A devastating new 44-page report reveals Labour’s cuts will push 400,000 into poverty and cost disabled people up to £10,000 annually, while the government refuses to make savings by cutting spending on war instead, writes Dr DYLAN MURPHY
THE Citizens’ Advice Bureau (CAB) has just issued a hard-hitting report entitled Pathways To Poverty, which condemns the government’s Pathways To Work green paper. This well-researched 44-page report totally undermines the many flimsy arguments put forward by the “red Tories” to justify their killer cuts.
The report goes through the effects of restricting Personal Independence Payment (PIP) eligibility, cutting the universal credit (UC) health element and making PIP daily living the gateway to UC health. As the CAB points out, over 1.6 million people, which is nearly half of those currently receiving the daily living element of PIP, stand to lose out with an average loss of £4,500 a year.
Its opening paragraph blasts Keir Starmer and company for their sham consultation over the £7 billion worth of proposed cuts: “By refusing to properly consult on its plan to cut billions from disability benefits, the government is choosing not to ask questions it doesn’t want the answers to.
“The cuts will have a devastating impact on disabled people (and their children), sending hundreds of thousands into poverty, and many more into deeper poverty. This will result from a series of arbitrary reforms that have been designed around savings targets rather than improving outcomes, inflicting hardship on people in ways that the government doesn’t yet fully understand.”
…
As the CAB report notes: “A DWP survey of disability and incapacity benefit claimants found that 41 per cent of respondents were on a waiting list for treatment for their health problems, and 50 per cent who were currently out of work felt their ability to work was dependent on receiving treatment.”
Finally, the CAB report makes the point that cutting billions from disability benefits is a false economy as it will merely make many disabled people even more ill, dramatically increasing the demands on the NHS, social services, education and voluntary sector. Besides this, there will be a growing number of disabled people made homeless by these cuts, never mind the increase in the suicide rate which will inevitably follow.
The CAB report concludes with a call on Labour to abandon its cuts, which are a devastating attack on some of the most vulnerable people in our society: “The government must reconsider its current approach. We are calling on the government to cancel proposed cuts to disability benefits.
Keir Starmer confirms that he’s proud to be a red Tory continuing austerity and targeting poor and disabled scum.Keir Starmer explains that he feels no shame or guilt benefitting personally from gifts from the rich and powerful while insisting on policies of severe austerity causing suffering and death.
UK Labour Party government ministers Keir Starmer, Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves explain that they are partners complicit in Israel’s Gaza genocide. The UK has provided Israel with arms, military and air force support. They explain that they don’t do gas chambers but do do forced marches, starvation, destroy hospitals, mass-murders of journalists and healthcare workers.Genocide denier and Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that UK air force support has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpA
Injured Palestinians are being brought to the Nasser Hospital for their treatment process after Israeli soldiers opened fire at Palestinians trying to reach the points where U.S. aid is distributed west of Rafah city in the southern Gaza Strip, in Khan Yunis, Gaza on June 01, 2025. It was reported that at least 31 people were killed and 170 people were wounded by the gunfire of Israeli soldiers. (Photo by Hani Alshaer/Anadolu via Getty Images)
“The new U.S.-Israeli genocide strategy: starve the population, lure them with promises of aid, then kill them.”
Fresh international outrage erupted on Sunday after Israeli forces opened fire on hundreds of starving Palestinians in Gaza gathered at a food distribution point where they had been directed by Israeli officials, resulting in a massacre described by witnesses as the largest since a new U.S.-backed humanitarian plan run by Israel was put in place last month.
Health officials in Gaza and multiple witnesses at the site near the southern city of Rafah reported that “Israeli forces fired on crowds around a kilometer (1,000 yards) away from an aid site run by an Israeli-backed foundation,” according to the Associated Press.
“The international community must act immediately and decisively to compel Israel to end its inhumane aid distribution mechanism in Gaza, following today’s massacre near a U.S.-backed aid centre south of Rafah, where Israeli forces killed or injured over 220 starving civilians,” said the Switzerland-based Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor (Euro-Med), in a Sunday morning statement, which had personnel on the ground near the aid station.
“Let them stop these massacres, stop this genocide. They are killing us.”According to the group:
Euro-Med Monitor’s field team documented Israeli forces opening fire on thousands of civilians gathered at dawn today, Sunday, 1 June 2025, in Tel al-Sultan, Rafah, near an aid distribution centre established by the Israeli army. Preliminary data indicate that the attack killed at least 31 civilians, including two women, and injured more than 200 others. Several remain missing.
The death toll is expected to rise due to the high number of critical injuries and the severe collapse of the healthcare system caused by the blockade and Israeli targeting of medical facilities.
In early May, as Common Dreams reported, United Nations aid officials and other humanitarian relief experts warned against the plan put forward by Israel and backed by the Trump administration that would allow a private and newly created Israeli foundation, euphemistically named the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, to administer the delivery of aid across Gaza with security provided by the IDF and U.S. mercenary soldiers.
