A cherry-picked calculation, a broken labour market, and a government using tabloid outrage as cover for cuts. Welcome to austerity with a fresh coat of paint

The £25k myth: how the media turns struggle into scandal

I’d be willing to bet my best (and, to be fair, only) hat that most of you have already seen the headline – the one barking at you in 200-point font that under Labour, “WORK DOESN’T PAY,” because ‘sickness benefits will now exceed the minimum wage by a whopping £2,500 a year’. The one being shared, aghast, by every right-wing commentator with their lamentations about the state of our country.

If you haven’t, please allow me to do the honours:

Now, since this is the Daily Mail, let’s all take a long, exhausted breath, remind ourselves what they consider journalism these days, and brace for the usual house blend: cooked stats, moral hysteria and a generous splash of Victorian sanctimony.

Because what’s actually being described on that front page is hardly the radical new welfare bonanza that the Daily Mail would like you to believe it is. It’s also not the return of champagne for claimants or subsidised skyboxes for the disabled. What we’re looking at – beneath the outrage-sized font and the strategic placement of a Union Jack somewhere off-frame – is the grim convergence of three deeply unflattering realities about life in the United Kingdom:

• First, that for a small number of people with severe, long-term health conditions and no capacity for work, our welfare system just about prevents total destitution, and only after endless assessments, appeals, and humiliation.
• Second, that the UK labour market is structurally broken, with millions of people working full-time jobs that still don’t come close to covering the cost of living.
• And third, that our political and media ecosystem is now entirely comfortable treating the most vulnerable as a cultural scapegoat and economic distraction – not in error, but by design.

In other words, this isn’t proof that the system is overly generous. It’s proof that work, welfare and the national conversation have all been failing people in different, but equally brutal ways.

Who exactly are we talking about?

The first thing we need to do is narrow the scope dramatically. This headline isn’t about your cousin on Universal Credit or the family down the road getting Child Benefit. It’s about a tiny group of people at the absolute extreme end of the welfare system – people who are so severely ill or disabled they’re deemed to have zero capacity for work.

The headline in all likelihood refers to a person who may need overnight ventilation, full-time care and constant supervision. Someone with advanced multiple sclerosis who cannot walk, dress or eat without assistance. Someone undergoing chemotherapy who’s too weak to leave their home. Someone with profound learning disabilities who requires round-the-clock support for basic daily tasks.

To qualify for the enhanced rate of Personal Independence Payment – a key component of that £25,000 figure – you must score 12 points or more on assessments that test whether you can wash, dress, communicate or navigate safely. Sixty-five percent of applicants are refused. To get the LCWRA element, you must be assessed as having such severe limitations that there’s no prospect of you working or even preparing for work in the foreseeable future.

This is the cherry-picked maximum scenario that the Daily Mail is relaying on, courtesy of the Centre for Social Justice, where every benefit aligns perfectly and expensively for one hypothetical claimant.*

A point that is incredibly important to note is that this isn’t disposable income. It’s survival money – covering care, mobility aids, accessible housing and medical needs. Because being disabled in Britain is expensive. According to Scope, it costs an average of £1,095 extra per month just to get by.

But you won’t find that on the front page. No mention that this so-called “windfall” barely keeps people afloat. No context about how few qualify, or how many are wrongly denied support and forced to fight a degrading appeals process for even a fraction of it.

Instead, we get a big, shouty number, presented as proof that severely disabled people are “better off” than workers – as if round-the-clock care were some kind of lifestyle choice.

It’s misleading and it’s dehumanising. And they know it – because that’s the point.

The point is to punch down

Beneath the spreadsheets, soundbites and strategic outrage, there’s something far more corrosive going on: these headlines are actively distorting policy and putting real people at risk.

Rachael, a disability campaigner known as Wheelie FUMS on Twitter, explained the real impact when I asked her about these headlines:

“As a disabled person on Universal Credit and PIP, these headlines hit hard. That Daily Mail piece wasn’t just misleading, it was dehumanising. It frames people like me as undeserving burdens or scroungers, and every time an article like this goes live, I see the same thing happen: it gets picked up on social media and I purposefully tag as #HateCrime and for good reason.

“Because this isn’t just about policy anymore. It fuels public hostility. It gives permission to people to doubt, shame or even threaten disabled people just for existing. I’ve had strangers question my wheelchair use, make comments in the street, or accuse me of faking, and these narratives are part of why that happens.”

This is the reality that never makes it into the Daily Mail headline or the Telegraph’s analysis, or the Centre for Social Justice’s calculations. When you reduce disabled people to numbers on a spreadsheet – when you frame their basic survival needs as “more generous than work” – you exceed being intellectually dishonest and veer into the area of painting a bright red target on their backs.

