It doesn’t stop there. Doing all this without asking the Chagossians, who have been forced to make their disapproval clear in public and in the courts, having not been properly consulted in private, is visibly unjust. And then paying – paying – Mauritius what is believed to be between £9 billion and £18 billion for the pleasure of this strategically unwise, democratically unjust giveaway is beyond belief.
In a logical and sensible world, this dog’s dinner of an agreement would never have got off the ground. But politics is not always either logical or sensible.
It would be an understatement to say that the local elections set off alarm bells for many MPs. Hordes of them can see Reform gaining ground in their constituencies, including among those voters directly switching away from Labour.
square HUGO GYE Labour is defiant against public anger – but we can't go on like this
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Nigel Farage has further weaponised the issue by comparing the savings made to the amounts spent on housing illegal immigrants, including in hotels. The message is simple: Brits are suffering the cost of cuts while the Government squanders money elsewhere.
This is not what newly elected Labour MPs believed they were standing in order to do. While they wore the winter fuel cuts, the experience of last summer, combined with the local election drubbing, has stiffened their resolve not to go along quietly this time. Over 130 Labour MPs are reported to have signed a letter to the chief whip declaring that they won’t support the measures.
At least some of the rebels may be reassured by some sort of watering down of Reeves’ changes, though the Chancellor will be reluctant to pass up a rare saving. But it inevitably also means that the Government is under growing pressure to eliminate other, more egregious, items of expenditure which are visibly wasteful – and particularly those which offer Farage and other opponents a readymade comparison to point to.
In other words, it isn’t just that Keir Starmer’s own parliamentarians and party instinctively hate the prospect of further welfare cuts; it’s that they fear them, too.
So MPs can also be pretty sure that they will be asked to swallow plenty more bitter pills on spending and tax in the months and years to come. Evidently, a lot of them have already decided that enough is enough, and savings must be found elsewhere instead.
That’s only the beginning of what I hope will become a backbench campaign to identify and press for better savings elsewhere in our gigantic state. For example, I expect we will soon hear Labour MPs asking why the Treasury and DWP aren’t doing more to cut the estimated £6.5 billion annual cost of benefits fraud, rather than cutting payments to honest claimants.
Mark Wallace is the chief executive of the Total Politics Group
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