OPINION

Reeves’s neo-liberal choice to punish the disabled

Labour’s Spring Budget slashes £4.8bn from disability benefits — pushing up to 400,000 into poverty — while refusing wealth taxes or growth-boosting reforms. Austerity by choice?

Wee Ginger Dug

Apr 1, 2025 — 5 min read

J ust before the Chancellor Rachel Reeves made her Spring Budget statement this week, the Guardian newspaper published a story reporting on the new austerity cuts that she was set to announce, the headline ran: “Further benefits cuts planned as Rachel Reeves forced to find extra £1.6bn”.

This headline is, to put it kindly, misleading. Reeves has not been “forced” to find an extra £1.6 billion, far less has she been compelled to find it by making even deeper cuts to the already meagre incomes of the most vulnerable. Reeves has chosen to impose more cuts on benefits because she refuses to raise taxes on the wealthiest, refuses to introduce a wealth tax on assets over £10 million, refuses to instruct the Bank of England to create more currency as it did when it bailed out the banks in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis, refuses to borrow more, refuses to boost economic growth by rejoining the European single market and customs union, and refuses to ditch the fiscal rules which she inherited from the Conservatives.

All these are possible political choices, just as cutting benefits for the sick and disabled is a political choice. Rachel from Kicking the Disabled chose to make the very Tory “tough choice” of punching down on those least able to push back. Her “tough choice” tells us all we need to know about the priorities of Starmer’s government.

The Government’s own figures show that more than 3 million households will lose money as a result of the government’s benefits cuts, and an extra 250,000 people – including 50,000 children – will be pushed into relative poverty by 2029-30. Other analyses claim that the Government’s figures seriously underestimate the scale of the damage and that the true figure of those who will be pushed into poverty is closer to 400,000. The Labour government is doing this in order to avoid criticism from a right-wing press, which is never going to give it a favourable hearing anyway. Starmer refuses to countenance raising taxes on the rich or the big tech companies. He is also dead set against rejoining the European single market and customs union, even though this is the single measure which will do more than any other to promote economic growth.

That Starmer is so unwilling to countenance these measures, which would bring about significant economic growth and obviate the need for throwing 400,000 disabled people into poverty despite being over four years away from another general election and possessing a massive and unassailable Commons majority, goes far beyond accusing him of political cowardice. If a Labour government is still unwilling to face down the right and its media allies despite the huge political advantages that Starmer possesses, then what exactly is the point of the Labour Party? Starmer is certainly a political coward, a man possessing no principles other than the pursuit of power for the sake of it, but he is also a spineless figurehead in a government which has been captured by neo-liberalists.

It’s clearer now than it ever was that real change is impossible under Westminster. If change won’t happen with a Labour government with an impregnable majority, it’s never going to happen at all.

The measures introduced by Reeves will make an already desperate situation even worse for families living in poverty. But people in poverty are not the political donors whom Reeves and Starmer need to keep on board. So they made the “difficult choice” to harm disabled people, it’s not like they’d disable the UK’s useless nukes.

It bears repeating that the main benefit for disabled people in England and Wales, Personal Independence Payment (PIP), and its Scottish equivalent, Adult Disability Payment (ADP), are not out-of-work benefits. The purpose of these non-means-tested benefits is to help pay for the additional costs which come with being disabled. Many disabled people rely on PIP or ADP to cover the extra costs they incur in order to stay in work. Cutting PIP will not encourage disabled people into work, and it could result in some disabled people having to give up work. For many others it will merely result in them having to forego the necessities which enable them to live a normal life.

Yet Darren Jones MP, the chief secretary to the Treasury, when trying to defend Rachel Reeves’ significant cuts to the disability benefits on the BBC, compared cutting disability benefits to cutting children’s pocket money and telling them to get a Saturday job. Labour is a party of ghouls. PIP is not ‘pocket money’. Kids don’t have to use their pocket money to keep a roof over their heads or pay for food or services that are essential to their daily functioning. The attacks on disabled people are an assault on people’s dignity. The real sickness is a politics that allows this shameful rhetoric.

An analysis from the Fraser of Allander Institute at the University of Strathclyde warns that the Scottish Budget “will be around £900 million worse off on the current side in 2029/30 than previously projected,” if no changes are made to what was announced this week by Chancellor Rachel Reeves. In her Spring Budget statement, she confirmed cuts to sickness and disability benefits, which will total around £4.8 billion a year by 2029/2030, as well as cuts to Government departments and the loss of thousands of civil service posts.

Labour’s Scottish branch manager Anas Sarwar continues to insist that his bosses in London are not introducing austerity, saying that government spending is continuing to go up. Tell that to the disabled people and their carers who face losing their benefits, tell that to the civil servants who are set to lose their jobs. Sarwar will insist that the Scottish Government mitigate the cuts from its limited budget and will describe as “SNP cuts” the cuts the Scottish Government is forced to find in other areas, as Westminster has imposed a legal obligation on Holyrood to balance its budget while denying it the full range of tax and borrowing powers.

Sarwar is insulting everyone’s intelligence when he claims that this is not austerity. If government spending rises but does not keep pace with inflation, that’s austerity. The fact that overall government spending is increasing has no bearing on the definition of austerity. It’s all about how and where the government spends money. Cutting the money available to the poor and the vulnerable and sacking frontline staff in order to boost defence spending is austerity. Cutting frontline services for the public while boosting the money spent on the private sector is austerity. According to figures from the ukpublicspending.co.uk website, annual UK Government spending increased throughout the years of Conservative austerity, rising from £673.1 billion in 2010 to £852.35 billion in 2019 – the year before the COVID pandemic. According to Anas Sarwar’s definition, there was no austerity under the Tories either.