If you ignore their words and observe their actions, Rachel Reeves and Keir Starmer have been clear on what they intend for Britain. Their mission is to dismantle the welfare state, privatise what’s left of the public good, and direct more money to the rich. This is why this week the Labour Party simultaneously promised to attack poor, sick, and disabled people via the DWP at the same time that they ‘softened’ tax changes for non-doms.
In other words, these Labour folk are nasty pieces of work; something which was obvious to everyone when chancellor Rachel Reeves did the interview circuit on 26 January:
Rachel Reeves is asked about watering down her non-dom policy.#trevorphillips points out Reeves says she's made the change because she's listened to the super rich & he asks, why won't you listen to other people in the same way? pic.twitter.com/Dh4APiqMJQ
— Saul Staniforth (@SaulStaniforth) January 26, 2025
The all-new Nasty Party starring Rachel Reeves and Keir Starmer
On 16 January, Canary writer Rachel Charlton-Dailey reported that:
On Thursday 16 January, a high court judge ruled what disabled people already knew, the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) had acted unlawfully in their controversial plans to reform the Work Capability Assessment (WCA). However, the DWP has also revealed that the Labour Party government is planning on going ahead with the WCA changes the Tories first tabled – but it will run another consultation, first.
Disabled activist and all-round legend Ellen Clifford took the DWP to court over a consultation which ran for just eight weeks in 2023. The department later used the evidence gathered from the consultation to make changes to the WCA, and who qualified as Limited Capability for Work Related Activity (LCWRA) – which are due to come into effect this year.
If they come in, the plans would see over 400,000 disabled people lose around £416 a month, something which could lead to countless deaths – this is on top of the god knows how many deaths the WCA has already caused.
Labour have all sorts of excuses for why they’re doing this, including:
- Cutting down fraud.
- Helping people who can work find jobs.
- Saving the country money.
Addressing these one by one, disability benefits fraud is close to 0% – i.e. it basically doesn’t exist. We also doubt Labour is serious about wanting to get people into work when it’s now talking about taking away benefit claimants’ driving licenses. We further doubt they want to save the country money when they’ve announced plans to go soft on taxing wealthy non-doms.
For the few, not the many
Interviewing chancellor Reeves on Sunday 26 January, Trevor Phillips asked:
The point I’m really driving at here is that for some some people, this concession, let’s call it that, to non doms, contrasts with what you’re doing to other people. And this morning, you’ve now written that you’re going to tackle… the spiralling benefits bill by taking away people’s driving licenses, getting people off the sick. Now this may be justified, but many working people will think that non doms get sympathy and people on welfare get ‘tough love’.
An angry Reeves responded:
If people aren’t entitled to benefits, they shouldn’t be getting them.
We’ve got good news for Reeves here; this is already what’s happening (bar the 0.1% engaged in Disability Living Allowance fraud, accounting for less than £1m in total). She continued:
And at the moment, we waste billions of pounds as a country every year in giving money to people who aren’t entitled to it.
No, we don’t actually, as noted above. We spend money trying to give sick and disabled people some level of support and dignity, and we spend far less on that than we should. Reeves continued again:
And what we’re saying is if you’re ripping off the state and ripping off other taxpayers, we will take money directly out of your bank account, and you risk losing your driving license. So proper penalties for people who, frankly, are getting money that they are not entitled to, and we’ll crack down on that. By the end of the forecast period, we’re gonna be raising more than £4bn a year by cracking down on fraud and error.
Again, no you’re not, you’re going to ‘raise’ extra money by making sick and disabled people destitute, as a recent court hearing demonstrated (reported by John Pring of Disability News Service):
Finding DWP’s actions unlawful, Mr Justice Calver said in his 42-page judgment that the eight-week consultation – issued by Stride in September 2023 – had failed to explain that planned reforms to the work capability assessment (WCA) would cut the benefits of 424,000 disabled people, with many worse off by at least £416 a month.
If the reforms became law, those 424,000 disabled people would also have to comply with work-related requirements and face the possibility of sanctions, while another 33,000 disabled claimants who were already in the limited capability for work group would now have to comply with even tougher work-related requirements and potential sanctions.
The same article clarified that the move wasn’t about helping sick and disabled people; it was about making their lives worse for the purpose of penny pinching:
Stride had failed to make it clear that one of the key motives for his reforms was to cut spending by about £3 billion over four years.
He and his ministers had claimed that the reforms were intended to support more disabled people into work, yet only 15,000 of the 457,000 affected were expected by DWP to enter employment.
