I think the claimant number is not actually a result of policy - or if anything, it's a result of right wing policy which reduced the ability of preventative medicine to stop these people falling into sufficient incapacity to require disability benefits and reduced the ability to get a job while disabled due to making it harder to enforce employment rights.
If it's not the result of policy any idea what it is a result of?
Or if you think it is the result of right wing policy to cut preventative medicine (your post is a bit ambiguous on this!), how is this expressed when health funding has gone up, and I don't think there has been any specific policy about preventative medicine (well, unless you count the age 40 checkups, but that's an increase in preventative medicine)?
Do you genuinely think it has gotten harder to get a job while disabled? I've only worked in one company, but the disability protection stuff seems to have only gotten stronger over the decades I've been here.
I've been trying to get a handle on what's going on, which I haven't managed. What I've got is:
a. 44% of the rise is people claiming primarily for mental health
39% is primarily physical health
17% Other/Unknown
b. Before the pandemic we spent less on disabled benefits than other rich countries (1.3% of GDP vs. 1.6% average), now we spend over the average (1.7%), and if the trend continues then before the end of this government we'll be spending more than anyone else.
I'm not sure what's causing the breakdown in mental health. It's worst amongst kids, where smartphones, social media and parental breakup are definitely factors, but the increase is across all age groups. I agree it's cultural rather than a government policy.
The physical health rise is almost all musculoskeletal and I suspect is largely obesity driven (again not policy driven!).
I sympathise with the government who have a system designed for physical health, have extended it across mental health, and it can't cope with either and is going to collapse unless they do something, but all the 'somethings' are terrible. I increasingly feel the government is like WW1 generals - all the options suck, they get uniformly blamed whether they pick the least worst or the actual worst, and as a result of the lack of clear incentives, are behaving somewhat haphazardly.
So I think there is basically a Worm's Eye(TM) and a Bird's Eye view to look at this.
At the Worm's Eye view, I agree with some of what Michelle said about COVID impact and I agree there is *some* increase in mental health issues. But I also think over the last 10-15 years we have massively expanded how our society thinks about this issue (in a way that is broadly left-coded). This is the challenge for the Worm's Eye view, that one ends up getting into causation, where people with different political views will disagree, because there are some fundamental differences here about what causes what.
At the Bird's Eye view, it seems to very clearly be a policy decision on the grounds that (a) one could simply have a different policy which resulted in fewer people being eligible (as many US states do), which would be more right-wing; and (b) the graph shows when the Government was really cracking down on benefits 2010-2016 the number of claimants fell, and that as soon as they got distracted by Brexit and forgot about this policy, the number started rising again.
P.S. See also the reply further down below, on why I think putting outcomes (where they are left- or right- coded) and policies separately, and letting them speak for themselves, rather than attempting to link them with causation, is less prone to bias. Not that thinking about the causation is not also very interesting (and important for other reasons)!
I think the Bird's eye view requires some change in policy or implementation to be behind the increase. If the disabled count went up because we'd had a war, and lots of veterans had had limbs blown off, would we really describe that as a shift to left?
Maybe that's an example of "Where things have changed back and forth over this period, I’ve compared the beginning with now", since 906k is for the year ending 2023 and the y/e 2024 figure is currently looking lower. But, given that the 2023 figure got corrected upwards in November 2024 and the 2022 figure got corrected upwards in November 2023 (I haven't checked whether the same trend continues further back), I'd treat the 2024 figure as provisional until November 2025, and take 906k as the most recent accurate figure we have.
"a more recent case where a court ruled a sex offender could not be deported to Afghanistan because he might be persecuted there for being a sex offender."
An awful lot of these rulings seem to be on the basis that people in their home country might disapprove of their crime. Like, OK, but we disapprove of it here too - shouldn't that mean they can't safely stay here either?
Yes, that's a fair point on the first - I quoted the most recent figure, but you're totally right it could be revised upwards. I guess on one level it doesn't matter for this purpose as both are much higher than in 2005.
Agree, 'we're better at protecting sex offenders from being lynched' shouldn't be a reason not to deport one. More broadly, the rulings seem to be assuming a duty of care to people who are meant to be hear temporarily, and at our discretion, that's well out of line of what most people would recognise.
