Kemi Badenoch calls for a smaller state and lectures low-income families on self-reliance. Meanwhile, she claims nearly £3,000 a month in rent and council tax for a six-bedroom farmhouse — all on the public purse.

This isn’t just hypocrisy. It’s grift dressed up as governance.

Our latest article: "Westminster grifter Kemi Badenoch is no different from the strivers she scapegoats"

https://voxpoliticalonline.com/?p=97808

Interesting confirmation of what we'd been suspecting. "Austerity, they found, is the key variable: without it, less-educated people are no more likely to vote for rightwing demagogues than highly educated people are. In other words, Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves are busily handing their core constituencies to Nigel Farage."
https://www.monbiot.com/2025/04/14/the-urge-to-destroy/
#austerity #UKpolitics #inequality

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

In 2013, peers warned that sweeping benefit changes – from Universal Credit to PIP – would do the exact opposite of what the government claimed.

Lower work incentives, harsher sanctions, increased homelessness, and brutal treatment of disabled people were all predicted… and have come to pass.

Now, with Labour in power, the same machinery of misery is being switched on again. It's time to speak out.

Read the evidence, remember the history, and decide where you stand: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/?p=97783

"$150 billion: that’s the grand total of savings Elon Musk revealed last Thursday that he and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) team are expecting to make after months of ruthless and often mindless cuts from a government the billionaire Trump megadonor claimed was riddled with fraud, waste, and graft.

To call this a monumentally unimpressive number doesn’t do it justice. Musk’s “savings” here — which are already error-ridden and inflated in the first place, created by totaling up spending that never actually existed or that was, alternately, either already cut or never actually was — represent just 15 percent of the trillion dollars he originally promised he would slash. It’s a mere one-fiftieth of what the federal government spent just last year alone, would shave off only one-tenth of one year’s worth of the average federal deficit over the past decade, and is a whopping less than half a percent of the overall $36.21 trillion of US national debt.

In fact, government spending so far under Donald Trump has actually gone up compared to the last two years under Joe Biden. Three months of Musk feeding the US government through a woodchipper has done less than nothing about the ostensible problem it was meant to solve."

https://jacobin.com/2025/04/musk-doge-savings-austerity-spending

This should be a bigger story

Fifteen years of #Austerity and benefit cuts is leaving children underdeveloped.

#EndAusterity

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2025/apr/17/a-third-of-uk-school-staff-report-physical-underdevelopment-in-poor-students

https://archive.ph/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/16/business/economy/federal-workers-trump-network-unions.html

Over 1000 lawyers, in 42 states, trained to do #ProBono work for federal employees being attacked by #DOGE. “We are still operating as though there is a #RuleOfLaw”

Labour’s proposal to implement a new “4-point rule” for PIP would strip over 1.1 million disabled people of their vital daily living support. This is a stealth cut disguised as reform — and it’s set to deepen poverty and hardship for the most vulnerable. It’s not just about numbers; this change will affect the lives of hundreds of thousands of disabled people, particularly those with mental health conditions, fluctuating disabilities, and complex needs.

If you’re concerned about the impact of these changes, here’s a template letter you can use to write to your MP and make your voice heard.

Read more from Mike, all about the proposed changes and how you can take action:

https://voxpoliticalonline.com/?p=97761

Samuel Rutherford commissioned the Westminster Assembly. Here he speaks of the effects of communion and fellowship with God. God’s infinite benevolence is forcing good-will, kindness, love, and friendship out of us.

Have you met Christians who seem to argue for opposite fruits? “Kindness” was dissed in Reformed circles a while back.

How can you offer less resistance to God’s work in you towards good-will, kindness, love, and friendship?

#Germany and a historical misunderstanding:
#hyperinflation: 1921-1924 vs. #deflation: 1930-1932 - The period after 1933 and its consequences were much more devastating due to #Brüning's #austerity policy, chart @diw.de interview (must-read)
https://www.diw.de/de/diw_01.c.932566.de/100_jahre_diw/von_den_brueningschen_notverordnungen_bis_zum_sondervermoegen.html

This is fricking awesome – In your face! #BlackZero
After many years of voluntary #austerity, #Germany’s two traditional big parties agree to amend the constitution to allow more borrowing. And 10y GER Bund yield has fallen again in the meantime, chart @johnauthers.bksy.social

Many of us area already beginning to think in "survival mode". I want us all to try and keep in mind that we should still take as much time as we can to preserve the things that make life worth living. These things motivate us to fight back harder against the #tyranny of #fascism, #neoliberalism, and #neofeudalism, and the artificially induced #privation they want us to call #austerity, as if it's some laudable aesthetic goal and not outright theft of the natural resources of the world from us.