Internal DWP documents, revealed during the legal case, showed that nearly 100,000 more disabled people could be forced into poverty.
The Scum (the newspaper, not Rachel Reeves)
Many responded to negatively to the loathsome Reeves and her appearance:
Chancellor Rachel Reeves says it's "perverse" that people with disabilities receive higher welfare payments if they're unable to work.
And it's not "a lot of money" @RachelReevesMP.
Absolutely reprehensible comments. We are more than workers of the state. We are people. pic.twitter.com/Nv0MPUwlh6
— Alex Tiffin (@RespectIsVital) January 25, 2025
10,000 out of 3,000,000 millionaires left the country last year – a tiny 0.33% of the total. These people would rather leave than pay tax here – good riddance I say – let’s not change our approach to try and appease rich freeloaders. https://t.co/LK2fcZqbkC
— Dale Vince (@DaleVince) January 25, 2025
Others are criticising Reeves writing in the Scum ‘newspaper’:
Cutting benefits for the most vulnerable people in the country is cruel and counterproductive for economic growth
It represents wealth redistribution from the poor to the rich, who spend less of their money
Rachel Reeves and Keir Starmer have made Labour nastier than the Tories https://t.co/F06uEU621U
— troovus (@troovus) January 25, 2025
People are also increasingly commenting on what an incompetent, robotic weirdo Reeves is:
Between this and "listening to the concerns of the non-dom community", I'm increasingly convinced that Rachel Reeves is the product of an AI generator that hasn't had enough inputs. pic.twitter.com/9N6Fn46DqG
— Ash Sarkar (@AyoCaesar) January 25, 2025
2025: Sky News, "Rachel Reeves to soften non-dom tax crackdown"
2022: Rachel Reeves, "Can the Chancellor Rishi Sunak explain why he won't close the outdated, unfair, and unjustifiable tax loophole that sees 70,000 people benefit from the non dom tax status"
Imagine becoming the… pic.twitter.com/1rRxcrUX9N
— Farrukh (@implausibleblog) January 25, 2025
Some are pointing out that the state of affairs under Starmer and Reeves was all so very predictable:
When I criticised Starmer for writing in the Sun Labour shills attacked me screaming, cult, Tory enabler, and something about grown up politics. Now “we have listened to the non dom community” Reeves writes in the Sun attacking sick & disabled people as a drain on our resources pic.twitter.com/kZoerJkDfi
— Cantona & Best (@bestcanton7) January 26, 2025
As I watch Liz Kendall, Rachel Reeves, Wes Streeting, & other @UKLabour MPs dismantling of what's left of our welfare safety net, I wanted to give a particular shout out to the Labour right, Lib-dem interlopers & all the other deluded fools who told me in 2019 was a Tory enabler.
— CrémantCommunarde #ResistHate🕊️ (@0Calamity) January 26, 2025
Rachel Reeves crashed the economy and is taking her failures out on the sick and disabled.
— Tory Fibs (@ToryFibs) January 26, 2025
The failed economy
To be clear, Labour would need to do far more than just increase non dom taxes if they were serious about spiralling wealth inequality. As Tax Justice UK note, fairer taxation would include:
New taxes on wealth We’re campaigning for a new wealth tax: a 2% levy on individuals who own assets worth more than £10 million – it would affect 0.04% of the UK population and would raise £24 billion a year. We’re also campaigning to apply national insurance to investment income, raising up to £10.2 billion a year.
Reform existing taxes on wealth Those who get their income from stocks, shares and other assets often pay far less tax than those who work. We campaign for the tax rates on these forms of income to be equalised with income tax. So we all pay the same rates. It could raise £16.7 billion a year.
Clamp down on tax havens Hundreds of billions of pounds are lost every single year to tax avoidance via tax havens. We campaign for global action against tax havens. We’re demanding more transparency – and global minimum rates of tax, so countries aren’t undercutting each other.
Figures such as Gary Stevenson of Gary’s Economics are also highlighting the issue spiralling wealth inequality:
You don’t hear Labour talking about this because they don’t want to make things better for everyone; they simply want to keep the scam going for the benefit of their wealthy donors.
Rachel Reeves: Torynomics
Let’s not mince words – Labour and Reeves are reprehensible and incompetent politicians who are repeating the privatisation and austerity failures of the past few decades. Surprise, surprise; repeating the same mistakes isn’t going to lead to prosperity, and targeting impoverished sick and disabled people over billionaire layabouts isn’t going to fix the economy.
Featured image via Sky News