THE careful fiction that the government’s welfare changes were driven by the need to reform a malfunctioning system and that there is a legitimate discussion, even debate, to be had about the level of payments to people who cannot work or who need care, is nonsense.

Keir Starmer and his ministers tried to present the back-tracking and U-turns of the past few days as the careful consideration by colleagues of a problem that could be resolved by rational discussion and reasoned compromise.

And Starmer excused his own boneheaded behaviour by arguing that he was “heavily focused on what was happening with Nato and the Middle East.”

Most prime ministers find grandstanding on the international stage preferable to facing thorny domestic political problems. In this case, Starmer’s risible bid to claim this was not an excuse but merely to put his role and the government’s retreat into context won’t wash with a population that already regards his support for Trump and Netanyahu with contempt.

If he was trying to do something to prevent the human catastrophe the Palestinians in Gaza suffer, or even broker a ceasefire or diminish the tensions in the Middle East, he might get a hearing. But as he bears the main responsibility for Britain’s discreditable role in backing the Israeli state and our country’s sordid complicity with both Nato and the semi-detached US, he won’t.

This revolt has been fermenting for weeks, and it was a combination of political arrogance and a blinkered attachment to Treasury orthodoxy that allowed ministers to screen out the political noise.

Insofar as the rising cost of disability payments is a problem, it is generated by the capitalist system in the sense that putting the protection of corporate profits and the generation of great wealth to the ultra-rich above the welfare needs of working people is the default position of those who rule us.

The notion that these reforms are measures to manage the re-entry of the ill, infirm, disabled and troubled into the world of work doesn’t square up with the reality of most minimum wage work or the marked reluctance of most employers to find work for any but the fully functional.

The government’s concession to the rebels is estimated to cost £2.5 billion a year, and government loyalists are arguing that Labour MPs who opposed the government proposals should own the tax rises that they insist will come in the autumn if these welfare payments are to be sustained.

Britain is the base for an astounding number of billionaires whose wealth has increased 12-fold over a generation. Tax Justice UK reports that the world’s 10 richest men doubled their wealth over two years.

Starmer told the June Nato summit that Britain is to buy US-manufactured Lockheed Martin F-35A fighter jets that are capable of delivering US-made nuclear ordnance. The Centre for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation reports that the F-35’s price per unit — including ancillary costs like depot maintenance, ground support equipment, and spare parts — is $110.3 million per F-35A, Those totals do not include the nearly $1.3 trillion in life cycle costs to sustain the aircraft over its operational lifetime.

Starmer plans to buy 138. In other news, Lockheed Martin donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural committee back in January this year.

The foundation of the fiscal responsibility dogma is that the wealth of the rich must be protected while the cost of social expenditure must fall on the people who need the services it pays for most.

We should be thinking of ways to make the rich pay for the crisis of their system.