If any MP withdraws opposition after Starmer’s disability cuts con, they’re betraying most vulnerable

‘We’ll only punish future disabled people’ is nowhere near enough ‘compromise’ for rebels and opposition parties to back the Starmer-Kendall eugenicist war on sick and disabled

The Starmer government and Liz Kendall’s Department for Work and Punishment (DWP) have offered what the ‘mainstream’ media are calling ‘concessions’ in their plan to steal as much as £6,000 a year from disabled and long-term sick people: not to take the money from people who are currently disabled, but only from anyone who becomes disabled in future – and to ‘consult’ on other changes, the meaningless political show where an authority asks some questions then does what it wants.

The ‘concessions’ come after almost 130 MPs, enough to wipe out Starmer’s unearned parliamentary majority, signed an amendment to defeat the legislation needed to make the planned cuts, which the ‘Labour’ government claims are necessary to make disability and sickness benefits ‘sustainable’, that Tory code word for cuts hitting the poorest so the richest and corporations, whose wealth has already soared through austerity, can pay less tax – a word and principle that new and nu-Labour have always embraced as eagerly as their blue counterparts.

The ‘concessions’ are a pantomime designed to minimise the damage to Starmer, not to disabled and sick people, after threats by his party whips that rebel MPs would be voting no-confidence in Starmer and might trigger a snap election that would cost most of them their seats, failed to reduce the number of rebels and in fact drove it up. Deferring cuts to future disabled people would mean no immediate ‘savings’, making a mockery of the supposed ‘black hole in the country’s finances’ that Labour claims is driving its war on the poor and vulnerable, while condemning those who fall sick or become disabled in future – almost half of us – into even more grinding poverty and despair.

Starmer’s and Kendall’s war is ideological and based on made-up numbers, hand in hand with their move to make it easy to kill off what the nazis called ‘useless eaters’ and accompanied by rhetoric almost as vile, Kendall’s war on those suffering from poor mental health because of the sickness of the society forced upon us all, and the determination to maintain Tory cuts that have pushed millions of our children into appalling poverty.

No one should be fooled. Any MP who backs down after this charade, and any MP of any party who backs Kendall’s cuts in any form, is betraying the most vulnerable among us just as much as if they voted through the original, pre-pantomime version of the cuts. Pushing the wickedness forward a generation is no absolution for the guilt of colluding in the red Tories’ war on the ordinary people who most need our help.

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