A shady new corporate lobby group claims public support for welfare cuts – but who are they?

The Telegraph has been peddling dubious-sounding polling that claims voters “across the political spectrum” back Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) welfare cuts.

It turns out that a shady new lobby group – stacked with CEOs, right-wing politicians, and corporate media hacks – is behind it.

Shady new lobby group pushing for DWP welfare cuts

The Telegraph led with the headline:

Cut welfare spending to boost growth, say voters

And the article then goes on to describe how:

A new survey has found that Britons from almost all age groups, regions and political leanings would be in favour of cutting benefits to grow the economy, in a rare sign of consensus across the UK.

What’s more, the Telegraph claimed that:

Even Green Party voters were narrowly more likely to back welfare cuts to grow the economy, with 38 per cent in favour and 36 per cent against.

Of the five parties covered by the poll, only the Liberal Democrats were more likely to say they opposed the policy.

According to the billionaire-owned Torygraph, 46% of Labour, 63% of Tory, and 61% of Reform voters back welfare cuts.

The article went on to make a series of claims that voters of different political leanings would back tax breaks for businesses and delay the phase out of fossil fuels “to support economic growth”.

Naturally, we’re to take the Telegraph‘s word on this. The outlet provided no citation or hyperlink to any of the actual polling results. As such, there’s no way to verify what the survey even asked to establish these findings. Of course, it’s highly plausible it put leading questions to prompt the answers it wanted.

However, what the article did confirm was who had commissioned the survey: 2030 Prosperity Alliance.

Shady new group pops up

Never heard of it? That’s because the suspicious new group only sprung up towards the end of March.

The Telegraph article simply said that it’s a:

a group of business leaders, economists and former ministers, aiming to ensure the UK achieves its economic potential in the next decade.

And it added that:

The coalition is led by Paul Johnson, the former director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, and Richard Haythornthwaite, the chairman of NatWest. It counts Lord Hague, the former foreign secretary, and Sir Alex Younger, the former head of MI6, among its supporters.

Or, a think-tank economist, a banker, a spy, and a foreign office secretary walk into a bar… and act like they should have an opinion on the UK’s welfare system.

The Telegraph also failed to mention Johnson’s senior advisory role for lobbying firm Public First. The company was at the centre of Covid-contract cronyism due to founders’ connections to Dominic Cummings. It has lobbied for a vast number of clients in the fossil fuel industry, private healthcare, and banking.

According to the UK consultant lobbyist register, Public First also counted the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) among its clients. BCG is now infamous for its role in setting up the heinous Israel and US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). This was the ostensible front for bypassing existing aid organisations that massacred hundreds of starving Palestinians seeking aid.

Senior partners at the scandal-rife firm also designed the ‘Trump Riviera’ plans to force the Palestinian population from Gaza to develop a commercial beach resort. BCG’s involvement with GHF began in the same time period it employed Public First: October 2024.

Representing the corporate-colonialist ruling class

The firm previously based itself out of Tufton Street. Its staff members have hobnobbed for a seedy slate of free-market think-tanks peddling climate denial, Brexit, and other neoliberal interests.

The rest of the 2030 Prosperity Alliance’s publicly listed members represent a ‘who’s who’ of the corporate-colonialist ruling class.

Heavyweights across extractive industries dominate the list of members. It includes bosses from multinational energy firm SSE, asset manager L&G, PR lobbyist firm WPP, Heathrow, and housing developer Barratt Redrow.

Next to its gilded roster of CEOs are former cabinet ministers and media bigwigs. This includes, for instance, Tory leader and foreign secretary William Hague and right-wing broadcast pundit Trevor Phillips.

Welfare cuts: “difficult trade-offs” to greedy capitalists; a lifeline for disabled people

Like all the worst lobbyist profiteer-fests, the group seeks to advance the interests of rich capitalists.

In an open letter that the billionaire-shilling Times dutifully published in March, the group spoke of:

difficult trade-offs needed to strengthen the UK economy

Of course, it’s easy to guess what that means. And it’s sacrificing marginalised communities on the altar of unchecked capitalist profiteering. Of course, to the likes of corporate capitalists in the 2030 Prosperity Alliance, this invariably includes welfare cuts. And of course, those ‘difficult trade-offs’ are a lifeline to the working-class and disabled people those same capitalists are relentlessly exploiting for financial gain.

The self-proclaimed “apolitical campaign” says it’s focused:

on harnessing Britain’s competitive advantages to deliver a decade of rising prosperity and close the “inaction gap” between what the country needs and what politics alone can deliver.

Naturally, that means big business “stakeholders” are here to save the day.

Obviously, the alliance is shamelessly playing into a timeworn paternalistic narrative that the ‘wealth creators’ know best.

Setting aside the environmental sham that is unchecked and perpetual economic expansion on a finite planet, the idea the country needs to listen to a mob of money-grubbing wealth hoarders is among the biggest capitalist cons going.

What they mean when they talk about ‘economic growth’ is burgeoning the bottom line in favour of the billionaire class.

Whose interests does it serve? Not yours

The 2030 Prosperity Alliance is another lobby outfit sowing the scam that the white ruling elite’s interests are the ‘national interests’.

It’s likely no coincidence either that the alliance is attempting to manufacture consent for benefit cuts at the very same time media-political war-hawks are driving a divisive discourse around ‘defence’ spending and the welfare system. Because whether it’s scapegoating and extracting labour from marginalised communities at home, or othering the ‘enemy’ abroad and exploiting marginalised Black and Brown Global Majority communities, it all serves the same goal – and the same people in power.

Who’d have guessed a group of greedy capitalists would want to turn the public against welfare claimants? If there’s one thing the public does not need to ‘prosper’, it’s another murky free-market lobby group to tell the government how to squeeze them for profits even more.