YESTERDAY, The Daily Telegraph newspaper reported that splits had erupted in the heart of Keir Starmer’s Cabinet between deputy prime minister Angela Rayner and chancellor Rachel Reeves.
According to the Telegraph, Rayner was responsible for a secret memo submitted to Reeves’ department last March which outlined alternatives to the planned spending cuts the chancellor was poised to introduce.
The spending cuts Reeves is pushing through targets the welfare budget, with cuts to disability benefits that will hit 700,000 families who are already officially designated as being in ‘relative poverty’.
The leaked memo reveals that Rayner and her team put forward ‘more radical’ ideas to cut public spending and bring down the massive national debt.
The ideas could be ‘contentious’ but were ‘worthy of careful consideration’, the memo acknowledges. These ‘contentious’ ideas involved transferring the attack on the disabled to migrant workers and their families by limiting their access to the state pension, limiting access to welfare benefits and increasing the NHS surcharge charged to foreign nationals for NHS treatment.
The memo states: ‘Migrants who have spent five to ten years in the UK generally receive access to a broad range of welfare entitlements’ and it urges that Reeves consider changes that would affect state pension rights for those who have made contributions for 10 years, and are at present entitled to claim when reaching retirement age.’
Rayner’s plans were aimed at trying to convince Reeves and Starmer that attacking the benefits and pensions of migrant workers instead of cutting disability benefits would move Labour closer to the right wing of the Tory party and Nigel Farage’s Reform outfit and win popularity amongst voters.
This emerging split in Starmer’s cabinet reflects the massive split that is tearing the Labour Party apart as it attempts to force the working class to pay for the crisis of British capitalism.
Reeves has become a target for those like Rayner who are terrified that all the cuts to jobs and benefits have caused a massive revolt and a turn away from Labour by millions of workers, as demonstrated at the disastrous results of the recent council elections.
Rayner’s ‘solution’ to this is to move the Labour government firmly in the direction of Farage and right wing Tories – blaming migrant workers and their families for the capitalist crisis and demanding they be made to pay.
On Wednesday, at Prime Minister’s Question Time, Starmer out of the blue, announced a partial U-Turn on his and Reeves decision to deny pensioners winter fuel payments, following a major rebellion from Labour MPs.
Ending this allowance in the first days of the Labour government was designed to prove to the international financiers that Starmer and Reeves were prepared to heap poverty on workers in order to satisfy the bankers and hedge funds who buy up UK government debt, that they were a ‘safe pair of hands’ for capitalism.
The Labour government could rely on the TUC leaders to damp down any mass opposition to savage cuts to benefits and public services, the bosses and bankers were assured.
This notion has been shattered by the surging uprising of workers and youth against Labour’s attempt to ‘super-charge’ Tory austerity. It has caused a dramatic split in Starmer’s government.
With Reeves being blamed for this crisis and with calls for her to be sacked, Labour is aligning with Farage and the Reform Party policy of attempting to split the working class by blaming migrant workers for unemployment, low wages and the demand by the ruling class that the welfare state is abolished to pay down the national debt, currently at over £3 trillion and rising by the hour.
With the Labour government being ripped apart by splits and the Tory party completely shattered Starmer and Rayner are preparing the ground for a coalition government with Reform and right wing Tories.
The powerful UK working class must now get ready to dump Starmer’s government and force the TUC to call a general strike to replace it with a Workers Government and a socialist planned economy. This is the only way forward!
