“Broken Britain” has become the favourite narrative of the right in recent months. The playbook goes like this: politicians and pundits alike exploit genuine concerns about squeezed services and living standards to propagate a sense of division and despair. Meanwhile, the parts of the state that actually need radical change are then either ignored or misrepresented, if only because their worst impact tends to be felt by the very marginalised communities the hard right scapegoats.

Few areas demonstrate this more than the disability benefits system. Reading the damning Timms report – the government’s landmark review into the personal independence payment (Pip) in England and Wales – last week, I was struck by the gulf between reality and rhetoric. The disability benefits system is “not fit for purpose” and “dehumanising” for claimants, the report found, yet scroll through a news site or switch on talk radio and there’s tumbleweed when it comes to substantive ideas to reform it, especially from figures typically eager to declare the nation’s institutions at risk of imminent collapse.

If there is a call to change the benefits system, it is only through the lens of bringing down the so-called bloated bill – not for making the system fairer for disabled people or even for it to work properly to get value for taxpayer money (assessments are so inaccurate that nearly two-thirds of appeals over Pip decisions are successful at tribunal).

Just look at the Conservatives who, keen to outflank a distracted Reform UK, are currently in the middle of a review of the disability benefits system with the express purpose of finding cuts. As shadow work and pensions secretary Helen Whately recently put it: “Disability benefits have become tantalisingly low-hanging fruit for those seeking easy cash from our benefits system.” Nastiness aside,........

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