With welfare cuts Starmer’s Labour is grabbing the Tory spade and digging deeper

Ah, spring. A time for daffodils, delusion, and yet another chancellor trying to sell austerity with a smile. Yes, it’s the week of the Spring Statement, where the government takes a long, hard look at the state of the nation and decides, with trademark compassion, that the real problem is disabled people getting £8.25 a day to survive.

This time, the cruelty isn't coming from the usual suspects. It's not the Tories sharpening their budget axe, it’s Keir Starmer’s Labour. The "not-as-bad-as-the-Tories-but-still-weirdly-keen-on-acting-like-them" Labour. The party formerly known for representing workers and the vulnerable is now laser-focused on freezing Personal Independence Payments (PIP). Presumably because the real crisis is that people who rely on the state for support aren’t suffering enough.

The Prime Minister, still clinging to the idea that he’s a centrist technocrat and not just a cut-price David Cameron tribute act, has declared that welfare costs are “unsustainable, indefensible and unfair.” Spoken like a man whose entire understanding of fairness begins and ends with a balance sheet.

Doing what the Tories only dreamed of

Yes, Labour. The same Labour that once gave us the NHS, the minimum wage, and child poverty reduction is now delivering soundbites so Thatcherite they may as well be scratched into a bust of Ayn Rand. Rachel Reeves, whose economic strategy appears to be “whatever Tory swing voters in Nuneaton would like,” has declared that it "can’t be right" to write off a generation who are out of work and gasp using PIP. She claims they are using it improperly. Not unlike the way MPs improperly use second home allowances to buy duck ponds and Louis Vuitton laundry baskets.

Then there’s Wes Streeting, seemingly auditioning to win the award of least caring frontline politician - a competitive field - who recently said to Tory MPs that Labour was “doing the things they only ever talked about.” One shudders to imagine what he’ll do next. Deportations by catapult? Means-testing air?

Politically, this isn’t “sensible centrism.” This is George Osborne in a Keir Starmer mask. Osborne once invoked the image of a hard-working person waking up at dawn while their scrounging neighbour slept in and enjoyed lounging on benefits. Starmer’s Labour have taken that metaphor, added a few more contemptuous flourishes, and started broadcasting it on every available frequency.

Speeding up the burying of our collective morality

It’s not just the rhetoric, it’s the policy. Making PIP harder to claim? Even after years of Tory rule have already turned the benefit system into a bureaucratic maze of medical assessments designed to stop help getting to the needy? At this point, Labour isn’t just digging the same hole as the Tories, they’ve brought in an industrial drill and hired contractors to speed up the burying of our collective morality.

Here’s a thought: most people claiming benefits are in work. Most people who are homeless also have jobs. The problem isn’t laziness or fraud, it’s that our economy is a dystopian farce where work doesn’t pay, rent is daylight robbery, and a food shop requires the tactical precision of a military operation.

Yet here comes Labour, crowing about benefit cuts to show they’re tough, and hopefully salvage their plunging poll ratings. Have they noticed that food bank usage has exploded? That scurvy, actual Dickensian scurvy, is back? That people are choosing between heating and eating, and increasingly achieving neither?

Reheated austerity

This is what so many warned about during last year’s election campaign. That behind the fluff of “change” and “renewal,” Starmer’s Labour was quietly committed to a reheated version of austerity. They refused to commit to scrapping the two-child benefit cap. They mumbled sweet nothings about fiscal responsibility. Meanwhile liberal commentators beamed approvingly, reassuring us that this was all just pragmatic politics.

Remember this Polly Toynbee article? The one from last summer, confidently asserting that Starmer’s Labour would lift the two-child cap and rescue the poor from the Tories’ cruelty? A comforting bedtime story for people who think "radical" means a new white paper looking at the issue. Yet here we are: benefits slashed, defence spending up, and not a crumb of radicalism to be found; unless you count radical indifference.

Labour members aren’t happy

The party faithful? Not so faithful anymore. Nearly half of Labour members - Labour members who haven’t quit yet - think the party’s heading in the wrong direction. Which is frankly optimistic, because it assumes the party is heading anywhere at all. They’re just following Tory voters around with a clipboard, asking what they’d like to see next.

Labour isn’t for Labour members. It’s not for liberals. It’s not for the poor. It’s not for people who believe in social justice, dignity, or the wild notion that disabled people shouldn’t have to prove they’re not faking it every six months. It’s for the mythical swing voter in a Home Counties semi who gets a little red-faced when someone mentions trans rights and thinks anyone on benefits should be forced to clean motorway laybys with a toothbrush.

Labour don’t care

That’s the only plan Starmer’s Labour has: be Tory, but with better diction. Pretend there's no alternative. Hope everyone on the left just holds their nose and votes for them anyway.

The truth is, poverty got worse under the Tories because they didn’t care. Now it’s going to get worse under Labour because they don’t either. That’s not pragmatism. That’s moral cowardice, dressed up in a red rosette.

GBP image created by Joegoauk Goa and is used under creative commons.