Caroline Elsom is Head of Government Reform at Onward.

The catastrophic cost of Britain’s benefits bill is no secret. But the already eyewatering sums are usually missing a crucial part of the welfare system – all of the extra payments, discounts and freebies that claimants can receive on top of their regular benefits.

Many of these schemes, known as passported benefits, will be familiar to readers, like free school meals, free prescriptions or council tax reduction for those on certain benefits. Few will be aware of just how many different extras are now on offer, covering everything from broadband contracts to court fee remission. At least 20 different schemes are topping up the incomes of those already receiving tens of thousands each year from the state in benefit payments that are intended to have already covered their essential living costs.

In my new report for Onward think tank, The Hidden Benefits Bill, I reveal the true cost of all these passported benefits: over £10 billion. The rollout of Universal Credit, which was meant to do away with the need for all these piecemeal legacy schemes, has dragged on so long that new schemes have now been added and existing ones enlarged.

It is no coincidence that the two major passported benefits that the Labour Government has decided to expand this year are free school meals and the Warm Home Discount. They are some of the only passported schemes that are measured in poverty statistics as additional effective income, while almost all others go uncounted. By bringing more people into these schemes, they can claim to have lowered poverty despite the changes poorly targeting those most in need.

From this year, the Warm Home Discount will automatically apply a flat £150 rebate to the energy bills of all households on Universal Credit, regardless of how energy efficient or low usage their home is. Likewise, expanding free school is set to cause chaos for school and local authority funding which uses free school meals as a marker of deprivation for the National Funding Formula, the Pupil Premium, eligibility for the Holiday Activities and Food Programme and extended rights to free home-to-school transport.

With the end of the rollout of Universal Credit finally in sight this Parliament, now is precisely the time that the Government should be looking to rationalise these schemes, not adding to them further. Instead, the Labour Government has ruled out any new welfare legislation for at least the next year following the disability benefit reform debacle. The bill to taxpayers and consumers will only grow further as a result.

Some would argue that £10 billion is a price worth paying for targeted support schemes – that it’s the cost of a civilised society that takes care of its most vulnerable. If only it were actually the case that these fragmented schemes were improving outcomes. Broadband social tariffs are often giving claimants worse deals than regular switching. Bursary cash for disadvantaged teens that makes them worse off in the long run, missing out on vital early experiences of the workplace. Special savings accounts that are driving claimants to hold out for top-ups while falling further into debt. Online forums that discuss using Healthy Start grocery cards to buy alcohol and vapes.

Worse still, the cumulative effect on some families of being able to claim thousands, sometimes more than £10,000 in additional support while on Universal Credit, is that they face a steep cliff edge if they try to come off benefits. The impact of already high marginal effective tax rates for many claimants due to the taper rate and income tax is compounded by the withdrawal of passported benefits, leaving claimants questioning whether they are really better off working more – or working at all.

In the clamour to look caring by carving out all these special schemes, it has become harder for claimants to manage their finances as a whole, with an entirely different set of household budgeting dynamics to those just beyond the benefits system. At the same time, many are left missing out on extra support they may be eligible for because they are simply unaware or unable to navigate the associated bureaucracy.

There is no easy way out of this mess without politically difficult trade-offs to radically rationalise the system. My report goes through each scheme in turn to propose an alternative way to deliver support, consolidating most into Universal Credit payments, alongside a single scheme for one-off unavoidable or unforeseeable costs and a lower taper rate for those working their way to financial independence from the state.

These changes are not about ripping up the Conservative record on welfare reform. Quite the opposite, in fact. They deliver on the reforms as originally intended – making Universal Credit the simpler, smoother system it was always meant to be. It’s time for a hard reset of working-age welfare, to peel back the layers of extra benefits and to return to the principle that work should always pay.

Academic Shaiel Ben-Ephraim describes himself as a “Jew from occupied Palestine”. He has posted what he describes as “probably the most important Hebrew tweet I’ve ever seen”. Ben-Ephraim introduces and translates the Hebrew words of Israeli general Moshe ‘Bogie’ Ya’alon, one of Israel’s most senior military and establishment figures.

