Here is a constituency that Labour could have gone for with a vengeance – natural Tories who are victims of social injustice, and most of whom have paid their national insurance contributions for decades and now feel entitled to draw their incapacity benefit. For those who are being hit are those very Middle Englanders the Government hopes to impress with its tight rein on public spending. Incapacity benefit has become a financial lifeline for the victims of such unfair manipulation of the labour market.Of course welfare reform is urgently necessary and much in this Bill is good, even generous; but the changes in payments for workers who genuinely have become incapacitated seem mean-spirited with their insistence that benefits will be docked for those with an income of more than pounds 85 a week There seems a serious political miscalculation here. It was all in tune with the fashion for downsizing companies in the false pursuit of productivity gains (or a quick flip to the share price), and the wasteful, cruel and stupid assumptions behind the phrase “too old at 50″. The roots of the problem reach back to the deeply cynical move of the last Tory Government in the 1980s to fiddle the unemployment figures by transferring hundreds of thousands of people off the Job Centre register on to social security.

This then played into an unhealthy culture of redundancy leading to early retirement, with reduced early pensions topped up by incapacity benefit. Rather what is being proposed – and what Labour backbenchers have rebelled against and the unreformed House of Lords threatens to chuck out again tomorrow – are changes to the welfare entitlements of a third of a million disabled people.
The Government’s argument is that many of them are not actually disabled but merely people in early retirement. But if that was the calculation – as a Government aide indicated in a well-publicised off-the-record briefing last week – then why do it in such a way as was bound to annoy 50-something early- retirers with a company pension and a bad back: Middle England personified? For we are not looking here at the benefits paid to what right-wingers routinely called `scroungers’. The Bill’s history suggests, on the one hand, a brave determination to put right some of the worst failings of the benefits system, and on the other, a cynical judgement – or misjudgement, more likely – of where the political payout is to be had. Being tough on welfare benefits might have seemed like a popular cause with Middle England.

MINISTERIAL MISHANDLING of the much disputed Welfare Reform Bill strengthens the impression that Tony Blair’s Government has become its own worst enemy. If the British Government wants to champion the interests of the poor, it should start by directing its fire at the trade practices of the industrialised world, rather than at the aid agencies, which are the poor’s natural allies.. Meanwhile millions of the poor suffer.Trade can act as a catalyst for reducing poverty, but only if the rules are not rigged against the poor. What is needed is an immediate end to all import restrictions on the world’s 48 poorest countries, an end to agricultural export subsidies, and the rapid withdrawal of MFA restrictions. When it comes to removing trade barriers at home, the rich world has developed feet- dragging into an art form. Five years ago we pledged to phase out the Multifibre Arrangement (MFA) which places restrictions on textiles – the developing world’s single biggest manufacturing export But we have so far done nothing. America imposes quotas on steel imports from Latin America – yet at the same time demands that poor countries open their markets to agricultural exports produced in the US with heavy subsidies.