Wednesday’s spring statement has been overshadowed by where the cuts are due to fall, with some departments asked to model cuts of up to 11%. Photograph: pxl.store/Alamy
‘You can’t cut your way to growth,’ says PCS head as Reeves confirms move to cut administrative costs by 15% by 2030
Rachel Reeves’s planned cuts of £2bn to government departments will hit frontline services from jobcentres to HMRC phone lines and efforts to cut the asylum backlog, a union has said.
On Sunday the chancellor confirmed plans to seek a 15% reduction in admin costs across Whitehall, amounting to about £2bn a year, by the end of the decade. She said this would also result in about 10,000 job losses in the civil service, although this was not a target.
As she prepares to give her spring statement on Wednesday, Reeves is under pressure to balance the books in line with her fiscal rules, meaning some departments are in line for spending cuts to avoid more tax rises or higher borrowing.
But the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS) warned her that there would be consequences for public services after 15 years of underfunding by the Tories.
Fran Heathcote, the general secretary of the PCS, said: “You hear that every day from the public, that they wait too long on the phone when they try to make tax payments, jobseekers rushed through the system in just 10 minutes because there aren’t enough staff to see them, victims of crime waiting until 2027 to have their cases heard in the courts as well as the backlog in the asylum system which results in additional hotel costs.
“The impact of making cuts will not only disadvantage our members but the public we serve and the services they rely on. We’ve heard this before under Gordon Brown when cuts were made to backroom staff and [the] consequences of that were chaos.”
Keir Starmer, Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves wear the uniform of the rich and powerful. They have all had clothes bought for them by multi-millionaire Labour donor Lord Alli. CORRECTION: It appears that Rachel Reeves clothing was provided by Juliet Rosenfeld.Keir Starmer confirms that he’s proud to be a red Tory continuing austerity and targeting poor and disabled scum.
Trucks carrying aid wait in front of the Rafah border crossing on March 2, 2025 in Rafah, Egypt. The flow of humanitarian aid into Gaza has been blocked, after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said Hamas had not accepted a US-proposed temporary extension to the ceasefire deal, following the expiration of the first phase on Saturday. Photo by Ali Moustafa/Getty Images
“There will be famine and chaos”
Israel has reneged on the existing ceasefire agreement they had agreed to with Hamas. The first phase of the ceasefire expired Saturday and Israel announced on Sunday it is halting all humanitarian aid and fuel deliveries to Gaza and closing the border between Israel and Gaza. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday that he made the decision “in full coordination with President Trump and his people.”
In a statement Hamas called the suspension of aid a “war crime” and a violation of the ceasefire agreement. It said Netanyahu’s “decision to suspend humanitarian aid is cheap blackmail, a war crime and a blatant coup against the [ceasefire] agreement”.
Stephen Zunes, the director of Middle Eastern studies at the University of San Francisco, says the US’s apparent proposal favoring Israel follows a well-established pattern seen since the beginning of the war.
“This is typical,” he told Al Jazeera. “Hamas and Israel will agree to something. Then Israel will try to revise it in its favor. Then the US will put forward a new proposal that is in Israel’s favor and then the US will blame Hamas for not accepting that proposal.”
Israel’s decision to block all aid going into the Gaza Strip is a war crime under international law, a human rights expert says.
Kenneth Roth – former head of Human Rights Watch who is now a visiting professor at Princeton University – said Israel as an occupying power has an “absolute duty” to facilitate humanitarian aid under the Geneva Conventions.
“Israel’s latest threat to cut off all aid is a resumption of the war-crime starvation strategy” that led to the arrest warrant for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by the International Criminal Court, he said.
Doctors Without Borders said Israel’s decision is “outrageous and will have devastating consequences”, said the group’s emergency coordinator Caroline Seguin.
“Humanitarian aid should never be used as a tool of war,” added the charity, known by its French acronym MSF, in a statement. “Regardless of negotiations between warring parties, people in Gaza still need an immediate and massive scale-up of humanitarian supplies.”
