When Harming the Vulnerable Becomes Government Policy: We’re Witnessing the Death of Labour’s Soul

The Last Honourable Labour Whip…

In a Party that’s not only lost its moral compass, Vicky Foxcroft’s resignation reminds us what principles actually look like and how rare they’ve become.

Sometimes it takes someone walking away to show you just how far everyone else has fallen. When Labour MP Vicky Foxcroft resigned as government whip yesterday over plans to slash disability benefits, she didn’t just quit a job; she exposed the moral bankruptcy of a Party that’s forgotten what it’s supposed to stand for.

While her colleagues prepare to vote for cuts that will push a quarter of a million disabled people into poverty, Foxcroft did something increasingly rare in modern politics: she chose conscience over career. In a Westminster where principle is treated as a luxury few can afford, her resignation letter reads like a voice from another era, when Labour MPs actually gave a damn about the vulnerable.

In a letter to the prime minister, Foxcroft said the benefits system was “in desperate need of reform” but her experience as shadow disability minister had showed her that the struggles of disabled people and organisations were “even tougher than I had imagined”.

She said: “The last Conservative government left many in poverty and living life in fear of losing their support, not getting access to the right medical care, not having suitable housing and not being able to participate fully in society. The real and ongoing distress was palpable.

“I absolutely understand the need to address the ever-increasing welfare bill in these difficult economic times, but I have always believed this could and should be done by supporting more disabled people into work.

“I do not believe that cuts to personal independence payment [Pip] and the health element of universal credit should be part of the solution.”

Falling on Deaf Ears

But here’s the flip in the Cruelty Disguised as Kindness that comes when you listen to Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall spin this attack on disabled people as compassion, and you’ll hear the language of every authoritarian who ever claimed to hurt people for their own good.

Too many people are being “written off,” she claims, when what she really means is too many disabled people are receiving support the government would rather spend elsewhere.

The proposed cuts will strip Personal Independence Payments from 370,000 existing claimants and prevent another 430,000 from accessing support they desperately need. The government’s own impact assessment buried in the fine print they hope you won’t read, admits this will push 250,000 people into poverty. But Kendall calls this “principled reform.”

This is the language of bureaucratic sadism: taking money from disabled people while claiming it’s for their own benefit. It’s the same twisted logic that calls food bank queues “efficiency” and homelessness “lifestyle choice.” When politicians start explaining why hurting people helps them, you know you’re watching democracy die in real time.

Kendall’s insistence that her “door is always open” to worried colleagues while remaining “firm in our convictions” reveals everything wrong with modern Labour leadership. She’ll listen to your concerns with infinite patience while implementing policies with infinite cruelty.

This is the Kendall Doctrine: compassionate rhetoric hiding Conservative policy. She’ll empathise with your moral qualms while demanding you vote for immoral laws. She’ll understand your principled objections while crushing them under the weight of Party discipline.

It’s the perfect synthesis of New Labour’s greatest achievement: learning to sound progressive while governing like Tories.

History’s Dark Echo

Remember in 2020 when Debbie Abrahams spent almost three minutes reading out more than 20 names of those affected, and referred to how some died after ‘taking (his/her) own life after being found fit for work’ or through illness after losing their benefits. At one stage, colleagues intervened to give Ms Abrahams time to compose herself and finish the list. Sadly, we are doomed to repeat the travesty…

Her list also included Jimmy Ballentine, a former coal miner with mental illness who took his own life after a DWP fraud investigation. His family said he accidentally overclaimed a small amount and was “hounded” before his death.

She mentioned Mark Scholfield, who endured an eight-week delay for his Universal Credit payment before dying, aged just 62, after losing a battle with mouth cancer. The DWP apologised and said while he was receiving UC, his ESA payment should have been fast-tracked.

She raised the case of Stephen Smith, who was deemed fit for work before photos emerged of him weighing just six stone. He later died. A review found the DWP followed policy.

The £3.59 Billion Question

The government claims these cuts will save £3.59 billion by 2029/30—money apparently more valuable than the lives and dignity of disabled people. But where’s this money really going? Not to better disability support, not to job training programs that actually work, not to the social care system that’s collapsing around us.

It’s going to the same place all austerity savings go: to tax cuts for the wealthy, corporate subsidies for donors, and the endless appetite of a state that can always find money for war but never for welfare.

The disabled are being sacrificed not for economic necessity but for political choice. There’s always money when the government wants to find it, just never for the people who need it most.

The PIP Lie

What makes this assault particularly dishonest is the government’s refusal to acknowledge what Personal Independence Payment actually is. PIP isn’t unemployment benefit, it’s support for the additional costs of living with disability or long-term illness. You can work full-time and still receive PIP because having a disability costs money whether you’re employed or not.

Yet Kendall frames cutting PIP as encouraging work, as if disabled people are just lazy and need financial punishment to motivate them. It’s a lie so transparent it insults the intelligence of anyone who’s spent five minutes understanding what disability actually means.

The 3.7 million people receiving PIP aren’t work-shy scroungers; they’re people dealing with conditions that make everyday life more expensive and more difficult. They’re paying for mobility aids, adapted transport, additional heating, specialist equipment, and the thousand small accommodations that make participation in society possible.

Cutting their support doesn’t encourage work; it makes work impossible for many and life unbearable for all.

