Rachel Reeves' war on disabled people

Rachel Reeves is declaring economic war on sick and disabled people while she simultaneously panders to wealthy tax-dodgers.

Last week Rachel Reeves said that she was going to relax rules aimed at cracking down on tax-dodging non- domiciled residents because she’d been "listening to the concerns" of the non-dom community.

At the very same time Reeves has been pushing yet another government assault on disabled people. Not just threatening to go after disability fakers, but also insisting that she’s going to impose another devastating £8 billion round of austerity cuts on the welfare system, especially aimed at disability support like Personal Independence Payments (PIP).

Reeves’ declaration of economic war against disabled people won approving headlines from far-right propaganda outlets like GBNews, The S*n, and the Daily Mail, but it’s left decent people wondering why Reeves is smashing Britain’s disabled people with an iron fist while she treats tax-dodging non-doms with kid gloves.

Why is Reeves so willing to "listen to the concerns" of a tiny minority of ultra-rich tax-dodgers who pretend to be resident overseas to avoid paying taxes in Britain, but stone cold deaf to the concerns of millions of disabled Brits who have been treated like shit and systematically abused via unfair "fit for work" assessments for well over a decade now.

Reeves is ignoring millions of sick and disabled people just like she’s remained deaf to the concerns of the millions-strong "pensioner community" as she pinched their Winter Fuel Allowance and refused to compensate the WASPI women for the money stolen from their pensions.

When confronted about the contrast between her concessions to mega-rich non-doms and her penalisation of disabled people, Reeves parroted a load of Tory-style propaganda about how "most working people" don’t want to pay tax to subsidise people who are "not entitled to support". However this "disability scrounger" narrative is deeply deceptive given her stated desire to slash disability benefits for people who are entitled to them alongside new plans to spy on people’s bank accounts and confiscate drivers’ licences.

Mahatma Gandhi said that "a nation’s greatness is measured by how it treats its weakest members", and Reeves is determined to demonstrate Britain’s moral inadequacy by continuing the depraved Tory agenda of targeting the most frail and vulnerable in society, whilst pandering to the mega-rich.

Even if people have lived such fortunate lives that they’ve never known anyone who has had to suffer Britain’s malicious disability benefits system through sickness or disability, and reject the moral case for supporting those who cannot support themselves because they have no empathy, there’s another compelling argument for not subjecting disabled people to another vicious £8 billion round of austerity cuts.

It’s economically illiterate to slash subsistence benefits, because people who are so poor that they’re entitled to disability benefits end up immediately spending everything they receive back into the economy anyway.

Impoverishing disabled people by a further £8 billion simply removes that £8 billion from economic circulation, while policies like relaxing rules on non-doms and refusing to clamp down on fake foreign ownership of British property and British-based businesses help the mega-rich to dodge taxes and siphon even more wealth out of the UK economy.

If Reeves really wanted to save public money she’d concentrate on making sure corporations and the mega-rich pay their taxes; deal with Britain’s debilitating infestation of greedy privatisation profiteers; and eliminate public handouts to businesses that use networks of offshore companies to siphon their profits out of the country.

But she’s got no interest in doing anything effective because that would involve going after people in her own wealthy and powerful social class, so instead she’s appealing to the basest instincts of the selfish "I’m alright Jack" mob by making life even more difficult for the poorest in society, even though basic economics and the last decade and a half of economic stagnation tell us that further impoverishing the already poor does nothing to promote economic growth.

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