In This Episode
The new Labour government has promised bold action to fix Britain’s benefit system. Last week, Keir Starmer announced a crackdown on benefit fraud and said people on long-term sickness benefits should look for work. But is this the answer?
To chew over the Government’s plans, Coco and Nish are joined by Caroline Selman, senior research fellow at the Public Law Project, and John Pring, the founder and editor of Disability News Service and author of “The Department: How a Violent Government Bureaucracy Killed Hundreds and Hid the Evidence”. With some help from our listeners, they tell us how broken the benefit system is and how we can fix it.
Then, to mark the Conservative party conference, we have the return of the section we like to call WTF. Some absolute shockers from the Tory leadership hopefuls remind us why they are no longer in power.
Useful Links:
For advice on benefits
https://www.advicenow.org.uk/guides/how-deal-universal-credit-overpayment
Contacting your MP
https://www.parliament.uk/get-involved/contact-an-mp-or-lord/contact-your-mp/
Guests:
John Pring https://www.disabilitynewsservice.com/
Caroline Selman https://x.com/SelmanCaroline
Video Credits:
Times Radio
Sky
BBC
Daily Express
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TRANSCRIPT
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Nish Kumar This is Pod Save the UK. And I’m Nish Kumar.
Coco Khan And I’m Coco Khan. As the government commits to cracking down on welfare fraud. We’re looking into our broken benefits system.
Nish Kumar And later, to celebrate the Tory party conference, we’re bringing back the section lovingly known as fuck.
Coco Khan Ooh boy, there has been a lot of wild stories from the Tories this week, and if you were in Birmingham this weekend yourself, did you pop along to conference?
Nish Kumar I was doing one of my tour shows to which tickets are still available. NishKumar.co.uk in Birmingham on Saturday night. It was like the day before the Tory party conference started, and I guess it was what people in the theatrical or showbusiness well generally know as counterprogramming, which is where there’s a big event happening or something’s being released. So you put something else on that aimed at the exact opposite of the target demographic before. Yeah, it’s it’s, it’s a thing like there was, there’s a long history of like when a big like action movie was released, distributors would release a rom coms. Well, because they were traditionally seen as being split audiences. This was visceral counterprogramming. This this was pretty woman coming out on the same weekend as con air like is.
Coco Khan It of the Bob Bernheim are about it isn’t it.
Nish Kumar This was not a bob and I cannot stress this enough this was not Kumar furtive this was definitely not I’ll come over to you as a weekend.
Coco Khan That would be a sartorial nightmare, isn’t it? Like Conservative Party conference in the afternoon and then Nish Kumar in the evening? How how does one dress like that?
Nish Kumar I genuinely I genuinely don’t know. I don’t know whether it’s possible to wear like red tweed trousers and an Andre 3000 t shirt. I don’t know if that’s the the way in which you would dress for both of those things, but I suspect there was not a huge crossover in the people attending my show and the Tory party conference. Unless they’re doing a prank. That’s all that’s that’s the only logical conclusion that I could come to. But in any case, the Tory party conference is thrown out a huge clusterfuck of bad headlines, which must be a relief for the Labour Government. After back to back weeks of the gum drama and the various scandals around gifts accepted by Labour and peace, However, of course everything has been overshadowed by the growing tensions in the Middle East as we record on Wednesday morning. Israel has committed to launching what it calls a significant attack on Iran’s oil fields in retaliation to a missile attack on Tuesday night. As always, we can’t recommend our sister podcast, Pod Save the World Enough. There’s an episode in their feed right now that discusses this rapid escalation of the conflict.
Coco Khan So more on Tory conference later in the show. But for now, let’s turn to benefits. Last week at Labour Party conference, Keir Starmer promised to crack down on benefits fraud, but he also expressed his desire to get more people claiming long term sickness benefits back into work. Here he is discussing that with the BBC’s Nick Robinson.
Clip The basic proposition that you should look for work is right. Obviously there will be hard cases. But the way I would do it is to say, yes, that’s the basic proposition. But we also want to support that so that more people can get into work.
Coco Khan So it’s worth pulling back and having a look at the benefits system as it exists currently. So benefits are administered through the Department for Work and Pensions is an absolutely massive department and it interacts with around 20 million people across the UK.
Nish Kumar In 2012, David Cameron’s coalition government introduced radical reforms to the way benefits were administered, rolling six previous benefits into one single means tested payment. Universal Credit. Universal credit recipients include people on low incomes, people needing help with living costs, people who are out of work or people with health conditions. The amount paid out depends on how much money you’re earning. So if you get paid more from work, you’ll get paid less from universal credit. As of January 2024, those 6.3 million people in receipt of universal credit and nearly 40% of those claimants were in work.
Coco Khan The aim was to simplify the system, but the roll out of universal credit hasn’t been smooth, and over a decade on, it’s still not complete. It’s also resulted in less money for many low income earners. For example, the Ifs found that poor families with children saw losses of 20% of their net income on average between 2010 and 2019 as a direct result of these reforms. In addition to universal credit, the welfare reforms of 2012 introduced a new payment for disability support called personal independence payments or Pips. This payment isn’t means tested, but it is instead tested against a set of criteria to determine how much someone should receive.
