Sentimentality is the enemy of welfare reform. Any attempt to change the bloated benefits system is invariably painted as an attack on the poor and the vulnerable. It takes real guts to stand up to this kind of emotional blackmail, but such courage is not a quality that has distinguished Sir Keir Starmer’s Government.

Despite Labour’s huge Parliamentary majority, Ministers have habitually backed down at the first sign of opposition to any proposed benefits reform. Only this week, the government passed legislation to remove the cap that limited social security payouts to the first two children in any family. Introduced by the Tory-led Coalition in 2016, the cap was a sensible measure that aimed to discourage households from having more children than they could afford. It was strikingly popular with voters, the majority of whom welcomed its principle of fairness. That explains why Starmer initially dismissed the idea of repeal.

But this resolve soon evaporated in the face of hysterical condemnation from backbenchers and campaigners who shrieked that the cap was an engine of child poverty. The government’s subsequent U-turn showed Starmer had given up on welfare reform – and that is a disaster for our country, for the unreconstructed benefits leviathan inflicts serious damage to our society. In terms of cost alone, its ravenous appetite is unsustainable. This year, benefits will consume £323billion – one quarter of all state spending.

Without drastic action, this gargantuan bill will continue to rise, while the ruinous cycle of dependency will intensify as ever more generous handouts promote unemployment and learned helplessness. Our population is becoming more fragile, irresponsible, mentally ill and workshy because we reward people to behave like this.

The renowned psychiatrist and author Dr Tony Daniels once said that the welfare state had created more invalids than the First World War, a reality borne out by the remarkable statistic that, every day, 5,000 new claimants sign on for sickness benefits. There is nothing remotely progressive about this racket. As the first Labour Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald wrote in his diary during the financial crisis of 1931: “To establish people in incomes that require no effort to get or do work is the very antithesis of socialism.”

The original welfare system was based on contributory principle; with eligibility for support limited to those who had paid in through taxes and national insurance. It was never supposed to be something for nothing. Yet that is exactly what it now provides, as can be seen in the flood of payments to migrants.

By definition, newcomers will have contributed nothing to the Treasury’s coffers when they first arrive here, yet many of them are lavished with benefits, including even subsidised social housing. One study out last week revealed that £10billion was handed to jobless migrant households between January 2024 and June 2025. Just as shockingly, £15billion in Universal Credit was paid over the same period to households with at least one foreign national.

Here in Britain, when we have increasing unemployment and tremendous strains on the public purse, it is the economics of the madhouse to lengthen our dole queues through the deliberate import of a huge number of jobless foreigners. The swelling influx of overseas claimants contradicts the fashionable myths that mass immigration is the key to prosperity and that new arrivals all come here to work. In truth, as the influx has grown, our social security burden has never been higher nor our economy more sluggish.

Deceit, delusion and dependency can also be found in Scotland, where the ruling SNP does not let its innate hostility to England inhibit its eagerness to exploit the English taxpayer. Thanks to the generosity of London, spending per head in Scotland last year was £2,429 higher than in England and much of the extra funding bankrolls greater benefit entitlements north of the border.

A report just published by the Centre for Social Justice warns that Scotland’s £28billion welfare budget has “ballooned out of control,” yet levels of deprivation remain as bad as ever. That again illustrates how welfare traps its users in poverty – and why reform is more necessary than ever.

Andrew Lownie deserves a gong for his dogged pursuit of truth over Andrew M-W

The fallout from the Prince Andrew scandal continues to reverberate across the world, thanks in part to my brilliant friend Andrew Lownie, whose audacious book Entitled exposed the cover-up of the alleged moral, financial and sexual debasement of the former Prince and his ex-wife. Lownie deserves all the praise and royalties that are heading his way, for his book is an epic of original research. It not only took him four years to gather all the material, including the transcripts of more than 300 interviews, but he also showed real courage in his quest for the truth, enduring death threats, and vexatious litigation.

The spectacular success of the book has imperilled the monarchy, caused upheaval in government and may ultimately change the course of British history. Indeed, it could be argued that no writer in Europe come up with a more consequential publication since Emile Zola triggered the Dreyfus Affair in 1898 with his famous open letter “J’Accuse” that denounced antisemitism in the French establishment,

What the Royal Family must now really regret is that the authorities were not more co-operative with Lownie when, in 2015, he began research on a new life of Lord Mountbatten and his wife Lady Edwina. For this task, he asked to see diaries and letters in Southampton University’s Mountbatten Archive, which had been bought for the nation with £4.4million of public money. Yet the university constantly stonewalled, and Lownie had to fight a long and expensive legal battle to gain access to the papers.

The experience turned him into a rebel with a cause – and his powerful demolition of Prince Andrew could be seen as his revenge against the British establishment.

Brown played the straight-talking man – but his career was littered with feuds

Is there a bigger hypocrite in public life than former Prime Minister Gordon Brown? He now denounces the appointment of Peter Mandelson as ambassador to the US, yet in 2008 Brown himself brought Mandelson back into Cabinet against the advice of concerned colleagues. Brown has claimed that, as the son of a Presbyterian Minister, he was raised “not to make attacks on people”, yet his career was littered with feuds and fall-outs.

Brown also employed the ruthless, hard-drinking Damian McBride as his enforcer. Known as “McPoison”, McBride boasted of destroying Brown’s rivals through “tip-offs to newspapers about drug use, spousal abuse, alcoholism and extra marital affairs”.

His downfall came in 2009 when he was caught plotting to smear senior Tories. Brown professed outraged ignorance of these dirty tricks, but few believed him. “For all Gordon’s high-minded posturing, everyone knows this is his modus operandi,” wrote the left-wing MP Chris Mullin.

British icons still going strong today

It is exactly a century since the classic red telephone boxes were first installed in London. Designed by the architectural genius Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, who was also responsible for a host of majestic buildings like Battersea Power Station, the kiosk quickly became a national icon, as symbolic of our culture as red pillar boxes, and black cabs.

In the late 1990s, British Telecom were operating more than 135.000 booths across the country. With the rise of mobile phones, their numbers have fallen dramatically, but many of the classic kiosks have been reincarnated as mini-libraries, shops, art galleries and storage facilities for defibrillators. One kiosk has even been turned into an aquarium – which is only right, given that imaginative innovation inspired this British masterpiece.