Starmer’s welfare cuts are nothing like ‘Tory austerity’

Keir Starmer has already folded on the winter fuel payment, promising a partial reversal of the policy by reinstating it for pensioners in receipt of pension credit. How much longer before the proposed £4.8 billion cuts to welfare benefits go the same way?

This morning, the Health Foundation think tank has issued a pronouncement that will be a red rag to critics of Labour’s welfare cuts: that the effect of Starmer’s reform of disability benefits will be four times as great as changes proposed by the Conservatives before the election and on a similar scale to George Osborne’s benefits cuts of 2015. Those cuts, announced in Osborne’s July budget of that year, after the Conservatives had unexpectedly been returned with a 15-seat majority, ending the coalition with the Lib Dems, were designed to save £9 billion over four years.

Osborne’s benefits cap, which was supposed to limit the amount any household could receive in benefits to £26,000, was cut to £23,000 in London and £20,000 elsewhere.