I got an email from Rachel Reeves today.  It was sent to all Labour Party members and was entitled Security for working people and renewal for our country – Our mission. I looked carefully through its 500 words.  Not one word on the savage cuts made in the Spring Statement to Personal Independence Payments (PIP) and the additional health related Universal Credit payments. Not one word.

You might think that Reeves assumes Labour members do not watch the news, listen to the Today programme or read newspapers or social media. All of these media yesterday were full of her plan to cut £5 billion from spending on disabled and chronically sick people. The email did not even include the Labour lie that the cuts are all about getting people back to work. It did not even mention another untruth – that this was about reforming a welfare system that was crippling the economy and holding back growth. 

Just like the way she failed to understand the furore over receiving a ‘freebie’ box for a concert, Rachel really is living in some sort of alternative universe.  One writer from the Novara website correctly concluded that what is really frightening is that Reeves actually believes the false narrative about fiscal rules, no need for progressive tax and genuflecting before the god of growth. At least with Cameron, Osborne or Johnson you can be fairly sure that they did not really believe that cutting libraries or welfare was the key to getting the capitalist economy moving.

On the Today programme this morning Robinson, for once, did put her on the spot as she refused to answer how cutting thousands of pounds of year from disabled people would contribute to growth. He played a clip of someone with a brain injury who explained how taking away vital monetary support would make it more difficult to keep working and lead to him losing his house. 

Whatever the crimes and limitations of the Blair/Brown government, they never cut the welfare payments to sick and disabled people quite so brazenly and brutally.  Indeed their tax credits and other measures lessened child poverty to a degree. Today one specialist think tank says that these measures will increase the number of children in poverty by hundreds of thousands.  Even the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP)and the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) in yesterday’s impact assessment say 250,000 more people will be pushed into relative poverty.

Labour manipulates the stats

Reeves has concocted an analysis that says families will be £500 a year better off under Labour but this assumes people forced off benefits will find reasonably paid jobs and that the housing programme and other measures produce growth. Average income figures erase the reality of very deep inequality and this is an absolute figure not adjusted for inflation over this whole period. How can such crude figure factor in how the economy will develop over the next 5 years with lower growth forecast and the possibility of a trade war.

On the other hand the Resolution Foundation has come up with a diametrically opposed calculation that average families will be £500 worse off. What we can be absolutely certain of is the devastating effect on the 3.2 million people currently receiving these benefits. The amount of money each person will lose will vary but it is anything between £1700 and £7000 a year.  Would Reeves or any MPs calmly accept a government cutting their salaries from one day to the next by such figures?

At the lively protest of several thousand we attended on Wednesday outside Downing St and Parliament. we heard the harsh reality of what these cuts will mean for disabled and sick people.   Lisa Hammond, a member of the EastEnders cast explained how PIP payments were not some extra luxury that allowed disabled people to live a gilded life but were essential to allow them to participate better at work or the community. She spoke powerfully about the way people are disabled by a society that makes daily life  inaccessible. – see video link below. John McDonnell and Jeremy Corbyn both spoke and said how they never expected a Labour government to treat disabled people in this way. John said these measures would kill and this is not alarmist  – desperate people will take their own lives. 

Professor Barr, from Ulster University, was one of the team who published ground-breaking research in 2015 that concluded that the government’s programme to reassess people on incapacity benefit through the work capability assessment(WCA) was linked to about 600 suicides in just three years. The DWP destroyed evidence to avoid further evidence of such tragedies.

Labour are Tory-lite

Labour loyalists and apologists for this government continually go on about how the Tories are worse and that Labour supports working people and those needing welfare. The reality is that it is purely a matter of degree – as if that justifies these cuts.  Worse, the gap is getting smaller.

Just to show a bit more contempt for people on the receiving end of the cuts Treasury Minister, Darren Jones , tried to cover for Reeves by what he thought was a clever way to explain away the cuts for the little people who do not understand how complex government is. He used the example of cutting his son’s pocket money by £10 to incentivise him to go out and do a paper round. Of course he left out the key part of any analogy, his son is in good health – he does not need an expensive adapted bike or a reduced round so that he can ‘get into work’ nor does he need a modified  home or personal carer to wash him after work. 

Stephen Timms, supposedly a Christian socialist and a minister for disability, tried to explain how these levels of disability can be easily modified to encourage Labour’s great reform.  Just a bit of tinkering that would benefit everyone. He could not really justify why new rules would mean expensive and probably insufficiently nutrious micro-waved meals were sufficient for disabled people since points for getting help with cooking would no longer get you your PIP. Could you imagine for one minute Timms or any other minister putting up with being restricted to microwaved meals? All the while this government pontificates about healthy eating and preventing obesity.

