The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has been at the centre of a storm in recent days; more so than usual. It’s over the Labour Party government’s plans to cut £6bn from chronically ill and disabled people’s benefits.
Aside from the fact that disabled people feel scared and betrayed, many non-disabled people are pointing out that this plan from Labour is something the Tories would have enacted. In fact, the Tories weren’t even planning on cutting as much as Labour now are.
However, a group of Labour MPs who have been openly supporting their party’s attempts to cull disabled people points to where this drive for further decimation of the welfare state is coming from. And it’s right at the top of Downing Street – namely, Keir Starmer’s chief of staff Morgan McSweeney and his Labour Together think tank; the same people who destroyed Jeremy Corbyn and pushed Starmer into power in the first place.
DWP cuts: brutal
As the Canary has been documenting, under Labour’s DWP plans £5 billion is expected to be stripped by tightening eligibility for DWP Personal Independence Payment (PIP), which is designed to support those with additional costs due to disability. In addition, PIP payments will be frozen next year, meaning they will not increase with inflation, affecting approximately four million chronically ill and disabled people.
Further alterations include increases to the basic rate of Universal Credit for those actively seeking employment or in work, while reducing support for individuals judged unfit for work. This, along with the changes to PIP, are perhaps the most vindictive of Labour’s plans: intentionally targeting the most chronically ill and disabled people.
It is the measure of this Labour government that it would do this. Not only has it gone way beyond the £3bn of DWP cuts it previously stated it would enact (now doubling that) – but this is further than even the Tories planned to go. All while allowing ITV News to run the story as opposed to putting out an official announcement.
However, when you see which Labour MPs are railroading this through – and who funded them to get elected in the first place – then it all makes sense.
Get Britain Working – or die trying
People have been widely sharing a letter from a new group of MPs in the Labour Party. It’s called ‘Get Britain Working’ and is headed up by David Pinto-Duschinsky. He also sits on parliament’s Work and Pensions Select Committee:
Our welfare system is broken. We have a moral duty to reform it, putting work at its very heart. Everyone who can work deserves the security, dignity and agency that employment provides.
That’s why we formed the Get Britain Working Group. And that’s why I, and dozens of Labour… pic.twitter.com/QsELwPhH5q
— David Pinto-Duschinsky MP (@DavidPintoD) March 10, 2025
The letter, signed by 36 Labour MPs, is basically issuing a public statement of support for Rachel Reeves and Liz Kendall’s plans to cut chronically ill and disabled people’s benefits. Pinto-Duschinsky even penned a column in City A.M. about the group. It was more-of-the-same nonsense: work is good for disabled people; we’ve got a worklessness crisis; people are left to rot on benefits, but the main problem is it’s costing us too much.
Now, you’d be forgiven for thinking that these 36 MPs just appeared out of thin air to create the Get Britain Working Group. Of course they didn’t.
Labour Together (again)
My colleague Hannah Sharland has done some extensive digging into these miscreants. And she found that almost every single one of them (29 in total) had either been funded by a) McSweeney’s Labour Together think tank directly (17) or b) by someone who had also donated to Labour Together (20), or both (8). You can browse her research here. Someone who funded six of these MPs was Trevor Chinn, one of the co-founders of Labour Together.
Of course, this is the same Labour Together that:
- Plotted to destroy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party.
- Fomented the exaggerated antisemitism crisis.
- Went after grassroots Labour supporters and smeared them as antisemites.
- Created Stop Funding Fake News to try and destroy the Canary, SKWAWKBOX, and other independent media outlets.
Labour Together was the brainchild of McSweeney and Chinn – and the former is now Starmer’s chief of staff. However, the point with the fact it is Labour Together MPs openly supporting the DWP’s drive to cut disabled people’s benefits should not be a surprise either.
A DWP mindset like the Tories
For example, Reeves before she was chancellor platformed much of her ‘securonomics‘ thinking via Labour Together. McSweeney ran Kendall’s 2015 leadership bid. And ex-shadow DWP secretary of state Jonathan Ashworth is now Labour Together’s chief executive.
These people are all of the same mindset: that work is central to a person’s identity; that everyone should work, and those that don’t are an underclass of people not worthy of the same treatment as everyone else. They dress this narrative up well, with more tactile language than the Tories would ever use. But the intentions are the same.
These Labour Together types ultimately view most chronically ill, disabled, and non-working people as ‘malingerers’. That is, people feigning or exaggerating their reasons to not be able to work.
‘Useless eaters’ if you like.
There could be no other reason for thinking that cutting chronically ill and disabled people’s benefits would be a way to either get them into work, or get them working more.
Work harder, play even less
A cartoon by Martin Rowson in the Guardian summed them up perfectly. It was called Keir Starmer’s new Stakhanovites:
The Stakhanovites were a movement within the Communist USSR. They advocated hard work over everything else. These people prided themselves on the fact that THEY worked harder than others and went way beyond what was necessary in their daily jobs. This was all with the goal of increasing the USSR’s productivity. However, as Radu Harald Dinu noted in the Scandinavian Journal of disability Research, the Stakhanovites helped pave the way for:
femininity and disability [to become] obverse categories of this ideal type [of human], denoting social inferiority.
Also:
when the Stakhanovite movement emerged during the late 1930s, it was no longer sufficient for the deaf to sustain their participation in industry. They were now equally expected to surpass their quota, exactly as other able-bodied workers did. These aspects illustrate that various types of disabilities did not receive equal treatment in the Soviet Union.
The point being, it is this ableist mindset that pervades the Labour Party today. You can see it in its planned assault on DWP claimants.
Labour Together: killing disabled people one DWP cut at a time
Ultimately, it is Labour Together and its right-wing, worker-first, ableist mindset that is driving the DWP cuts that are coming. If you wanted any more confirmation of this, then as the Canary previously reported:
Starmer and his key staffers are calling ministers in for two 30-minute ‘briefings’ about the yet-to-be officially announced DWP plans on Wednesday and Thursday. Ostensibly, its to “win over” MPs for its package of atrocious austerity-driven cuts.
Leading these meetings is the Downing Street Policy Unit – which is, of course, led by Morgan McSweeney.
The Labour government and DWP’s drive to persecute disabled people to improve the economy (under the guise of ‘helping’ them) is vicious and twisted. However, it of course makes economic sense in a world where Western capitalism is on its last legs. Those in power are simply trying to keep its life support on.
There is another way, though – as Corbyn showed us. But don’t worry – the same people now coming for disabled people made sure that that was never going to happen, as well.
Featured image via the Canary