Ben-Ephraim’s words – and the explosive words of Ya’alon – need little elaboration, except to flag to readers that Ya’alon describes Israel as ethno-supremacist “Judeo-Nazis” for their crimes against Palestinian people. And he mocks the common Zionist tactic of complaining that we must never compare Israel to the Nazis. Read in full below – emphases added:

This is probably the most important Hebrew Tweet I’ve ever seen. Moshe Ya’alon is a former chief of staff and defense minister. The absolute cream of the Israeli defense establishment. In this text he admits that the Israeli government and settlers have become Judeo-Nazis and their policy is based on Jewish supremacy. Here is a full translation:

“On the last Tuesday evening, I attended an event marking the International Holocaust Remembrance Day. When I got home, I received a message about Jewish pogromists attacking Palestinians in the south of Hebron, stealing their livestock, and burning their property. “We can’t compare!…”

After ambulances, which tried to reach the scene, were delayed by the Jewish terrorists, three Palestinians were evacuated to the hospital, one of them with skull fractures. “No event can ever compare to the Holocaust, which we endured!” …

Advertisement

I turned, of course, immediately to the security authorities in the area, and I was assured that the incident was being handled by the IDF. To this day not a single Jewish terrorist has been stopped (as in many other cases), because … the Israel Police is controlled by a convicted criminal, a fascist racist Nazi, the Shin Bet is controlled by a representative of “Jewish supremacy” from the schools of the rabbis Tao, Lior, Ginzburg, and Zini (Dodo), the defense minister prevents administrative detentions of Jewish terrorists, and the other minister in the Ministry of Defense encourages illegal outposts and equips them with off-road vehicles, to torment the lives of Palestinians, to evict them from their land, and to settle the land with Jews (you’ll ask again why I blamed the government for “ethnic cleansing”!?). The ideology of “Jewish supremacy,” which has become dominant in the Israeli government, resembles Nazi racial theory, “but we must not compare!” …

When I commanded the Jerusalem and Samaria Division, the Central Command, and the IDF, I was acquainted with the warnings of Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz, regarding the process of dehumanization to the point of turning us into “Judeo-Nazis” (as he put it), under our control of another people. I did my best, even as defense minister, “so that we may know how to defeat terrorism and remain human.”

I never deceived myself into thinking that only through concessions would we achieve “peace now,” and I also understood the danger of “Jewish supremacy” over our future and our existence. Therefore I advocated separation according to the proto-programmatic speech of Yitzhak Rabin of October 5, 1995, and therefore I named my book is “A Long Short Way.” As of now, Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz was right and I was wrong.

The task of the next Israeli government is to prove that Professor Leibowitz was wrong, and not to bring ruin upon our state. The government of “Jewish Supremacy” — the government of lies and betrayal — the government of messianism, the traitors and the corrupt — must be replaced before ruin.”

Advertisement

Israelis of conscience see that it is adopting the policies of Judeo-Nazism and Jewish supremacy. They have known it for a long time. But most do not have the courage to say so. This is an earthquake.

Unsurprisingly, the silence of ‘mainstream’ media and pro-Israel groups on Ya’alon’s words is deafening.

Featured image via the Canary

Well if nothing else, Sir Keir Starmer has partly falsified my analysis of his government. I have previously argued that Labour’s travails, cathartic as they might be, are simply a product of the doom spiral in the public finances, and that any future government is likely to end up almost as unpopular, almost as quickly.

But say what you like about Kemi Badenoch or Nigel Farage, I think – and I don’t want to jinx it – they would both manage to resist the temptation to somehow give Peter Mandelson a fourth opportunity to leave government in disgrace. So that’s something.

Nonetheless, we shouldn’t fall into the trap of assuming such things are the root of the problem. It is always tempting for people trying to avoid confronting big, systemic problems to latch on to relatively trivial particular ones as explanations instead. Yet as the last ten years have had ample opportunity to demonstrate, a government that the public broadly supports can actually endure quite a lot of particular scandal.