Nish Kumar At the same time as these reforms were happening to the welfare system, the coalition government introduced new policies that it said would get more people into work with punitive measures introduced for those. Deemed does not meet the conditions of their universal credit payments. For example, in the Searching for Work category, claimants are required to spend 35 hours a week searching for jobs, which, as anyone that’s ever been out of work before knows is a pretty awful task. When introducing the policy in 2013, the former Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Iain Duncan Smith, who some listeners of a couple of months ago may remember as someone we described as the principal cause of politically induced vaginal dryness. But he said that the introduction of sanctions would end the UK’s something for nothing culture, a phrase which I hope contextualized why we deemed him a cause of politically induced vaginal dryness.
Coco Khan But as we’ll dig into later, these changes, particularly for people with disabilities or long term health conditions, have had devastating impacts. Now, let’s quickly frame some of the costs here, because it’s at the heart of the new government’s plan to reform the system. Benefits make up about 11% of the government’s annual budgetary expenses. So in the fiscal year 2024 to 2025, the UK will spend 138 billion on welfare, 89 billion on support for disabled people and 35.3 billion on housing benefit. The support for disabled people is something of a fixed cost, but that 138 billion spent on welfare is what the government is trying to reduce. As we heard last week, the government is proposing further crackdowns on benefits, fraud and simultaneously trying to get more people into work.
Nish Kumar Last week made a call out for experiences of the benefits system and we’ve had so many responses. Well, it’s probably not surprising to anyone. Listening, however, is that none of them are positive stories. So first, we just like to say huge thank you to everyone who wrote in, and we’re very sorry about the difficulties you’ve been going through. While we can’t address everyone’s experiences directly, we try to work as many of your contributions into the episode as we can while keeping you anonymous. We’d also like to remind you if you feel your voices aren’t being heard by the system, you can contact your MP directly to make your case. We’ve put links in the show notes for how to do that. So joining us now to discuss how the government can start to fix the benefits system is Caroline Selman, senior research Fellow at the Public Law Project, and John Pring, the founder and editor of Disability News Service and the author of The Department How Violent Government Bureaucracy Killed Hundreds and Hid the Evidence. Thank you so much, Caroline and John, for joining us today.
Caroline Selman Thanks for having us.
Coco Khan Well, thank you for being here. So I just want to kick off with trying to say something positive about benefits. I feel like the conversation we have around it is is constantly in the negative. You know, it’s always these horrible sweeping statements about people not working hard enough and taking other people’s tax money. But I think that obscures the the crucial job that benefits do and for such a large amount of people. You know, I always use myself as an example. You know, I grew up with just my mom, single parent, you know, migrant, didn’t have a lot of money. She worked all the hours, but she needed help from the state and it helped keep us afloat. It was never lots. We still felt poor. We still had to sacrifice. It was still stressful. But I don’t think I’d be sitting here in front of you now having the privilege of interviewing you. Had we not had that little bit of help. So I guess my very first question is let’s think about the benefits of the system. So, John, let’s start with you. How important are these benefits to people with disabilities who you tend to represent?
John Pring A vital I mean, there are there are safety net. There’s income related benefits and there’s disability related benefits. And they’re both absolutely crucial to disabled people. And they they would not be able to survive without them. And as as the research has shown, you know, sometimes, you know, when they are taken away, they do not survive.
Coco Khan Caroline, you’re fighting for justice for people who had their benefits reduced or taken away. What does that look like for them when those benefits are reduced?
Caroline Selman Yeah. So like you say, we are currently working with Central and Law Center right about supporting people in relation to sanctions so that when people have money taken away, if they haven’t, for example, attended a work focused interview with the DWP. And although they tend to be things that are put in place for not particularly serious things like being a bit late to an interview, the consequences for people are really very serious. So you’re looking at sort of about 100% of somebodies standard allowance if you’re a single person sometimes for really quite a long amount of time. And one of the key concerns we have about the sanction system is it’s been shown not to work in terms of supporting people into work or better paid work. But it has been shown to be really harmful and repeatedly across both sort of independent studies and also some of the government’s own evidence as well. So there’s a core concern as to why that regime should be being used at all. But the piece of work that we’re did with such a good law center is about supporting people to challenge sanctions if they are challenged because people can ask for an internal review. To peel them. And what we find is that if people do challenge them, they’re very often successful.
Nish Kumar The Department for Work and Pensions, which is the government department, is kind of behind all of the benefits and the way the benefits are handed out. Given what you’ve just said, is that evidence that the Department for Work and Pensions is not fit for purpose and that it’s is actually is it fundamentally broken?
Caroline Selman I think most people, regardless of where you are on the political spectrum, if you have something that’s been found not to work and which causes harm, that’s probably not a policy that is a good one to be applying to people. And more broadly, we have also got concerns about how DWP is to understand who is being impacted by things and how. What we’ve seen recently in terms of that statistics is that some people are more likely to be impacted or harmed by the sanctions regime than others, which also raises a whole host of concerns about how decisions are taken by the DWP in terms of and how policies impacts people. But another area that we do a lot of work on is how the DWP is increasingly using things like data analytics and machine learning, and that’s been identified by National Audit Office as having a real risk of bias within it. But where the DWP is on record as saying they don’t have the data or the way of knowing whether that bias is in place but still ruling at pace.
