Call it tough love. Only without any of the love bit. Let’s face it. There comes a time in every Conservative politician’s life when you have to say enough is enough. That it’s just not fair on the rest of us. Now, MPs might just have enjoyed a five-day mini-recess, but they deserve every minute’s free time they get. Because they clearly work far harder than everyone else. But on a Tuesday morning it sticks in the throat to think of people lying around at home, being paid to have disabilities that exist mainly in their imaginations, while you have to give a speech in central London.
The thing is, we just haven’t been ambitious enough for people on welfare payments. Let me introduce you to KemiWorld. Think of the double amputee who ran a marathon. Though try not to think of the cost to the NHS of the prosthetics. Welfare is very much a one-way balance sheet as far as Kemi Badenoch. The point is that most disabled people just sit at home and moan. They need to get out more. Let’s face it, if a double amputee can run a marathon then it ought to be a doddle for a single amputee to run a double marathon. Just get out there and do it.
Too many people just think of welfare benefits as an excuse to sit indoors and watch TV all day. So, diddums has bad anxiety and suffers from panic attacks. Frankly, I’m not surprised. I’d be having panic attacks if I was as useless as you. Just get out there and do something.
Find a job, even if there aren’t any jobs to find. Leave the house and start walking. And don’t come back until you’ve pulled yourself together. Take a leaf out of the tech bros’ book. Most of them have ADHD of some sort. So, rather than complaining, use your spare time to establish a billion-pound startup. It’s not that hard. All you need is an idea. And you’re not going to have one if you spend all day on your arse.
Tuesday morning saw Kemi and the shadow work and pensions secretary, Helen Whately, in Westminster explaining their plans to cut £36.1bn from the welfare budget. The £0.1bn is there to make sure you don’t think the Tories have just plucked some random numbers from thin air, which of course they have. This way we can all pretend it’s fully costed down to the last 50p.
It’s also possible that somewhere in the back of your mind you will remember Kemi and Helen talking about £36bn in savings at the Conservative party conference last month. You may well have wisely zoned out and missed the announcement. Which is why the Tories have popped back for another go. One that is almost certainly doomed to fail, as no one takes the costings of an opposition party particularly seriously. So don’t be surprised if there’s yet another press conference before Christmas, to re-announce the re-announcement. Third time lucky.
Still, it’s not hard to see why Kemi increasingly enjoys a presser. She’s taken to having them almost as often as Nigel Farage. For one thing, it’s about the only way she can get any attention. For another, it’s a chance to highlight the gap between her and her shadow cabinet. Her approval ratings continue to poll considerably higher than those of the Tory party itself. Mostly because her team are a bunch of deadbeats. Twenty or so semi-sentient beings in search of a personality. None more so than Whately. More of her later.
There were whoops and cheers from a surprisingly large audience as Kemi approached the lectern. They were all – there is no kind way of saying this – of an age and a wealth that apparently had no better place to be at 10.30am on a working day. Credit where credit is due. At least they hadn’t stayed in bed like the benefits claimants.
For Kemi and the audience, though, it was all common sense. A token nod to compassion – people who were terminally ill and well past retirement age would still get benefits – but for everyone else there would be a rude wake-up call. Why waste time saying a last goodbye to your family when you could be doing a productive day’s work instead. Sentimentality was the Labour way. And who, now she had come to think about it, really needed two legs anyway? Bipedalism was overrated.
Then came the charisma vacuum that is Helen. Like so many Tory MPs, she has been on quite the journey. When she was first elected to parliament, she was a wetter than wet Cameroon. Well on the left of the Tory party. Since then, she has slid to the right. She talks these days of getting people back to work, but you can’t help wondering if the only job she is really interested in is her own.
Helen was there to talk us through the numbers. Though not the ones that really counted. Such as how the welfare bill almost doubled under the Tories. It turns out, it’s far easier to cut the bill when you are in opposition. And for Whately, all benefit claimants were just debit sums in the ledger. There was no understanding that – as in the Netherlands, where there had been great success in funding measures to get young people into work – it might be an idea to invest in opportunities.
Nor was there any acknowledgment that cutting benefits by up to £10,000 per household might create further costs. That people might lose their homes, forcing councils to accommodate them in bed and breakfasts. Claims by charities that these changes would lead to a massive surge in child poverty were dismissed by Kemi. Just attention-seeking from charities that would say that, wouldn’t they?
The questions from the media slipped by easily enough. Kemi refrained from having a go at Ed Miliband and Lucy Powell about their fatal attraction to Russell Brand more than a decade ago, and she did say she wouldn’t be cutting benefits for people from the EU with settled status. So there is a heart there, somewhere.
-
On Tuesday 1 December, join John Crace and Pippa Crerar as they skewer the biggest stories from Westminster and beyond, as part of the Guardian’s year in review event. Joined by fellow Guardian writers, expect candid conversations, witty remarks and surprises as they look back on the year-defining stories of 2026. Book tickets here or at theguardian.live
