Labour leadership frontrunner makes fifth policy reversal since becoming by-election candidate Daily Telegraph 28/05/26 Andy Burnham has dropped his support for migrants being given immediate access to benefits in the UK, in his latest about-turn on policy. Mr Burnham repeatedly voiced his opposition to the no recourse to public funds (NRPF) policy that bars migrants from the benefits system until they obtain permanent residence. But The Times reported that Mr Burnham’s team stated he no longer stood by the policy. NRPF has been UK policy since 1999, and means that migrants on work, study or family visas cannot access public funds such as housing support, Universal Credit or disability benefit. Only when a foreign citizen has been granted indefinite leave to remain (ILR), allowing them to live, study and work in the UK permanently, is the ban on benefits lifted. The Mayor of Greater Manchester still features a call on his website from 2019 calling on Boris Johnson, then prime ...
Labour has left the nation sleepwalking into a welfare state that punishes work Daily Telegraph 24/05/26 How far have we travelled down the British road to socialism? We now live in a country where a family living on benefits in London can be better off than a household earning £70,000 per year, according to analysis by the Centre for Social Justice. For much of Britain, the link between how much you work and what you can afford has been broken. If Labour has a core ideological belief, it is that fighting inequality is a moral crusade that trumps everything else. Economic growth must play second fiddle to this sacred cause. Conservative politicians of recent decades have been too frightened to challenge this mantra, for fear of being seen as heartless. There was, of course, the Thatcherite interregnum in the 1980s, when wealth creation was openly celebrated, and rising inequality was seen as a price worth paying for the country becoming richer. But that was an aberration from ...