Coco Khan So John, obviously you’ve written a whole book about the Department for Work and Pensions. Is this a new problem with them? Is it just in the last ten years gotten terrible or has it always been underlying? You know, I think I might go so far as to say prejudices against certain groups. I’m just a general meanness to people who are very vulnerable.
John Pring I think that that’s the kind of key question in my books about really this idea of slow bureaucratic violence. The first death I found was 1996. There were a couple of others early 1997 before Labour came into power. And. I think the harm, the violence built gradually, slowly over those years. And then in the post 2010 austerity years, it kind of exploded into violence. And I don’t think that’s an exaggeration at all. Those years between 2010 and 2013, 2014 were just horrific.
Nish Kumar John can you just define what you mean when you say violence? What is it? Is that specifically the sanctions that people are facing?
John Pring Some of it is sanctions. A lot of them are about the assessment process so that a lot of them were people who took their own lives, 1 or 2 who literally starved to death, who had their benefits removed. Graham, for instance, from Nottingham, he missed his assessment. He had severe mental distress and he locked himself in his flat. He missed a work capability assessment. They cut off his benefits. They cut off his gas. And I mean, it’s it’s so distressing to think about it. But over the course of about nine, 12 months, he literally starved to death. That’s the violence we’re talking about.
Coco Khan One thing I wanted to ask you, because you mentioned the austerity years. And I may have this wrong, but I understand that for a while and perhaps it still continues today that these assessments were done by for profit third party contractors. Is that still the case and is that how to role? I assume, therefore, they’re on the targets to to get those numbers down, even if they’re faced with people who are entitled to it.
John Pring The first company that everyone always talks about is that Atlas, which is a French a French company, and they have fortunately now been removed from that process. The last government recently pretended, well, the contracts, but Capita is another one that was involved. Maximus is another is American huge outsourcing giant. We also need to talk about Unum, which is a massive insurance company again American and was lobbying the government very, very hard from the mid 1990s to make the assessment processes as tight as they possibly could and that would encourage people to take out their private insurance policies because they realized that they might not get the support they need if they became ill.
Nish Kumar We’ve actually had a note from a former work coach at the DWP who said that there was an insistence from management that sanctions would come naturally, which this person notes was true, but didn’t consider the reality and complexity of people’s situations. So when sanctions were inevitably placed on claimants, this person notes that it broke all trust in the relationships that they’d been trying to build. Caroline From the sort of legal side and the people that you’ve been dealing with in terms of pushing back on this kind of stuff, is is that something that rings true with your experience, this idea that the system was designed not to actually make an assessment but designed to essentially facilitate sanctions to be placed on people?
Caroline Selman The thing that rang really true was that by the impact on trust as a result of of sanctions. And I think, you know, that’s not just in terms of our own experience in relation to it is also, you know, borne out by DWP own findings. I mean, I think in terms of some of our own experience in this area. So we often come at stuff from an access to justice perspective so high we’re supporting people to exercise their rights or challenge incorrect or unfair decisions. But one of the things that really comes through so strongly in that is that wider pernicious impacts of everything that John’s just been describing, of people’s experience of the system as whether it’s one that you see is supportive and one that you can trust, or whether it’s one that you feel is set up to potentially assume the worst of you or to be punitive.
John Pring There was a change in policy under the Coalition that pressured staff to it to refer more claimants to have the benefits sanctioned. So the performance of the Jobcentre staff was measured by what they called off benefit flow. So the number of claimants who stopped receiving an out of work benefit, even if they had not secured a job, and that led to a huge increase in sanctioning rates. So we’re talking 2010 to 2013 and it reached more than a million sanctions in 2013, which is about 345% above the average level, 2001 2008. And this kind of top down pressure on staff acted as a what they called a moral anesthetic, which they say it made invisible the needs and interests of the claimants they were sanctioning.
Nish Kumar To look at some of the situations here can be incredibly unique. And there is a real problem with a one size fits all sort of policy with with a lot of these assessments. So we’ve actually had something come in from a listener who told us about unexpectedly needing to become a carer for two children whilst undertaking a PhD. Stipends are a nontaxable income, so the standard way for the DWP to deal with the nontaxable income is to deduct it from universal credit payments, leading to no additional support for this person despite them suddenly. Now needing to support two children. If they’re in a job with equivalent pay, they would have received the payment. They raised the issue with local government and their Jobcentre and they rewarded a small payment from an assessor 18 months later. They were told by the DWP that they owed thousands of pounds. This listener later withdrew from there and is still paying off the debt to the DWP years later. It is an absolutely heartbreaking story and the introduction of Universal Credit had rules. That means the DWP can pursue funds despite the error not being the claimant’s fault. Now, Caroline, how common are stories like this? And the listener has partly written in to give us information of real world lived experience of these things, but also I think, is there anything people can do? Is there anything that says they can do in this kind of situation, which seems like a complete complete and total failure of the system.
