Green Paper Related Discussions

She’s front bench isn’t she ?

I haven’t heard her say anything about anything. Is she watching and waiting do you think ?

More from the Times

The olive branch on disability cuts will cost about £500m and is already causing concern in government about yet more unfunded spending commitments

But so far hasn't won over MPs as ministers make clear they aren't shifting on the substance

By this it looks like the rebels are not impressed

Yeah they have took it out of there funding for that time already

DWP cuts are being driven by Starmer adviser Morgan McSweeney

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has been at the centre of a storm in recent days; more so than usual. It’s over the Labour Party government’s plans to cut £6bn from chronically ill and disabled people’s benefits.

Aside from the fact that disabled people feel scared and betrayed, many non-disabled people are pointing out that this plan from Labour is something the Tories would have enacted. In fact, the Tories weren’t even planning on cutting as much as Labour now are.

However, a group of Labour MPs who have been openly supporting their party’s attempts to cull disabled people points to where this drive for further decimation of the welfare state is coming from. And it’s right at the top of Downing Street – namely, Keir Starmer’s chief of staff Morgan McSweeney and his Labour Together think tank; the same people who destroyed Jeremy Corbyn and pushed Starmer into power in the first place.

People have been widely sharing a letter from a new group of MPs in the Labour Party. It’s called ‘Get Britain Working’ and is headed up by David Pinto-Duschinsky. He also sits on parliament’s Work and Pensions Select Committee:

The letter, signed by 36 Labour MPs, is basically issuing a public statement of support for Rachel Reeves and Liz Kendall’s plans to cut chronically ill and disabled people’s benefits. Pinto-Duschinsky even penned a column in City A.M. about the group. It was more-of-the-same nonsense: work is good for disabled people; we’ve got a worklessness crisis; people are left to rot on benefits, but the main problem is it’s costing us too much.

Now, you’d be forgiven for thinking that these 36 MPs just appeared out of thin air to create the Get Britain Working Group. Of course they didn’t.

Labour Together (again)

My colleague Hannah Sharland has done some extensive digging into these miscreants. And she found that almost every single one of them (29 in total) had either been funded by a) McSweeney’s Labour Together think tank directly (17) or b) by someone who had also donated to Labour Together (20), or both (8). You can browse her research here. Someone who funded six of these MPs was Trevor Chinn, one of the co-founders of Labour Together.

Of course, this is the same Labour Together that:

• Plotted to destroy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party.
• Fomented the exaggerated antisemitism crisis.
• Went after grassroots Labour supporters and smeared them as antisemites.
• Created Stop Funding Fake News to try and destroy the Canary, SKWAWKBOX, and other independent media outlets.

Labour Together was the brainchild of McSweeney and Chinn – and the former is now Starmer’s chief of staff. However, the point with the fact it is Labour Together MPs openly supporting the DWP’s drive to cut disabled people’s benefits should not be a surprise either.

This the is the group inside the Labour party who are behind the cuts:

https://www.labourtogether.uk/
https://www.labourtogether.uk/contact-us

So far the government's 'olive branch' to Labour MPs planning to rebel isn't going down v well.

"I can't believe that's it," one MP says.

“Small tweaks here and there won’t be enough. As long as the welfare reforms punish the most vulnerable, they’ll face opposition,” another tells me.

Labour MP Rachel Maskell told @politico : “I'll have to vote against something which will cause such harm to my constituents - too many lives will be put at risk if they press ahead.”

Me too but what worries me is talk of looking at the assessments . I hope they aren’t planning on making the 4 point question closer to the 8 point questions.

Sorry to be like Columbo but I can't get my head around this pip olive branch nonsense.

Labour are trying to scrap the work capability assessment meaning no more Universal Credit health elements so unless there's an intermediate benefit those who will lose pip will have to look for work or face sanctions.

This is disastrous and unworkable.