Jeremy Corbyn, who once led the UK Labour Party, said that Israel’s blocking of humanitarian aid was a “resumption of genocide”, before adding that the current British government – led by Labour – was “complicit.”
Fayza Nassar, a woman living in the heavily destroyed urban Jabaliya refugee camp, said the closure would exacerbate already dire living conditions.
“There will be famine and chaos,” she said. “Closing the crossings is a heinous crime.”
Israel’s offensive has killed at least 48,388 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. It says more than half of those killed were women and children.
Israel’s decision to halt aid into Gaza is alarming.
International humanitarian law is clear: We must be allowed access to deliver vital lifesaving aid.
We can’t roll back the progress of the past 42 days. We need to get aid in and the hostages out.
Israel's new cutoff of humanitarian aid to Gaza as a tactic to pressure Hamas is a resumption of the war-crime starvation strategy that led the International Criminal Court to file charges against Netanyahu and Gallant. https://t.co/GcoYeB80GC
BREAKING: MSF strongly denounces Israel’s announcement to block aid into Gaza.
Humanitarian aid should never be used as a tool of war. Regardless of negotiations between warring parties, people in Gaza still need an immediate and massive scale-up of humanitarian supplies.… pic.twitter.com/NhOWoRDbrU
Elon Musk at Trump’s inauguration. The president established a ‘department of government efficiency’ on the same day. Photograph: Kevin Lamarque/AP
Elon Musk has achieved astonishing power in Trump’s administration – and spent the weekend wielding it
Since declaring his support for Donald Trump in July of last year and subsequently spending more than $250m on his re-election effort, Elon Musk has rapidly accumulated political influence and positioned himself at the heart of the new administration. Now as prominent as the president himself, Musk has begun to make use of that power, making decisions that could affect the health of millions of people, gaining access to highly sensitive personal data, and attacking anyone who opposes him. Musk, the world’s richest man and an unelected official, has achieved an astonishing level of power over the federal government.
Over the weekend, workers with Musk’s “department of government efficiency” (Doge) clashed with civil servants over demands for unfettered access to the computer systems of major US government agencies in a breakneck series of confrontations. When the dust settled, several top officials who opposed the takeover had been pushed out, and Musk’s allies had gained control.
Musk, with the backing of Trump, is now working to shut down the US Agency for International Development (USAid) – the world’s largest single supplier of humanitarian aid. He bragged on Sunday about “feeding USAid into the wood chipper”. He has also targeted several other agencies in an aggressive attempt to purge and remake the federal government along ideological lines, while avoiding congressional or judicial oversight.
Many of Musk’s actions have taken place without forewarning or transparency, sowing chaos and confusion among the thousands of people employed at the agencies like USAid that he has gone after. Humanitarian organizations that rely on US funding have halted operations and laid off staff, while government workers have been locked out of their offices. He is operating Doge as an unofficial government department with no congressionally approved mandate while he technically holds the position of “special government employee”, which allows him to sidestep financial disclosures and a public vetting process.
Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts
and reality then.Climate Science Denier Donald Trump says Burn, Baby, Burn.
Changes in climate and unpredictable weather patterns are causing “chaos” for nature, the National Trust has warned, as it calls on politicians to prioritise tackling the climate and nature crisis ahead of the elections.
At the end of what is predicted to be the warmest year on record, the governing body of protected sites is “sounding the alarm” for UK wildlife in its audit report which has laid out an extensive list of species affected by climate change in 2023.
Warmer year-round temperatures have affected the traditional seasonal shifts, which has had a serious knock-on effect for flora and fauna across the country, the National Trust has highlighted.
From low rainfall causing the river Derwent in the supposedly wettest area of England to dry out for the third consecutive summer, to storm Babet and storm Ciaran battering parts of the country with flooding, the extremes in weather are having serious consequences on habitat and wildlife.
