Today, 1 December, PM Keir Starmer gave a speech at Coin Street Neighbourhood Centre, frantically defending Rachel Reeves’ recent autumn budget. At the same time, he was also forced to defend Reeves herself. The chancellor appears to have lied about the dire state of the UK’s finances in the lead-up to hiking taxes.

And unfortunately, that’s far from the worst of it. Whilse Starmer banged on about the damage done by austerity, he also spoke about the need to ‘reform’ welfare spending. Apparently, that means ‘strip health benefits from disabled young adults to enrich my mates in business’, if you don’t speak Politician.

Poor Reeves

The weekend after the budget, Reeves faced stark accusations of misleading the public. Earlier forecasts from the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), which Reeves based many of her public statements on, suggested far worse financial outlooks than the forecasts from more immediately before the budget release.

The Labour machine was working in overdrive to defend the chancellor from the allegations. The PM’s chief secretary, Darren Jones, insisted that “of course” Reeves didn’t lie. He also stated that the government needed to increase room in the budget to pay for the NHS and cost-of-living policies.

The chancellor herself stated that “I clearly could not deliver a budget with just £4.2bn of headroom,” in a BBC interview on Sunday. She also noted that this would have been “the lowest surplus any chancellor ever delivered”.

Likewise, Starmer insisted that the early OBR forecasts showed £16bn less headroom than they’d hoped. As such, and given Labour’s budget commitments, he said:

Therefore, against that backdrop, it was inevitable that we would have to raise revenue. So there was no misleading there.

The OBR itself even called its leak of the more-optimistic forecast before the budget presentation “the worst failure in the 15-year history of the OBR”. A spokesperson stated that:

It was seriously disruptive to the Chancellor, who had every right to expect that the EFO [economic and fiscal outlook] would not be publicly available until she sat down at the end of her Budget speech.

The office blamed its website setup, leaving the files open to anyone who guessed the right URL. However, it also insisted that the leak was completely unintentional.

Austerity by any other name

In his speech, Starmer waxed lyrical about his pride in the budget:

And so yes, I am proud… I am proud we scrapped the two-child limit. I am proud we’re lifting over a half a million children out of poverty, proud we raised the national minimum wage – again.

For what it’s worth, that “over half a million” was 450,000 last week. The Child Poverty Action Group had it as 350,000 before that. We as a country really must do something about these rapidly rising numbers of children who were in poverty until Reeves and Starmer started doing speeches about them.

Starmer also spoke against the effects of austerity on the UK:

look at the OBR’s analysis of productivity, and it’s crystal clear to me that austerity scarred the long-term productive capability of this country. So – why would we repeat it?

What a fucking fantastic question Keir. It makes us wonder why you’re banging on about attacking welfare:

And our welfare state is trapping people, not just in poverty but out of work. Young people in particular, and that is a poverty of ambition.

And so while we will invest in apprenticeships, and make sure young people without a job have a guaranteed offer of training or work, we must also reform the welfare state itself – that is what renewal demands.

This is pure spin. Stating point blank that austerity had a massive negative affect on the country, then turning around and stating that benefits trap people in poverty is unabashedly two-faced.

As Labour’s own Diane Abbott pointed out:

The media is deliberately focused on who said what, when.
This is much more important; the harsh reality of continued austerity.

Thousands of young adults face cuts to health benefitshttps://t.co/8c2QZMnQDO

— Diane Abbott (@HackneyAbbott) December 1, 2025

Slashing disability benefits to pay bosses

Just as Abbott alluded to, Starmer is reportedly considering removing long-term health benefits from universal credit for people aged under 22. There’s around 66,000 18-21s with disabilities or long-term illnesses who may lose out as part of the draconian move.

Instead, Labour are reportedly considering ploughing money into a scheme to encourage employers to hire young adults. Note, as reported by the Times, that this isn’t specifically for employing disabled young adults. It applies to anyone who’s been out of work for 3 months.

So, to put it bluntly: Starmer plans to remove health benefits from disabled 18-21s, in order to pay businesses to hire young people. Those businesses have absolutely no extra incentive to hire the disabled person who just had their health benefits ripped away.

No matter how he tries to sell it – getting young people into work, ‘reforming’ welfare, boosting productivity – there’s no other way to say this. Its austerity, pure and simple. And, just as was true of austerity before, it’s funny how there’s always more money to slip into private pockets.

Featured image via the Canary

By Alex/Rose Cocker

This post was originally published on Canary.