Just stop what you are doing for one moment. Can you hear a strange breaking sound?
No? Listen harder, because I can hear the Labour Party snapping its own crumbling spine to crawl deeper into the filthy rectum of capital.
Let’s be honest. Neither Keir Starmer or Rachel Reeves particularly care about the longer term because they’re both fighting to save their jobs in the next weeks and months from a likely leadership challenge emanating from the Labour backbenches.
Reeves’ survival budget
This was a survival budget, crafted by a financial illiterate with a (dodgy) PhD in elitist appeasement, turning the fortunes of the public purse into the misfortunes of poor people and working classes.
This wasn’t balancing the books, this was spinning the books like a fucking roulette wheel. Reeves — a strong contender for a financial Darwin Award — is a values atheist with the charm of a cold-eyed bailiff padlocking your dead nan’s house while lecturing you about “difficult decisions”.
It takes some serious brass neck to claim this was a “cost of living” budget.
The cost of living has continued to rise under this flailing Labour government and it’s going to take a whole lot more than a pitiful minimum wage increase to stop you from needing to apply for a payday loan to buy a block of Lurpak butter and a tin of baked beans.
Giving and taking away
Reeves dangled the abolition of the two-child benefit cap like a crumb to starving families. Yes, it is a very small win, but it’s drowned out by the sneering cuts elsewhere, such as slashing £300 million in subsidies for the Motability scheme.
Pulling VAT exemptions and insurance relief from disabled people who rely on adapted vehicles to maintain a bit of independence isn’t compassion, it’s yet another dog whistle to the morally debased tabloid filth-peddlers, painting benefit recipients as scroungers while ignoring the real scandal — a welfare bill that’s ballooned not from “laziness” but from a rigged economy that leaves millions of low paid workers relying on benefits to put food on the table.
And those other ‘reforms’ that force 18-21-year-olds into six-month work placements or face a benefit loss? That’s not opportunity, it’s forced labour with Labour, and a nod to the workfare fascists that Labour are supposed to vehemently despise.
Forced labour with Labour? You can have that one for free, Mr Polanski.
Talking of all things green, Reeves sounded the ecocide klaxon when she axed the Energy Company Obligation, condemning millions in fuel poverty to yet another winter of being forced to choose between heating and eating, only to be topped off with a new mileage tax on electric vehicles, punishing the precise green transition she claims to champion.
Where was the massive public investment in renewables? What about a jobs guarantee for green transition workers? Reeves just churned out more hot air while the planet chokes on the fumes of capitalism.
Not the “broad shoulders” again?
Reeves wants you to believe she is all about making the “wealthiest pay their fair share”, but her utterly pathetic £2,500 surcharge on homes over £2 million starting in 2028, rising to £7,500 for the £5 million palaces isn’t going to leave much of a dent in the average oligarchs portfolio and is so laughably fucking feeble it wouldn’t even cover the coke bill for one weekend in a Knightsbridge townhouse.
This is the same woman who spent the election campaign swearing she’d never raise taxes on “working people”, now openly pickpocketing them while the super-rich laugh themselves hoarse. History will remember Rachel Reeves as the Labour Chancellor who stood in the rubble of Tory Britain, looked at poor people, disabled people, homeless people, and deliberately chose to tighten the noose.
Labour — still plunging in the polls like a lead-weighted turd that’s navigating its way around the u-bend — needs to ditch this failed neoliberal drivel for genuine redistribution which begins with taxing the billionaires properly, and nationalising our key industries.
Nobody is fooled by this “most left-wing chancellor” nonsense, are they?
“But what about Reeves freezing rail fares?”, the Starmerites cry. We’re talking about the most expensive rail fares in Europe, right? A one-year gimmick that does nothing for the chronic underfunding of transport as a public good is utterly worthless.
Going down
I remember the outrage when Corbyn’s Labour dipped below 20% in the polls. I remember them telling us how Labour would be 20% ahead under any other leader than Jeremy Corbyn, yet here we are, six years later, sleepwalking towards a fascist government and a Labour Party that will be lucky to cling on to just a dozen parliamentary seats following the next general election.
Whether you back the Polanski horse, or the Your Party horse, we need to ride this one together so we can say we did everything within our power to fight these forces of abominable wickedness.
Temu ‘economist’ Reeves and the traitor Starmer are not merely a disgrace. They are class enemies in red ties, and the fight against them begins now.
Featured image via the Canary
This post was originally published on Canary.