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‘money For War, But For Not The Poor’: Ex-labour Candidate Hits Out Against Welfare Cuts
Faiza Shaheen, ex-Labour parliamentary candidate for Chingford and Woodford Green, has slammed the government’s planned disability benefit cuts, urging them to tax the ultra-rich instead.
During BBC Question Time last night, an audience member asked: “If the proposed benefit cuts are supposed to get people back to work, how do you genuinely ensure that genuinely unwell people are not going to be impoverished?”
Host Fiona Bruce then asked Shaheen whether she believed cuts to the government’s £65 billion incapacity benefit bill were necessary.
Shaheen said she opposes directly cutting people’s money, then added, to cheers from the audience: “It’s really striking isn’t it in the last few weeks, there’s always money for war, but not for the poor.”
The economist and activist said that her own mother had been on disability benefits, “She had heart failure, did she want heart failure? Absolutely not.”
Under Tory austerity, Shaheen said that the DWP “came, they harrassed her, it was absolutely heartbreaking to see”.
Shaheen, who ran as an independent candidate at the general election after being deselected by Labour, said she was “upset and shocked” that a Labour government is treating people on benefits as if they’re “all cheating”.
Emma Reynolds, Economic Secretary to the Treasury, said: “We’re not saying that”. Shaheen said “That is the implication for always going for this group of people”.
She went on to say there are “much better ideas” for saving money, including taxing the ultra-rich and introducing a 2% tax on individuals with over £10 million, which she said would generate £24 billion per year.
Bruce pointed out that many countries have introduced wealth taxes and “either abandoned them because they haven’t worked or because they have brought in so little money”.
She said: “So I worked with governments around the world actually, that were looking at this.
“And one thing they did was that they were very clear about what the money was going to be used for. They spoke about it in terms of solidarity. And so the public was really behind it. And so the rich knew that there wasn’t really much they could do to and argue against it.”
Olivia Barber is a reporter at Left Foot Forward
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