Sometimes a phrase slung across the despatch box has a habit of sticking, and Kemi Badenoch managed to sling one Labour’s way that has followed them like a bad smell. No longer are they to be referred to as ‘the Labour Party‘, but instead upon them is bestowed the title ‘the Welfare Party’.

I do not think, when Mrs Badenoch fired that specific broadside, that she intended it as a compliment; it certainly hasn’t been received as one. Yet the longer one examines the evidence, the harder it becomes to label that new brand as unfair; the Welfare Party are living up to their name.

Few readers of the Express will be shocked to hear that the welfare state has grown beyond what we can manage.

Indeed the truth behind Andy Burnham‘s bonkers benefits has finally been exposed – it’s barely believable.

Now new figures exposed in the press this week show that almost half of Labour MPs are now propped up by a majority exceeded by the amount of people receiving disability benefits.

We ought to consider what this signals: a governing party whose survival in office depends not on the productive economy, but on the scale of the welfare it rolls out at our expense.

A ballooning benefits bill is not, whatever vapid platitudes ministers mutter to one another in the voting lobbies, a symptom of compassion. It is a symptom of failure.

At present some 4.1 million people now claim Personal Independence Payments (PIP), the vast majority being of working age.

These men and women would have, a generation ago, been expected to contribute substantially more to the economy than they draw from it.

Extrapolate this trend over the next few decades and the picture is starker still.

The advent of AI, which drives people away from work by hoovering up entry-level jobs, partnered with more choosing benefits over employment, spells ruin.

For years we have seen more retirees than those in work, the burden of funding the care of those who have earned their end-of-career life falling on fewer shoulders.

How long will it be until the backs bearing an ever-greater weight break under the strain?

There was even the disappointing but sadly not shocking news that one in every six Universal Credit payments made last year was doled out to households containing a foreign national – to the tune of £11.9 billion.

It has long been viewed by those on the right as a bizarre way to strive for a good society by relocating the wealth of the earners to the pockets of the unproductive.

The inflation of these numbers is now reaching such eye-watering extremes that they cannot be waved away with the usual invocations of “fairness”.

Add to this the triple lock, the great sacred cow of British politics, which is increasingly being regarded by younger politicos in Westminster with something close to derision, and the problem crystallises.

The state has long since passed merely spending your money. It draws ever-greater sums upward and outward from the productive economy, distributing them into a socialist apparatus of dependency.

In the past politicians tried to pretend this was not happening; now they extrapolate your funds with willing connivance, knowing full well that their own re-election depends on their addiction to tax.

Small wonder, then, that Labour backbenchers agitate perpetually for benefits to rise further still – after all, their voters need them to.

But perhaps we ought to ask what happens to a country whose wealthy are packing their bags, whose tax base is contracting, and whose jobs market has grown quiet, when the answer to every difficulty is simply to enlarge the welfare state rather than the economy that must, eventually, pay for it.

We do not lack for compassion in this country, no. What we lack, increasingly, is production.