Just before a Budget, the Government announces unspecified cuts to Personal Independence Payments.

No, not 2025, but 2016 – when Iain Duncan Smith and George Osborne proposed cutting £4.4billion from PIP, and were forced to u-turn.

This is how it happened ... 🧵 The week before the Budget on 16 March, then Work & Pension Secretary Iain Duncan Smith set out changes to disability benefits which included proposals meaning 500,000 people lost up to £150 per week due to cuts to Personal Independence Payments...

The Employment Rights Bill starts its final stages in the House of Commons today.

This is the biggest upgrade in workers’ rights in 50 years – a genuinely good bit of legislation from the Labour government after decades of anti-union laws.

But how did we get here? 🧵 In what would be his final conference speech in 1993, Labour Leader John Smith said:

"[We] will give all workers basic rights that will come into force from the first day of their employment… the same legal rights to every worker, part-time or full-time, temporary or permanent"

In 2015, 2017 and 2019, the Labour manifestos set out policies on the Winter Fuel Payment and on social care costs.

In 2024, the manifesto was silent on both.

Call me a cynic, but I think they may have been planning these cuts in advance ...
🧵 In 2015 (Ed Miliband was Leader), the manifesto said

🔴“Labour supports measures to cap the costs of care”
🔴“We have taken the tough choice to restrict Winter Fuel Payments for the richest five per cent of pensioners”

The Reeves policy removes the WFP from c.90% of pensioners

Today marks the beginning of the end of the 30 year failure that was privatisation of Britain's railways.

This afternoon MPs will debate the Passenger Railway Services (Public Ownership) Bill - which will see private rail franchises taken into public ownership as they expire.
🧵 Public opinion was against the privatisation of British Rail 30 years ago, and has remained against it ever since.

Most polls show about a two-thirds majority in favour of rail public ownership, including a majority of Tory voters.

#OnThisDay in Labour history 10 years ago … 🌹

Tony Benn passed away at the age of 88

Benn was a former Cabinet Minister, one of Labour’s longest-serving MPs, and an inspirational figure on the Labour left for decades … he inspired me 🧵 Although he never led Labour, or even held one of the great offices of state, he is in the rare company of having a political philosophy named after him: ‘Bennism’.

He left a legacy Labour party reform, anti-war activism, constitutional reform, and popularising politics ...

19 councils have had requests for 'Emergency Financial Support'* agreed by Government

As I've said for a few years now, the crisis in council finances is not a few bad apples, but the whole barrel-load of austerity passed on by the Government

*This isn't funding. It's debt. 🧵 Councils in England are getting c.£15bn LESS in central government funding than they were in 2015.

This announcement does not provided any of these 19 councils with a penny more from Government

Instead, it allows them to sell council assets to pay for under-resourced services:

🌹Well done to those Labour MPs who have distanced themselves from the appalling comments of Keir Starmer & Emily Thornberry in the last day or so

It should be entirely uncontroversial to support international law and universal human rights

So well done to those that have 🧵 Richard Burgon

https://x.com/RichardBurgon/status/1712414658525585486?s=20

#OnThisDay in Labour history 7 years ago ...

The Chilcot Report was published showing that Tony Blair exaggerated the case for war, that Iraq posed no military threat to the UK, that Blair had committed the UK to war come what may, and that there was no post-invasion strategy 🧵 Military families who had lost loved ones in the war called for Blair to be prosecuted for war crimes. Sadly, 7 years on, the alleged war criminal remains at large.

This is how the nation's newspapers reacted ...

#OnThisDay in Labour history 6 years ago ...

The 2017 manifesto was launched at Bradford University

"Our manifesto offers hope … Our manifesto is for the many, not the few", said Jeremy Corbyn

🧵 It was described as "Corbyn's sharp left turn" by @theipaper

The front page emphasised tax rises on the rich, scrapping tuition fees, public ownership of water, energy and rail

And the pledge to build "at least 100,000 council and housing association homes a year" ...

Nigel Lawson was undoubtedly the most influential Chancellor of my lifetime.

Although in his later years he was rightly regarded as a French villa-dwelling Brexiteer hypocrite and a climate change-denying crank, in his prime he reshaped the British economy and state ... 🧵 As Thatcher's longest-serving Chancellor he was key to her project

“our policies aimed at a conscious break … with the entire post-war political consensus … to change the change the entire culture of a nation from anti-profits, anti-business, government-dependent lassitude”

Parks are for loitering in ... that's the bloody point of them!

https://twitter.com/SaulStaniforth/status/1640245067804733440

Note as well, he says it's fuelling "anti-social behaviour", not "crime".

