THE Sunday Telegraph gave us an advance view of what Reform UK has in mind for the many people in Britain who depend on disability benefits.

As long as disability benefit claimants are anonymous and unseen, it is possible to detach policy-making from empathy — and Reform UK’s finance spokesman Robert Jenrick (just one of Boris Johnson’s many former Cabinet members who have effected a team transfer from the Tories to Farage’s outfit) gave us a master class in discounting empathy.

He wrote in the Telegraph that the sum spent on disabled people was “not generosity” but “suicidal empathy.”

Where a statistical relationship between empathy, or the lack of it, and disability can be discovered is in the 2021 Census, which shows that disabled people are much more likely to die by suicide than non-disabled people.

For men, the figure for disabled men was over three times higher — 48.36 deaths by suicide per 100,000 people compared to 15.88 deaths by suicide per 100,000 people for non-disabled men.

The figure for disabled women was over four times higher — 18.94 deaths by suicide per 100,000 people compared to 4.47 deaths by suicide per 100,000 people for non-disabled women.

Perhaps someone in the Parliamentary Labour Party might ask Jenrick what the likely impact of a £50 million cut in disability benefits might mean — in purely policy terms of course!

The same question could have been put to the previous Labour chancellor in Keir Starmer’s administration and certainly should be put to the present chancellor (and previous defence secretary) John Healey who is on record, in both capacities, as being in favour of an increase in arms expenditure precisely at the expense of the welfare budget.

Reform wants to scrap Personal Independence Payments (PIP) and the health element of universal credit, and replace it with a “health security allowance,” a single, regularly reviewed, payment.

Jenrick also says that Reform will ban foreign-born households from claiming universal credit, housing benefit, pension credit, jobseeker’s allowance, child benefit, free childcare, free school meals or disability benefits.

It takes a particularly perverse political personality to see advantage in policies that, in effect, would result in both a sharp increase in mortality and the introduction of an apartheid system.

But, if that was not enough, Jenrick has now proposed a forced-labour system for long-term benefits claimants.

Reform UK claims that cuts to the Personal Independence Payments system would save £21 billion while cutting foreign nationals out of the benefits system would save up to £30bn.

When the party says its wider package of cuts will save £50bn it is sustaining a narrative — already established by the main parties of government — that the welfare system is an increasing and unsustainable burden on the economy and that it represents an area of public spending that can be cut without too much political risk.

Official figures always include as a “benefit” the £146.1bn in pension payments that workers pay for themselves out of their own pay packets.

Since 2012-13, total welfare spending has fallen by 1.2 per cent of GDP and Starmer found out that even a Parliamentary Labour Party as supine and spineless as the present one can be roused to resist this kind of thinking.

Delegates to the TUC and Labour Party conferences have an opportunity to increase the risk to a political Establishment that sees vulnerable people, substantially working class, as soft targets for a shift in public spending directed at raising the prospect of war on our continent.

The TUC in particular needs to rally the labour movement and the wider working class to understand that ramping up arms spending can only be at the expense of welfare and living standards.