This is a useful and well-sourced article. I get the impression a lot of people think the Conservatives spent 14 years cutting NHS funding and tightening immigration restrictions (perhaps because of what you've said before about them talking right but governing left), so it's good to make the data showing the opposite more widely known.
OTOH, the article seems slightly inconsistent between talking about policies and talking about observable effects whose political causes are unknown or debatable. I could imagine someone saying "NHS waiting lists have got longer and that's a shift to the right", and I think you'd reject this because there was (AFAIK) no policy change to that effect and real-terms funding of the NHS has increased throughout. But some of the other points (like the one about benefit claimants that Michelle mentions) are similarly observations about downstream effects (of unknown or debatable causes) rather than policy changes. I'm not sure from the introduction whether the article is meant to be just about policy changes, or about how society in general has changed for whatever reason(s) - some parts of it imply the former but other parts of it imply the latter.
Excellent methodological criticism! Personally I prefer the observable effects methodology. I get the desire to include the policies, and I think it would be cumbersome to have 4 sections for each entry so I don't have a great solution here, but I agree it's dubious to mix and match.
Not including policies would mean one would have to omit things such as same sex marriage being legalised, changes in maternity leave, strike law changes, all of which are pretty important.
Or at least would mean you'd have to grab the data downstream of those changes (fewer strikes, more than zero gay marriages) which is a cumbersome way of getting at the point. However I think the point Rachael and I are making is that there's a certain incomparability between policy and outcome, which is why it would be fairest to evaluate them seperately on each topic. Where data and policy have gone in one direction you say "clearly moved this way" where they've gone in opposite directions you say "this is interesting, not clear what's going on" as opposed to picking whichever of the policy or outcome lenses gave you the answer you wanted (but I get that you're writing it in your spare time, and your readers are reading it in their spare time, and just because something is fairer doesn't mean either side has capacity).
I can see the benefits of the approach you suggest, but to me there's a bigger problem here, which is that to do what you suggest you have to invoke causation, which involves political judgements where people will disagree (as we're seeing in the discussion on welfare claimants), which brings in much more opportunity for bias (on my part).
For example, as someone on the right, who thinks that tax rises and increases in regulation have been a major cause of our low growth, I could definitely right that taxes have risen, regulation has risen and growth has stagnated, and said then say 'they've gone in the same direction - clearly moved to the left'. But someone on the left, who thinks that, e.g. low investment in transport infrastructure and insufficient spending on the NHS is the cause of our low growth, would understandably take objection to this framing. I think it would be much more write an unbiased piece in the way you suggest, with judgement on whether certain policies had led to certain outcomes or not (at least not without making it much, much, longer, in a 'some people think this, others think that, way').
The 'not directly comparable' point is annoying, but then lots of the things aren't directly comparable anyway (e.g. how to compare Gove's schools reforms, which have nothing to do with money, with Government now heavily subsidising childcare?), so I feel bunging everything together and letting people judge is the lesser of two evils.
On the second, this is a feature not a bug. In some areas, right and left want the same observable effect (e.g. lower crime) but have different views on how to achieve it (e.g. long prison sentences vs focus on rehabilitation). In other areas, right and left want different observable effects (e.g. should migration levels be high or low).
Where I think they want the same effect (crime levels, unemployment levels, etc.) I've commented on changes where relevant, in 'other observations'. Where I think the actual effects desired are different, I've credited that to right or left.
Obviously feel free to disagree with the positioning of these in specific cases, but that is the logic.
Btw, Substack on mobile has got even more broken. Footnotes are still displayed partly off screen, but now when you click on the number it doesn't display the footnote but redirects you to a new blank page, and you have to click Back to return to the article and see (about two thirds of) the footnote!
I'm sorry to hear this. :-( That does sound annoying!
I think the solution is that you help me to get as popular as Scott Alexander, and then I get to talk to the substack people to get them to implement specific custom formatting for this blog. :-)
Some long covid (including a lot of depression / mystery ailments / people being pushed over the threshold of not being able to work that isn't recorded as long covid), some NHS crisis (partly downsteam of covid including employee burnout, partly aging population, partly overseas workers leaving due to the hostile environment) which could maybe be policy caused but would be right wing policy if it was, some social care crisis (which is kind of right wing policy to reduce council funding but is mostly just aging population, decreasing family care, and cost disease on carers).