Caroline Selman We see from from casework that quite a common story is, like you say, where somebody has been awarded something by the DWP. Relies on that as being something that they are entitled to. Have often gone back and double checked and said, Am I definitely entitled to that before then, relying on that to spend it and then finding that they weren’t entitled to it and having it recovered from them, causing the financial hardship that comes from that. And so that’s something that is very familiar to us from casework. And again, in terms of DWP own data, in terms of that context of official error. So where that mistake has been made by DWP, we know from statistics from a couple of years back which have stopped publishing now that three quarters of the overpayments they had on their debt management system were things that were caused by DWP. And that’s partly reflective of a change in policy and the legal framework which was introduced when Universal Credit was introduced, which basically gave DWP the power to recover overpayments even when it was their mistake. That said, they do have discretion as to whether to do it. And one of the concerns that we have is that they don’t really apply that discretion before they apply deductions. Generally, the default position is to recover that overpayment regardless of the context and regardless of the potential harm for somebody’s efforts recover. It’s even if it is to do with their own mistake. In terms of what people can do is that people can in those contexts get in touch with DWP to ask for some relief in terms of the rate that it’s recovered. Or they can ask for it to be waived as well. So if particularly in that kind of circumstance where they’ve relied on something and text about it, and that is the kind of context where they can and should be able to ask for a waiver. What we found is that that is not well communicated to people and that people don’t know that they have the ability to to request that and ask for that and that in some circumstances, DWP really should be granting that waiver, which is something we’re quite keen for people to be more aware of and for DWP to do more as well so that people know about it as well.
Nish Kumar Let’s talk about one of the other major types of benefits, the personal independence payments or Pips, we’ve got a huge listener response from people talking about the Pip assessment process who’ve called it degrading and said that the question’s this, quote, tempted to catch them out. Another listener talked to the difficulty of actually being approved for a Pip, saying that despite having lost three quarters of their leg, it was still hard to get a payment. John, it sounds like Pip’s a pretty difficult to get. Can you talk us through some of the issues that that causes?
John Pring On a very basic level, people aren’t getting the support they need and Pip is there to contribute towards the extra costs that disabled people face in their daily lives, The extra costs around the house. For instance, if you’re not able to do your own cleaning or you can’t look after your own garden or you need to take taxis more often than most people or these kind of things are really, really important. And that’s what Pip is therefore.
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Coco Khan I want to go back to an earlier point. Sorry, Caroline, you were talking about the use of A.I. creating biases. Can you tell me a little bit more about that? And also which groups specifically are being impacted?
Caroline Selman Yeah. So what we know and DWP has been very public about the fact that it’s putting about 70 million pounds into developing what refers to as data analytics and machine learning, in particular, in order to try and predict or identify whether cases should be investigated for fraud. And the concerns we have about that is that those things have been flagged up by, for example, the National Audit Office as having particular inherent risks of bias, which is also something that we know from other contexts in terms of risks associated, particularly with predictive tools, where there’s a risk that what happens is that they are baking in preexisting biases that might exist in the system or fleshing out some other forms of bias.
Coco Khan And so just so it’s clear to the listeners what we’re talking we’re saying like people with certain ethnicities, what are we saying in terms of bias?
Caroline Selman So we can’t see what’s happening because we don’t have the data. But the risk of bias is raised by, like you say, certain ethnicities or other characteristics. So, for example, if you have something that is a proxy for a particular nationality, for example, the individuals might be being disproportionately picked up and identified as somebody to investigate for fraud, not necessarily because there’s any more risk that that individual would have committed fraud, but because of how the algorithm has worked in terms of what it’s using for proxies to pick people up and identify things. So the key concern is whether tools that are being ruled out might be disproportionately picking up individuals and investigating them for for fraud when they haven’t committed fraud.
Nish Kumar We should also just say, according to figures published by the DWP themselves, black and minority ethnic claimants are disproportionately likely to be hit with universal credit sanctions. Black claimants are 58% more likely than white claimants, and mixed ethnic groups are 72% more likely. So even before we have a conversation about I am in addition to all of the other various problems with the DWP, by the acknowledgment of the figures itself as published, there is a racial problem here.
Caroline Selman Yes. So I think, first of all, with sanctions, the starting context, let’s do all of this is again, it’s a system that doesn’t work and causes harm. And what those figures show is that if you’re black or mixed ethnicity, you are more likely to be impacted by that system, which doesn’t work and causes harm. And there’s still lots of sort of gaps in terms of that data. But that raises really serious questions for DWP about who is being impacted, how and why. We have some statistics now for sanctions. But it’s a concern across universal credit and how decisions are being made in relation to Social Security. So again, like those considerations about if you’re ruling out automation, that risk that you’re potentially baking in some of those things that might be preexisting bias and not having the ability to properly check for that or prevent that from happening.
Nish Kumar John, in the last couple of years, we’ve seen these large scale public inquiries about ordinary people who’ve been mistreated by different elements of the government department or there’s been a failure of state in some way. I’m thinking of the Covid inquiry, the Grenfell inquiry, the infected blood scandal, the post office scandal. Do you believe the DWP and the events that specifically have happened as a consequence of that department’s actions in the last 15 years is a scandal on par with that? And is it something that we should be actively pushing for a full public inquiry in the way that those have been conducted?
John Pring Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Without that, because otherwise we’re going to be doomed to repeat what has happened over the last 30 years. And and there are two big waves of DWP reforms coming up. There’s going to be an employment white paper coming up in the autumn and then there’s going to be a disability benefits paper coming up in the spring. For one thing, the MPs don’t know the past history. So if the voting on these measures don’t know the past history, then how can they judge whether these measures are going to be helpful or not? And that’s why we’ve been trying to and some brilliant activists did a crowdfunder to get a copy of my book to every MP in the House of Commons. Hopefully some of them agreed it.