“There is no reason to put in place a system that is at odds with the DNA of any principled humanitarian organization,” said Jens Laerke, a spokesperson for the U.N.’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), on May 9.a
The controversial Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which has been marred by controversy since its creation last month and denounced as operating as cover for Israel’s ongoing atrocities against the Palestinian people in Gaza, said in a statement reviewed by the AP that it distributed 16 truckloads of aid early Sunday “without incident,” and dismissed what it referred to as “false reporting about deaths, mass injuries and chaos.”
Footage and testimony from witnesses at the scene posted online, however, made those claims look like lies:
Around 200 civilians were killed and injured after Israeli forces opened fire and shelled civilians with tanks while they were trying to reach one of the so-called “aid delivery” points run by the U.S.-Israeli Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.#WitkoffMassacrepic.twitter.com/JI7E8rpBmM
Dr. Ramy Abdul, a professor of law and Euro-Med chair, however, shared footage of the scene where the killings and chaos took place and said: “The new U.S.-Israeli genocide strategy: starve the population, lure them with promises of aid, then kill them.”
As did others, Abdul dubbed the horrific event the “Witkoff Massacre,” a reference to President Donald Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff, now in charge of brokering a U.S.-sponsored cease-fire deal between Hamas and the Israeli government.
Thousands of people headed toward the distribution site hours before dawn. As they headed toward the site, Israeli forces ordered them to disperse and come back later, witnesses said. When the crowds reached the Flag Roundabout, around 1 kilometer (1,000 yards) away, at around 3 a.m., Israeli forces opened fire, the witnesses said.
“There was fire from all directions, from naval warships, from tanks and drones,” said Amr Abu Teiba, who was in the crowd.
He said he saw at least 10 bodies with gunshot wounds and several other wounded people, including women. People used carts to ferry the dead and wounded to the field hospital. “The scene was horrible,” he said.
Most of the casualties were shot “in the upper part of their bodies, including the head, neck and chest,” said Dr. Marwan al-Hams, a health ministry official at Nasser Hospital, where many of the wounded were transferred after being initially brought to a field hospital run by the Red Cross.
In a point-by-point breakdown on Friday, Drop Site News‘ Jeremy Scahill detailed that Witkoff, through his negotiations with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is trying to “strong-arm Hamas into a deal that does not end the genocide” that continues apace in Gaza.
After Israel last week rejected tentative language amenable to both the U.S. and Hamas negotiators, Witkoff responded on Saturday to an updated draft submitted by Hamas with a rejection of his own, calling it “totally unacceptable.”
Meanwhile, the threat of famine for the entire population of Gaza continues—all with firm U.S. backing and complicity, infuriating humanitarians worldwide as the death and suffering mounts.
Reda Abu Jazar toldAl-Jazeera on Sunday that her brother was among those killed as he attempted to retrieve food at the distribution site in Rafah.
“Let them stop these massacres, stop this genocide. They are killing us,” she said.
Multiple deadly incidents over recent weeks at the aid delivery sites set up by the Israelis led Euro-Med on Sunday, following the latest massacre, to say “these incidents should not be dismissed as procedural issues fixable through operational adjustments.”
“They must be understood within the broader context of the grave consequences of the Israeli military’s control over humanitarian aid” in Gaza, the group continued. “It is inconceivable that the same entity accused of committing genocide for nearly 20 months can be entrusted with improving the humanitarian conditions of the very population it targets.”
Euro-Med called for an “immediate end to the Israeli aid distribution mechanism in the Gaza Strip… as it has become a site of field executions and fails to meet even the most basic humanitarian standards.”
The group called for the reinstatement of UN-led relief operations “to ensure the safe and effective delivery of aid to Gaza’s population.”
UK Labour Party government ministers Keir Starmer, Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves explain that they are partners complicit in Israel’s Gaza genocide. The UK has provided Israel with arms, military and air force support. They explain that they don’t do gas chambers but do do forced marches, starvation, destroy hospitals, mass-murders of journalists and healthcare workers.Genocide denying UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy says that UK is suspending 30 of 350 arms licences to Israel. He also confirms the UK government’s support for Israel’s Gaza genocide and the UK government and military’s active participation in genocide.Genocide denier and Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that UK air force support has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpA
Foreign Secretary David Lammy meets with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, July 2024. (Credit: Ben Dance via Flickr.)
As British establishment opinion begins to turn against Israel, the hypocrisy shown by government figures like Foreign Secretary David Lammy, who long defended Israeli brutality, is both ironic and infuriating.
