When Rachel Reeves presented her Spending Review this Wednesday, she repeated after each announcement that "this is my choice, this is a Labour choice", just like the chorus to a song. Yes, she was singing to an imaginary working class gallery in the places in Britain where poverty is at record levels, buildings are boarded up and people are "left behind".
So she mentioned by name the "deprived areas" of Blackpool South, Stockport, Stoke Central, Swindon North, Newcastle Upon Tyne East and Wallsend - where youth facilities, swimming pools and libraries would be "restored"... Those regions where pollsters claim that working class voters have been turning to Nigel Farage's Reform party. But of course it's also where a majority of working class voters stay home during elections, in disillusionment with all parties.
Reeves even referred directly to Farage several times during her speech, implying he preferred spending his time drinking in "the Westminster Arms". Which may well be true, but it shows how spooked her government is over Reform's recent electoral "success".
Just last week it happened again. In the Hamilton by-election, Reform came in a close 3rd, wiping out the Tories and taking 26% of the vote, while Labour only just won the seat off the SNP by a tiny margin with 31.5%. In the run-up to this election Nigel Farage had promised that Reform would scrap the 2- child benefit cap and restore the universal fuel allowance to pensioners. So something just had to be done!
And what about the cutting review?
In fact even before her Review, Reeves confirmed that the government would U-turn on the cut in winter fuel allowance for pensioners, given it's been one of the main factors pushing Labour's poll ratings down to 23%!
However there was no U-turn on the £5bn cuts to disability benefits (affecting 3 million disabled people), nor any mention of scrapping the 2-child benefit cap. And this, when 25% of the country's population is already living under the breadline.
But never mind, Reeves implausibly claimed that by "extending Free School Meals to over half a million more children, that policy alone will lift 100,000 children out of poverty". And we'd better believe it!
Reeves has made a big thing of her increase of 3% per year in spending on the NHS, but as the Financial Times points out, this is "slower than historic real-terms growth rate of 3.6 per cent for the NHS".
In other words, it will not cover growing needs and in reality, amounts to a cut!
But all of the spending which has been announced comes at the expense of cuts elsewhere. Government departments in charge of housing and local government, culture, environment and business are all set to see "real-terms cuts to their spending from 2025-26 to 2028-29". The Foreign Office has already had 7% of its budget cut, including the cut in overseas aid from 0.5% of GDP to 0.3% to help fund defence spending. This will mean over 4,000 workers in Britain and overseas will lose their jobs...
Even if Reeves prefaced her speech by claiming that her "driving purpose" since becoming Chancellor was "to make working people, in all parts of our country, better off". And that "day-to-day government spending should be paid for through tax receipts", she said nothing about ensuring that those tax receipts would increase so that spending and welfare could increase.
Of course she didn't. Real welfare, that is the working class faring well, isn't consistent with capitalism and it's a government's job, whatever flavour it might be, to ensure the capitalists' interests are served. In recessionary times it might mean granting concessions to workers (as Reeves claims to do) - but that's only to try and prevent a riot!
They can't prevent a riot
Speaking of riots, one could say that social conditions in some regions are a tinderbox. Like in Ballymena in Northern Ireland, where riots took place on Tuesday night and spread to other parts of the six counties.
Riots don't happen by themselves, of course. They are always incited by those with an agenda - in this case, recalling the Southport debacle, it was the racist Unionist far right capitalising on an alleged sexual assault by 14-year-old Romanian boys. But if the local population wasn't frustrated, disillusioned and deprived, would it respond?
The irony is that the other rioting taking place on the same night was also incited by anti-immigrant bigotry: Donald Trump's ordered raids on migrant workers in Los Angeles. But in this case it was those in favour of the immigrants who were fighting state forces sent against them! And there's the problem: how to expose the scapegoating trick of the far-right 'agent provocateurs' who try to turn us against our own side, thus protecting the real enemy - the rotten capitalist class for which both Farage and Reeves act as willing representatives.