Coco Khan So both of you have, you know, very close insights into the inner workings of DWP. What are some improvements that can be made now? Things are like low hanging fruit to make this more compassionate as a system.
Caroline Selman Yes, I think we’ve talked already about the real need to properly reform the sanctions and conditionality regime. But there is a fundamental point about some of these things needing quite a big culture shift and fundamental change, and that could include looking at. For example, in Scotland, they’re trying to take a more rights based approach, inclusive of kind of radical things like. Listening to people and making sure that the evidence is at the heart of things as well. And but alongside that, there are things that could make things a little bit incrementally better. Know we would support there being much more transparency about things raised about evidence to some of what John has been talking to. I think what it demonstrate is the sheer amount of efforts that he and others have had to put into and how difficult it is for individuals on the outside to be able to evidence and demonstrate that systems are working. And it is quite difficult and intensive to do that from the outset. So as a starting point, a culture shift in terms of being open and transparent about, you know, when you’ve had an inquiry that it doesn’t take several Freedom of Information Act requests and decision notices requiring you to put that stuff out in the public domain that that is put out in the public domain. And also there’s a culture of wanting to learn from what that evidence says and do things differently and change things. And there does have to be something fundamental about looking at that relationship that people have with, you know, their work cultures and and DWP generally. And whether it is one that’s based on on trust rather than viewing people as a potential bad faith out there.
Nish Kumar Clearly, there’s a backlog here of decisions that need to be challenged in regards to the deep and sanctions have been put down. How can people be better supported to do this? Is there any information that you can direct people towards if they want to take up the cases with the DWP?
Caroline Selman People can and should challenge things through an internal review. So that’s monetary consideration, which you can do on your journal if you’ve been sanctioned and you think you shouldn’t have been. And also on things we were talking earlier about deductions for overpayments. You know, if that is something that you either think you can’t afford or with a card in a context where you really don’t think it is fair that they’re recovering it because it was a DWP mistake. And you check that and you tried to make sure that you were definitely entitled to it before you relied on it. You should also think about whether you want to ask for a waiver as well. And what we know is that when people do ask for these things, they can be successful in either successfully challenging something or getting things waived. But that only happens if if you do know two and then are able to go and ask for those things.
Coco Khan That’s so bleak, by the way, just what you were saying there, like if so many people are successful, it’s probably unfair, right? Like any in any other situation, if the verdicts were constantly coming back as being incorrect, it would provoke some soul searching about whether those verdicts were correct and whether there was a problem. But not not here.
John Pring I’ve got something interesting on this. Yeah. Something I dug up in the National Archives from I think it was early, 2000s maybe at that point they were talking about tribunal cases. I think they were they were coming down on the side of claimants about 50% of the time. And they said at the time, well, yeah, 50% were comfortable with that. But if I ever got to 70%, then I think, you know, we would have a problem. We would need to do something about it. But but it has got to 70% in the in the 20 tens. And and recently I think. Is that right Caroline that some of the tribunal the percentage of cases taken to tribunal by benefit claimants appealing against those benefit decisions is got about 70%.
Caroline Selman So so across different decisions some of them have got really high like you say, sort of talent challenge rates. There’s other bits where again and so for sanctions, at one stage we had data which showed that really there was both quite a low number of people who were challenging, but a really high success rate when you did challenge them. But again, a lot of that data is now not being published. And again, so it’s harder to kind of hold that to account and see that. But and like you say, you know, it’s good that that individuals managed to challenge the sanctions successfully. But how much better would it be if you were in a situation where someone was being unfairly or incorrectly sanctioned in the first place?
Nish Kumar Thank you so much, Caroline and John for joining us today. And thanks to everybody who wrote in.
Caroline Selman Thanks for having us.
Nish Kumar So that was a.
Coco Khan Wow.
Nish Kumar Very intense, powerful conversation. Thanks again to all the listeners that wrote in. I’m sorry we couldn’t include all of your stories, but yeah, quite an astonishing thing. And I mean, it feels like at the very least, there needs to be a public inquiry about the DWP conduct and the way that it’s handled the business that it was charged with handling. Yes. It feels like there is this recurrent thread that something has gone very badly rotten at the center of our government in the last decade, decade and a half, in the way that we’ve handled some of the most vulnerable people in our societies. You know, we we we’re talking constantly about marginalized groups that have been treated unfairly. You know, regardless of which scandal you look at, whether it’s, you know, infected blood, post office. These are often, you know, either minority groups or working class people that lack a kind of voice in the national conversation.
Coco Khan Yeah, for sure. I mean, certainly I mean, there are so many points in our conversation there that took my breath away, made me feel upset, angry, just shocked, you know? And I think one of the things I was really struck by was the scale of the problem. Yeah. So, you know, Keir Starmer talked about benefit fraud. That’s a small percent. Yeah. But actually the probably the biggest percent is everyone being let down by them. Do you know what I mean? And you know, there’s no there’s no means of getting justice on that aside for going to a tribunal when so many people are just they’re just far too ill or simply don’t have the resources, whether it be money or time to to do that. Yeah.