Rachael continues:

“What’s especially cruel is the implication that we’re better off. I don’t know a single disabled person who isn’t living in constant fear of reassessment, of cuts, of being pushed further into poverty. No one on benefits feels ‘wealthy.’ We feel watched. Judged. Left out of the conversation unless it’s to be used as a scapegoat.

“And the bigger worry? These headlines shape policy. They make cruelty look like common sense. And people like me pay the price, with our health, our security, and our dignity.”

This is the exact feedback loop that makes these stories so dangerous. The misleading headlines generate public anger, which creates political pressure for cuts, which makes life harder for disabled people, which generates more misleading headlines about “welfare dependency”. It’s a vicious cycle that treats some of the most vulnerable people in society as political footballs.

The Daily Mail’s front page isn’t just bad journalism – it’s their usual playbook of weaponising vulnerable people for headlines. And they know exactly what they’re doing.

They want you angry at benefits. You should be angry at wages.

There’s a final angle in this story that should stop us all in our tracks, because in any remotely functional media ecosystem, this would be the headline:

A full-time job on the national minimum wage earns you less than the basic support package needed to keep a severely disabled person alive and housed.

That’s not a scandal about “welfare dependency”. That’s a scandal about how work is priced in this country.

A person working 37.5 hours a week on the new National Minimum Wage of £12.21/hour earns around £23,809 a year before tax. After tax and National Insurance, that drops to roughly £19,000 take-home. So when the Mail breathlessly points at a complex disability case and says: “Look! they’re better-off than workers!” what they’re really doing is quietly admitting that we now live in a country where the labour market is so underpowered that even our fraying disability safety net sometimes does better.

That’s not a welfare issue. It’s a wage issue. A productivity issue. A corporate greed issue. A cost-of-living crisis. And it’s entirely self-inflicted.

Because the sad fact is that work no longer guarantees stability in the UK. In-work poverty is at record highs. Over half the people in poverty are working. Millions are skipping meals, working second jobs or quietly burning out under constant financial strain, all while being told that if they just hustled harder, everything would be fine.

So instead of asking “why does someone with multiple disabilities get £25k in support?” maybe ask “why can’t someone working full-time afford to live?”

Because the answer isn’t that the person on benefits is gaming the system. It’s that the system itself has been redesigned to reward wealth, punish labour and pit struggling people against each other for the sake of headlines.

That front page doesn’t expose a failure of welfare. It exposes a failure of wages.

The betrayal we’re witnessing

The thing that frustrates me the most about this situation is that we’re not just dealing with the Daily Mail’s usual tabloid cruelty anymore, we’re watching it work exactly as intended.

Those misleading headlines about “generous benefits” and “welfare dependency” aren’t just generating clicks and moral panic – they’re manufacturing the moral cover Labour is now quietly using to justify a new wave of austerity. The same government that promised to be different, that spoke the language of compassion and social justice, has looked at the most vulnerable people in our society and decided they’re a politically acceptable source of savings.

Last week, Labour passed their watered-down Welfare Bill – and even in its diluted form, it will still push hundreds of thousands of disabled people deeper into poverty. The rebellion from Labour MPs wasn’t enough to stop it. The evidence of real-world harm wasn’t enough to stop it. The voices of disabled people themselves weren’t enough to stop it.

And all of this is unfolding against the backdrop of a labour market in quiet collapse, where full-time work at the legal minimum still leaves people unable to afford food, rent or heating. Where millions are stuck in insecure jobs with no path to stability. Where wages have flatlined while corporate profits balloon, that, too, has been rendered invisible by the page-one screaming match over “welfare scroungers”.

So we’re left with a perfect storm. A media ecosystem that dehumanises disabled people for profit, and a supposedly progressive government that uses those narratives to justify cuts that will devastate lives. The Daily Mail creates public anger. Labour harvests political permission. And disabled people pay the price.

This is the Britain we’re building in 2025. One where the most vulnerable are treated as both scapegoats and ATMs, where survival support is framed as luxury, and where the people who most need society’s protection are abandoned by the very politicians who claimed to represent them.

It’s not just disappointing. It’s a quiet betrayal – not only of disabled people, but of anyone who still believes that work should offer stability, that government should protect the vulnerable, or that journalism should deal in facts.

And the worst part? They’ll keep running headlines like this, hoping we’ll mistake it all for common sense.

* Worth noting that the Centre for Social Justice was founded by Iain Duncan Smith – the architect of Universal Credit and former Conservative Work and Pensions Secretary – and received a D grade for funding transparency from openDemocracy in 2023. So when they produce calculations that coincidentally support cutting disability benefits, perhaps a grain of salt is warranted.

Credit for this article goes to “The Bear” at East Anglia Bylines. Original article can be found here.