ASB is a dangerous catch-all term for "things people complain about".

ASB is simply a device for criminalising non-criminal behaviour - simultaneously wasting police time and harassing young people

On this day in Labour history 🌹

Labour won the 1950 election, but only narrowly …

The landslide of 1945 general was all but wiped out, with Labour’s majority reduced from 146 to just five … 🧵 There had been major boundary changes since 1945, which favoured the Tories.

The Conservatives gained 90 seats on just a 2.8% swing.

Turnout was 83.9% - the highest ever in a UK general election

"Zero tolerance of antisemitism, racism or discrimination of any kind"

Really? 🧵...

https://twitter.com/Keir_Starmer/status/1625887628141764610

What about Barry Sheerman - an MP on the right of the Labour Party?

He sent two clearly antisemitic tweets in August 2020. Was the whip withdrawn? Was he suspended? No
thejc.com/news/uk/labour…

NEU ballot result: teachers have voted overwhelmingly for strike action:

✅Teachers in England 90% on a 53% turnout✅
✅Teachers in Wales 92% on a 58% turnout✅
✅Support staff in England 84% on a 46% turnout
✅Support staff in Wales 88% on a 51% turnout✅

https://twitter.com/NEUnion/status/1615031078062034945

All teachers and support staff deserve an inflation-proofed pay rise.

As a parent and trade unionist, solidarity with @NEUnion members ✊
theguardian.com/education/2023…

#OnThisDay 80 years ago …

A report entitled ‘Social Insurance and Allied Services’ (which became known as the Beveridge Report) was published on 2 December 1942 ... 🧵 Labour MP and Minister without Portfolio, Arthur Greenwood, in charge of reconstruction in the wartime coalition, had appointed Liberal peer Sir William Beveridge in 1941 to inquire into social insurance ...

Starmer leaning into this Daily Mail headline at #PMQs asking how he can justify tax breaks to private schools? Sunak replies it's an attack on hard work and aspiration.

You can have all the aspiration and hard work you want, and still be nowhere near affording £40,000 a year school fees to these fake charities

Some thoughts on Gordon Brown's proposals:

Brown is right to say Government should “pause any further increase in the cap”, and then negotiate separate company agreements to keep prices down after examining profit margins and available social tariffs.
1/n
theguardian.com/politics/2022/… The proposal for equity financing to energy companies is not necessarily bad - which means the Government takes shares in the companies for every penny it loans them.

We put something in, we get something in return.

2/n

#OnThisDay in Labour history, Robin Cook died 🌹

The former Cabinet Minister, who resigned in protest against the Iraq War in 2003, died on 6 August 2005 while walking in the Scottish Highlands ... 🧵 Former minister Chris Smith wrote of Cook that since resigning, he had been setting out a vision of "libertarian, democratic socialism that was beginning to break the sometimes sterile boundaries of 'old' and 'New' Labour labels"

Just a reminder that 10 years ago George Osborne proposed regional pay in the public sector, starting with the civil service ...

Liz Truss can try to revive it, but it will be defeated again @pcs_union
bbc.co.uk/news/uk-174111… New Labour also tried to pilot regional pay in the Department of Constitutional Affairs (now Ministry of Justice) in 2007 ...

Here's then minister Harriet Harman defending it:

Quite astonishing the number of BAME Labour MPs & councillors who have in recent days spoken out about anti-black racism in Labour post-Forde.

And yet no public response from the Party or any interest from political journos

Start with this by @Taj_Ali1🧵
novaramedia.com/2022/07/29/it-… .@HackneyAbbott, who was abused by senior HQ staff - subject to “expressions of visceral disgust, drawing (consciously or otherwise) on racist tropes”, as Forde put it - has called on Starmer to act ...

theguardian.com/politics/2022/…

#OnThisDay in Labour history ...

This was the front page of the Evening Standard, as Clement Attlee's Labour Party won by a landslide in the 1945 election - 77 years ago today ...🧵 The Labour manifesto had a clear economic analysis:

"The great inter-war slumps were not acts of God or of blind forces. They were the sure and certain result of the concentration of too much economic power in the hands of too few men"

Public ownership was the solution ...