LABOUR Chancellor Rachel Reeves denied that Wednesday’s Budget was anything other than a massive austerity attack on workers with the sick and disabled deliberately targeted for benefit cuts.
Responding to all the evidence and statistics, including findings of the government’s Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), that her savage cuts to benefits will drive 250,000 people into poverty, Reeves told Sky News she was ‘absolutely certain’ that this would not happen, and cutting benefits will ‘instead of pushing people into poverty are going to get people into work’.
The DWP impact assessment said that 3.2 million families will lose an average of £1,720 a year as a result of Reeves austerity cuts.
No one will be fooled for a moment at Reeves’ callous dishonesty in denying the assessment of the Labour government’s own official findings.
To start with, there are no companies or businesses desperate to recruit the thousands of people with disabilities. On the contrary, companies across the UK have already put a freeze on employment or reduced staff, in anticipation of the increase in employers’ tax contributions for every employee that she introduced in her Autumn budget, and which takes effect in April.
This is without taking into account the economic catastrophe being loaded onto the UK, Europe and the world by US president Donald Trump. He is relentlessly ramping up his tariff war on all goods produced outside America.
With equal contempt and arrogance, Reeves and the Labour leadership completely dismiss the warnings from their own Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR). This is an impact assessment accompanying her statement saying that unemployment was set to rise, and that even if Reeves’ claim was true, more than 20 people will be poorer for every one person her ‘reforms’ push into work.
Even The Guardian newspaper, normally supportive of Starmer’s government, in an editorial yesterday designated ‘Labour’s plan for stability as austerity in disguise’.
In a further article in the same edition, columnist Gaby Hinsliff notes that the impending trade war by Trump would wipe out any of Reeves’ claimed savings overnight.
Hinsliff reported on the rumours, persisting in Whitehall, that to try and appease Trump, Starmer and Reeves are considering scrapping the UK’s digital tax currently levied on US tech giants saying: ‘Few things would be harder for Labour backbenchers to swallow than the prospect of slashing help for vulnerable people, while letting tech billionaires off the hook to appease the US president.’
Already these backbenchers are facing the wrath of their constituents, over a Labour government elected on the promise of being a government for working people and business, that is being so shamelessly revealed to be a government prepared to heap absolute poverty onto millions of families, in order to pay off the massive debt that is drowning bankrupt British capitalism.
A split within the ranks of the Labour MPs is today a very real prospect, with Starmer and the right wing turning to the Tory Party for support.
The Tories, of course, have been in complete agreement with the thrust of Labour’s austerity programme, only criticising it for not going far or deep enough.
Some form of coalition government, between the Starmer right wing and the remnants of the Tory Party, is increasingly being viewed by the capitalist class as the way to drive through super austerity cuts, that would dump the entire economic crisis onto the backs of workers and their families.
The powerful working class wouldn’t stand for Tory austerity and they will not tolerate a Labour government destroying the welfare state and forcing millions of workers into extreme poverty to rescue a British capitalist system that is crashing into recession.
The TUC leaders are content to sit idly by and watch Starmer’s government unleashing a vicious austerity war on workers and the most vulnerable sections of society.
The immediate issue is to sack these leaders and replace them with a leadership prepared to organise the power of the working class in a general strike to kick out this Labour government and bring in a workers government and a socialist planned economy.
Join the WRP and Young Socialists to build up the leadership required to put an end to bankrupt capitalism through the victory of the British Socialist revolution