The Whip’s Dilemma

As government whip, Foxcroft’s job was to convince reluctant Labour MPs to vote for policies that directly contradict everything the Party claims to believe. Imagine the conversations:

“I know this will push disabled children into poverty, but it’s for the greater good of balancing the books.”

Her resignation letter reveals the impossible position of anyone with a functioning conscience in Starmer’s Labour: support policies that destroy lives or lose your career fighting them. Most choose career. Foxcroft chose humanity.

“I knew I would not be able to do the job that is required of me and whip, or indeed vote, for reforms which include cuts to disabled people’s finances,” she wrote. In a Party where most MPs have learned to swallow their principles with their morning coffee, such honesty sounds almost naïve.

The Parliamentary Arithmetic of Betrayal

More than 100 Labour MPs have expressed “concern” about the bill, which in Westminster speak means they know it’s morally indefensible but are hoping someone else will take the heat for stopping it. When the vote comes in a fortnight, we’ll see how many of these concerned MPs actually have the courage to vote against their own government.

The smart money says most will fall in line, muttering about Party loyalty while they vote to impoverish disabled people. They’ll tell themselves they can do more good inside the tent than outside, that compromise is the price of power, that someone else will fix the damage later.

This is how good people become complicit in evil: one small compromise at a time, until they wake up voting for things they once would have died fighting against.

Though Cowards Flinch and Traitors Sneer

The question is, has Foxcroft’s principled stand done something Starmer didn’t expect: Has it opened the floodgates?

It’s claimed there are around 50 to 120 Labour MPs planning to vote against these cuts, with many more preparing to abstain. The biggest rebellion of Starmer’s leadership is brewing, and it looks like it’s being led by an MP who remembered what the Labour Party is supposed to stand for.

However, the response from Starmer’s operation has been predictably authoritarian. Party whips are threatening rebels with suspension, blacklisting from government jobs, and even removal of the Labour whip itself. They’re desperately recruiting popular MPs to pressure their colleagues into compliance, turning the parliamentary Party into a network of informants and enforcers.

This is the modern Labour Party in action: threaten your own MPs with career death for refusing to attack disabled people. It’s the perfect inversion of everything the party once claimed to believe, using Party discipline to enforce Tory policies rather than progressive principles.

The rebels hitting back at these threats are doing more than defending their right to vote with their conscience; they’re defending the soul of the Labour movement itself. When Party loyalty demands betraying the vulnerable, loyalty becomes complicity and rebellion becomes duty.

Will this true Labour position from Foxcroft and the growing rebellion open the floodgates of conscience, or will the cowards flinch and traitors sneer? The words of the Red Flag have never felt more relevant: the choice between standing with the exploited or joining their exploiters has never been starker.

The Moral Reckoning

Foxcroft’s resignation forces a question every Labour MP must answer: what did you join this Party to do? If it wasn’t to protect the most vulnerable from Conservative cruelty, what was the point?

When a Labour government starts attacking disabled people while claiming it’s for their own good, when it pushes hundreds of thousands into poverty while calling it reform, when it demands Party loyalty for policies that contradict Party values, something fundamental has broken.

The Party that created the welfare state is now dismantling it. The movement that fought for workers’ rights is now attacking workers’ benefits. The institution that promised to protect the vulnerable is now targeting them for cuts.

Beyond the Westminster Bubble: This Will Come Back To Bite… and Bite Hard

Outside the rarefied air of parliamentary procedure, real people are watching this betrayal with growing anger. They voted Labour to end Tory cruelty, not rebrand it with better PR. They expected protection for the vulnerable, not sophisticated explanations of why hurting them helps them.

Every disabled person watching this knows they’re seeing their future: a Labour government that will throw them under the bus just as readily as the Conservatives did, but with more eloquent explanations of why it’s necessary.

Every working family knows they’re next: if Labour can attack disabled people this easily, no social protection is safe.

But Labour should remember what happens when they abandon their principles on welfare. When Harriet Harman, as acting leader, ordered Labour MPs to abstain on Tory welfare benefit cap cuts in 2015, it provoked fury within the Party and bewilderment among voters. The message was clear: here was a Labour Party that wouldn’t even oppose Conservative attacks on the poor.

That abstention became a symbol of everything wrong with post-Blair Labour, a Party so terrified of being seen as soft on welfare that it became hard on the people welfare was designed to protect. Voters in 2015 found themselves unable to vote for a Labour Party that acted like a Tory Party, contributing to the electoral disaster that followed.

The lesson was obvious: when Labour abandons Labour values, Labour voters abandon Labour. Yet here we are again, watching Starmer’s government repeat the same mistake with even more devastating consequences.

Vicky Foxcroft has inadvertently created a test for every Labour MP: the Foxcroft Standard. When your government demands you vote for policies that contradict your principles, do you resign or comply? Do you choose conscience or career? Do you remember why you entered politics or forget it for the sake of staying there?

Most will fail this test, as most politicians always do. They’ll find sophisticated reasons why voting to impoverish disabled people is actually the principled thing to do. They’ll discover complex explanations for why Party loyalty matters more than human decency.

But history will remember who passed the Foxcroft Standard and who failed it. In years to come, when the damage of these cuts becomes undeniable, when the human cost is finally counted, there will be a reckoning.

Some MPs will be able to say they fought against this cruelty. Others will have to explain why they chose to enable it. The difference between them isn’t political sophistication or strategic thinking, it’s basic human decency.

Vicky Foxcroft reminded us what that looks like. The question is whether anyone else in Labour still remembers.

Paul Knaggs