retirement post-Covid is driving inflation because labour can command higher wages through scarcity. So it is directly about lowering pay.

Three, if the number of people on long-term sickness benefits is rising, we need not conclude as Hunt does that they are gaming the system. 

We have recently emerged from a pandemic virus with unknown long-term effects. Tory underfunding has created a seven-million-long NHS waiting list, and people forced to wait a long time for treatment are more likely to develop chronic illness. 

Poverty, which is associated with multiple health problems, has risen steadily under the Conservatives. All these factors will tend to worsen the nation’s health.

We cannot afford a rerun of the 2010s — too many of today’s problems are direct consequences of the decisions taken then. Nor can we allow the Tories to divide workers from those “on benefits.” Their strategy is to immiserate us all.