Labour's latest excuse is a sick joke

Labour's excuse for attacking children and disabled people is a sick joke.

Starmer’s Labour have come up with a sick new excuse for their poverty-spreading social security cuts.

When challenged about policies like their attacks on disabled people and their refusal to reverse the depraved Tory economic sanctions on children, numerous senior Labour MPs have stated iterations of the phrase "Labour is the party of work, the clue is in the name".

The use of this phrase to defend social security cuts implies that Labour have no duty of care towards people who cannot or should not work, like children, sick and disabled people, and pensioners, because their only concern is contemporary workers.

Labour’s track record in government already demonstrates their depravity.

One of Starmer’s first acts as Prime Minister was to defend the Tories’ diabolical two-child economic sanctions against families by purging seven Labour MPs for daring to vote for it to be repealed.

Rachel Reeves’ decision to cut the winter fuel allowance for pensioners living on as little as a grand a month was an act of performative cruelty, especially when Starmer immediately gave away the £3 billion that this policy was claimed to save, in weapons shipments to Ukraine.

Starmer, Reeves, Cooper, and various other senior cabinet ministers conned WASPI women and their families into voting for Labour by promising compensation for their stolen pensions, only to U-turn once they were in government and tell them they’re getting nothing.

Rachel Reeves and the right-wing ghouls she’s surrounded herself with at the treasury also have it in for disabled people, pretending that welfare reforms to further impoverish those who are too sick or disabled to work is some kind of important priority, when the money saved by making Britain’s disability benefits system even more miserly and Kafkaesque is a drop in the ocean in comparison to the vast sums lost every year due to the tax avoidance and evasion of corporations and the mega-rich.

Labour’s excuse that they have to impoverish children; the sick and disabled; and pensioners because Labour is "the party of work" is a sick joke.

There’s absolutely nothing about being a socialist who fights for better wages and conditions for workers that means you have to crush those who cannot or should not work.

In fact, it was Clement Attlee’s transformative post-WWII Labour government that introduced the welfare state as we know it, and that was a legitimate socialist version of the Labour Party, as opposed to the Thatcherite mess it’s morphed into under Starmer.

It should barely need pointing out that children are the workers of the future; pensioners are former workers; unemployed people are workers who are temporarily without a job; and an awful lot of sick and disabled people also worked before their conditions stopped them from doing so.

As for those who were always too disabled to work, what does it say about us as a country that successive governments have been intent on turning their lives into Kafkaesque nightmares, in which they’re forced to repeatedly prove their incapacity in order to access paltry subsistence benefits, while corporations and the mega-rich are showered with endless handouts and tax breaks?

You’d have to be the most venal of "I’m alright Jack" wankers to believe that hounding and abusing permanently disabled people is a necessary component of helping workers.

And that’s before we even get to Labour’s actual policies on workers.

Increasing employers’ National Insurance contributions rather than going after profiteering corporations and the mega-rich is not a pro-worker policy. In fact it eliminates jobs, and makes life harder for the kind of small businesses where the owners actually work, rather than passively collecting wealth as shareholders.

If Labour really wanted to help workers, they’d introduce policies to bring down excessive housing costs; deal with Britain’s debilitating infestation of privatisation profiteers in our public utilities; reform the punishing business rates system; ban poverty-pay employers from receiving government funds and bidding for government outsourcing contracts; and invest in infrastructure and public services rather than continuing Tory austerity cuts.

None of this stuff is on the cards, because Labour has been taken over by the same kind of wealthy elitist class who run the Tory party. People who don’t really give a damn about the collapsing living standards of millions of ordinary workers, because the system is working perfectly well for them personally.

Starmer has stuffed the Labour benches with more private landlords than ever before in the party’s history (including at least one who is an outright slumlord), and he’s happy to take orders from mega-rich donors in return for cash, designer clothes, football and concert tickets, and glasses.

It’s not just a sick joke to use a glib line about being "the party of work" to pretend that Labour has no duty of care towards children; sick and disabled people; the temporarily jobless; and pensioners, it’s doubly offensive because Labour isn’t even interested in properly serving the interests of ordinary workers anyway.