"The soaring number of people on disability and sickness benefits is blowing up the country’s welfare bill and imperiling its long-term financial stability"

The article is too long to realistically copy and paste in full in the comments, plus you'd miss all the helpful interactive data graphs, but I've shared the Gift link so that should get you past the paywall, and if that doesn't work, you can use this link to bypass it instead:

https://archive.ph/gd4TK

A few highlights:

Some seven million people—more than 10% of the population—now claim at least one or more sickness or disability benefits. The numbers are growing fastest among working-age people who should be powering the country’s economy, surging more than 60% in the past six years to 4.7 million from 2.9 million in 2019.

Many of the newer disability claims are for mental-health issues like depression, anxiety and ADHD, which can be harder for the government to verify than a physical disability. Between 2017 and 2025, disability claims for cancer doubled. But benefits claims for all psychiatric issues surged fourfold.

The scale of the payout has become a scandal. No other western country has seen such a rise in disability claims. In the U.S., the number of people getting federal disability payments has fallen in the past 15 years. The most recent figures show some 10.6 million working-age people in the U.S. claimed one or both main Social Security programs for people with a disability, in a country with a population five times bigger than the U.K.

The financial incentives to claim are significant. For example, a young person living outside London can claim around £900 a month on unemployment and housing benefits. If they are classified as being too sick to work and also claim PIP, that increases to around £2,000, tax free. If you work 40 hours a week in a minimum-wage job in the U.K., you take home £1,880 a month after tax.

Badenoch has published The Right Way, a 100-page attempt to define what a future Conservative government would actually believe and how it would govern.

It’s explicitly not a manifesto: it’s modelled on the pre-Thatcher Right Approach documents of 1976, and tries to provide a diagnosis of Britain’s problems and a coherent Conservative philosophy from which individual policies can then follow.

There are sections on the economy, energy, government, the country and social cohesion, defence, and borders/immigration.

I think this is interesting, important, and something this subreddit should read and discuss! It's been a long time - 50 years, in fact - since the Conservatives produced something like a coherent political philosophy. I think it's important and interesting that she's done so.

As found on Twitter - for those who haven’t seen it yet.

I remember that there was a lot of pressure on Baedonoch a few months ago, maybe even a year ago, and she conceded something about leaving the ECHR, but it was not concrete - I believe it was caveated a bit, but I could be wrong.

What is the current policy of the Tory Party about leaving or modifying the supranational treaties and organisations that the UK is currently signed up to?

Asking as it's conference and I've seen some of this stuff being discussed in the news etc.

Mny thanks