I think it has got mildly easier to get a job while disabled, but this is now going back down again now people are doing return to office more throughly.
I appreciate the thoroughness of this analysis, and I’ll leave the broader debate on other policy areas for another occasion. However, I take issue with the conclusion that tax policy has moved to the left over the last two decades. While headline tax rates have risen in some cases, the overall structure of taxation has remained broadly regressive, disproportionately impacting lower and middle earners.
First, the freezing of the personal allowance (effectively a stealth tax) has hit lower earners the hardest. With inflation pushing more people into paying income tax for the first time, and many more being dragged into higher tax bands, the system has quietly become more burdensome for those with modest incomes. This is not a progressive shift; it’s fiscal drag that results in a heavier tax burden on those who can least afford it.
Second, while it’s true that the highest income tax rate increased from 40% to 45%, this change only affects a small fraction of earners. The more significant issue is the effective 60% marginal tax rate on earnings between £100,000 and £125,140 due to the withdrawal of the personal allowance. Far from being a straightforward “move to the left,” this anomaly penalises those in that bracket more harshly than those earning even higher sums.
Then there’s the issue of tax incentives, particularly for pensions and investment schemes like EIS (Enterprise Investment Scheme) and SEIS (Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme), popular in crowdfunding. While these schemes technically offer the same percentage relief to all taxpayers, the practical benefit skews heavily in favour of higher earners.
A basic-rate taxpayer (20%) investing in EIS gets a 30% tax rebate—but since they pay less tax overall, the proportionate benefit is smaller.
A higher-rate taxpayer (40%) making the same investment reduces their 40% tax liability, meaning they get more financial relief relative to their tax burden.
Additional-rate taxpayers (45%) see an even greater proportional advantage.
The same applies to pension tax relief, which operates at a taxpayer’s marginal rate. Higher earners get 40% or 45% tax relief on their contributions, while basic-rate taxpayers only get 20% relief. In theory, this is meant to encourage pension saving, but in practice, it means that those who can afford to contribute the most receive the most benefit.
Another example is foreign dividend taxation. Under UK tax treaty rules, only higher-rate and additional-rate taxpayers can claim foreign tax credits on dividends. If a basic-rate taxpayer receives a foreign dividend where 15% tax has been withheld at source, they cannot reclaim any of that tax. A higher-rate taxpayer, on the other hand, can offset this foreign tax against their UK dividend tax liability, reducing their overall tax bill.
On VAT, the increase from 17.5% to 20% was a shift towards regressive taxation, disproportionately affecting lower-income households, which spend a greater share of their income on consumption. While tax as a share of GDP has risen, much of this has been driven by indirect taxation and fiscal drag, rather than by any major redistributive shift.
In sum, while some headline figures suggest a leftward shift in tax policy, the reality is more nuanced. Many of the key changes, such as freezing allowances, stealth tax rises, and regressive tax incentives, have placed a greater relative burden on lower earners while offering disproportionate relief to those at the top. If anything, the system has become less progressive in practice, even if the overall tax take has increased.
Would be interested to hear counterpoints on this, but I don’t think the case for a clear leftward shift in taxation holds up when looking at the details.
I think the claimant number is not actually a result of policy - or if anything, it's a result of right wing policy which reduced the ability of preventative medicine to stop these people falling into sufficient incapacity to require disability benefits and reduced the ability to get a job while disabled due to making it harder to enforce employment rights.
If it's not the result of policy any idea what it is a result of?
Or if you think it is the result of right wing policy to cut preventative medicine (your post is a bit ambiguous on this!), how is this expressed when health funding has gone up, and I don't think there has been any specific policy about preventative medicine (well, unless you count the age 40 checkups, but that's an increase in preventative medicine)?
Do you genuinely think it has gotten harder to get a job while disabled? I've only worked in one company, but the disability protection stuff seems to have only gotten stronger over the decades I've been here.
