Welfare reforms should have been about reassessing how we define vulnerability instead they’ve left the PM vulnerable - David Behrens

Communications has never been the strong suit of this administration but this was a new low. Starmer should have been setting the moral tone; instead he was caught in a pincer movement between Labour’s left wing and the spectre of Reform on the doorstep of Number 10.

One word ran through the debate and that word was vulnerability. MPs on both sides pointed to the paradox of a Labour government abandoning the most vulnerable in society. Even the Tories, a party not renowned for their commitment to distributing wealth evenly across society, appeared outraged at the idea of taking money from families in desperate need of it to balance the nation’s books.

Almost all of this missed the central point, which is that vulnerability is relative. It is not an inviolable condition no-one can gainsay. The current Government definition of the word is so vague as to be almost universally inclusive and that perhaps explains why so many people are choosing to shelter under its financial umbrella.

On current figures, nearly a quarter of working-age people are now in receipt of one or more benefits and the number is rising exponentially; they can’t all be vulnerable.

I can’t speak for every one of them but I can speak for myself. By any rational measure I am not vulnerable – at least not yet – but in Government terms I could quite easily claim to be. Almost anyone could.

I proved as much by filling in an application for the Personal Independence Payment, the benefit at the centre of the current debate and the one most attractive to people of working age. My own age apart (you have to be under 66) I could quite easily have staked a claim without resorting to outright dishonesty.

You don’t have to be physically infirm to receive a PIP. You can qualify just by demonstrating a long-term condition that makes it hard, for instance, for you to mix with other people or manage your money. I haven’t made that up: the DWP lists those as genuine vulnerabilities. Keir Starmer could tick the first box and Rachel Reeves the second.

You or I might write off behavioural conditions like that as shyness or being rubbish at arithmetic. You wouldn’t want to put them on your CV. But they are perfectly normal human characteristics and the idea that they should exempt you from having to earn a living, perhaps for ever, is palpably absurd.

Yet the statistics suggest that vulnerability has become ingrained in a part of society as an alternative to working. It explains why welfare spending is spiralling out of control – £21bn a year now and forecast to be £34bn by the end of the decade. That is unfair to the country and to claimants who really need their benefits and it ought not to have been beyond Keir Starmer and his colleagues to communicate that.

The one who came closest to doing so was the Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall, the minister in charge of PIPs. “We need to make changes because too many people have been written off, are left to a life on benefits, when being in good work is so important,” she said after Tuesday’s vote.

Why didn’t her boss say that in the first place? I can think of no other Prime Minister who was as afraid as Keir Starmer of saying what they thought – or at least what they wanted us to think they thought. As a result, none of us really knows what Starmer thinks at all.

He thinks he needs to out-Reform Reform but even Nigel Farage will tell you that the benefits system needs fixing. His stated policy is to hike National Insurance for foreign workers so that businesses have to hire more Britons – whether they want to be hired or not.

And generally speaking, you are either in favour of benefits reform or you are yourself on benefits. In fact, most people who claim benefits legitimately also want them reformed. I’m basing that generalisation on data published last year by YouGov.

Keir Starmer wants reform, too, or at least we think he does. But unless he learns to say so himself, the most vulnerable person in Britain right now is him.