Rachel Peeves
AFTER yet another week of chaos, Sir Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves have managed to infuriate absolutely everybody.
Well, everybody except for benefit claimants, that is.
Workers are raging that their taxes have been hiked to pay for a huge £16BILLION splurge on welfare
The Chancellor designed her Benefit Street Budget to appease the party’s revolting Left-wing backbenchers — scrapping the two child benefit cap at great cost.
Yet those same Labour MPs — while happy for a day or so — are now furious again, thanks to No10’s decision to water down the workers rights bill.
God knows why Downing Street picked this week to make the U-turn — but then its political strategy is a mystery at the best of times.
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If Reeves and Starmer didn’t think it could get any worse, they were wrong.
By lunchtime yesterday, the Chancellor was being accused of “lying” to the British public in the lengthy run-up to the Budget.
Her bizarre breakfast-time speech on November 4 made dark threats of having to raise income tax to fill a £20-30billion black hole.
Yet the OBR revealed yesterday that she already KNEW such a deficit never existed.
So why did she still raise the tax burden to the highest level in British history?
What’s certain is that she and the PM have shifted Labour irrevocably leftwards.
Gone are the promises to put “country before party” and govern from the centre ground.
We now have a high-tax, high-welfare Government pushing through policies that Red Ed Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn would be proud of.
Tory leader Kemi Badenoch — who, by contrast with Starmer, has had a very good week — says it is “unchristian” to force working people to pay for the workless.
Look at who else is picking up the tab.
Pubs have been betrayed over business rates. Savers have been fleeced.
Pension pots have been hammered.
Anybody who enjoys a night out, a bet or even a milkshake has been clobbered.
Labour is already at a historic low in the polls.
Starmer and Reeves seem determined to find out just how low it’s possible to go.
Judge & fury
SCRAPPING jury trials just to save money is a gross dereliction of Labour’s duty to defend our freedoms.
As eminent criminal lawyer Geoffrey Cox argues in this paper, it’s the kind of move made by dictators.
Juries made up of everyday folk have worked for centuries.
So why hand more power to judges who may have less understanding of ordinary lives?
