Labour liars to STARVE kids & FREEZE pensioners!

Right, so yesterday was the day an awful lot of people got an awfully rude shock as the realisation that voting for Keir Starmer’s Labour was one of the biggest mistakes they’d ever made, as Rachel Reeves stood up to talk about the big £22bn black hole on the nations finances, that she apparently knew nothing about, despite the Institute for Fiscal Studies making it abundantly clear weeks ago during the General Election campaign, that the country is broke, that the Tories have led us to financial ruin and that we need yet more austerity as the answer to dig ourselves out of this, despite austerity having decimated this country and people’s livelihoods for the last 14 years already. Reeves answer to this in no small part was to declare war on not only the young, refusing to deal with child poverty, but now the old too, shredding pensioner incomes to pay for this. Sir Kid Starver has now been joined by Rachel ‘Freeze’ Reeves. We know austerity and yet more cuts doesn’t work, we’ve had 14 years to get our heads around that on one hand and ordinary working class people have very much felt that failure in their incomes and the services we all rely on, now set to continue. We can now expect more of that, we can now expect more income suppression and worst of all that suppression appears to be very much deliberately aimed at the youngest and the oldest in society, those that don’t yet work and those who have done their work. Under Jeremy Corbyn we were promised cradle to grave economics, but under Keir Starmer, it’s more like work will set you free and if you don’t work, you’re a burden.
Right, so we might as well cash in the receipts from the start here because that was Keir Starmer attacking Jeremy Hunt just 2 months ago for looking at slashing the winter fuel allowance for pensioners last year and that was Rachel Reeves grinning like the cat that has got the cream, telling Sky how much she’s enjoying her job now, in power, as she’s able to do things rather than just say them. I don’t think there are two clips that could possibly sum up Keir Starmer’s politically bankrupt, morally defective Labour Party more than those in light of what Reeves has declared she’s going to do to close this terrible black hole, they’ve only known about pretty much for as long as the time span between now and when Keir Starmer made that chronic claim in parliament, given what he’s assented to do now.
We already knew that kids were going to stay in poverty, the chance to lift 300,000 out of poverty completely, the scrapping of the two child benefit cap would have helped 1m kids all told, though still in and of itself doesn’t go far enough to address child poverty, something even Tony Blair swore he’d deal with and did, that this government won’t touch with a bargepole, whipping MPs to vote against scrapping it, suspending 7 Labour MPs who voted to stop punishing kids.
Sadly it became readily apparent that as an age group that isn’t typically economically active, they weren’t going to be Reeves only target as pensioners came under attack too and exposing Starmer in light of that clip yet again to be the unflinching liar and hypocrite so many of us already knew him to be.
The winter fuel allowance is being withdrawn from pensioners who, due to being in receipt of the lowest state pension in the whole of Europe, despite living in what is supposedly the 6th richest economy on Earth, already don’t really have enough to get by on. Those worst off, relying on pension credit, are safe, but there’s no taper to that, and those on the boundary of the cut off between entitlement and no entitlement, have now lost their winter fuel allowance too. Disproportionately, this will harm pensioners in the north more, it gets colder in winter, but I suppose when so many are seen to be economically inactive as well, just like children, why invest in them? That really does come across as the underlying narrative here. Rachel Reeves has always been about being there for workers, but where Labour is supposed to be there for the working class, it has long abandoned such notions since Starmer became leader and here we have it playing out. Work will set you free. Plenty of older kids, if they’re lucky have a paper round or some such, my first job was setting up a fish stall in town, butt hat’s supposed to be about a bit of pocket money, not the difference between whether or not you go hungry and indeed if you’re too young, you’re victimised by your own government, a Labour government, even more.
At the other end of the spectrum, many older people who might want to retire, after years of austerity, despite all the nonsense talk of the triple lock on pensions, when the state pension itself is already too low, when even people with a second pension, a vocational one for example, still might not be able to necessarily live comfortably without some work, especially in winter, that’s a massive failing of the state. Who is the state, who is the economy supposed to work in the interests of after all? But how many of those pensioners cannot work due to their health too? They will be the most vulnerable pensioners in winter time.
10 million people will lose the winter fuel allowance now. Just under one sixth of the UK population and when excess deaths during the winter time amongst the over 60’s as a demographic are a years long, well known about, utter failure of the state too, that figure could surge. 1.5m of these people are already too poor to retire, still doing hospitality, or catering or cleaning jobs amongst others to top up their meagre pension. 1.4m are already in fuel poverty, but do not receive pension credit. Two thirds of those affected are women. What Reeves has announced on this measure amounts to a death sentence, especially those at the pension credit boundary and as that clip above showed, she’s doing it with a smile on her face. Of that £22bn black hole that she damn well did know about, because it was public knowledge during the election campaign, so how could she not, running for the office she was? Pensioners are going to be paying for roughly a fifth of that alleged shortfall.