Nish Kumar Well, check the show notes. We’ve got links to resources that people can use, especially if you’ve found yourself the victim of some of these kind of draconian. And, you know, to borrow John’s language, violent conduct by this department. And also again just to restate right to MPs will again provide links in the show notes about that. I think there needs to be a concerted campaign of pressure. To get an inquiry into this, and we’re all part of that. You know, we exist, we’re part of the media space and it’s incumbent on all of us to actually push for an actual public inquiry to find out what happened.
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Coco Khan Hey, guess what? Guess what time it is. Guess what?
Nish Kumar What time is it?
Coco Khan WTF O’clock time. That work?
Nish Kumar I don’t know. I think we have to call it WT fuck. Otherwise, it looks like we’re paying tribute to Marc Maron. Every time we. Every time we do the sketch, which I’m very happy to do. I’m a huge fan.
Coco Khan Okay, so what should we say then?
Nish Kumar WTFuck. Just swear.
Coco Khan No I don’t want it.
Nish Kumar Why?
Coco Khan Peer Pressure?
Nish Kumar I’m not trying to get you to smoke.
Coco Khan Just one puff. Just one puff you might like.
Just one fuck. Just one fuck Coco.
Coco Khan Anyway. WTFuck. There you go. You happy? Is back again?
Nish Kumar Yeah, that’s right. And they’ve been coming in thick and fast this week because it’s Tory party conference. Well, great reminder to this country of why we voted them out of office. Like if the Tory party was trying to have any sense of regret saying at the election result and Lord knows there’s been plenty of legitimate things to criticize Keir Starmer’s Labour Party for any regrets would have been wiped away from five minutes of watching some of the stuff that’s happening. Kerry Badenoch appears to have been the sort of headline act in this Glastonbury festival of weird shit by claiming that maternity pay has gone too far and describing statutory maternity pay as excessive. In an interview with Times Radio’s Kelly McCann.
Clip You need to have more personal responsibility. There was a time when there wasn’t any maternity pay and people were having more babies. We need to make sure. Well, that’s because women often had to not work. They had to stay at home. So is that the solution? That’s not that. You’re putting words in my mouth.
Coco Khan What even is that one line of that? There was a time when there was no maternity pay. Women had more babies. There was also polio and other illnesses that we had not yet cured. Why is that? I don’t even get it.
Nish Kumar On Sunday morning, she kind of unloaded this fusillade of absolute budgetary. The thing with maternity pay was part of it, which I mean, anyone who knows people who’ve recently had children will tell you that maternity pay is insane in this country and it’s something that we desperately need to examine and overhaul. It’s a phenomenally strange thing to have said it like it makes no sense to me. Biden also said that immigrants who come to the UK should love this country and uphold its traditions. And this this is my highlight of the whole week. This, to me was the absolute weirdness. This is a quote from an article she wrote in the Sunday Telegraph. I’m not trying to present this as fulsome away as possible so that it doesn’t seem like we’ve added to it to make it sound fuckin madder than it does. So I speak as someone from an immigrant background. Being born in the UK was like Charlie Bucket finding a golden ticket in his chocolate bar. I really did win the lottery. I love Britain with the knowledge of how special this country is and how many opportunities it gave me. I also have a hard nosed view on immigration. Now I’ve not got those things together. That is how the paragraph is presented. So I know she is presenting herself as an equivalent to Charlie from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory getting the golden ticket again, not really acknowledging the fact that her parents may have done things and committed sacrifices in order to get the golden ticket, which is kind of the point of Charlie the Chocolate factory as well, like Charlie’s parents, like, sacrifice things to get that golden ticket for him. So I don’t really acknowledge that any of that, like generational sacrifice. But they’d say, I’ve got the golden ticket. Charlie Of course, spoiler alert wins the chocolate factory at the end. And this is the equivalent of Charlie saying we will no longer be allowing children in the chocolate factory. I’ve got in the chocolate factory for the rest of you. Yeah, exactly. All the chocolates for me, All the rest of you people that hate the chocolate factory. As analogies go, she couldn’t have picked a worse. What? She also said that there were too many immigrants who hate Israel coming to the United Kingdom. It’s not clear what her basis for that is. And she also, and this is a direct quote, said, we cannot assume all cultures are equally valid. They are not.
Coco Khan Right.
Nish Kumar So I think listen, I think the political calculation behind this is this idea that, you know, you have to appeal to the real hard right of the Tory party because the Tory membership in the last decade or so has moved to the right of even conservative voters who were nonmembers, seemingly on a lot of different issues, and has also moved probably to the right of the majority of the country on a lot of issues. So in order to curry their favor, a food analogy, I think that would probably not appreciate in order to roast chicken in their favor. You have to assume that this this is a political calculation to say, well, I’m going to say the most hard right things possible. I mean, saying that not all cultures being equally valid is almost a Powell style comment.
Coco Khan And of course, it’s totally dog whistle, because the follow up question to that will be like, well, which cult cultures name them? Which ones? And they won’t be drawn on that. But we all know what they’re saying. It sounds like muslin, but not muslin.
Nish Kumar Yeah, well, that was put to her directly and she sort of denied that she was Islamophobic.
