Right-Wing Media Watch: Tory press cheers Kemi’s assault on the long-term unemployed

The Conservative Party wants to slash benefits for long-term unemployed people who, in Kemi Badenoch’s words, have not “contributed enough” to the system.

Under the plans, unemployed people claiming Universal Credit would receive the full rate for six months while they look for work. After that, those deemed capable of working but judged not to have made sufficient tax contributions could see their benefits cut by 30 percent. The Tories also want to restrict how benefits can be spent, with claimants issued a ‘Back to Work’ card preventing them from buying alcohol or cigarettes, withdrawing cash or gambling. The party says the measures would save £538m a year by reducing payments to around 350,000 claimants.

Badenoch says the policy is aimed at tackling a benefits system that she claims allows people to treat unemployment as a “lifestyle choice” and would encourage more people into work.

Needless to say, the Tory press welcomed the proposal with glee.

“Kemi’s ruthless crackdown on Benefits Street,” splashed the Daily Mail, declaring that jobless people who have paid little tax would have their “handouts docked” and be prevented from spending them on “vices” such as drinking, smoking and gambling.

The Daily Express was similarly enthusiastic: “Cut benefits and get Britain working,” its front page declared, reporting that claimants judged not to have paid enough tax would see their welfare cut by 30% after six months, with payments loaded on to a card to police their spending.

Writing in the Mail, Badenoch herself presented the policy as a matter of fairness to those who work and pay tax.

“And we must always remind ourselves that this safety net does not come free,” she wrote. “It is paid for by the person getting up at 6am to go to work. By the nurse, the builder, the waitress and the small-business owner who looks at their payslip every month and sees how much has gone in tax.”

She then invoked hedge fund billionaire Chris Rokos, writing that the welfare system “was paid for by people like the financier Chris Rokos too,” before noting that he is now moving to Greece with the £330m he paid in UK taxes last year.

There are several problems with Badenoch’s argument.

Firstly, “welfare” is not synonymous with long-term unemployment. Welfare spending might make up around a quarter of total UK government spending but state pensions take up a goodly proportion of that, having made up around 42 percent of the total in 2023-24. But where’s the Mail and other’s assault on pensioners?

Secondly, Badenoch’s invocation of billionaire Chris Rokos as an example of a taxpayer undermines the suggestion that wealthy people inevitably flee Britain when taxes rise. Rokos is leaving for Greece, which offers generous tax incentives to wealthy foreigners, but one high-profile departure is hardly evidence of a mass exodus. In fact, the latest provisional figures show a modest 0.5% decline in the number of non-domiciled residents in the tax year ended in April last year, at 73,400.

Indeed, research by Patriotic Millionaires UK found that 88 percent of UK millionaires are proud to live in Britain and 75
percent would be willing to pay more tax to protect the country’s social, cultural and economic foundations. Just 9 percent were most concerned about millionaires leaving, compared with 43 percent who were most concerned about doctors and other qualified health workers doing so. And 64 percent supported higher taxes on the wealth and capital of the richest to reduce the burden on everyone else.

Yet successive Conservative governments and their right-wing media cheerleaders have spent years portraying benefit claimants as “scroungers”, “frauds” and “cheats”. The Sun’s infamous “Beat the Cheat” campaign in 2012 encouraged readers to report suspected benefit fraud, while George Osborne’s 2016 attempt to cut £4.4bn from disability benefits contributed to the resignation of then-work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith.

The same politics are evident in the proposed ban on spending benefits on alcohol, cigarettes and gambling: portray claimants as irresponsible, frame welfare as a burden on virtuous taxpayers, then present restricting their choices as moral discipline. Yet controlling what people can buy does little to address the reasons they remain out of work, whether ill health, disability, caring responsibilities, childcare, skills or a lack of suitable jobs.

The Tory press has spent years helping to construct that hierarchy.

Now, with Badenoch promising to slash their payments and police what they spend, the same newspapers are cheering from the sidelines. Rather than interrogating the evidence behind the Conservatives’ claims, they are once again helping turn people struggling without work into political scapegoats and presenting punishment as policy.