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Catherine, I wrote a signed for letter to Keir Starmer, not an email, so I am hoping for a reply after Easter. It was not about me; it was about him. I asked, with genuine curiosity, how he justifies his actions after all he has said and done. I reminded him of his own words, describing a childhood where illness and financial insecurity loomed large, and how his family depended on the NHS and welfare state, not as abstract ideas but as lifelines. Whether they relied on benefits or NHS care, the principle remains: the state his mother needed then is the very one being dismantled now under his leadership.

I reflected on his memoirs, where he shared how his mother’s lifelong battle with Still’s disease left their family reliant on these systems. He spoke of the fear of medical crises, the exhaustion of caregiving, and his mother’s quiet dignity through decades of pain. Yet his government’s reforms to Universal Credit and PIP, halving support for new claimants and imposing rigid work search requirements on those with fluctuating conditions, would have punished his own mother for having better days between debilitating flare ups.

While he wrote movingly of learning compassion through her suffering, these policies seem to abandon that hard won empathy when politically inconvenient. The boy who depended on the welfare state now leads a government intent on shrinking it. The man who credits his mother’s illness for teaching him dignity now oversees assessments that strip it from others.

I questioned whether history will see this as honouring her struggle or betraying it. For those facing similar struggles today, these changes risk pulling the very safety net his family once saw as a lifeline. I asked him how he reconciles these policies with the compassion his mother’s suffering instilled in him. He has called the welfare system indefensible and fundamentally broken, but when his family relied on public services during her fifty year illness, was it broken then, or only now, as austerity prioritises five billion pounds in savings over safeguarding the vulnerable?