Think The Unthinkable And Look To The Past?

Andrea Jenkyns. Tim Montgomerie. Jake Berry. And now, Nadine Dorries. Boris Johnson has a hand in this. Eventually, he will show it. Nigel Farage needs to watch his back. And his front. And his sides.

Reform UK has been better than Labour on cutting the benefits of the sick and disabled as if that would cure them or find them jobs, on the Winter Fuel Payment, on increasing workers’ bus fares by 50 per cent, on increasing employers’ National Insurance contributions so as to destroy charities and small businesses while making it impossible for big businesses to take on staff or to increase wages, and on forcing working farmers of many decades’ standing who formally inherited their parents’ farms to sell them to giant American agribusinesses.

Reform has been better than both Labour and the Conservatives on the two-child benefit cap that Jenkyns, Berry and Dorries voted to impose in the first place. But for how much longer? And for how much longer will it hold to Farage’s articulation of the obvious answer when even the Government had recognised that Britain’s six remaining steel companies, four of which were already being kept going with public money, ought to be merged and sold to a single buyer?

Speaking of disability benefits, unlike any non-Labour MP apart from three who had been suspended from the whip for non-policy reasons (and two of those voted by proxy through a Labour Whip), Angela Rayner voted to cut them from households mostly without five million pounds. Yet now she has the gall to hide behind her disabled son.