LABOUR Party leader Sir Keir Starmer caused a public split in the Labour Party when, on Sunday, he committed any future Labour government to keeping the hated two-child benefit cap.
This cap prevents parents from claiming Universal Credit or Child Tax Credit for a third or any additional child.
All those who thought that Tony Blair was the absolute low point in the degeneration of Labour will be shocked to learn that after Starmer’s pledge to keep the cap he earned a new accolade on social media – ‘Sir Kid Starver’!
The two-child benefit cap was brought in by the then Tory Chancellor George Osborne in 2017, to drive parents back to work or force them to work extra hours.
The Child Poverty Action Group states that this cruel policy hit about 400,000 families, with parents missing out on £3,000 a year for every child over the Tory limit of two.
Nearly 1.4 million children in Britain suffered deprivation under this Tory policy that a study published this month by the Nuffield Foundation concluded was ‘poverty-producing’. That of course was the Tory intention from the start, to withhold benefits from low-paid working class families to ‘incentivise’ them, through hunger, to slave away to try to feed their families while providing cheap labour for the bosses.
Child Poverty Action estimate that ending the cap would instantly lift 250,000 children out of extreme poverty and vastly improve the lives of a further 1.25 million. This is the cap that Starmer has now pledged to uphold, despite all the previous condemnations by Labour.
Labour’s Shadow Works and Pensions Secretary Jonathan Ashworth recently damned the cap as ‘heinous’ while deputy party leader Angela Rayner insisted in 2020 that ‘the obscene and inhuman two-child cap must go.’
Today they are all singing a different tune, declaring that any future Labour government would inherit a bankrupt British capitalist system that cannot afford benefits to keep millions of children from starving, just as it cannot afford to pay any wage increases that break Starmer’s ‘fiscal rules’ of cutting inflation and the massive national debt by making the working class and their families pay.
This has led to a growing number of Labour MPs and millions of workers and the middle class to ask what is the point of Starmer? – except to stab the working class in the back!
His policies are indistinguishable from the Tories, while his hatred of unions and striking workers matches, or even exceeds, that of some Tory MPs.
While Starmer is happy to consign children to poverty, sack any shadow minister who dares to support strikers, and block from standing candidates who exhibit the slightest signs of having socialist ideals, he is desperate to crawl to the capitalist class.
Last Friday, it was reported in the financial press that Rachel Reeves, Labour’s Shadow Chancellor, has sent a personal letter to Tory financial backers inviting them to one-on-one breakfast meetings.
Breakfast for Tory donors and empty bowls on the table for millions of children says it all about Starmer.
With the capitalist class deserting the wreckage of the Tory government, Starmer is pitching for their billions and support as he works towards splitting the Labour Party and preparing for a coalition government with the Lib/Dems and sections of the Tory party that remain.
This would be an emergency government of national salvation for capitalism, with Labour free from the constraint of relying on union funding and completely subservient to the ruling class and its requirement to smash the unions and save capitalism from a powerful working class that is refusing to see its lives and the lives of its children destroyed to keep this bankrupt capitalist system from collapse.
This is Starmer’s only mission.
The only way forward for the working class to resolve this crisis is to dump Starmer and the right wing, and for the trade unions to immediately demand the TUC call a general strike to kick out the Tories and put an end to plans for a national government by bringing in a workers government and socialism.
Only the WRP and Young Socialists fight for this policy and perspective – join today to build the revolutionary party to organise the victory of the British socialist revolution.
