The first female British Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Rt Hon Rachel Reeves MP has earned the moniker ‘Rachel from accounts.’ I object to this as it gives her far too soft an image. Instead I like to call her Chainsaw Rachel.
Wednesday saw Chainsaw Rachel deliver the “spring statement” – sort of a pre-budget budget – to the House of Commons. This came after the UK economy was downgraded and the Governor of the Bank of England Andrew Bailey warned of a sluggish economy for years to come because of the potential trade war and aging population (the latter problem being structural and impossible to fix but may explain the move towards ‘assisted dying’ if you ask me.)
In the end the government pulled back from a mooted axing free school meals for 5 to 7 year olds, perhaps calculating that no Labour government could get away with snatching the food from the mouths of hungry children (something only Thatcher tried to do, Thatcher Thatcher the milk snatcher). Labour had already cut the winter fuel allowance therefore risking the freezing to death some of the old folks (some of whom will have been old enough to remember VE day), so perhaps they had already decided to focus on the old first, and the young later.
But Chainsaw Rachel did start hacking away the gargantuan UK disability bill. The Labour government has decided to balance the books off the backs of those too mental or physically disabled to truly fight back. This is what the British government has been reduced to. “Helen Barnard, the director of policy at the food bank charity Trussell, said: “The insistence by the Treasury on driving through record cuts to disabled people’s social security to balance the books is both shocking and appalling. People at food banks are telling us they are terrified how they’ll survive.”
Now traditionally I’d be somewhat on board with the whole smaller state, reduce the welfare bill fandango if I thought these welfare cuts would be passed on to the hard working British taxpayer, of which my husband was previously one of an ever shrinking band. But that’s not what is going to happen.
Take for instance the £5 billion the Labour government said they would save from the changes to the PIP, a payment that allows the disabled to work in some cases. First the £5 billion ‘saving’ was already forecast down by the Office for Budget Responsibility who, in technical terms trashed the maths homework of Rachel from Accounts. All week she came up with various savings that various cuts would make, and the OBR got out its big red pen, made the necessary corrections and threw her copy book back in her face demanding ‘must do better.’
The other problem with stealing £5 billion off the blind kids is that this £5 billion has already been spent housing illegal immigrants who just barge their way into the country without a knock on the door. In 2019 the Home Office signed a contract with private contractors to provide hotels for the thousands of illegal immigrants that have washed up on the shores of Great Britain.
Currently more than 38,000 migrants are in hotels, costing the Home Office £5.5 million a day. A further 65,707 migrants are in dispersal accommodation. (It’s not really the Home Office though is it. It doesn’t have any money of its own – that’s taxpayer money that is.)
Research by the Institute for Public Policy Research found that the annual cost to UK taxpayers of each asylum seeker had increased from £17,000 to £41,000 between 2020 and 2024. If the IPAS centre in the Gaeltacht annoys you, you can only imagine what the budget of £41,000 spent on each asylum seekers is doing to the British taxpayer. And it’s not just the money, is it?
Day after day there are cases demonstrating categorically that once here, it is impossible to deport illegal immigrants. Yesterday, it was reported that a raging alcoholic from Pakistan who sexually assaulted a girl and who had previous convictions won his appeal against deportation as he was too much of an alcoholic to be shipped back to Pakistan where drinking alcohol is illegal, and therefore he would suffer “inhumane and degrading treatment.” You can’t make this stuff up. This is what I call a deliberate humiliation of the British taxpayer who is left scratching their heads asking, just how did it come to this.
The truth is that it doesn’t really matter what cuts old Chainsaw Rachel makes to welfare budgets, pensions, winter fuel allowance, or disability it will all be swallowed up by the bill generated by the military aged men who decide to break into the UK illegally and must be put up in hotels provided by private companies and billed to the taxpayer. It is the same racket that is going on in Ireland, only at a much bigger scale. The Illegal Immigration Industrial complex is not cheap to run.
Now you might be asking, what the heck has this got to do with us over this side of the Irish sea? Ireland, courtesy if the US multinational and competitive corporation tax rates is not skint – it isn’t stealing the food from the five year olds, or benefits from the old and the sick. This is true, but nothing in life is guaranteed or inevitable. If President Trump goes ahead with his tariff war, things could get difficult. The collapse will not be immediate but there are already predictions that US tariffs could affect up to 80,000 jobs in Ireland in ‘worst case scenario.’
The Minister for Finance Paschal Donohoe wasted no time in floating the idea that the government might row back on promised tax cuts, should the tariffs become a reality. In terms of tax cuts promised in the last Budget, Mr Donohoe noted that the Government “outlined a number of changes in personal taxation that we would like to make. If we’re in a situation where we’re experiencing an economic shock, that wouldn’t be the right thing to do. The right thing to do would be to maintain your tax base, so that you’re in a position where you can continue to invest in housing, you can keep your public finances safe, and you can look after day-to-day spending.”
So promised tax cuts are already on the chopping block. Next the Irish government will start wielding the chainsaw and who knows what benefit will get cut – a little off child benefit here, shaving something off disability benefit there. But like the UK, you can rest assured as to what will not be cut. The millions paid to the good upstanding folks who out of the kindness of their hearts offer to turn your local hotel, such as Carna Bay Hotel, into accommodation for “international protection applications” and send on the invoice to the Irish taxpayer.
There will not be cuts to the immigration housing bill. In February this year the “International Protection accommodation bill topped €1 billion for the first time. The daily average spend was €2.75m per day revealed in new figures released by the government.”
That’s only going to get bigger. As I said, the Illegal Immigration Industrial complex is not cheap to run.