I've been trying to get a handle on what's going on, which I haven't managed. What I've got is:
a. 44% of the rise is people claiming primarily for mental health
39% is primarily physical health
17% Other/Unknown
b. Before the pandemic we spent less on disabled benefits than other rich countries (1.3% of GDP vs. 1.6% average), now we spend over the average (1.7%), and if the trend continues then before the end of this government we'll be spending more than anyone else.
Source: https://ifs.org.uk/publications/health-related-benefit-claims-post-pandemic-uk-trends-and-global-context
I'm not sure what's causing the breakdown in mental health. It's worst amongst kids, where smartphones, social media and parental breakup are definitely factors, but the increase is across all age groups. I agree it's cultural rather than a government policy.
The physical health rise is almost all musculoskeletal and I suspect is largely obesity driven (again not policy driven!).
I sympathise with the government who have a system designed for physical health, have extended it across mental health, and it can't cope with either and is going to collapse unless they do something, but all the 'somethings' are terrible. I increasingly feel the government is like WW1 generals - all the options suck, they get uniformly blamed whether they pick the least worst or the actual worst, and as a result of the lack of clear incentives, are behaving somewhat haphazardly.
(Replying also to Michelle).
So I think there is basically a Worm's Eye(TM) and a Bird's Eye view to look at this.
At the Worm's Eye view, I agree with some of what Michelle said about COVID impact and I agree there is *some* increase in mental health issues. But I also think over the last 10-15 years we have massively expanded how our society thinks about this issue (in a way that is broadly left-coded). This is the challenge for the Worm's Eye view, that one ends up getting into causation, where people with different political views will disagree, because there are some fundamental differences here about what causes what.
At the Bird's Eye view, it seems to very clearly be a policy decision on the grounds that (a) one could simply have a different policy which resulted in fewer people being eligible (as many US states do), which would be more right-wing; and (b) the graph shows when the Government was really cracking down on benefits 2010-2016 the number of claimants fell, and that as soon as they got distracted by Brexit and forgot about this policy, the number started rising again.
P.S. See also the reply further down below, on why I think putting outcomes (where they are left- or right- coded) and policies separately, and letting them speak for themselves, rather than attempting to link them with causation, is less prone to bias. Not that thinking about the causation is not also very interesting (and important for other reasons)!
I think the Bird's eye view requires some change in policy or implementation to be behind the increase. If the disabled count went up because we'd had a war, and lots of veterans had had limbs blown off, would we really describe that as a shift to left?
Yes, that's fair.
I guess we have three options here. Simplifying:
- It's all due to external factors such as COVID and phones (neutral).
- It's to do with how society shifting in how it approaches mental health / 'neurodivergence' and who is eligible for support (left)
- It's about the NHS funding less preventative medicine and similar (right)
I think it's the first and second but Michelle thinks it's the first and third.
"Net migration increased from 185k to 741k."
I thought it increased as high as 906k: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c3degx4029ko
Maybe that's an example of "Where things have changed back and forth over this period, I’ve compared the beginning with now", since 906k is for the year ending 2023 and the y/e 2024 figure is currently looking lower. But, given that the 2023 figure got corrected upwards in November 2024 and the 2022 figure got corrected upwards in November 2023 (I haven't checked whether the same trend continues further back), I'd treat the 2024 figure as provisional until November 2025, and take 906k as the most recent accurate figure we have.
"a more recent case where a court ruled a sex offender could not be deported to Afghanistan because he might be persecuted there for being a sex offender."
An awful lot of these rulings seem to be on the basis that people in their home country might disapprove of their crime. Like, OK, but we disapprove of it here too - shouldn't that mean they can't safely stay here either?
(And then there's the chicken nugget case: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/albania-deportation-chcken-nuggets-home-office-b2695233.html)
Yes, that's a fair point on the first - I quoted the most recent figure, but you're totally right it could be revised upwards. I guess on one level it doesn't matter for this purpose as both are much higher than in 2005.
Agree, 'we're better at protecting sex offenders from being lynched' shouldn't be a reason not to deport one. More broadly, the rulings seem to be assuming a duty of care to people who are meant to be hear temporarily, and at our discretion, that's well out of line of what most people would recognise.