Earlier this month the foreign secretary, David Lammy, described Israel’s latest assault on Gaza as ‘intolerable’ and ‘monstrous’ in Parliament. Noting his apparent pain — ‘as a lifelong friend of Israel’ — at having to issue such a statement, he decried the futility of military strategy in recovering the Israeli hostages and defeating Hamas. He condemned the Netanyahu government and labelled the far-right Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich an ‘extremist’. Leaning over the aisle for emphasis, he admonished his Tory counterpart, Priti Patel, for being insufficiently critical of Israel. Lammy announced: ‘We are crystal clear: what is happening is morally wrong, unjustifiable, and it needs to stop.’
Anyone observing the words and actions of the Labour Party over the last nineteen months — in both opposition and government — is likely to have experienced some cognitive dissonance upon hearing such comments. In Lammy’s Tottenham constituency, where I live, he has repeatedly ignored residents’ concerns about his support for Israel, only rarely appearing at heavily stage-managed local events, and cancelling many others. Most of Lammy’s Westminster speech could have accurately applied to Israel’s behaviour at almost any point since it launched its brutal and wildly disproportionate onslaught in October 2023.
So why the sudden change of tone? How did Lammy — and the Labour hierarchy more generally — come to stand so belatedly in opposition to Israeli brutality, after nearly two years of condoning, apologising, and flip-flopping on the war in Gaza?
…
But while the condemnation of Israel’s behaviour may be a watershed, the lack of concrete action to oppose the Israeli genocide is far more significant. Any serious response would include, at the very least, a full arms embargo, massive diplomatic pressure, and a refugee resettlement scheme for displaced Palestinians.
But perhaps more Machiavellian motivations are behind the continuing shifts and ambiguities in the Lammyite line on Israel. Pausing talks on a future trade deal leaves the UK’s existing trading relationship with Israel intact. As several backbenchers have noted, there is a logical chasm between the government’s newfound revulsion at Israel’s devastation of Gaza and its continued material support for those operations. While some arms export licences were suspended in September 2024, the three months that followed saw the sale of more military equipment than the total approved by the Tory government between 2020 and 2023. The UK has continued to supply 15 percent of the components to the global pool of F-35 fighter jets used to lethal effect in Gaza — a position defended in court only a few days before Lammy’s tub-thumping speech, essentially arguing that those exports trumped the duty to prevent genocide.
On the same day as the high court hearing, Maria Eagle, Minister of State for Defence Procurement, spoke at an event for Israel’s Independence Day — commemorated by Palestinians as Nakba Day — during which she celebrated the RAF’s surveillance flights over Gaza on Israel’s behalf. The government maintains that these flights, operating out of the RAF’s Cyprus base, are solely used for intelligence relating to the recovery of Israeli hostages, but it has rebuffed parliamentary inquiries into their exact purpose. Action on Armed Violence has reported at least 518 surveillance flights since December 2023, including 24 in the two weeks before Israel’s attack on Nuseirat refugee camp in June 2024, which killed 274 Palestinians.
UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy says that UK is suspeding 30 of 350 arms licences to Israel. He also confirms the UK government’s support for Israel’s Gaza genocide and the UK government and military’s active participation in genocide.UK Labour Party government ministers Keir Starmer, Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves explain that they are partners complicit in Israel’s Gaza genocide. The UK has provided Israel with arms, military and air force support. They explain that they don’t do gas chambers but do do forced marches, starvation, destroy hospitals, mass-murders of journalists and healthcare workers.
Keir Starmer says that the Labour Party under his leadership all feel a small part of Scunthorpe.
Keir Starmer – and it follows the UK Labour party – is desperately unpopular. It’s not difficult to see why. He and his Labour party have been pursuing heartless, evil policies – withdrawing energy support for freezing pensioners, maintaining the two child benefit cap condemning poor children to a lifetime of disadvantage, attacking the severely disabled by hacking benefits to complicity and active participation in Israel’s genocide. It is definitely attacking the least able to defend themselves, the actions of a Fascist.
Desperate times are causing Starmer to behave desperately – his racist homage to Enoch Powell, his totally unnecessary attack on Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party – unnecessary since there’s not a UK general election for 4 years – and the promotion of militarism in schools, the expansion of UK weapons manufacturing capability and the ability to load nuclear missiles to RAF jets.
It’s not necessarily consistent but it’s an attempt to stir up racism – the speech so that the left supports him against rising right-wing antagonists which he has personally encouraged while he is also appearing Neo-Fascist as is the current fashion, to gain populist support and to potentially escape prosecution for war crimes, the desperately evil cnut.
We need urgent co-operative action on climate not hostile Fascist militarism.
UK Labour Party government ministers Keir Starmer, Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves explain that they are partners complicit in Israel’s Gaza genocide. The UK has provided Israel with arms, military and air force support. They explain that they don’t do gas chambers but do do forced marches, starvation, destroy hospitals, mass-murders of journalists and healthcare workers.Genocide denier and Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that UK air force support has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpA
