I sat and watched Prime Minister’s Questions yesterday, and I want to tell you what it looked like from where I am standing. Not from a green leather bench. From a desk, across from real people, every single working day — people on benefits, and every one of them struggling.
So when I watched Kemi Badenoch drum on yet again about how welfare must be cut — attacking the Government and claiming the welfare bill had “risen by £20bn” since Starmer took office — I want to do something simple. I want to show you the two worlds side by side. Because the cruelty is in the numbers, and the numbers do not lie.
Here is what a Member of Parliament has to live on.
From 1 April this year, an MP’s basic salary is £98,599. Basic. Before the expenses for a second home, the staff, the travel. And it does not stop there — IPSA has set them on a path to around £110,000 by 2029, a rise of roughly £19,000 over this Parliament. That pay rise alone — just the rise — is bigger than what many of my clients have to live on in an entire year. IPSAaol
Here is what a jobseeker has to live on.
The Universal Credit standard allowance for a single person aged 25 or over is £424.90 a month. That is roughly £98 a week. Out of that comes food, gas, electricity, clothes, soap, the bus fare to the job interview the system demands they attend, the phone they need to even make the claim.
£98 a week. £98,599 a year. Look at those two figures and tell me this is a country that values all its people equally.
An MP earns more in a week than a jobseeker is given in two and a half months. And it is the person on the £98 who is lectured about living within their means.
I will say it the way it deserves to be said: Universal Credit is not enough to live on, but too much to die on. It keeps you alive just enough to keep you quiet. It does not let you live.
And while we are shining a light, let us not forget the man the whole country renamed. 30p Lee. Lee Anderson — now a Reform MP, sitting alongside Farage — who stood up and told the nation that a proper meal could be cooked for around 30p a day, if only people learned to budget and cook. The same man who said that nurses earning £35,000 a year who needed a food bank simply did not need them, that they had, in his words, “something wrong” with their own finances. And he said all of this while drawing a basic MP’s salary of £84,144.
Thirty pence. From a man on eighty-four thousand pounds. That is the whole disease in a single sentence.
Because this is the trick, and I want you to see it clearly. They strip out every real cause of poverty — the flat wages, the dear food, the broken services — and they hand you a culprit instead: the poor person themselves. Too lazy. Too feckless. Cannot cook. Cannot budget. It is never the system that failed them. It is always them who failed.
The people I work with are not scroungers. They are carers, the recently laid-off, the disabled, the working poor whose wages run out before the month does. Many are in work and still on Universal Credit, because that is what wages have become in this country.
When a politician on a hundred thousand pounds tells a person on ninety-eight pounds a week to tighten their belt, that is not economics. That is contempt with a microphone.
I am German. I know exactly what it looks like when a society starts quietly sorting its people into those worth feeding and those who can make do with 30p. It does not begin with cruelty. It begins with a spreadsheet, and a comfortable man saying the sums do not add up. The sums always add up — when it is someone else going without.
I will keep working with these people. I will keep helping them write the CV, prepare for the interview, hold their nerve. And I will keep putting these two numbers next to each other for as long as anyone tries to pretend the problem is the poor.
A benefit you cannot live on is not generosity gone too far. It is cruelty that has not yet finished counting.
