Matt

The manufacturing of consent for another round of welfare cuts is well under way. And frankly, the whole thing is becoming depressingly familiar. Before Parliament has even seen Alan Milburn’s final report, we’re being treated to a steady drumbeat of media interviews, briefings and commentary telling us that painful choices are unavoidable. That radical reform is necessary. That anyone raising objections simply doesn’t understand the scale of the problem. It’s all quite telling. Because increasingly, I don’t think Labour MPs are the real audience for this exercise. The real audience is outside Parliament: the media commentariat, think tanks and, through their relentless promotion of these proposals as economic ‘common sense’, a currently sceptical public. The objective, it seems, is to turn scepticism into grudging acceptance, then point to that acceptance as evidence that the reforms are politically viable, perhaps even desirable. It’s a familiar process of manufacturing consent. A pincer movement: persuade the public there’s no alternative, then tell Labour MPs the public demands it. And at the heart of it lies a particularly pernicious political trick. Present people with a false choice, then insist they choose. Either we cut financial support for some of the most vulnerable people in society, or we face economic ruin. Either we accept the reforms, or we condemn another generation to a lifetime on benefits. Heads I win, tails you lose. As any first-year debating student knows, once you’ve conceded your opponent’s premise, much of the argument is already lost. But why should we accept the premise? For fellow Star Trek fans, this is our government’s Kobayashi Maru moment. The seemingly impossible, no-win scenario. Kirk’s solution was famously to reprogramme the computer. He refused to accept that the rules of the simulation were the only rules possible. And that’s precisely what we need to do with our political economy. Andy Burnham has already identified the operating system that’s been running Britain for the past 40 years. It’s called neoliberalism. And he’s promised to end it. An economic model that has progressively hollowed out our democracy, stripped communities of economic power, privatised public wealth, weakened organised labour and handed ever greater control over our collective future to financial markets and corporations. A model that disciplines workers through insecurity, while insulating capital from the consequences of its own failures. Indeed, what we’re living with now barely resembles the free-market capitalism its advocates once promised. It’s closer to corporate socialism: public money underwriting private risk, public services guaranteeing private returns, and the taxpayer picking up the bill when things go wrong. Socialism for the powerful. Market discipline for everyone else. And all the while, the same political and economic establishment tells us what is and isn’t possible. What we can and cannot afford. Which choices are ‘responsible’ and which are supposedly beyond the pale. That’s the real significance of manufacturing consent. It’s not just about selling unpopular policies. It’s about narrowing the boundaries of political imagination until the public, and eventually Parliament itself, forgets that alternatives exist. So what does reprogramming the system actually mean? It means replacing an extractive economy with a productive one. It means taxing accumulated wealth more fairly, restoring collective bargaining, taking back democratic control of essential infrastructure, and investing in the industries, services and communities that generate genuine prosperity. It means rewriting fiscal rules that constrain long-term public investment, and ensuring institutions such as the Treasury, the OBR and the Bank of England serve democratically determined economic objectives rather than treating the preferences of financial markets as the final word. It means being prepared to confront concentrated economic power, whether that sits in the bond markets, water companies, property monopolies or tech corporations. And it means recognising that economic policy is not simply about distributing whatever crumbs are left after capital has taken its share. It’s about deciding how wealth is created, who controls it and who benefits. Keynes famously observed that “anything we can actually do we can afford”. That doesn’t mean resources are infinite. It means the real constraints on an economy are its productive capacity, people, skills and resources, not the fictional idea that a sovereign government operates like a household with a fixed pot of money. Which brings us back to welfare. Before asking how much we can cut from the social security bill, shouldn’t we first be asking why so many people need financial support in the first place? Why do millions of people work yet still need Universal Credit to get by? Why are housing costs swallowing wages? Why are so many people waiting for medical treatment? Why are insecure employment, poor housing and ill health so deeply embedded in our economic model? Some 3.1 million Universal Credit recipients were already in work in April this year. That’s not evidence of a country overwhelmed by people unwilling to work. It’s evidence of an economy in which work itself too often fails to provide security. Of course, Milburn is right about one thing. Too many young people are being failed. We urgently need better mental health services, apprenticeships, training, employment support and good jobs. And he’s right that this requires serious upfront investment. But here’s the contradiction. If poverty, poor health and lack of opportunity are keeping young people out of work, how does making some of them poorer solve the problem? PIP isn’t an unemployment benefit. It helps disabled people meet the additional costs of living, including costs that can enable them to work. Taking that support away and promising better opportunities later isn’t necessarily a route out of poverty. It risks creating another barrier to escaping it. And that’s why this debate has to be about much more than the merits of one report. There is sufficient wealth in this country to provide a decent social security system. What we lack is an economic model that distributes that wealth fairly, invests productively and gives working people genuine power over their lives. Rising welfare expenditure is not simply the cause of our economic difficulties. Much of it is a symptom of an economy that isn’t working as it should. Until we’re prepared to tackle that underlying failure, taking money away from people already struggling is neither economically convincing nor morally defensible. A Labour government should not be taking a penny from people who need support while leaving the structures that generate poverty, insecurity and inequality largely intact. This feels uncomfortably like the unfinished business of the Starmer government: the same old economic assumptions, dressed up in the language of unavoidable choices. Andy Burnham has promised something different. An end to neoliberalism. A more democratic economy. A state that shapes markets rather than simply submitting to them. Well, this is the test. Because you cannot promise to change the economic operating system while continuing to accept its most damaging assumptions. We don’t have to choose between supporting vulnerable people and building a stronger economy. Done properly, the former is part of achieving the latter. The real choice is between continuing to manage the consequences of a broken economy, or finally having the courage to change the economy itself. And that is the choice Labour should be offering the country.