OVER 5,000 children in West Belfast are living in households adversely affected by the two-child benefit cap, it’s been revealed.
The shocking figure was revealed in an answer from Communities Minister Gordon Lyons to a question from local People Before Profit MLA Gerry Carroll.
This grim statistic is a stark reminder that we live in a society where children and young people’s future life chances are not only impacted adversely by where they were born – their chances of being adequately fed, clothed and housed while looking forward to that future of inequality and injustice are also determined by their postcode.
Depressingly, it is the so-called defenders of the working class and the poor who are ensuring that class remains the single most important determining factor in how a child’s life will pan out. The two-child cap was introduced by the Tories in 2017 in the midst of the austerity years. As the long years of Tory misrule staggered towards their end with a succession of appallingly incompetent and uncaring PMs, there was reason to hope that a Labour Party returned to power with a hefty majority born of anger and frustration would act immediately to right this most egregious of wrongs.
But if we seriously underestimated the ability of the Conservative Party to continue finding a leader even worse than the last, the trust we placed in the Labour Party was to be proved catastrophically misplaced.
‘The adults are back in charge,’ we were told as Keir Starmer took the keys of No.10. But not only were the new adults as uncaring as the last, they were immeasurably more cynical and cruel. Because while the Tories were being true to their themselves as they targeted the most vulnerable in society in pursuit of profit and power, the Labour Party ditched every basic socialist principle in a Faustian pact with the right-wing British establishment that ensured that only the name on the door had changed.
Gerry Carroll has demanded that the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, scrap the two-child limit in her upcoming budget. He is right to do so, but he knows in his heart of hearts – as we all do – that waiting on this Labour government finally to act in defence of the neediest is a forlorn and pointless activity.
The Chancellor has scrapped her plans to raise income tax after a Labour briefing on her intention to do so was met with a tsunami of opposition by the overwhelmingly right-wing British media. And in an attempt to distract from the party’s economic incompetence and to appeal to the Faragist right, Starmer and Shabana Mahmood, his new Home Secretary, have been focused almost entirely on concocting a reactionary and punitive new policy on immigration that will curry favour with the press.
It goes without saying that this Labour government – like the Tory governments before it – gives not a second thought to children in West Belfast, be they on the Falls or the Shankill.
