‘Deciding to balance the books on the backs of the poor and vulnerable is a bad political choice that will boomerang on Reeves and the Labour Government,’ writes The Mirror’s Kevin Maguire
Rachel Reeves would’ve gone to war with a UK Conservative Government had any Tory Chancellor kicked another 250,000 people, including 50,000 children, into poverty.
When the Right-wing knave would also be grabbing an average £1,720 per year from more than 3m families with £4,500 hits on 800,000 who’ll lose or never now receive disability payments, she’d beat the callous cash slasher into a bloody pulp.
So Rachel the Benefit Snatcher can expect no mercy from Labour rebels, trade union leaders, charities, political opponents and her victims when she, not a Tory, is the architect of this gruesome assault.
Neil Kinnock’s famous 1985 ferocious assault on Far Left Liverpool councillors springs to mind when Labour’s then leader ripped into Militants for sending workers redundancy notices in taxis.
Forty years later you end in the grotesque chaos of a Labour Chancellor – a Labour Chancellor – hiring officials to scuttle around a country handing out poverty to its own sick and disabled.
The Militant Moderate in the Treasury’s war on the ailing is a political stain that will be impossible to cleanse when it is a world away from what people voted Labour into power to do.
Reeves was punchy in the House of Commons, reminding the nation she inherited a financial basket case from the Conservatives and the world is highly volatile without mentioning Donald Trump’s mayhem.
OBR homework markers halving economic growth this year to 1% from 2% was offset by slightly better forecasts the next four years and she sold a line that households would soon be £500 in pocket after tax.
But spending cuts on the horizon away from health and defence plus swinging the £5billion welfare blunt axe are party poopers.
There’s some validity that Tories demanding deeper benefit pain would be worse yet that’s still no excuse for a Labour Chancellor.
The language of priorities, declared Labour NHS founder Nye Bevan, is the religion of socialism.
Deciding to balance the books on the backs of the poor and vulnerable is a bad political choice that will boomerang on Reeves and the Labour Government.
