TWO weeks ago the Labour government’s work and pensions secretary Liz Kendall called the two-child benefit cap ‘a stain on our society’, and this week the Starmer-led party showed just how hollow and treacherous these words were when they voted against an amendment to abolish this hated cap and disciplined the seven Labour MPs who refused to bow to Starmer’s orders.
These seven MPs have had the whip withdrawn for at least 6 months and can no longer sit as Labour MPs but as Independents, for having the principles to stand up for the hundreds of thousands of children driven into poverty and hunger as a result of a Tory cap introduced in 2017.
This cap stops parents on universal credit claiming benefit support for any third or subsequent child born after April 2017. The effect of this cap has devastated the lives of children and families, with the latest official figures showing a record 1.6 million kids living in families hit by this cap last year – the equivalent to one-in-nine of all children in the UK and an increase of 100,000 in the previous year.
Over half of the families (59%) of the 450,000 households hit by this brutal Tory cut had at least one parent in work. The savage financial toll on working class families has been catastrophic with a loss of £3,455 a year for each child affected and a childhood of unremitting hunger and deprivation.
None of this is the slightest concern to Starmer and the right-wing who run the Labour government, whose only policy is spending what bankrupt British capitalism can afford on workers and their families.
According to the leading poverty charity, Child Poverty Action, abolishing the cap would be the most cost-effective way of immediately reducing child poverty, lifting 300,000 children above the breadline and pulling 700,000 more out of extreme poverty.
The charity estimates it would cost the government £1.7 billion. Compare this amount with the pledge made by Starmer last year that the UK would give the Ukraine £3 billion a year ‘for as long as it takes’, a pledge recommitted to immediately after the election.
No money for starving children at home but unlimited billions for Ukraine’s fascist-led Zelensky regime to carry on with an imperialist war to weaken Russia and open up the country and its resources to capitalist exploitation.
Indeed, Starmer is falling in line with the drive by imperialism for a global war on all fronts to try and regain its military domination of the world.
This week, the UK army’s new chief of staff, Sir Roly Walker, warned that there was an urgent need to plough billions into building up the military for a World War in the next three years. He named Russia, China, North Korea and Iran as the main enemies.
Along with the £3 billion a year to the Ukrainian fascists, Starmer has committed the Labour government to increase government defence spending to 2.5% of the UK’s GDP (the total wealth produced by the UK), boasting it was an increase over the Tories 2.3%.
Starmer has positioned the Labour government as the means for the capitalist ruling class to wage war on the ‘enemies’ of imperialist domination and force the working class and their children to pay for it through poverty and starvation.
The last Tory government was too weak to carry out this war on two fronts, but armed with a massive majority, achieved on the lowest turn out ever in a general election and driven by the hatred of workers for the Tories, Starmer is preparing Labour to wage a class war to the finish on behalf of the bosses and bankers.
The working class must immediately demand that the TUC take action for a ‘regime change’ to remove Starmer and the right-wing ‘lieutenants of capital’ that dominate Labour, by calling a general strike to defeat their war on children and their drive towards a new imperialists war.
A general strike to remove Labour’s class traitors and advance to a Workers Government and a socialist planned economy is the only way forward.
Only the Workers Revolutionary Party and Young Socialists stand and fight on this programme and are prepared to implement it – join the WRP and the Young Socialists today.
Forward to the victory of the British and World Socialist Revolutions. Consign capitalism to the dustbin of history!
