Starmer won’t touch Benefits Street to ‘save his own skin’ | Politics | News

Labor gave up on benefits reform because the Prime Minister was too weak to take on the urgent challenge, according to a former minister on a mission to save Britons from Benefits Street. Mother-of-three Helen Whately, 49, who has been at the center of Kemi Badenoch’s efforts to gain the nation’s trust, was horrified this month when Sir Keir Starmer revealed the government’s plans for its next term in power.

He says the “gaping gap” in the King’s Speech is the lack of any proposed changes to the law to reform benefits. Last year the Prime Minister was humiliated when backbenchers forced him to introduce planned changes to disability benefits. Welfare spending is expected to exceed £400bn in 2030-31. Ms Whatley believes the future of the country will be at risk if this bill goes any further.

He claims Britain’s Labor Party is facing a crisis of its own making, accusing the Government of “killing 100,000 people since they took office” and breaking its manifesto pledge by increasing employers’ National Insurance. He believes the Prime Minister’s fragility is to blame for the lack of legislation to overhaul the benefits system.

“We know Keir Starmer is very thin,” he says. “Labor backbenchers don’t want welfare reform and in fact this was a speech the King made to save Keir Starmer’s life, not to do what the country needed.”

Warning that national security is under threat, he says: “I find it extraordinary that we have a Government that prioritizes spending more on social benefits rather than spending more on defence. This is the wrong priority.”

Arguing that nothing less than Britain’s future is at stake, he says he “doesn’t want my constituents, or anyone else in this country, or indeed my children, to have a future that looks as bleak as it does under the current Government.”

Andy Burnham has no hope of meeting the challenge of dropping the welfare bill if he wins the Prime Ministership.

“I don’t see the possibility of Andy Burnham or any of the leadership candidates being serious welfare reformers,” he says. “They’re not talking about welfare reform because that’s unpopular with the Labor backbenchers.”

He insists it is possible to set a “compassionate precedent” for welfare reform so that the system is a “safety net, not a lifestyle choice.”

He warns that if the country fails to grasp this challenge and put its public finances on a solid footing, there is a “risk that the safety net will become unaffordable”.

“I don’t want this to happen,” he says. “That’s why you need to be responsible for the public finances, so you can afford to take care of the seriously disabled, the seriously ill, the seriously unable to work.”

He wants the country to “stop benefiting foreigners”

“We can’t afford this and Britain shouldn’t be a cash machine for the world,” he says. “If you’re here [and] you must be working and contributing from another country.”

The long-term future of the welfare system depends on taxpayers’ willingness to support it.

“People are so angry because they feel like they’re being taken for a ride,” he says.

One of the key questions he is asked is: “Why bother working? Why am I paying into Benefits Street?”

One of the biggest concerns is the future of young people who do not have a job and do not study.

“We are facing a very serious situation where there are approximately one million young people who are not in education, employment or training,” he says. “In fact, 700,000 graduates are on out-of-work benefits… “It’s terrible that young people at this stage of life don’t work.”

He expects tackling this challenge to be a major task for a future Tory Government.

“This is an issue that will require a lot of hard work after the next election because I do not believe this Government will solve the problem,” he says.

He adds that Labour’s National Insurance increases have made it harder for young people to find work in the hospitality industry. As a former bar waitress, she values ​​the lifelong interpersonal skills gained in this environment and looks out for such work experience when reviewing resumes.

“That’s one of the reasons why we’ve announced that we’re going to lift business rates for small shops, small hospitality venues, pubs and cafes, because we know these businesses really need help to get by and employ people,” he says.

As the child of two doctors, the future of healthcare is an issue that concerns him closely.

“On Christmas day, I would wander around the wards with my father, who was a surgeon,” he says. “I remember the camaraderie, the morale; people were doing this because they really cared.”

Childhood Sunday lunch conversations focused on “everything wrong with the NHS”.

Ms Whately “thought a lot about doing medicine” and, while taking the necessary A Levels, decided she wanted to “fix the NHS rather than be a doctor”.

This ambition sent him to Oxford to study philosophy, politics and economics, before jumping into the private sector to understand how business works. After working at PricewaterhouseCoopers and AOL Time Warner, he joined the elite consulting firm McKinsey, where he worked in healthcare roles.

This convinced him that “big decisions are made by politicians” and he won a seat in Parliament in 2015 after standing against current Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey in 2010.

When Covid struck he found himself in the toughest job of his life as a minister in the department of health and social care.

He recalls: “The hardest part was at the beginning… There was no plan for social care. Officially local authorities had to have plans. I wanted to see local authority plans; they were almost blank sheets of paper.”

The mission was simple: “Try to stop people dying from Covid.”

“That was the job, and it was worth putting all our hours into it and doing everything we could.”

She admits that she and her husband “weren’t very good parents” at the time, and that their children spent too much time “not really homeschooling.”

Today one child is sitting A-Level exams, another is sitting GCSE exams and a third is “just a teenager”.

“Currently, my weekends are spent revising biology or economics with one of these,” he says.

He feels “blessed” to have a “beautiful constituency” of Faversham and Mid Kent, home of Leeds Castle. Going into the countryside with the dog is a favorite activity and he can occasionally be seen on horseback, which he considers “a very good way to clear my head”.

Hard work and ambition have propelled Ms. Whately forward throughout her career. One of his priority projects today is to ensure that the Conservative party wins a majority in the next election. It’s a daunting challenge for a party that, at the time of writing, is narrowly ahead of Labor and the Greens, but eight points behind Nigel Farage’s Reform UK. Does he have any hope of overtaking the Conservative Party by this time next year?

“Yes, definitely,” he says. “I mean, that’s why I’m here and why I work so hard.”

He is confident that Ms Badenoch’s outspoken approach to public life is what the nation needs.

“People are tired of politicians avoiding being honest with them,” he says.

He enthuses that the Tory leader “came into office with conviction, with a clear understanding of what he stands for”. “He really thinks things through. He’s a very decent person and a real team player. And those are all the qualities you need in a party leader and ultimately a Prime Minister, and I think he’s fantastic.”

The Conservative Party still has a mountain to climb before Ms Badenoch reaches Number 10, but Ms Whately is not afraid of hard work.