THIS week, The Guardian newspaper, using the Freedom of Information Act, published the Labour government’s own internal assessment of the impact of the planned cuts to disability benefits.
According to this assessment by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), these cuts to disability benefits will hit 700,000 families who are already officially designated as being in ‘relative poverty’.
This figure of 700,000 is on top of the 250,000 people that a government impact assessment made in March estimated would be driven below the poverty line, as a result of Labour chancellor Rachel Reeves’ cuts to disability benefits.
These cuts to the Personal Independence Payments (PIP) were announced by chancellor Reeves in her Spring Budget in March, and at that time the findings of the DWP that 250,000 people would be driven into poverty was well known.
Reeves dismissed these findings by the government’s own officials by insisting that she was ‘absolutely certain’ this wouldn’t happen because cutting benefits for disabled people meant ‘instead of pushing people into poverty are going to get people back to work’.
Now, it turns out that even the figure of 250,000 is an underestimation of the number of families whose lives will be destroyed.
Disability rights campaigners called the new disclosure ‘truly shocking’ with Mark Harrison from the group Disabled People Against Cuts saying it was ‘unthinkable to push disabled people, already in poverty, deeper into the mire and further away from the jobs market’.
Unthinkable for workers but certainly not unthinkable for Reeves and prime minister Keir Starmer.
The cuts to PIP have only one aim, to cut public spending on disabled and those caring for them, with not a thought for the damage inflicted in Labour’s pursuit of forcing the working class to pay for the capitalist crisis.
Forcing the most vulnerable to pay for the bankruptcy of British capitalism was behind the decision by Starmer to tear up election pledges and end the winter fuel allowance for pensioners.
If Starmer and the right-wing thought that the disabled and pensioners would be ‘easy targets’ for the super-charged austerity they are intent on forcing through, then they were badly mistaken.
Labour MPs are terrified that the fuel allowance was the number one issue raised on doorsteps in last week’s local elections.
The elections demonstrated conclusively that the working class will not tolerate Labour massively ramping up austerity attacks on benefits, wages and jobs, just as they refused to put up with the last Tory government.
No wonder Labour MPs are panicking and demanding that Starmer retreats on benefit and fuel allowance cuts.
For his part, Starmer responded to last week’s massive defeats saying he would cut ‘faster and deeper’, in order to rescue a British capitalist system that is diving over the cliff into recession and bankruptcy, and determined to take the working class down with it.
The demand that workers passively accept being driven into poverty to ‘save’ the country was made public this week when health secretary Wes Streeting responded to the proposed ballot for strike action by resident doctors (formally called junior doctors) for a pay increase by rejecting their demands out of hand.
After 14 years of Tory austerity that have kept their wages below the level they had in 2008, resident doctors are being told by Streeting that this is the price they must pay to keep the NHS from collapse.
Similarly, every worker in the public sector has been told the same thing – that workers must accept wage cuts and poverty levels of pay to keep public services from collapse.
While workers are rising up and rejecting a Labour government that serves only the interests of capitalism, the TUC is doing nothing, refusing to call any action in opposition to Starmer’s war on benefits, wages and public services.
These TUC leaders must be sacked and replaced with a leadership prepared to immediately organise the full strength of the working class in a general strike to kick out the Starmer government and bring in a workers government and socialism.