The Great Social Experiment: Let the Poor Drown in "Personal Responsibility"

Back in 2010, the Tory government had a brilliant idea (at least, brilliant to the kind of person who’s never had to choose between heating and eating). They decided people on benefits were far too "dependent" on the state, and the best way to fix this was to give them less money.

Aside from this basic tenet, they had the bright idea to stop paying rent directly to landlords and councils. Instead, they’d hand the money straight to the tenants so they could pay it themselves - because apparently, financial responsibility can be magically taught through sheer necessity.

Now, in 2025, it gets very strange. Rachel Reeves cannot BE George Osborne after major surgery – we’ve seen them in the same room together – yet she appears to be channeling the attitudes of the former Chancellor, and in many respects making them even harsher.

With chilling echoes of ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ Starmer’s ‘Labour’ has decreed that only those who WORK really matter, that if the schizophrenic/disabled/incurable cancer sufferers just knuckled down and got a job, they’d feel SO much better.

But simply putting ‘support to work’ in place for those who feel able to work and letting those wondrous benefits speak for themselves isn’t enough. They threaten to withdraw or cut financial benefits people rely on – many rely on them IN ORDER TO WORK, and could not do so without them. A fact that seems to have passed Reeves by...

Doubtless she or her coven-sister Liz Kendall will get round to blocking direct rent payments to landlords, too, possibly making those on Housing Benefit or the UC housing element wear badges indicating the fact, and giving landlords the right to ‘throw the scroungers out’.

Or maybe the DWP will just stop paying rent altogether, and the ‘undeserving poor’ can just live in the workhouses?

Let’s take a moment to appreciate the sheer, breathtaking idiocy of the Tories’ stopping direct rent payments. It was the sort of policy only a bunch of Etonian Toffs, who’ve never had to worry about an eviction notice in their lives, could come up with. They thought they were fostering independence, but what they actually did was create a mass eviction crisis.

Turns out, when you give people who are already struggling extra money and expect them to prioritise rent over, say, feeding their kids or paying off loan sharks, some of them might, shockingly, not manage.

But who could have seen that coming? Oh right, literally everyone who has ever lived in poverty.

Liz Kendall is attempting a similarly idiotic approach to ‘helping’ those on benefits back to work – giving people who are already struggling LESS money, to ‘motivate them’.

The idea that people on benefits are just too coddled and need a gentle nudge toward self-reliance – or that those too disabled to work just need to be forced to - is a perfect example of how out of touch these policymakers are.

Back in the 2010s, the coalition government acted like tenants were lounging in their council flats, puffing cigarettes with their welfare money, rather than scraping by in a system designed to humiliate and punish them for being poor. And when people inevitably fell behind on rent and got evicted, the government acted surprised, as if the inevitable consequences of their own policies were some kind of economic mystery.

Today’s government is going even further, taking every chance to demonise those forced to rely on benefits – naturally not pointing out that over 40% of Universal Claimants are IN work – and claiming many actual disabilities don’t exist, sufferers are just malingering to enjoys the ‘luxury’ life offered by reliance on benefits that are less than the minimum wage…

With that same humiliation/punishment system still in place, Starmer’s ‘Labour’ is actually trying to tell us the poor, sick and disabled have had it too easy for too long; that the mentally ill are ‘overdiagnosed’; that supporting them just costs too much and you, the ‘working people’ shouldn’t be expected to pay the bill.

As with all idiotic social experiments, reality eventually caught up with the rent policy - it failed so badly that they had to quietly backtrack. Of course, they didn’t make a big fuss about it, no grand announcements, no apologies for the thousands forced into homelessness because of their meddling.

They just reversed course and pretended it never happened, like a posh kid shoving a broken vase behind a curtain before the butler notices. You can expect Reeves and Kendall to do the same – Starmer, of course, will just say he thought they knew what they were doing. Meanwhile, millions will suffer. Some will die.

Given that Kim Leadbeater has refused to say people who ask for ‘Assisted Dying’ because of worries they are a financial burden will be ineligible, that’s a sobering thought…

This is what happens when the ruling class tries to "fix" working-class problems without understanding them in the slightest. They treat poverty like a game, playing social engineering with people's lives while insulating themselves from the consequences.

And when these brilliant ideas inevitably blow up in their faces, it’s never them who suffer, it’s always the people at the bottom, left to pick up the pieces of yet another failed experiment.