Coco Khan The Islamophobic stuff. I mean, that’s so horrible thing to say, but I’m quite used to now the maternity pay one through me because. Nobody is in disagreement about maternity pay. Like everyone, even the conservatives themselves have said that having maternity pay is good. It’s good to get people back into work. It’s just out of the blue. Do you know what I mean?
Nish Kumar No one’s gunning for mums. Mums are like the only group of people people are not actively gunning for.
Coco Khan So, I mean, I’ve been trying to figure out what her statements mean. And I think what she’s trying to say is that if companies want to offer maternity pay, that’s fine. But the idea that the state mandates it is basically communism. I think that’s what she’s trying to say, although she’s not actually being clear about it. She’s done a lot of backtracking today.
Nish Kumar I totally agree with you. But I also think I think the danger sometimes is reading too much into what these comments mean and actually just take them at face value. She’s basically opened up to you. And for right wing whack job shit I just generated.
Coco Khan I do want to take a brief moment to mention that she’s been doubling down on her claims that she’s working class or has certainly been working class. I think she wouldn’t say that now. And the evidence she presented as to why she is has grown up working class is that she had to take the bus to work and to college. Don’t you think that’s amazing?
Nish Kumar I have to say, as someone who took two busses to a state school that was technically a state school, and that’s how we phrase it, a selective grammar school ID card. It it didn’t feel super working class like as a decision. Also like I’ve seen like Julian Barratt from The Mighty Boosh on the bus.
Coco Khan I’ve seen so many people on the bus. I’ve seen Tom Hiddleston in the bus.
Nish Kumar It’s just called Living in a City, it’s not-called Working class. It’s called Living in a City.
Coco Khan It’s called not having a chauffeur every day.
Nish Kumar Some people do have Chauffeurs, but they still need to take the bus upwards.
Coco Khan True. In an interview with Trevor Phillips for Sky News, Tory leadership hopeful Robert Jenrick, who has criticized Labour for the Garm drama, we should say, has denied any wrongdoing or hypocrisy in accepting a 75,000 pound donation from a company with no employees.
Clip Somebody loaned you 75 grand and you don’t really know who they are. Well, we well, we do know we do know who they are. Who? Well, it’s a company that does sports fitness technology in the UK, and it’s a perfectly valid and legal donation. We’ve registered it in the correct way, and I’m not aware that there’s any challenge to that.
Nish Kumar You know what this reminds me of? I think this is a good thing to remind everyone that like. Labour can’t even do sleaze. Well. Because the ultimate like a lot. Of this stuff like Starmer’s been get left foreground for gloss. It’s pathetic. Robert Jenrick got 75,000 pounds. He’s not even the prime Minister. Imagine how much corruption he could be engaged in.
Coco Khan My goodness. I mean, there’s just never answers. Did you hear that James Cleverly has been asking his fellow conservatives to be more normal? Have you heard that? Yeah. Now, I saw that being kind of tweeted by the various political journalists this morning, and it really made me laugh. Is that bad?
Nish Kumar Well, I think the background to it is that one of the things that has stuck in the American presidential debate is calling Trump weird. And I think that this idea that they’re quite strange and like talking about abortions is actually quite a strange thing to do. There’s a strange obsessions has kind of stuck a little bit in the States. And so I think probably James Cleverly is trying to avoid that tag being labeled on the British Conservative Party, because also, let’s face it, like Suella Braverman, Cami Jenrick. They’re pretty weird. Jenrick is a weird guy. He’s he he talks about the fact that he gave his daughter the middle name Thatcher. That’s weird.
Coco Khan That is weird.
Nish Kumar It’s not even a first name. Why not? Margaret? It’s. Wait, that’s so weird. But we should say that James. Cleverly.
Coco Khan Exactly. I mean, he’s not hardly.
Nish Kumar He’s lagging way behind. The guy trying to get the Tory party to be less weir is way behind in the polls.
Coco Khan So speaking of weird, in Jenrick speech, the Tory Party delegates, he tried his hand at some comedy patter in this clip from the Daily Express.
Clip Anyone says the grown ups are back in charge in our country, just like Ed Miliband. And then you’ve got you’ve got David Lammy, our foreign secretary. He’s the one who went on celebrity mastermind and said that Henry the seventh succeeded. Henry The eighth is not quite a celebrity, certainly not a mastermind. He keeps banging on about a ceasefire. And that’s just between Sue Gray and Morgan McSweeney.
Coco Khan What do you how would you rate it as a professional comedian, son?
Nish Kumar You are not charismatic. That is not like that was hard to watch. That was really hard to watch. I don’t want to give too much away about the specifics of my week by dislocated my toe and a medical professional had to admittedly under anesthetic, pull the broken toe out and reset it in its correct place. And I would rather have that happen again than, say, that clip.
Coco Khan Do you think there is any room for improvement? What would you what tips could you give him? Quit.
Nish Kumar Quit. Leave public life. Leave public life, please. In order for me to watch that clip again. I would need the amount of lidocaine that was injected into my foot to be injected into my brain, for me to find it acceptable to watch that game. It was horrible.
Coco Khan I wouldn’t know who was laughing and where they paid.
Nish Kumar If they weren’t paid. They have absolutely been ripped off.
Coco Khan So let’s move on to another hopeful Tom, too. Can he try to buy some votes with some toucan branded goodies to grind tarts, to tote bags, to get tattoos, and even to contain a bottle of fake tan with the tagline your conference glow up.