This is a useful and well-sourced article. I get the impression a lot of people think the Conservatives spent 14 years cutting NHS funding and tightening immigration restrictions (perhaps because of what you've said before about them talking right but governing left), so it's good to make the data showing the opposite more widely known.
OTOH, the article seems slightly inconsistent between talking about policies and talking about observable effects whose political causes are unknown or debatable. I could imagine someone saying "NHS waiting lists have got longer and that's a shift to the right", and I think you'd reject this because there was (AFAIK) no policy change to that effect and real-terms funding of the NHS has increased throughout. But some of the other points (like the one about benefit claimants that Michelle mentions) are similarly observations about downstream effects (of unknown or debatable causes) rather than policy changes. I'm not sure from the introduction whether the article is meant to be just about policy changes, or about how society in general has changed for whatever reason(s) - some parts of it imply the former but other parts of it imply the latter.
Excellent methodological criticism! Personally I prefer the observable effects methodology. I get the desire to include the policies, and I think it would be cumbersome to have 4 sections for each entry so I don't have a great solution here, but I agree it's dubious to mix and match.
Not including policies would mean one would have to omit things such as same sex marriage being legalised, changes in maternity leave, strike law changes, all of which are pretty important.
Or at least would mean you'd have to grab the data downstream of those changes (fewer strikes, more than zero gay marriages) which is a cumbersome way of getting at the point. However I think the point Rachael and I are making is that there's a certain incomparability between policy and outcome, which is why it would be fairest to evaluate them seperately on each topic. Where data and policy have gone in one direction you say "clearly moved this way" where they've gone in opposite directions you say "this is interesting, not clear what's going on" as opposed to picking whichever of the policy or outcome lenses gave you the answer you wanted (but I get that you're writing it in your spare time, and your readers are reading it in their spare time, and just because something is fairer doesn't mean either side has capacity).
I can see the benefits of the approach you suggest, but to me there's a bigger problem here, which is that to do what you suggest you have to invoke causation, which involves political judgements where people will disagree (as we're seeing in the discussion on welfare claimants), which brings in much more opportunity for bias (on my part).
For example, as someone on the right, who thinks that tax rises and increases in regulation have been a major cause of our low growth, I could definitely right that taxes have risen, regulation has risen and growth has stagnated, and said then say 'they've gone in the same direction - clearly moved to the left'. But someone on the left, who thinks that, e.g. low investment in transport infrastructure and insufficient spending on the NHS is the cause of our low growth, would understandably take objection to this framing. I think it would be much more write an unbiased piece in the way you suggest, with judgement on whether certain policies had led to certain outcomes or not (at least not without making it much, much, longer, in a 'some people think this, others think that, way').
The 'not directly comparable' point is annoying, but then lots of the things aren't directly comparable anyway (e.g. how to compare Gove's schools reforms, which have nothing to do with money, with Government now heavily subsidising childcare?), so I feel bunging everything together and letting people judge is the lesser of two evils.
Thank you, re the first point!
On the second, this is a feature not a bug. In some areas, right and left want the same observable effect (e.g. lower crime) but have different views on how to achieve it (e.g. long prison sentences vs focus on rehabilitation). In other areas, right and left want different observable effects (e.g. should migration levels be high or low).
Where I think they want the same effect (crime levels, unemployment levels, etc.) I've commented on changes where relevant, in 'other observations'. Where I think the actual effects desired are different, I've credited that to right or left.
Obviously feel free to disagree with the positioning of these in specific cases, but that is the logic.
Btw, Substack on mobile has got even more broken. Footnotes are still displayed partly off screen, but now when you click on the number it doesn't display the footnote but redirects you to a new blank page, and you have to click Back to return to the article and see (about two thirds of) the footnote!
Yes! This is very annoying!
I'm sorry to hear this. :-( That does sound annoying!
I think the solution is that you help me to get as popular as Scott Alexander, and then I get to talk to the substack people to get them to implement specific custom formatting for this blog. :-)
Because all the other blogs want broken mobile footnotes?
