Welfare Reform and Incapacity Benefit

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 6:09 pm on 22 November 2005.

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Photo of Steve McCabe Steve McCabe Labour, Birmingham, Hall Green 6:09, 22 November 2005

I am grateful for the opportunity to take part in this short debate. I found the contribution from Sir Malcolm Rifkind intriguing. It was almost as though he had never been away.

Debates such as this are an opportunity to probe the Opposition. As Opposition Members have spent the past two months touring the country and the television studios with the tale of two Davids, this could be a useful debate. I recently had a glimpse of one David, Mr. Cameron, giving a speech in Birmingham, in which he attacked the Labour party's approach to welfare. He told us that his vision for the future promises a huge expansion of the voluntary sector. I do not know whether that was a code for cuts, but I was a bit disturbed when he went on to say what he thinks the sick, the unemployed and the disabled need. Apparently, they do not need the new deal, access to work or pathway-to-work pilots. No, according to him they need the confidence—note the confidence, not the money—to buy a new suit. Well, maybe old Etonians whose confidence has taken a bit of a knock need a quick shopping spree and all is okay, but that is not my experience of how we need to deal with some of the hard problems we face today. To parody that speech a little, I could point out that the hon. Gentleman also commented on Labour's DNA in our approach to welfare. It is my view that it is the Tories' DNA that characterises their approach to welfare. They simply despise the welfare state, as we have heard again today.

We know what kind of Britain the Tories want. In the past, their Britain was a place where mass unemployment was a price worth paying. They trumpeted it. They declared war on every British shipyard worker, steel worker and miner. They thought that the humbling of a once proud working class was a sign of political strength. Ask my hon. Friend John Mann what crushing mining communities means. It means a generation reared on heroin. It means taking once stable communities and smashing them into the ground. It means tearing apart the very bonds of family and community that give society its cohesion. So when I hear Opposition Members accuse us of incoherence or incompetence, I wonder whether they have changed at all.

I know that the highest concentrations of people on incapacity benefit are densely clustered in areas of disadvantage in once proud industrial and manufacturing towns, and I know that the record rises in claims in those areas occurred during the period when the Opposition were in power, because of their cynical manipulation of the unemployment figures. The party that today thinks that it can point accusing fingers at us would like the public to forget the fact that Mr. Howard was once responsible for managing unemployment. Those were the days when GPs signed off healthy men on long-term sickness because their jobs were gone and no one on the other side of the House had any intention of doing anything else for them.