{"id":80848,"date":"2025-03-16T07:41:37","date_gmt":"2025-03-16T07:41:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/?p=80848"},"modified":"2025-03-16T07:45:24","modified_gmt":"2025-03-16T07:45:24","slug":"labour-ministers-who-thought-that-freezing-benefit-payments-was-appropriate-are-not-fit-to-hold-public-office","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/2025\/03\/16\/labour-ministers-who-thought-that-freezing-benefit-payments-was-appropriate-are-not-fit-to-hold-public-office\/","title":{"rendered":"Labour ministers who thought that freezing benefit payments was appropriate are not fit to hold public office"},"content":{"rendered":"

As the Guardian notes<\/a> this morning:<\/p>\n

\n

Ministers have left the door open to a humiliating U-turn on their highly contentious\u00a0plans to cut benefits\u00a0<\/a>for disabled people, amid\u00a0mounting uproar<\/a>\u00a0over the proposals across the Labour party.<\/p>\n

Both Downing Street and the Department for Work and Pensions did not deny they were about to back\u00adtrack on plans to impose a real-terms cut to the personal independence payment (Pip) for disabled people, including those who cannot work, by cancelling an inflation-linked rise due to come into force next spring.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Think about this for a moment.<\/p>\n

Labour ministers, who have received a pay rise<\/a> of 2.8% to bring their basic MP pay to \u00a393,904 from April, with the pay of every minister being in six figures as a result, were planning to remove the inflation element of the Personal Independence Payment from all recipients of that benefit, whatever their condition, in a deliberate move intended to make their lives harder so that Rachel Reeves might balance her books.<\/p>\n

I could spend a long time analysing this, or simply summarise what this looks like. It would seem that, like Musk, these ministers have had an empathy bypass. They are clearly utterly unable to comprehend the situation of a person with a disability utterly dependent on state help - which many will feel guilty about claiming because the whole system is callously set up to make them feel that way - but without which they cannot survive.<\/p>\n

It takes some quite extraordinary lack of humanity to be unable to do that when the facts will be known to you.<\/p>\n

A person who is so indifferent to the condition of others that they considered this, and had to be forced into reversing their decision, is not fit to be a government minister. That is where some Labour ministers are.<\/p>\n

This is the Age of Aggression in action.<\/p>\n

This is neoliberal indifference made clear.<\/p>\n

This is an action promoted by those suffering ethical indifference.<\/p>\n

This is callousness.<\/p>\n

This was unforgivable, Starmer, Reeves and Kendall.<\/p>\n

We should not forget.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As the Guardian notes this morning: Ministers have left the door open to a humiliating U-turn on their highly contentious\u00a0plans to cut benefits\u00a0for disabled people,
 Read the full article…<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[215,14,204,35,16,118,106],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-80848","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-age-of-aggression","category-corruption","category-economic-justice","category-economics","category-ethics","category-labour","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80848","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=80848"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80848\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":80852,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80848\/revisions\/80852"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=80848"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=80848"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=80848"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}