I think it's the movements on indentity that matter most :-) (Oddly you corrected this in the copy of the same paragraph at the bottom of the article)
Footnote 18: Of course you can't think of areas where we're further to the right now than in 2025, we're in 2025 :-)
it is salutory [to] reflect
Gobsmacked that only 20% of 18-24 year olds view Churchill positively. That is some serious history rewriting (and teaching) going on.
But is it a left indent-ity or a right indent-ity?
So long as it's justified I don't mind :-)
Regardless of the rest of the article, I just wanted to say that I appreciated the F&S reference. You don't many of those any more.
Thank you! I was hoping somebody would spot it. :-)
Some long covid (including a lot of depression / mystery ailments / people being pushed over the threshold of not being able to work that isn't recorded as long covid), some NHS crisis (partly downsteam of covid including employee burnout, partly aging population, partly overseas workers leaving due to the hostile environment) which could maybe be policy caused but would be right wing policy if it was, some social care crisis (which is kind of right wing policy to reduce council funding but is mostly just aging population, decreasing family care, and cost disease on carers).
I think it has got mildly easier to get a job while disabled, but this is now going back down again now people are doing return to office more throughly.
(sorry, this was meant to be a reply to Neil in my thread but I'm in bed on my phone and it failed to thread properly)
I've replied up in that thread. :-)
I appreciate the thoroughness of this analysis, and I’ll leave the broader debate on other policy areas for another occasion. However, I take issue with the conclusion that tax policy has moved to the left over the last two decades. While headline tax rates have risen in some cases, the overall structure of taxation has remained broadly regressive, disproportionately impacting lower and middle earners.
First, the freezing of the personal allowance (effectively a stealth tax) has hit lower earners the hardest. With inflation pushing more people into paying income tax for the first time, and many more being dragged into higher tax bands, the system has quietly become more burdensome for those with modest incomes. This is not a progressive shift; it’s fiscal drag that results in a heavier tax burden on those who can least afford it.
Second, while it’s true that the highest income tax rate increased from 40% to 45%, this change only affects a small fraction of earners. The more significant issue is the effective 60% marginal tax rate on earnings between £100,000 and £125,140 due to the withdrawal of the personal allowance. Far from being a straightforward “move to the left,” this anomaly penalises those in that bracket more harshly than those earning even higher sums.
Then there’s the issue of tax incentives, particularly for pensions and investment schemes like EIS (Enterprise Investment Scheme) and SEIS (Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme), popular in crowdfunding. While these schemes technically offer the same percentage relief to all taxpayers, the practical benefit skews heavily in favour of higher earners.
A basic-rate taxpayer (20%) investing in EIS gets a 30% tax rebate—but since they pay less tax overall, the proportionate benefit is smaller.
A higher-rate taxpayer (40%) making the same investment reduces their 40% tax liability, meaning they get more financial relief relative to their tax burden.
Additional-rate taxpayers (45%) see an even greater proportional advantage.
The same applies to pension tax relief, which operates at a taxpayer’s marginal rate. Higher earners get 40% or 45% tax relief on their contributions, while basic-rate taxpayers only get 20% relief. In theory, this is meant to encourage pension saving, but in practice, it means that those who can afford to contribute the most receive the most benefit.
Another example is foreign dividend taxation. Under UK tax treaty rules, only higher-rate and additional-rate taxpayers can claim foreign tax credits on dividends. If a basic-rate taxpayer receives a foreign dividend where 15% tax has been withheld at source, they cannot reclaim any of that tax. A higher-rate taxpayer, on the other hand, can offset this foreign tax against their UK dividend tax liability, reducing their overall tax bill.
On VAT, the increase from 17.5% to 20% was a shift towards regressive taxation, disproportionately affecting lower-income households, which spend a greater share of their income on consumption. While tax as a share of GDP has risen, much of this has been driven by indirect taxation and fiscal drag, rather than by any major redistributive shift.
In sum, while some headline figures suggest a leftward shift in tax policy, the reality is more nuanced. Many of the key changes, such as freezing allowances, stealth tax rises, and regressive tax incentives, have placed a greater relative burden on lower earners while offering disproportionate relief to those at the top. If anything, the system has become less progressive in practice, even if the overall tax take has increased.
Would be interested to hear counterpoints on this, but I don’t think the case for a clear leftward shift in taxation holds up when looking at the details.