The right’s scrounger rhetoric dominates the benefits debate. Labour must fight back – and win | Frances Ryan

Back in 2009, months before the coalition government unleashed sweeping austerity, the then Conservative backbencher Iain Duncan Smith produced a study that would go on to lay the foundations for the rollout of universal credit. Now, nearly two decades later, Duncan Smith and his thinktank, the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), has published State of Dependency: a landmark report promising to expose “the full scale of Britain’s worklessness crisis”.

The study paints a picture of mass benefits reliance: it identifies 3,400 local areas where more than half the working-age population are on out-of-work benefits, or “economic opiates”, as the authors call them. They’ve even provided an interactive map (in the yellow and black colours of a road hazard sign, no less) so members of the public can type in their postcode to see if their neighbourhood is “a welfare hotspot”.

This is not just another ugly social policy report from a politically sidelined former minister – it is a gauntlet being thrown down ahead of Britain’s big benefits debate.

Next month, the government is expected to release two major reports into the social safety net: the Timms review on personal independence payments (Pip), which pays for some of the extra costs of disability in England and Wales, and the Milburn review into young people who are out of work.

It wouldn’t be overstating the importance of Westminster reviews to say their recommendations could shape the future of our welfare state for decades to come. With almost 1 million young people not in education, employment or training (Neet) and the disability benefits bill rising in cash terms, Andy Burnham will face immense pressure to use the proposals to launch a once-in-a-generation overhaul of the social security system.

An overhaul in itself is no bad thing. Disabled people applying for benefits face a debilitating mess of bureaucracy and barriers, while too many young people have been abandoned, facing greater obstacles and fewer services. The question is, will the overhaul actually improve conditions for the people who rely on it, or buckle to the anti-benefit sentiment that’s been bubbling up for months?

That the right is not currently in power won’t stop it from wielding significant influence on what’s to come, in large part thanks to its dominance of Britain’s media ecosystem. Legacy media are not even hiding their attempts to shape November’s reforms before they are announced, with the Times this week launching a “welfare inquiry” to investigate the impact of the benefits “crisis” on public finances.

Some of this is made up of concrete policy proposals, such as the Daily Mail’s pitch to radically means-test Pip. But increasingly much of it is just vibes, a vague sense that this disability problem is getting out of control (or having one is becoming “cool”, as the Telegraph recently put it), and that disabled people – particularly the young – are somehow grifting “perks” while everyone else struggles with rising bills.

The changes in how people consume media since the last major benefits reforms in the early 2010s mean the risks of misinformation and outright bigotry are even greater. Last week, Nigel Farage announced plans for a new video studio in Westminster for the launch of Reform TV on YouTube, with the party’s proposed £50bn benefits cuts presumably being lined up as viral content

Keep an eye out too for a revival of the striver v scrounger rhetoric as energy and housing costs are set to lead to the worst living standards in modern times by 2029-30. There are few easier ways to convince workers that the unemployed should go hungry than when they’re cutting back on their own food shop. It is telling that the CSJ study includes a section directly comparing “economically inactive claimants” with workers: someone on minimum wage would have to work six days a week to match “the security, cash and ease” a disabled person gets from a package of state benefits, it proclaims. About 1.4 million foreign nationals receive working-age benefits, it ominously adds. Divide and conquer never gets old.

A Labour government is no guarantee these divisions – worker v claimants, old v young, migrant v citizen – won’t be espoused from the cabinet table. No recommendations by Timms or Milburn have been confirmed yet, but Whitehall sources say there are potential plans to scrap a key part of universal credit for under-25s and replace it with a multi-billion pound package to get people back into work.

Sure, it’s depressing if ministers are tempted to bow to the prevailing political winds by pulling cash from young people, but it’s not exactly surprising. For decades, the right has set the boundaries for what Britain’s safety net can be, resulting in little more than subsistence-level benefit rates, an ever crueller culture of testing and a sicker population.

The conventional wisdom has always been that change can only go one way: the benefits system can repeatedly become more punitive and error-strewn, but never more compassionate or accurate. For a leader who has defined himself as someone unafraid of large-scale change, Burnham is well placed to challenge that orthodoxy – if he wants. The opportunity to transform the benefits system does not come up often, and it is rarer still for a Conservative prime minister not to be at the helm.

It’s unfashionable to say it out loud but the truth is that Labour has the power to radically improve the disability benefits system: introduce more evidence-based assessments and reduce the need for mass appeals against incorrect decisions; stop using public money to line the pockets of private companies; and end unnecessary reassessments for lifelong disabilities. Similarly, ministers can address why more people need disability benefits in the first place: by investing in threadbare mental health support; addressing NHS waiting times and poor preventive health services; fixing Access to Work; and tackling employer attitudes to disabled candidates.

The right has long believed it has a monopoly on Britain’s benefits system, as if it were still paternalistic Victorians punishing and pitying the lower orders. But check the calendar and it is 2026. There is a Labour government in office and two big wads of research coming that can at last lay the groundwork for remaking our safety net. The millions who rely on it must hold their breath to see whether that chance will be grabbed or thrown away.