The real problems remain, and two stories this morning highlight them. First, the ongoing row over student loans, with one former director of the Office for Students cropping up in the Times to suggest they should be replaced with a graduate tax. Second, the increasingly acute crisis in local government finances, with dozens of councils warning they face bankruptcy over SEND obligations and Reform UK’s discovery that they can’t cut anything.

Both of these issues are manifestations of the same root problem, which is politicians hiding the spending implications of their policy preferences with creative accounting. Shifting statutory obligations onto councils allows Westminster to set welfare policy but hide the cost implications on local government books, whilst selling mortgages to teenagers (‘student loans’) has allowed successive governments to postpone a reckoning with the unsustainable bloat in tertiary education.

Solving either of these means making difficult decisions. In the case of SEND and other statutory responsibilities, it means either actually devolving policy to councils, so they can decide for themselves what resources to commit to it, or bringing direct financial responsibility back to Westminster. In other words, either creating a postcode lottery in special needs support or blowing a multi-billion pound hole in a new government’s budget.

Student loans are even thornier. A ‘graduate tax’ is popular with sector apologists and other supporters of the status quo because it is essentially the same system – i.e. shaking down people for life for a decision they made at 18 – but dressed up, they hope, more presentably. It would still leave younger workers facing usurious marginal tax rates and a higher overall tax rate than many of their older, higher-earning colleagues.

But any move towards a more sensible system of public support for higher education would involve there being much less of it, and it being offered far more selectively. The great merit of the student loan system, politically, is that it has spared politicians the need to make decisions about which degrees, at which universities, and for which prospective students are actually a ‘public good’ deserving taxpayer support; sector apologists know this is a powerful argument against spending restraint, and are quick to punch the bruise of “Who doesn’t deserve education?” if anyone tries it.

Yet if there were easy and popular solutions to Britain’s problems, they would have been solved by now. Government in this country has been boiling down for some time to a collection of very painful choices. What’s changed is that the accumulated costs of putting those choices off have now reached the point of unbearable pain themselves.

In a way, it isn’t fair. Starmer, Rachel Reeves, and those mutinous Labour backbenchers are only really trying to do what all their predecessors have been doing: patch up something that gets you through the next couple of years and hope for the best. It is simply their misfortune that the future eventually arrives, and the tomorrow into which previous governments shunted all these problems is the today they – and perhaps, at some point, we – have to govern.

Faced with that grim prospect, we must take our pleasures where we can. So pass the popcorn, please – I think Morgan McSweeney’s on.

Zarah Sultana has thrown her support behind the Green Party’s Gorton and Denton candidate, Hannah Spencer. In doing so, she’s demonstrated exactly how solidarity on the left should work. In a statement, Sultana said:

The candidate list is now published and it is clear that Hannah Spencer, a local plumber and trade unionist, is the strongest challenger to Labour and Reform. ​ I am, therefore, giving my personal critical support to her and the Green Party in this by-election, and I urge others to do the same.

I have always been clear that the left is strongest when it is united. ​ Our real opponents are not one another. ​ They are Reform and the far-right.

However, Sultana’s comments are unfortunately at odds with a statement from the Grassroots Left slate for Your Party – who she backs.

Zarah Sultana at odds with the Grassroots Left

Your Party (YP) had already issued a statement outlining that after deliberation with local members, it had decided that a YP candidacy would not serve their ‘collective goals’ of defeating Reform. But, the Grassroots Left (GL) slate subsequently stated that:

Grassroots Left will not lend unconditional support to the Green Party candidate, because the Greens are a pro-capitalist, pro-Nato party and have been enforcing cuts in councils all over the country.

Many people from across the leftist spectrum have, rightly, been pointing out this is an immature and short-sighted approach in the face of rising fascism.

Zarah Sultana’s statement came after the GL left one, and is interesting for outlining exactly why, on that statement, GL got it wrong:

My statement on the Gorton & Denton by-election: pic.twitter.com/HSrgDf70h2

— Zarah Sultana MP (@zarahsultana) February 3, 2026

In particular, it’s worth looking at one passage from Sultana:

As a young Muslim woman, I understand viscerally what it would mean for the far-right to gain power in this country. This is not an abstract debate for me, nor the millions of people across the country whose safety would be directly affected.

