LABOUR’S repeated attacks on disabled people are cynical, cruel and, in providing an excuse to legislate for ever-greater state intrusion into private citizens’ lives, a threat to all our freedoms.

Liz Kendall chases headlines with the latest gimmick (banning those found guilty of benefit fraud from driving). More sinister is the resurrection of Tory plans to make banks share information from private accounts and powers for the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) to seize funds without a court process.

The state already has ample power both to detect and punish benefit fraud: it can make banks share clients’ financial information if there is suspicion of fraud, while those found guilty can be jailed for up to 10 years (courtesy of Keir Starmer in a previous iteration, as director of public prosecutions egging on the then Conservative-Lib Dem coalition’s war on welfare). 

This is not about fighting crime. Nor even about cutting costs: benefit fraud amounts to less than 3 per cent of social security spending, and ministers say the new legislation is aimed at saving £1.5 billion over five years, an almost irrelevant sum given annual spending on social security excluding pensions is over £130bn.

It is about creating a climate of fear. 

The approach echoes that toward immigration, where endless scaremongering about “small boats” obscures the rarity of such arrivals compared to immigrants who arrive legally. 

The rise in legal immigration from the Boris Johnson government onward was accompanied by some of the most vicious propaganda directed at immigrants: the double standard helps warp the whole debate, preventing an honest conversation about immigration’s benefits, especially for an ageing society. The result is that immigrants in general are presented as a threat.

More goes unclaimed each year in benefits people are entitled to than is lost through benefit fraud. Successive governments’ public showdowns with “benefit cheats” are designed to make claims themselves seem suspect, softening the public up for cuts. 

They also discourage people from claiming what they need: Britain’s unemployed are the least likely in Europe to seek government help. Sweeping new powers exposing the private finances of citizens who are not even suspected of wrongdoing will be a powerful disincentive to claim, increasing poverty and social exclusion.

Tory hysteria over benefit fraud fed distrust of disabled and sick people, depicting them as scroungers cheating the public. 

This government continues the trend, despite Kendall herself in a more honest moment admitting that the rise in the sickness benefit bill is linked (who’d have thought it) to rising sickness, itself attributable to a whole range of social and economic factors the government could instead address. 

Chancellor Rachel Reeves targets welfare for spending cuts, and has vowed to proceed with Tory plans to restrict payments under the Work Capability Assessment, though disability campaigner Ellen Clifford’s victory last week at the High Court — which found the DWP’s consultation into the reform unlawful — offers hope she may be thwarted.

Given the tiny savings crackdowns on fraud can deliver, we should see this Bill as part of another “hostile environment,” one not directed at immigrants but at the poor and sick. 

And it sets dangerous precedents: in 2023 over 22 million people claimed some form of benefit (including pensions). The government right to snoop on our bank accounts could easily be extended to much of the population. 

Meanwhile, as rights groups from Liberty to Disabled People Against Cuts warned Kendall months ago, automated sifting of vast quantities of data is inherently unreliable and liable to see innocent people victimised: a faulty DWP algorithm resulted in over 200,000 people wrongly facing investigation for housing benefit fraud, the Guardian revealed last summer.

This Bill combines two dangerous features of recent legislation: the demonisation of vulnerable people and increased state power over individuals. 

Anyone that hoped a Labour government would mean a change of direction for Britain should be up in arms.