OPINION
Prime Minister Keir Starmer has no intention of cutting benefits (Image: POOL/AFP via Getty Images)
Sir Keir Starmer’s new-found zeal to cut benefits is a mirage: nothing more than a smoke and mirrors trick to convince the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) that Labour can find savings in order to balance the books.
For Labour has absolutely no intention at all of cutting the benefits bill – and the only people it hopes to fool are the folks at the OBR, with the pretence it can be trusted with the country’s finances. It has nothing to do with stopping the extra 1,000 people a day claiming Personal Independence Payment or PIP, the main disability benefit, or finding a solution to the 9.3 million people aged 16 to 64 who are now economically inactive in the UK.
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I know better than anyone how difficult it is to cut the welfare bill. I was a minister for many years in the Department for Work and Pensions working with Iain Duncan Smith to get people into work and off welfare dependency – and we were opposed every step of the way by the Labour Party, even when we were getting an extra 1,000 people a day into work and achieving record employment rates.
Indeed, Labour protested and campaigned against me personally, trolled me, stalked me, camped outside my house and even sent their future Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell to come to my home area to repeat calls for me to be lynched. The current Chancellor Rachel Reeves, as Shadow Benefits Minister, was one of those leading the charge against setting conditions to receive benefits and opposing sanctions for non-compliance.
The simple fact is that Labour hates benefit changes. It just isn’t in their DNA to deliver cuts, and you cannot make a crab walk straight. It won’t reduce the welfare bill – whatever guff it gets the OBR to swallow. Indeed, all the indications are that the benefits bill is going to balloon further.
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Apart from asking the nation to look down the sofa for money, Reeves has tried virtually everything to try and find cash. First, she sent a missive to every department and quango asking for growth ideas – which seemed to be ignored – then she repeated the pledge to deliver Heathrow’s third runway, until fellow Cabinet colleagues and climate fanatics squashed it. Finally she shot off to China, with begging bowl in hand, but came back empty handed.
These announced cuts are therefore born out of Reeves trying to save her own skin and fill her ever widening, self-created, black hole. Her final step, and increasingly her only step, is more tax rises – if she can find anything left to tax.
The truth is that Labour would sooner grab yet more money off the working population than take money away from the benefits system, and that’s what’s coming next. But don’t worry, if Labour destroys any more businesses, we’ll all be signing on.
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