OPPOSITION to the cuts unveiled today was not concentrated in Parliament.

It was outside where disabled people rallied to insist the Chancellor’s books should not be balanced on their backs.

Despite her denials, Rachel Reeves condemns Britain to more of the same austerity that has crippled services, and lowered living standards, for 15 years.

Her hopes of growth lie exclusively in two sectors. One is housing, where government planning reforms reduce communities’ already limited say over developments while leaving the real cause of a house-building bottleneck — its control by a handful of construction firms whose profits depend on scarcity — in place.

The other is through increased military spending. Labour, so hostile to public spending as a spur to growth in other fields, regurgitates garbled Keynesian nostrums on the economic benefits of building missiles and killer drones. 

Yet research undertaken for the Scottish government has shown military spending creates fewer jobs per pound of investment than almost any other area of public expenditure. Even if we leave aside — and we should not — the core question of what the British military, an active participant in the Gaza genocide, does with its money, it is absurd to claim the drive to war will deliver prosperity.

The Chancellor referred to the mess Labour inherited from the Conservatives. But citing debt as a reason to cut spending is exactly the argument they trotted out 15 years ago. 

Not only did most British people become poorer. People became sicker, too.

This was a consequence of attacks on social security. And of reduced real-terms NHS spending: waiting lists had almost doubled on 2010 levels before the end of 2019, and trebled by 2023. Worsening health has more general social causes, too: increasing poverty, and associated bad housing and living conditions; insecure housing and work, pushing people to their limits physically and mentally. In 2018, British life expectancy stopped growing for the first time since records began and it has fallen since.

These points are important given Reeves has picked the sick and disabled as the main targets of the spending review. 

Here, too, she sings from the same hymn sheet as George Osborne in 2010. Then the disabled were branded work-shy, ironically by a government that was shutting down the network of disability-friendly Remploy factories, just as today personal independence payments which actually help disabled people to work are being withdrawn in the name of making them do so.

Assessment of ability to work was removed from doctors and handed to unscrupulous private companies. Thousands died within months of being declared “fit for work.” Casually applied “benefit sanctions” meant for the first time since the creation of the welfare state vulnerable people — Mark Wood, Errol Graham — were starving to death in one of the richest countries in the world.

And the Britain now cutting assistance to the poorest is still rich. Austerity was not a collective belt-tightening exercise, but a huge transfer of wealth upwards. The longest spell of wage stagnation since the Napoleonic wars combined with what the Sunday Times Rich List termed a “golden age for the super rich.”

As new research from Oxfam points out, the bonanza continues. British billionaires saw their wealth rise by £35 million every day last year to a total of £182 billion, part of the narrowing concentration of wealth among the very richest worldwide. This wealth is not the reward for innovation but, the research shows, depends overwhelmingly on control of monopolies and crony connections with governments. It’s our wealth, in fact, and is stolen from us.

Austerity continues for the poor because the state continues to shovel money at the rich. A wealth tax is an idea whose time has come. 

But we must also make the case for nationalisation. So much of our money is redistributed upwards by a crooked state and extortionate monopolies. It’s time to end the racket.