Ultimately, this is what the Gorton and Denton by-election has turned into: a testing ground that is an opportunity for the Green party to show that people are coming together to reject the fascism of Reform. And, Sultana’s comments show exactly what happens when a socialist who has lived experience of racism can do when understanding the very real cost of parties like Reform. This isn’t an abstract political debate for many people in this country.

It is a reality that has material consequences. In choosing to focus on other policy issues, rather than the much more immediate threat of Reform, GL have shown naive judgement that is disappointing to see.

No more ‘whip’: Pluralism strengthens movements – it doesn’t weaken them

However, this rather public disagreement is not a dramatic sign of a ‘rift.’ Instead, it is another sign that Sultana is well practiced at productive disagreements that make the movement stronger. Unity does not require uniformity. Leftists are not required to agree on every single point. Instead, we must be able to unite when necessary to resist racism and fascism.

In what many onlookers will probably view with understandable frustration, a heated battle of the factions will soon be underway with the Central Executive Elections (CEC) of Your Party due to take place on the 26th February. Apparent differences in mission have driven a divergence among members, signaling an existential moment for the movement. Namely, Jeremy Corbyn has endorsed the For the Many slate, while Sultana has endorsed the Grassroots Left slate.

Unity does not mean compliance

It is worth noting, the GL statement has faced pushback from within the group itself, with some members expressing dissatisfaction with the tone it adopted.

Chloe Walker, CEC Northwest candidate standing on the Grassroots Left slate shared her views on the difference in views amongst members in the community-grounded movement. She told the Canary:

Personally as I’ve stated previously, I think that the most prevalent sentiment amongst local members is correct – it would have been nice to back a candidate, Tony Wilson, but the party’s not in a place to be able to fight a campaign like this at present, because of how slow and disempowering the founding process has been. I don’t think we should be going out of our way to criticise the Greens or their candidate in this instance – she’s a strong candidate in any case and I’d obviously rather see them than Labour or Reform win here. But we don’t have to come out and back the Greens to the hilt, either. Individual YP members might choose to help out with their campaign, and that’s their prerogative. But we shouldn’t use party infrastructure to support them; we have to retain some independence while we try to carve out a political identity that is visibly distinct from that of GPEW. Our intervention should be limited to criticising the Labour and Reform candidates, if we feel inclined to make any statement on an election we’re not involved with.

Walker added:

specific views towards this by-election do vary amongst GL candidates, reflecting our commitment to a pluralistic and open party where members have the autonomy and mutual respect to disagree while still remaining committed to broader shared political goals.

Ashley Walker, a Grassroots Left member from Stockport also stated:

Despite what some people think the Grassroots Left does not belong to any one person alone, it belongs to every member of every group who is a part of it. And if we win this election the CEC we form, and the party it will help build, will belong not to us but to every member of this party. Because without true democracy there will never be socialism.

No more top-down control: Left unity in action

We published a piece on Monday on Palestinian journalist Ahmed Alnaouq’s plea to factions on the left to unite against the billionaire-funded fascist threats facing all of us. Alnaouq pleaded:

My friends, fascism is not at the doorsteps in the UK. It is here. And unless we join forces with each other, unless we hold hands, we will not be able to defeat it. And we don’t have the luxury for trial and waiting. We do not have time. We have to act. My friends, we have the numbers. We have the resources. We have the support of the people. What we don’t have is organisation. We need to learn how to work with each other in order to defeat fascism, in order to defeat far-right, in order to defeat Zionism. And we must never shy away from calling ourselves anti-Zionists because we are anti-Zionists.

Sultana has shown that unity does not require spoon-feeding members the statements they are permitted to make. Grassroots Left has demonstrated that it will not submit to control by powerful figures and will instead maintain autonomy over its messaging. They have also worked collaboratively and supportively with independent candidates to advance a shared mission for a transparent, democratic, and accountable political party.

While work remains to build robust democratic processes that ensure such statements genuinely reflect the will of its membership, a powerful movement is clearly emerging: one that challenges the dominance of privileged public figures and meaningfully empowers its members.

Featured image via the Canary