Nish Kumar I don’t even know where to start with this. So also, Tom. Tugendhat is supposed to be he’s supposed to, you know, notionally be presenting himself as the light more moderate. Again, to borrow cleverly phrase, more normal candidate. And he’s selling Tom to content.
Coco Khan So now on to some tough news for the government, but something that probably won’t leave our listeners too upset. Rosie Duffield has quit Labour. Her resignation was certainly something to behold. Here’s a choice paragraph. As Prime Minister, your managerial and technocratic approach and lack of basic politics and political instincts have come crashing down on us as a party after we worked so hard, promised so much, and waited a long 14 years to be mandated by the British public to return to power.
Nish Kumar A quick reminder for anyone who’s managed to avoid Rosie Duffield. She’s a proud member of the gender critical movement and frequently indulges in Twitter love ins with J.K. Rowling. We can note, though, that she has spoken up against the removal of the winter fuel allowance and is an advocate for removing the two child benefit cap. She changed her ex profile and had a photo to a bird flying free of its cage, badly Photoshop with the colors of the suffragette movement, which have since been adopted by some anti-trans old gender critical people. However, she’s not actually leaving the party due to their stance on gender and trans rights. Given the case, time is actually move the party closer to her position over the last few years. She told the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg that I and others put it on the agenda by basically being very loud about women’s rights and I’m glad it is now mainstream discussion. But that’s not why I’m leaving the Labour Party. The Labour Party has left me. Were you surprised about this, Coco?
Coco Khan I mean, I’ll be honest, I. Did not realize that Rosie Duffield.
Nish Kumar Was still in the Labour party? You thought she left a long time ago?
Coco Khan She was still in the party, but her reputation is eclipsed, I suppose you’d say, by these gender critical views. And so a part of me always wondered how feasible would be to have those opinions in the current party and how and how long that the tensions that have been like rising around the issue. I mean, it would come home to roost at some point. So there was a part of me that wasn’t surprised if there was already bad blood and bad feeling. I mean, my only thought is just what will happen to her constituents now. What is she going to do If she’s going to be an independent? She’s going to a doubt she’ll join Corbyn’s independent alliance.
Nish Kumar Yeah, that doesn’t seem like that doesn’t seem necessarily like the natural fit.
Coco Khan No. And I don’t suppose she’ll go to reform.
Nish Kumar I will say and gain. Not to give too much away about the background to how we make these podcasts, but we do have a production mate and one of our team is 100% convinced she’s going to reveal.
Coco Khan How, though.
Nish Kumar I’ve no idea. I’ve no idea. But what I will say is that, you know, and this is something I’ve observed from watching some colleagues go down a kind of rabbit hole of transgender rights and the kind of transphobic movement can sometimes bleed into conservativism in other areas. Like I have seen some disquiet expressed online by constituents who are maybe a little bit annoyed that she ran under a Labour Party platform, didn’t run as an independent. And then just a, you know, a couple of months after the election has now resigned the whip. But after having run under the Labour Party banner and secured herself, you know, potentially a five year salary as an MP, as a Labour MP, like, I have seen some of that disquiet expressed and I can completely understand that frustration. So next week Parliament’s back in session.
Coco Khan Are you excited?
Nish Kumar Well.
Coco Khan Finally the games begin.
Nish Kumar Not like I’m excited from the perspective of like, we actually need some stuff.
Coco Khan Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Nish Kumar You know, I mean, these just been. It’s been so many years of status and now it’s like we actually need some stuff to get done and we need to get a look at what Rachel Reeves is putting in the Autumn Statement. And because we need to actually get a look at what Stamas plan is for the country because it does feel a bit like he won the election and now what? You know, I think.
Coco Khan They haven’t spent loads of time in parliament.
Nish Kumar Has the time in Parliament? That’s right. But I think he came to power with a lot of energy and said, you know, we’re going to be in parliament, we’re going to get legislation done. And we have only seen a huge amount of evidence of that. So now the parliament is back in session. No excuses for the Labour Party. They’re also going to be facing in Rishi Sunak I imagine somebody who’s pretty toothless because, you know, he I’m sure he will start bringing up all the clothes and stuff.
Coco Khan Colorful name from the past. And it was, you know. Yeah. When he said that. yeah. Rishi Sunak. I remember him. And that’s it. So thank you for listening to Pod Save the UK and we want to hear your thoughts. Please email us at PSUK at Reduced Listening dot co dot uk.
Nish Kumar Don’t forget to follow Pod Save the UK on Instagram, TikTok and Twitter. And if you want more of us, make sure you subscribe to our YouTube channel.
Coco Khan Pod Save the UK is a Reduced Listening production for Crooked Media.
Nish Kumar Thanks to senior producer James Tindale and assistant producer Mae Robson.
Coco Khan Our theme music is by Vasilis Fotopoulos.
Nish Kumar Thanks to our engineer Ryan Macbeth.
Coco Khan The executive producers are Anouska Sharma, Dan Jackson and Madeleine Herringer. With additional support from Ari Schwartz.
Nish Kumar And remember to hit subscribe for new shows on Thursdays on Amazon, Spotify or Apple or wherever you get your podcasts.
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