Ross Clark

According to official figures from the Department for Work and Pensions, benefits fraud costs the taxpayer £9.5 billion a year. But does anyone really believe it isn't higher, given the massive rise in people apparently so incapacitated by poor mental health that they are incapable of working? It transpires that Liz Kendall's efforts to save the taxpayer £5 billion a year will do nothing of the sort. A government impact assessment estimates that the benefits bill will actually rise by £8 billion over the next few years as the claimant count increases by 750,000. And even Kendall's reforms may end up being watered down if Labour backbenchers have their way. Enough of them have threatened to rebel to wipe out the government's massive majority.

As if the saga of HS2 could not get any worse, Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander will reportedly announce today that, actually, the railway line will not be open by its latest proposed date of 2033, and that 2035 is now more realistic. But I wouldn’t book your ticket just yet. Some analysts believe the line – which is a truncated version of the original proposal, only reaching Birmingham – will not be open for a couple of years or so after that. For some reason a Conservative government then decided the state should handle HS2, in spite of the lousy record of civil servants in managing such projects That will be more than quarter of a century after the then-Conservative government decided to go ahead with it.

How much of the government’s Welfare Reform Bill will survive the mauling of backbench Labour MPs? If this bill even achieves £5 billion worth of savings by the time it becomes law, it will be something of a miracle. Once again, Rachel Reeves’ claim to be an ‘Iron Chancellor’ is about to be tested. No-one should be surprised if she folds. This week, the wobbling began. In her post-spending review interview with the Today programme, Reeves initially said that she would not be reviewing the proposed changes to the criteria for claiming Personal Independence Payments (Pips), which are supposed to mean that hundreds of thousands of people are no longer eligible. Then she hinted that she would be listening to objections from within her party.

Whatever happened to the great promise to ‘smash’ the smuggling gangs? When it came to power just under a year ago the Starmer government promised to pour resources into securing Britain’s borders. There was going to be a new Border Security Command – which was actually set up with £150 million of funding, although if anyone can tell me what it has done or what it has achieved, I am all ears. However, it now seems that the UK Border Force is one of the areas which Rachel Reeves has earmarked for spending cuts. The agency has an annual budget of £1.2 billion and employs 11,400 staff, who enjoy extremely generous overtime – an ‘annualised hours allowance’ to compensate staff for working unsociable hours can add between 20 to 43 percent to their earnings.

So now we know how Labour intends to try to head-off the threat from Reform UK. It is going to fight them on the tram lines. Rachel Reeves will announce this morning £15 billion worth of new tram lines in the Midlands and the North as part of a £113 billion package of public investment. There will be £2.4 billion for trams in the West Midlands, £2.1 billion for a new tram system in Leeds, an extension of the Manchester tram system to Stockport and an embryonic tram system between Derby and Nottingham. The idea of a ‘north-south divide’ is 25 years out of date.

It is beginning to feel a bit like 1998 all over again. That was the year of the first countryside march when it – supposedly – rose up in anger at the Blair government over its plan to abolish hunting, introduce the right to roam and build some houses for people to live in. Landowning interests, already reeling from Rachel Reeves’ decision to partially remove the inheritance tax exemption on agricultural land, are now gearing up to bleat about a proposal to slash the £2.5 billion a year budget for Environmental Land Management (ELM) – the scheme which replaced the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) after Brexit.  It is reported that the scheme will be designed to be less generous, with payments being retained only for small farms.

Who would have guessed that caving into union militancy and paying a whacking above-inflation pay rise, with no strings attached, would lead to even bigger pay demands? In one of its first acts after coming to power last July the Starmer government awarded junior doctors a 22 per cent pay rise, which they accepted and ended their run of strikes. Is anyone really surprised the BMA has come back this year demanding 30 per cent, threatening yet more strikes? It is not hard to guess what would happen were the government to cave in again: next year’s demand would come in at 50 per cent. Who would have guessed that caving into union militancy and paying a whacking above-inflation pay rise, with no strings attached, would lead to even bigger pay demands?

How much longer are Reform’s critics going to be able to get away with calling it a right-wing party? It is an odd kind of right-wing party that proposes to reinstate welfare benefits that even Labour has decided are too expensive; that pledges to nationalise the steel industry and 50 per cent of utilities; and whose manifesto for the last election budgeted for £141 billion of spending increases over five years, including an extra £17 billion for the NHS. Nigel Farage’s party is only ‘right-wing’ if you define your political spectrum entirely in terms of attitudes to national borders and on ‘woke’ issues such as critical race theory and trans rights, or if you see climate change and net zero as a left–right issue.