Labour’s £4.8bn Welfare Cuts: Clive Lewis Speaks Out

On 25th March, Labour MP Clive Lewis appeared on BBC’s Newsnight programme and spoke on the cuts to welfare which were predicted by reports leading up to the Spring Statement, which took place on the following day.

Leftists across the land took to X and other social media outlets to whoop at Lewis’ as he attacked the Labour government, and specifically the Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves, on the decision to make huge cuts, totalling £4.8bn, to welfare for millions of people across the country. One X account even saw Lewis’ track as an ‘epic rant’, though there was nothing particularly epic or ranty about it.

The Cuts and Lewis’ Response

The government’s own impact assessment on the cuts estimate that 3.2m people will be affected, which are being made by the Labour government in the name of ‘balancing the books’ and clearing up the ‘mess’ that Labour claim they inherited from the previous Conservative government.

Keen observers will rightly question how a state like Britain could need to make such swingeing cuts to welfare when just three days later committed to a total of £15bn of financial aid to Ukraine to assist in the continuation of the Nato-backed proxy war which has been raging there since 2022. Similarly, observers will also rightly question how a country which prints its own money needs to balance its books – countries, as opposed to businesses, cannot go bankrupt and having control of the amount of money circulating in your system, like Britain has, makes balancing the books not only unnecessary, but as Clive Lewis said in his appearance on Newsnight, but a choice which the Government has made. Lewis said:

“There will be many who have a sense of a kind of despair at this. I mean you’re talking about balancing the books, this is a choice that’s being made. Because you’ve set an arbitrary fiscal rule, which we were seeing over in Germany [which] is now being relaxed to invest £500 billion into their economy, we could relax the fiscal rule here. 
We could cut down on tax relief to the tune or £200 billion a year, which the national audit office says many of those tax reliefs we don’t even know what they do. So there are choices here and we’ve made the choice to cut and to punch down on some of the poorest and most vulnerable.“

The Cowardice of Lewis and his ilk

Unfortunately, as correct as Lewis has been on this point, his response has been extremely limited. In fact, it has begun and ended with his ‘epic rant’ on Newsnight. Some of his supporters (yes he does have supporters, as it turns out) leapt to his defence when I said on social media that an MP with an ounce of principle and who really believed that the cuts were ‘punching down’ on the most vulnerable in society would have resigned as an MP (possibly in co-ordination with other MPs who have shouted from the rooftops about the cruelty of this government – John McDonnell, I’m looking at you) and forced a by-election, which Lewis could have stood as an independent candidate in.

Lewis could have made the by-election about one single topic – that being the cruel cuts inflicted on the most vulnerable in society by an uncaring government. The media attention that any resignation and by-election campaign would generate would put a government – which has already blown what precious little good will it had in the bank after scrapping the winter fuel payments for pensioners and failing to stop fuel bills from rising yet again in April – in an extremely precarious position and certainly would have put Chancellor Rachel Reeves under a degree of scrutiny and pressure from which she may not have recovered.

Yet he failed to step down as an MP, as is typical of MPs of the ilk of Clive Lewis. He is part of the Socialist Campaign Group, a group which is not socialist, hasn’t waged a campaign worthy of the name and isn’t a group. If the Trades Description Act stretched to political activism, then the SCG would need to be very worried. The Socialist Campaign Group is filled to the brim the most mealy-mouthed, spineless cowards and contemptible wretches ever brought together under one banner – they have, certainly since the total collapse of Project Corbyn and arguably before its undignified demise, shown themselves to have no principle whatsoever and its members are certainly not in the business of resigning from a job with pays £93,000 per year plus expenses on a trivial matter like welfare cuts.

In response to my online criticism of Mr Lewis, his defenders threw arguments in my direction which ranged from that he should remain as an MP and fight (with one anonymous account even claiming that this was a brave strategy and that I was a coward) while another stretched credibility to its very limit by claiming that Lewis had to stay as a Labour MP because his vote would be vital in electing a left candidate for leader in the future!

The question we must ask ourselves is this: Does Clive Lewis really believe that welfare cuts are a principle on which he should make a stand – is it a principle he would be prepared to stand in a by-election for and possibly lose his seat as a consequence, or is he simply playing to his crowd (including, it turns out, his disciples on X) by calling the cuts a choice, which the government has made and ‘staying and fighting’ in a very well-remunerated job?

It could even be argued that the Labour Party machine has, in reality, no issue with Lewis’ ultimately largely meaningless and performative appearance on Newsnight – his future election as an MP could well be secured by his reputation as a critic of the Labour government, which would play well in a constituency which includes the local university.

For now, in Clive Lewis we see what we often see from what is left of the left in the Labour Party – a man who has said the right things at the right time and in the right place, but ultimately will only ever go so far as to say these things, never being willing to sacrifice his privileges or status on an important and worthy point of principle.