Labour’s Identity Crisis: From Council Estate Roots to Champagne Politics, Labour’s Lost it’s Way
Once heralded as the party of the working class, Labour has embarked on a shameless lurch to the right that would make Thatcher blush. Under Keir Starmer’s “leadership”, they’ve abandoned their principles faster than a rat fleeing a sinking ship.
In a twisted turn of events, it falls to the likes of Suella Braverman – that bastion of compassionate conservatism – to call out cruelty in retaining the two-child benefit cap. Braverman shocked Westminster by calling for an end to the controversial policy brought in by the Tories during their coalition with the Lib Dems.
It’s policy so draconian, that even some Tories realised it crossed a line.
But not our valiant “opposition.” No, Wes Streeting defends clinging to this abhorrent measure, peddling the fiction that withholding support from larger families will somehow “alleviate poverty.” This from a man who admits benefits once kept his own belly full.
One Boy, Two Bills and a Fry Up, What’s For Afters…
The gall of Wes Streeting flogging his poverty porn memoir “One Boy, Two Bills and a Fry Up” while gleefully consigning today’s impoverished children to empty fridges and nights by candlelight is staggering.
He stated: “I think that the answer on child poverty is all about social security. Of course, that’s part of it. I grew up on a council estate with a single mum, and often the benefit system put food in the fridge and money in the electric meter. I am a product of a welfare state that quite literally fed me and housed me and clothed me at points in my life.”
Streeting went on to say: “I also know that that the answer to child poverty, ultimately, is not simply about handouts, it is about a social security safety net, that also acts as a springboard that helps people into work and with good work that makes the cost of living affordable for everyone.
“That means that if you aren’t doing the right thing, and earning a living and playing by the rules, that you don’t just have enough to make ends meet, but you have enough to do the things that make life worth living. And we’re some way from that from that now.”
With sickening hypocrisy, he waxes nostalgic about welfare providing his own sustenance, clothing, and shelter, before promptly advocating to yank that safety net away from others. “Of course, that’s part of it,” he concedes, a fleeting acknowledgement of reality before plunging into right-wing dogma.
Wes Streeting: Two-Child Benefit Cap To Stay
Streeting is utterly shameless in rebranding vital social protections as mere “handouts” undeserved by the underclass. For him, the cruelty is a feature, not a bug – a convenient “incentive” to coerce the rabble into dehumanising drudgery, lest their children starve.
His doublespeak about a “social security safety net” as a “springboard into work” is an insult to the millions trapped in perpetual precarity by stagnant wages, soaring costs, and a rigged economy. Tell that to the legions already working multiple jobs while their kids go hungry.
No, Streeting’s allegiance lies not with the strugglers he mythologises, but with his cynical party’s mad dash to “electability” by immiserating the most vulnerable. He’s spirited away the ladder that once helped lift his own family, abandoning Labour’s soul to the Hampstead socialist.
He also repeated the message that the state of public debt and lack of money will tie Labour’s hands. The fact we are a sovereign nation that prints its own money just simply passes him by.
Meanwhile in a world turned upside down, Braverman said: “The truth is that Conservatives should do more to support families and children on lower incomes… A crucial reform that Frank advocated was to scrap the two-child benefits limit, restricting child tax credits and universal credit to the first two children in a family. If they have a third or fourth child, a low-income family will lose about £3,200 per year.
“Over 400,000 families are affected and all the evidence suggests that it is not having the effect of increasing employment or alleviating poverty. Instead, it’s aggravating child poverty.”
Mr Streeting told The Independent that poverty in the UK is forcing women to choose to have abortions because they cannot afford to keep the child.
Of course, it makes you wonder if removing the Two-Child Benefit Cap might change that assumption, hey Wes!
Let’s call it what it is – the working class abandoned to Tory cruelties while Labour drinks Champagne with Cheshire set. A century of fighting for the downtrodden, crumpled and discarded for a veneer of “electability.”
In their desperation to curry favour with the propertied classes, they’ve torched the last tattered remnants of their socialist soul. Streeting and his ilk are lapping at the dregs of Blair’s “Third Way” while the marginalised they once championed are sacrificed on the altar of “economic credibility.”
If the arsonists now occupying Labour’s ranks retain a shred of principle, they should heed Braverman’s unlikely moral leadership on this issue. Scrap the two-child tax credit cap and stop immiserating the already immiserated. But I won’t hold my breath – turkeys seldom vote for Christmas.
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