All these Labour ministers are morally bankrupt and help to repeat tabloid lies about sick and disabled people fiddling the system. What they are doing is actively dividing one group of the working class (lucky to have some sort of job) to another one (who are denied access to work by a system that disables them).  A disunited working class is exactly what the bosses prefer and they pay their captive media millions to ensure this is the story in the news.

Disabled people always have to adapt not business

If you followed all the discussions in the last weeks, all the waffle has been about getting disabled people to adapt, to change their attitude. We will even give you these wonderful work coaches who will get you back to work. Not a word about how employers do very little to facilitate access to work. If your prime motivation is profit it is obvious that hiring disabled or sick people is a bit of a risk to the balance sheet. As long as the capitalist law of value and exploitations exists there will always be restrictions on disabled people getting work. The privatisation of huge sectors of the economy started by Thatcher and endorsed by Blair makes it even harder for the state to intervene to support disabled people.

Young people are being particularly battered with these cuts. For those aged under 22 the so-called ‘reform’ will have a devastating impact on young people including young care leavers. The latter are more likely than other young people to have health conditions or disabilities due to early trauma and a care system that fails to provide the support they need. Many have no family to turn to for financial or emotional assistance. 

After supporting efforts to recognise that mental health is as important as physical health and that it is a growing issue, particularly since the pandemic, the government has grotesquely suggested that too much mental illness is being diagnosed.  Again for Labour, the fact that work can be low paid, insecure and alienating and that decent housing is not a right is totally removed from their equation about mental health. If your main pitch is to partner with capital with growth you are not going to put forward any policies that infringe on the total sovereignty of business to operate as it sees fit.

Labour are not even competent

Not only is the government dishonest, hypocritical and heartless it is also incompetent. One reason that the OBR demanded Reeves should make more cuts is that she blithely assumed that once a disabled or sick person loses benefits they will magically get jobs or conveniently disappear from the balance sheet.  What will happen is that local councils, hospitals or others will have to pick up the pieces and foot the bill. For example if someone loses their PIP they also will lose their carer allowance.  Yes the government made a big fuss about helping carers before the election. Now they seem to want to cut them too.

Class and racism is also excluded from Labour narrative on the reform. For obvious reasons poorer people tend to get more sick and have more accidents, particularly at work, than richer people. Richer families also can provide private resources for their loved ones.  Policy institutes have shown these austerity cuts will hit deprived areas more. In 2019-20, more than half of people receiving a disability benefit were in the most materially deprived fifth of the population (according to Professor Marmot, author of 2010 report on health inequality).

A big part of Labour’s lying narrative is this notion of a £70 billion expanding balloon of welfare payments that will blow up the whole economy and our way of life.  If, instead of looking simplistically at absolute numbers you take percentages, and also compare these to similar economies you will see that Britain is not an outlier but in fact very much aligned with European countries.  The percentage of people in work is broadly similar. What is different, at least in northern Europe is that unemployment benefit is much higher over there and skills training is often excellent.

Disabled people and allies fight back

At the moment there is more unease and tension about these cuts inside Labour’s Parliamentary Party than over the two child benefit or the winter fuel allowance.  Even some of the more pro-Starmer clones that were carefully selected as candidates are privately fuming. They might have not moved a finger on Palestine or the U turns on energy or tax but hitting disabled and sick people hard is not something they joined Labour for.  Less and less of these MPs are working class or from a trade union background but many are ex-councillors or have worked for charities, policy groups or quite simply know people in these situations. They are familiar with how tough it is for people to get the benefits they are entitled to. 

The left should definitely try and build a campaign with these MPs and not dismiss them in a sectarian way. However you wonder how many will actually stand up and vote in May against these cuts.  By the time they vote the storm may have been tempered.  A week ago there was talk of 80 MPs but according to press reports this has declined to 40 or even 30.  Neverthess, we should be putting pressure on our local MPs to stand up and be counted.  Reform will definitely be making use of these cuts demagogically to build their base. If MPs go along with the reform it will make it easier for Farage.

We argue for a wealth tax and changing the arbitrary fiscal rules that prevent more borrowing.  Both measures would easily allow us to restore and improve these benefits. 

Disabled people are organising militant protests with or without the support of MPs.  Protests took place throughout Britain last weekend and this Wednesday and the battle will continue. The vote in May on accepting these cuts will be a particular focus.

Dianne Abbott summarised the situation perfectly and her sound bite has been taken up by many – ‘the government is trying to balance the books on the backs of the poorest’