Welfare state is being treated not as a shared good, but as a burden

The National

9 hours ago

Supporters are told to welcome these as signs of pragmatism, but they reveal only a fake-it-till-you-make-it government clinging to the same austerity logic that's gutted public services for more than a decade. There's no strategy of principled adaptation, just damage control masquerading as radical policy-overhaul.
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Like cynical venture capitalists who asset-strip football clubs, this government treats the welfare state not as a shared good but as a historical burden. Public support systems are remodelled with fewer seats, less atmosphere, and none of the legacy. Cuts are proposed, resisted, and delayed, but always within the logic of managed decline. First they tried to demolish the Kop end stand, now they promise only future fans will be excluded.
Proclaiming progress, the luscious playing surface is narrowed and replaced with astroturf. Starmer and his front bench echo the language of 'toughness' while attacking the right to protest and doubling down on hostile-environment policies. Protesters are kettled, marches are banned, and dissent is criminalised by degrees. All this while far-right groups openly organise to infiltrate and co-opt Reform UK, talking of 'seizing control' and reshaping elections by 2030.
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These are not fringe figures. They're part of a co-ordinated ecosystem of antisemitism, Islamophobia, authoritarianism and conspiracism – emboldened by silence and triangulation. Instead of calling it out, however, Labour's leadership seems content to play the same game: pinned in the six-yard box, offering managerial discipline while the far right runs rings around them and takes audacious pot-shots. Picture ex-Scotland manager Craig Levein's infamous 6-4-0 formation against the Czech Republic, but fielding only newly drafted players who might be loyal, but have no experience in big games.
Those of us pushed to the margins – disabled people, migrants, Muslims, and working-class communities – know what happens when the centre tries to outflank the right. Rights are lost and protections evaporate. We vanish from the headlines, except when someone from a marginalised group sells their soul for a front-bench post to prop up the attack on their own team. More of us end up in poverty, detention, or despair.
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Meanwhile, Number 10 parades like champions of Europe, running victory laps over a non-league economy. The fans are left with crumbling public services – akin to Manchester United fans getting drenched beneath Old Trafford's increasingly dilapidated roof. And though our elected manager and board point to victories of old, it's clear they're preparing to flog the stadium that is the UK to the highest bidder, while calling it progress.
There's still time to fight this decline, but only if leaders stop hiding behind spreadsheets and rediscover the courage to name what we're up against: a political slide toward exclusion, authoritarianism, and resentment – selling the strongest players in the name of a squad rebuild.
The public knows the difference between real change and stage-managed retreat. Delivering anything less than what's needed means not just losing the match, but the risk of relegation and surrendering the values on which the club's success was genuinely built.
Ron Lumiere
via email
FOLLOWING Laura Webster's Saturday article on thenational.scot about Labour founding the welfare state, which has become a standard response by Labour hacks to every scenario: the Labour welfare state is a myth. The welfare state was agreed, with minor differences, by the wartime coalition. Bismarck had a welfare state in the 1870s and he was no socialist either; he wanted a race of supermen.
The Brits had to acknowledge that the German soldier was fitter, taller and better educated, like the Channel Islands' children after German occupation.
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England did not achieve public education till the 1870s, due to opposition by the controlling Church of England. The Church of Scotland had no wish to control public education in Scotland, which has been free since the reformation. Incidentally, Catholic education legislation was introduced at the turn of the last century by a Liberal government, not because they were sympathetic to Catholicism, but because the wanted to create divisions in Scotland. Incidentally, there are no 'Prodistent' schools in Scotland, merely non-denominational schools where Catholic and other-denomination pupils and teachers are more common than most people realise.
It was a Liberal minister in World War One, Winston Churchill, who introduced free milk, because of the poorer state of the British working class compared to German wartime recruits. The architect of the welfare state was the Liberal Lord Beveridge.
Lords Wilson and Callaghan introduced further austerity and pay freezes etc.
Donald Anderson
Glasgow
IF Westminster taxed the rich cheats who threw money at Brexit so they could avoid the new EU laws on tax havens, they would bring in way more cash than they will get from hitting the poor and disabled.
They could close the loopholes the government deliberately creates and make everyone pay their tax. Loopholes are actually government-created corruption.
Labour could recover if they taxed the rich – as long as Israel doesn't mind, of course.
Bill Robertson
via email