Contrast all of this with some of the good news she put out for a moment though.
Junior doctors get the 22% pay increase they have campaigned for, that they absolutely deserve and many other public sector pay increases of around 5% came too. I absolutely welcome that. I do not welcome it being paid for, as people will read it, on the backs of starving kids and freezing OAPs though and I doubt they do either. In truth the pay rises pay for themselves because of the extra tax revenue raised, both in terms of income tax and people spending so raising wages is never a bad thing for an economy and it actually is a very easy thing to do, Labour get brownie points for this, compared to the Tories who were just pathetic over the issue and economically ignorant besides, but ultimately, with more cuts besides coming Rachel Reeves as well, slashing infrastructure projects, roads, rail, new qualifications to save a bit money and apparently she still have £16bn to fill yet, so what more cuts are to come? Are the rich going to pay for any of this? Well when Reeves first targets are kids and the elderly, probably not!
She made a big thing of saying ‘If we cannot afford it, than we cannot do it.’ Well £3bn to Ukraine per year for as long as it takes, is apparently still affordable. The defence budget being hiked by £10bn isn’t unaffordable, anther £45m a year for the royals, we can afford that too, but off the back of whom? Kids and the elderly. The least economically active. Work will set you free. Well not when it’s forcibly the difference between heating and eating. Oh and those energy bills that were promised were going to come down? That would help the elderly under these circumstances too? They are out of the window as well.
All from Reeves who previously had her House of Commons credit card suspended for overspending on it without providing receipts to the tune of more than £4,000 and has previously stated she couldn’t get by on her £86K a year salary – that comment was made only back in January! Oh and as we might’ve known and as Skwawkbox has today exposed, she’s no stranger to claiming her heating bill for her London MPs home on MPs expenses. Pensioners freeze, but Reeves, according to the IPSA website which is where you can find out all about your MPs expenses claims and which Skwawkbox has checked found that:
‘In the 2023/4 reporting year, Reeves claimed almost £1,300 for utilities for her London MP’s home – including almost £1,200 for energy – while receiving an MP’s salary of more than £90,000.’
According to the ONS, between 2014 and 2022, there were more than 87,000 excess deaths directly attributable to cold housing. 10m people have lost their heating money come this winter, at least in part, so what cuts will they have to make in their own lives now?
The worst part of all of these cuts, is that they are completely unnecessary. A wealth tax of 1% on all wealth over £10m would fill Rachel Reeves black hole entirely and leave her with some left over. So many of these people become so fantastically rich, because of our labour, our work yet the wealth created doesn’t get shared equally. Why should they not pay their share, when they have so much more? We can afford a wealth tax, it is a choice Rachel Reeves is making to not do so, preferring to target the economically inactive amongst the working class, when so many of the wealthiest in this country, who’s wealth sits there and does nothing, is the ultimate example of real economic inactivity. They get called the wealth creators, but they don’t have any without us, they didn’t get rich without us, and they ought to pay their way too. 1% on all that wealth isn’t asking for very much at all, but it’s apparently too much for Rachel Reeves. Only the Green Party has repeatedly called for this and stood on it as policy in their election campaign.
Nothing quite sums up how inept and clueless to genuine economics that works for all she is, than her saying, if we cannot afford it we cannot do it, which is a phrase that echoes John Maynard Keynes, the economist who’s work paved the way for the rebuilding of this country after WWII, but if Reeves knew Keynes as much as she wishes to invoke him, she’d know he actually said ‘if we can do it, we can afford it’. We have the NHS, the welfare state, we had a housebuilding boom because of that, because of a Labour Party that was genuinely for working class people, where today it is just another Tory Party and more and more people I hope are finally waking up to that.
What Starmer and Reeves are overseeing here is going to be catastrophic, it is unforgivable cruelty when there are other choices to be made that just copying George Osborne all over again, but that is what we’ve got. Another party blaming the other for bankrupting the country, while they tear up everything we need in deference to the wealthy, who might donate to their party of course.
Meanwhile, in continuing true Tory style, privatisation of UK infrastructure is carrying on unabated, as our entire main gas pipeline has now been procured by a foreign vulture capitalist conglomerate, the final sale overseen under this new Starmer led government. Get the details on another disaster in waiting in this video recommendation here and I’ll hopefully catch you on the next vid. Cheers folks.