14 years of Tory cuts and austerity and now Labour are in power it is more of the same. It simply doesn't work. Cuts do not generate growth. If people have less money in their pockets, they spend less, businesses suffer, jobs are lost and the tax take decreases. This doesn't feel like rocket science so why does it feel so difficult for government?
#Cuts
#Austerity
#Tory
#Labour

A Rare Peek Inside the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy

https://newrepublic.com/article/167002/council-national-policy-documents-right-wing-conspiracy

The Council for National Policy, a secretive network of powerful conservatives, goes to great lengths to conceal its activities and even its members. But recently uncovered documents reveal the extent of the group’s influence on American politics.

More: https://syzito.xyz/@OccuWorld/114324572893272616

"It’s a myth to think of the US as uniquely free from monetary and fiscal constraints. The US has special powers to issue debt and find willing purchasers, of course, but freedom to issue debt is not the same as freedom to spend. In 1978, the world’s central banks were prepared to abandon their dollar reserves if the US continued to pursue an inflationary politics, as it did under Carter. So in the supply-side view, the US as dollar hegemon is quite limited in the kinds of spending it can support. Off the table is anything that’s too redistributive or liberating—welfare, or investment in free education and health care—because these empower labor and the poor.

By contrast, spending on defense, police, and prisons was fine, as were so-called tax cuts, which are really tax expenditures. The supply siders proposed a budget that was extremely generous in subsidizing financial wealth holders—creating these government-subsidized markets for capital gains—and extremely austere in subsidizing wages or spending on the poor. I think this captures the real motives behind the business revolt of the 1970s. Despite appearances, supply siders weren’t screaming for less government; they were screaming for government to subsidize capital income on a new basis. Hence this shift from industrial profits to capital gains."

https://www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/against-the-people/

Suomen julkinen velka 1980 - 2025

Finnish public #debt 1980 to 2025

Kokoomus is the center-right neoliberal party, who always put on #austerity and say they’re doing it to ”get rid of the problem of debt”

I bet this story is the same everywhere else: If you look at what they did when they were in power, they almost single-handedly created the problem to begin with.

The most fluent liars of them all are the smiley-faced center #neoliberal #right.

#SirKeirStarmer is in an impossible situation. He's trying to thread a needle that doesn't have a hole. Make no mistake this is still #newlabour and there is little to distinguish them from #conservatives. Like so many countries all the parties are in thrall to #neoliberalism and they won't move away from it. To do so would be to admit neoliberalism is a disaster. Instead they do what all UK govs do when the going gets tough, #austerity because they have no solution. They are tied to the #US and the fantasy of "#freetrade". The #tories knew this but they had no plan and that's why they called elections. When they get back in, they still won't.

A 'tough decision' is a choice that impacts you negatively, but is for the Greater Good.
Austerity isn't a 'Tough Decision' , it is cowardice

“Rep Issa just asked Republican leaders on their conference call if they could get a briefing from the admin on the Trump tariffs.

The Hill has been largely left in the dark on what the admin is trying to accomplish. GOP lawmakers have been left trying to make sense of the mishmash of a message coming from various corners of the admin.”
-J Sherman

A positive sign, even MAGA Congressman Issa is concerned about Trump’s #tariffs.

“This week 19 factories had mass layoffs, 15 closed, &4,134 factory workers across America lost their jobs.”

Rep Khanna is sounding the alarm.

#Trump #Tariffs #Stagflation #Austerity #Economy #Recession #Resist #USPol

https://www.alternet.org/trump-factory-workers/

“The Senate Budget resolution sets up the toxic combo of

Tax cuts tilted to the wealthy
+Cuts to programs helping people afford food and health care
+Massive, regressive tariffs
=Transfer of wealth from low- and middle-income families to the wealthy”
-B Duke

The majority of Americans are harmed by this draconian budget. The resolution now goes to the House.

#April5 #Resist #Recession #Austerity #Stagflation #Resolution #USPol

https://www.cbpp.org/research/federal-tax/republican-agendas-triple-threat-to-low-and-moderate-income-family-well-being